Interrogating Orientalism: Hindu Festivals and Travellers' Tales in the Colonial Indian Ocean.

Thimithi – the Tamil Hindu fire-walking ceremony has always attracted the attention of the curious and the thrill seeker and remains a tourist attraction as well as the performance of a solemn vow in many parts of the world where it continues to be enacted. A source of much speculation as to the participants' apparent ability to withstand the pain of walking over hot coals, travellers' often exaggerated accounts of eye witness attendance at such events regularly graced the columns of western journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article focusses on an unusual investigation carried out in colonial Mauritius in mid-1874. The enquiry resulted from a published description of thimithi written by Nicolas Pike, former American consul on the island which caused concern at the colonial office in London, who asked for an explanation. This produced a set of reports, firstly by British police officers, and secondly, but more remarkably, by leading members of the Tamil community on Mauritius. Their detailed and occasionally humorous responses to the western orientalist gaze deftly unpick the absurdities and hypocrisies of the so-called ruling caste whilst their very involvement serves to complicate our understanding of the relationship between white settler and Indian 'subject' in the mid-Victorian colonial empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]