Shibashish Purkayastha
PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. ORCID: 0000-0002-1630-0038. Email: shibashish.purkayastha@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.14
Abstract
The purpose of this article shall be to trace a historical trajectory of the development of travel writing as a distinct genre in Assamese literature. In Assam, the germ of travel writing dates back to the nineteenth century in which European travellers wrote extensively on their visits to North East India, which were exotic accounts of their encounters with an alien culture. The first Assamese travelogue was Jnanadabhiram Barua’s BilatarSithi which was serialized in the Assamese monthly Banhi in 1909 which, for the first time, narrativized a non-westerners account of his travels to the United Kingdom in a series of letters. However, the genre of travel writing in Assam seemed to attain its growth and maturity in the days following Independence. In the late 1980s, the travel writer, as a move away from merely offering descriptive sketches eulogizing their travels, started looking back into the nuances of the self as a site of imaginative and critical reflections. The onus of this article shall be to trace the growth and development of travel writing in Assamese literature and shall then move on to reviewing some of the important travel narratives of Assamese literature which seem to problematize our understandings of the nation, identity, body and the gaze. Additionally, it shall also examine whether these travel narratives attempt to expand the discursive and generic boundaries of the form of postcolonial travel writing. Through close readings of select travel narratives, I argue that they posit a poetics of difference by attempting to engage in a dialogue between their encounters with foreign cultures vis-à-vis, the nuances of everyday material realities of the life of the traveller.
Keywords: agency, travel, history, identity, body, empathy