Komal Yadav
PhD Research Scholar, JNU, ORCID: 0000-0003-4049-8192, Komalydv94@gmail.com
Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.48
“Prompter’s Whisper”: History, Travel and Narrative in Post-Colonial Indian English Travel Writing
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Travel, Subaltern History, Ethnography, Narrative.