Please join us for a talk by Daniel Majchrowicz (Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University) on “The Case of the Vanishing Maharaja: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Hindi and Urdu Literature:”
Date: Monday, February 16, 2026
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Venue: AB 2400 (East Wing), CAC
ABSTRACT: In 1851, the teenage maharaja of Indore went missing. Rumors in the bazaar claimed he had been drugged by his vizier or kidnapped by agents from Calcutta. The reality was more prosaic: He had gone on vacation. In this talk, I examine the travels of the maharaja of Indore and the Urdu-language travelogue his court produced from that journey to ask why this genre suddenly rose to popularity in colonial India. The travelogue, I will show, lets Indians give voice to a global imagination that reflected their ambitions and aspirations in the rapidly expanding world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps it was more than just a vacation after all.
Co-sponsored by the South Asian Studies Program and the Rutgers British Studies Center.