Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

In the tradition of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, Hamilton gives us the epistolary British adventures of Zaarmilla, raja of Rohilkand, as related to his friend Maandaara (these names have a total of six macrons between them, which I have omitted). Hamilton's politics were the wrong ones, which is forgivable on its own,but it makes it all the more jarring when Zaarmilla moves from Eastern naif to authorial mouthpiece, laying on the sarcasm with a trowel. Hamilton knows full well that her screeds against late eighteenth-century species like sentimentalists and defenders of the commons and skeptorationalists in the model of David Hume take on a different valence coming out of the mouth of the show more unimplicated, decent foreigner of breeding, and she milks it. Certainly, though, this novel is interesting from the feminist POV, and has a lot still to say to people who don't know where they stand on the "tolerance of others' intolerance" East/West questions of our own historical moment. And several of the character sketches are cute, and you get a lot of insight into the William Jonesian construction of India and Sanskrit as the Greco-Rome and Classical language, respectively, of the East--although that then gets deployed problematically in the service of a discourse justifying British imperial dominance of India as "liberation" from Mughal Mohammedanism. And so on. show less