Introduction: women travellers, Muslim travellers

Between July and October 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in London featured a special exhibition entitled ‘Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers’. It highlighted the journeys of predominantly British women as they travelled to other parts of the globe between the 1660s and the 1960s. Only in the final section of the exhibition, in a small corner to itself, did it recognize women travelling in other directions, specifically ‘a selection of the world's women who made Britain their destination’. Of these twelve, four hailed from the Indian sub-continent, while just two were Muslims. That these women were included at all is certainly to be commended for its recognition of South Asian and Muslim women's participation in the culture of travel, yet their few numbers and bounded location suggest the marginalization of their experiences.

Over the past two decades, some scholars have sought to redirect attention to these and other marginalized figures. A pioneering effort in this direction was Rozina Visram's Ayahs, Lascars and Princes (1986) which documented the substantial numbers of Indians, many of whom were Muslim and some of whom were female, who resided in Britain as servants, sailors and labourers from the early eighteenth century.