East of Suez Ceylon, India, China and Japan — Edition Insights

The Taj Mahal as a Document of Decay and Restoration

Penfield’s account of the Taj Mahal is less a celebration of its beauty than a record of damage and repair. He notes that Mahrattas looted precious stones, and after the Mutiny, British soldiers took inlay pieces as souvenirs. The British government spent twenty years restoring the interior, but “no diamonds, no rubies, and no emeralds” remain—only colored glass. This focus on loss and substitution is characteristic of Penfield’s approach: he treats monuments as palimpsests of conquest and neglect. His description of the Taj’s exterior as “perfect” and “unsullied” contrasts with the interior’s diminished state, suggesting a tension between preservation and historical reality.

Benares as a Religious and Economic Nexus

Penfield portrays Benares as a city where piety and commerce intertwine. He writes that two hundred thousand residents “live and fatten upon” the half million annual pilgrims, and that the city sends devotees “overflowing with merit and zeal” to spread Hinduism across Asia. His language is blunt: the streets are “narrow and filth-smeared,” and the Brahmins are “insinuating men of religion” who control the city. The excerpt emphasizes the sheer number of gods—over two hundred thousand—and the dominance of Siva, whose trident and disk appear on hundreds of temples. Penfield’s tone is observational rather than reverent, treating Benares as a sociological phenomenon.

The Role of Literary Precedent in Penfield’s Travelogue

Penfield explicitly frames his journey through the lens of earlier writers. He claims that Kipling’s work gave him such a “thorough mental acquaintance” with India that his survey merely confirmed impressions. Similarly, he credits Mortimer Menpes, Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Eliza Scidmore for depicting Japan “conscientiously.” This reliance on literary precedent shapes the book’s structure: Penfield often describes what others have already described, adding his own sensory details. The excerpts suggest that East of Suez functions partly as a verification of received knowledge, a travelogue that acknowledges its own secondhand nature while asserting the value of firsthand experience.

Readers should note that Penfield’s narrative is filtered through a late-Victorian sensibility, with a strong emphasis on visual description and historical anecdote. The catalog subjects—geography and travel—accurately reflect the book’s content, but the excerpts reveal a deeper interest in how places are represented and remembered. Penfield’s diplomatic background in Egypt, mentioned in the front matter, does not appear in these passages, leaving open the question of how his earlier career influenced his perspective on Asia.