Title:-Quenching the thirst of exploration : Revisiting the genre of Travel writing with special reference to Bishwanath Ghosh's Chai,Chai, Tamarind City and Gazing At Neighbours (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Prompter's Whisper": History, Travel and Narrative in Post-Colonial Indian English Travel Writing
The theory revolution and the counter-traditional wave in humanities in the 1980s have garnered attention towards new localism by positing alternatives to the great tradition. In this, Travel writing has proved adaptable and responsive to post-colonial and Globalization studies, thereby shaking off its 'middlebrow' status. Keeping in mind the relevance of travel writing in Global politics, the paper aims to engage with In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale (1992) by Amitav Ghosh to delineate the question of History, Travel and Narrative in Indian English Travel Writing. The paper contends that Ghosh uses the Hybrid non-fiction space of the travelogue to write a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric discourse of Travel writing. It seeks to foreground that the reverse Grand tour of Amitav Ghosh problematizes the western hegemonic hold on the field of Ethnography and History. The paper is divided into two parts-the first part will establish In an Antique Land as Resistive subaltern history, followed by the second part, which focuses on Ghosh's privileging of third world ethnography to write an alternative narrative.
International journal of english, literature and social science, 2022
Travel writing is a literary genre that remain concerned with travelling accounts or records of a person. Such accounts enable one to know about different cities and countries and become familiar with varied cultures, behavioral patterns and their living conditions. Travel writings are being produced since time immemorial. India is a land of diverse cultures, languages, and food habits that remained a favourite destination among travel enthusiasts living both India and abroad. Many European, Chinese and Arab Travel writers like Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Ibn-e-Battuta and Hiuen Tsang have written at length about their experiences of travelling to India. They all have written works on India, its culture and the people that are living there. Their accounts are not reliable from the information point of view because they are based on whatever these travellers have seen or witnessed around them. They do not provide an actual image of India but rather presented an unrealistic portrayal of India in their writings. They have not focused on the adversities and social evils that were prevalent at that time. Earlier, travel writings remain a product of colonial enterprise. That is why there is a need for India travel writers to discuss their opinions regarding the impression of India and the people at large. Through this paper, I will try to show the history of Indian travel writings and works that are being done under this genre until now. At the same time, I will also discuss about the recent changes that are happening in this genre.
Indian Travel Narratives: New Perspectives
2021
The study of travel narratives as a genre has received a boost with the emergence of new disciplines like Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies and Postcolonial Studies. These cross-disciplinary fields trace in travel accounts not only a picture of contemporary society but also micro-narratives of agency and reverse gaze. While well-known travelogues written during the colonial period by men and women from the West usually project the imperial eyes, those of travellers from the East to the West reveal worldviews altogether different. The gaze of women looking at unfamiliar spaces obviously follows variant trajectories. The travel narratives of racially or ethnically marginalized individuals have more complex patterns. A diachronic study of travelogues would reveal distinct changes in material conditions of travel and attitudes of travellers. Advent of modernity, growing secularization of the travel as a process and consumerisation of the tourist sector have made travelling more comforta...
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Travel writing, often reflects the culture of the traveled land through the cultural lens of the traveler. This article attempts to analyze how cultural translation operates in a travelogue. The analysis is based on Bishwanth Ghosh's Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began, an account of his experience as an outsider in the city of Madras. One of the primary reasons for selecting this particular text is that not many authors have extensively written about Madras (Chennai), one of the oldest cities of India. The travelogue unlike others that are mostly records of passing travels is different in a way that it documents the transformation of a city on account of the author's stay there for almost a decade. The well acclaimed travel critic Mary Campell has elaborated on the major concerns of the traveler, while encountering a foreign culture.. It therefore represents not only the changing times, but also the intra-cultural transformations along with the socio-political and demographic changes, that happened in a city with a long history.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2020
This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act that inscribed gendered landscapes with a dialogue between East and West, slavery and freedom. The Hindu male’s subaltern masculinity had to be overcome through diverse means, all of which metaphorically interacted to shape Parivrajak’s writings.
Beyond Tourist Gaze in Select Odia Travel Writings of Gobinda Das, Golakbihari Dhal and Pratibha Ray
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2018
This paper focuses the question: What does it mean to be a traveller rather than a tourist? The term "tourism" ismostlyused in impersonal commercial language but "travel" often implies the personal, picaresque style of travel writing. The travellerbeing the hero of the text and the tourist as an unfortunate by-product of globalisation highlight the formation of the important binary opposites through the identity/difference logic.Travel writers deprecate the behaviour of tourists and go for a more authentic way to engage with cultural contrastfor a more concrete example of otherness. The primary texts taken for this study are the select Odia travel writers: GobindaDas'sDese Dese (In Countries), GolakbihariDhal'sLondon Chithi (Letter From London), and Pratibha Ray's Swapnara Alaska (Dreamy Alaska) and Africa NayikaNilanadi (Africa's Heroine the River Nile).
'AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET': PRE-COLONIAL EUROPEAN TRAVELLERS AND THE 'REALITY' OF INDIA
The article explores the accounts of European travellers of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of images and representations of India. During these two centuries, about hundred travellers came to India from Europe and wrote accounts of their experiences. As travel writing had developed into a very popular genre in the early modern Europe, some of these accounts were published many times, translated into important European languages and read extensively. Some of them were also included in the popular anthologies and collections of travel writings. These travel accounts, therefore, became the first means to represent the 'reality' of India. This study is directly concerned with these early European representations and narrative constructions and problematizes them in relation to the 'reality' of India. KEY WORDS Travel Writing, Colonial India, European Imperialism, Early Modern Period, Orientalism
The Aesthetic Gaze: Siting Nineteenth Century Indian Travel Writing
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017
Indians have reportedly been traveling to Europe since the seventeenth century and narrativizing their travel accounts at least since the mid-eighteenth century. However, 'travelogue', what we know by European standards, as a genre in the Indian context is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, the literary 'modernity' that purportedly ushered thereafter, and the high noon of Indian nationalism. Citing late nineteenth and early twentieth century 'Indian' travelogues, this paper examines the stakes in the Indian travelers emulating the eighteenth century Grand Tourist, and demonstrates how the literary articulation of tourism therein is symptomatic of an elitist-exclusionary mindset that strived to showcase cultural proximity with the colonizer on the one hand, while distantiating the colonially un(der)exposed 'natives' on the other hand.
Generic Shifts in Women’s Travel Writing between Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Bengal
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Women's travel writing in Bengal proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the popular form of serialized publications in journals such as Bharati (1877), Dasi (1892), Prabasi (1901), among others. However, to perceive this rich output of travel literature as a single, homogenous genre would be fallacious. Travel writing in this time undergoes several generic modifications as it journeys through the turn of the century. Through my paper I would like to trace these shifts within Bengali women's travel narrative using the stretch of aryavarta as the anchoring landscape. From Prasannamae Debi in 1888 to Nanibala Ghosh in 1933, these travellers from Bengal travel to the north and northwest regions of India, mapping the same landscape but within diverse narrative frameworks, and in so doing, dramatically (and one could argue deliberately) alter the land they wish to represent. Their subjective position as women writers further inform and complicate their work, as do the contemporary political framework of the time they respectively inhabit. What the reader is left with can conservatively be termed travel writing, but can equally and with ease inhabit the roles of memoir, political writing, ethnographical study, among others.