With Venetian explorer Marco Polo writing interesting notes about the southern parts of India (and Italian Christopher Columbus reading them on his historic journey across the Atlantic), the tradition of Europeans writing travel narratives about India is long. But it perhaps had a more formal start with the diaries of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first European to discover a sea route to India.
This tradition grew stronger through colonial times and continues to grow even today. Western travellers, anthropologists, linguists, historians, fiction writers and even politicians and diplomats have written extensively about the Indian Subcontinent. While some of the narratives are systematic and very convincing, even for the natives, others contribute to what Edward Said theorised as “Orientalism” a representation of the Orient as it is not.