“Wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where”

This chapter explores the sedentary-nomadic binary in relation to family history, national history, and imperial history produced as commissioned narrative and “strange family story,” devised to protect the reputations of members of the great house and the interests of sedentism. It demonstrates how sedentary elites must enter into negotiation with nomadic elements and with nomadic narratives in order to ensure the safeguarding of reputations, as a consequence of their contact with the moonstone as a nomadic object. It demonstrates how nomads in the novel, who are both English and Indian, may function ambiguously and subversively as agents of colonization and decolonization, and reads nomadism in the context of legislation on thuggee, the Regulating Act of 1773, with its erasure of Eurasians and its legal restrictions on Eurasian professionals entering Britain to practice medicine. It demonstrates how the sedentary reader discovers nomadic narratives or “wandering narratives” as necessary for the production of history.