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Travelogue for Children: Bhakti Mathur’s Amma, Take Me to The Golden Temple (2017)

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Raj Gaurav Verma

Assistant Professor of English, University of Lucknow. ORCID: 0000-0003-1819-3376. Email: ajgauravias@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.37

Abstract            

This paper argues that travel writing not only neglected women (at least in its initial stages) but also children in its critical idiom. One of the recent additions to travel writing can be seen in Bhakti Mathur’s Amma Take Me Series, which sets a landmark in adding the gendered and the childist perspective in travel writing. The ‘Amma Take Me’ Series: “Come Explore the Places Where We Worship” is published under Puffin Books by Penguin Random House India. This series introduces readers to the history of the major Indian faiths through their important places of worship like Shirdi, Golden Temple, Tirupati and the Dargah of Salim Chishti. So far there are four books in the series. They are written as travelogues of a mother and her two young children and are designed for children between eight to twelve years. Mathur uses mythology, tradition and history associated with these places to unfold their story as they travel. While children’s literature shows the pattern of ‘Home’ and ‘Away’; travel writing is marked by an outside trip or journey. Amma Take Me Series conforms to the pattern of both the genres in its treatment of “outsiderness.” This series is different as it allows the children (in the text and the child-reader) an access to the outside world, especially to places of worship, guided by their mother who is both the narrator and a source of information. This adds another aspect to travel writing which is about learning one’s own culture through spaces of historical and religious significance. The ‘outsiderness’ is connected to a ‘sense of identity’ and ‘extension of self’ to these places which results in “spatial-socialization” for children. This paper attempts to read Amma, Take Me to the Golden Temple (2017) in the context of gender and children’s literature theory and criticism and the way they develop this socio-spatial and historical-personal relationship through their narrative. The study asserts the “transcendental nature” of travel writing and the ability of pilgrim-narratives in particular, to offer solutions to the problems we face today.

Keywords: travel writing, pilgrimage, children’s literature

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Solon Karthak and Travelogues in Nepali Literature

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Norden Michael Lepcha

Former Assistant Professor of English, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. Email: nordenmike@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.36

Abstract

Apart from Nepal and Bhutan, Nepali is the dominant language of the lower Himalayan and sub-Himalayan regions of India. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, many important literary organizations from this region have been publishing books and journals in Nepali.  In 1992, Nepali was recognised as the 19th official Indian language and included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. It has been recognised as one of the modern languages of India by the Sahitya Akademi, or Academy of Letters, of the Indian government since 1975; and the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award has been bestowed on the best literary works of Indian Nepali writers along with other Indian languages every year. The 2019 award was given to Solon Karthak for his anthology of travel narratives Visva Eauta Pallo Gaon (2013). As an Indian national residing in Kalimpong, West Bengal, Karthak has been writing for a long time but since he writes in Nepali, many in India have no clue about him probably because of the language barrier. Indian Nepali literature is not often translated into English, and remains inaccessible to most people within India and outside it. Solon’s thirst to travel and passion for literature shaped him into an excellent travel writer, in fact one of the forerunners in this genre in Nepali literature. This article will give an overview of Solon Karthak’s travel writings which are not only descriptive but have an artistic touch in them. His contribution to develop and bring Niyatra (Subjective Travelogue) into mainstream Nepali literature shall always be remembered.

Keywords:  travelogues, Nepali, Salon Karthak, Sahitya Akademi Award

Flânerie in female solo travel: an analysis of blogposts from Shivya Nath’s the Shooting Star

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Sanchari Basu Chaudhuri

Research Scholar, Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-9414-9724. Email: sancharibasu84@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.35

Abstract

Contemporary travelogues have spilled over to social media through travel blogs. This paper explores the lens of flânerie to examine blogposts of the immensely popular The Shooting Star run by Shivya Nath, a proponent of Indian female solo travel. Concerns of risks associated with safety, sexual gaze and harassment often inhibit women from loitering. Such perceptible risks increase furthermore in the case of solo female travellers. The paper argues that travelogues of this blog construct travel experiences, motivations and obstacles through hybrid positions offered by flânerie. The study concludes that this construct is an important tool while negotiating public spaces which contributes towards narratives of subversive reading of gender writing in travelogues.

Keywords: flânerie, India, solo female traveller, travel blogs

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A Journey of Exploration and Reconstruction of the Feminine Self: Reading Shivya Nath’s The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World (2018)

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Akshita Chotia

Research Scholar, Department of English and Modern European Languages, Banasthali University, Rajasthan. Email: akshitasharma0023@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.34

Abstract

The contemporary philosophical, intellectual and literary plentitudes aver the fact that travel literature deals with the discourse of identity. Travel records our temporal and spatial progress. It throws light on how one is defined and identified. Many critical texts on travel writing have explored the transcendental world of the journey of the human self. Further, there have been some critical theorists from India as well who have also examined the uncanny nature of journey and therefore the journey in the outside world is represented as a metaphor of the journey of the internal world. In addition, there have been some Indian women writers who have explored the complex terrain of journey that a woman undertakes and through the process they explore themselves. The present paper intends to explore the journey from an existential crisis to the growth of the woman self in the book The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World (2018) by Shivya Nath. The vivid descriptions, moving encounters and the uplifting adventures of an Indian woman which are depicted in the book, map not only the world but also the human spirit. The study intends to apply the basic arguments of female bildungsroman and theory of self for understanding the process of growth and development as far as the life of the protagonist is concerned.

Keywords: identity crisis, exploration of the woman self, female bildungsroman, travel literature

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Travel Discourses: Narrative of Witnessing Human Rights in Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island (2014)

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R. Samuel Gnanaraj¹ & S. Azariah Kirubakaran²

¹PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli (Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli). ORCID: 0000-0002-2837-1175.Email: rgsam93@gmail.com

²Assistant Professor, Department of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli (Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli). Email: sak.bhc@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.33

 Abstract

Travel discourses very often reflect what the traveller encounters among the people, regarding their culture, tradition and space. The nuance of encountering the novelty is pivotal for a traveller. Samanth Subramanian in This Divided Island emancipates many restraints through identifying the solitude and unseen areas in the divided island (Sri Lanka). This paper aims to present the narrative of violation of human rights through embracing the interdisciplinary subject of travel across boundaries. Human rights and travel writing are vital to its subject. It establishes the narrative of witnesses of the internal war that happened in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese and the Tamils for three decades. The narrative discourses in This Divided Island bear the truth of witnessing. This paper also comprises two component features. One, it establishes that travel writing witnesses the unseen realm of humanity during the wartime in Sri Lanka, and two, it witnesses the deep memories and rebuilds it. The sufferers of the war were neither majority nor minority. The important facets of the civilians who were affected internally and externally underwent a period of transition, where they became victims or they were restructured as militants. Subramanian’s This Divided Island brings strength and reveals unknown factors and transmits the violated rights through narrating the events.

Keywords: Travel, Witnessing, Human Rights, Memories, Rebuilding

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Representing Kolkata : A Study of ‘Gaze’ Construction in Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in the City and Bishwanath Ghosh’s Longing Belonging: An Outsider at Home in Calcutta

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Saurabh Sarmadhikari

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Gangarampur College, Dakshin Dinajpur, West Bengal. ORCID: 0000-0002-8577-4878. Email:  saurabhsarmadhikari@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.32

Abstract

Indian travel writings in English exclusively on Kolkata have been rare even though tourist guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet have dedicated sections on the city. In such a scenario, Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2016) and Bishwanath Ghosh’s Longing Belonging: An Outsider at Home in Calcutta (2014) stand out as exceptions. Both these narratives, written by probashi (expatriate) Bengalis, represent Kolkata though a bifocal lens. On the one hand, their travels are a journey towards rediscovering their Bengali roots and on the other, their representation/construction of the city of Kolkata is as hard-boiled as any seasoned traveller. The contention of this paper is that both Chaudhuri and Ghosh foreground certain selected/pre-determined signifiers that are common to Kolkata for the purpose of their representation which are instrumental in constructing the ‘gaze’ of their readers towards the city. This process of ‘gaze’ construction is studied by applying John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s conceptualization of the ‘tourist gaze’. Borrowing the Foucauldian concept of ‘gaze’, Urry and Larsen state that ‘gazing’ is a discursive practice that is both constituted by the filters of the gazer’s cultural moorings as well as the institutionalized mechanisms of the travel/tourism industry which rely significantly on the deployment of signs and signifiers to construct the ‘gaze’ of the travellers and the tourists towards a tourist destination. The present paper seeks to analyze how both Chaudhuri and Ghosh use ‘selective’ signifiers of the city of Kolkata to construct the ‘gaze’ of their readers towards the city in their representation.

Keywords: representation, gaze, construction, Kolkata, travel narratives

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Boundaries as Crossovers: The Shoreline as a Digressive Site in Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay’s Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra (2010)

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Upamanyu Sengupta

Assistant Professor of English, Maharashtra National Law University Mumbai. Orcid ID: 0000-0001-7483-8916. Email: senguptaupamanyu@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.31

 Abstract

A prose retelling from the sixteenth century verse composition of Mukundaram Chakrabarti’s Kavikankan Chandi of the merchant Dhanapati’s voyage to Sri Lanka, Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay’s award-winning Bengali narrative Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra (2010)[Dhanapati’s Journey to Sri Lanka] is richly digressive. These digressions feature two types of stories: first, tales from the inhabitants along the shoreline as they await the arrival of Dhanapati’s fleet and second, myths drawn from Ramayana and Mahabharata relating the spatial sanctity of the places the fleet passes by. This paper examines these digressions through the spatial category of the shoreline which functions as a zone of seamless crossover between the voyage and the stories. It is here that boundaries between the two become fluid and human stories set across different times and places segue into one another. If, as Ross Chambers argues, digressions demonstrate a ‘permeability of contexts’, shorelines in Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra trigger associations which drift away from the voyage to render it more tangible through an assemblage of the ports the fleet traverses and the stories that unfold in them. Shorelines are also sites for reversal of gazes as the focalizer keeps shifting from the voyagers to the waterside inhabitants who witness the fleet pass by. Here the narrrative veers away from a sequential, ordered and cohesively narrowed telling to a sense of place based on non-linear, decentered, and dilatory meditations of simultaneity.

Keywords: digressions, crossovers, shorelines, assemblage, sense of place

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‘Amphibious Historiography’: Reading Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) through the Actor-Network Theory

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Gaana Jayagopalan

Assistant Professor, English Studies, Christ University, Bangalore. ORCID: 0000-0001-9623-1329. Email: gaana.j@christuniversity.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.30

 Abstract

This paper explores Samanth Subramanian’s travel writing collection Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast (2010) for its strength in establishing the significance of the human—non-human connection in the Indian coastline. Although a decade old, the work stands out even today for its strength in framing ‘travel’ from a non-terracentric point of view, as most travel writings have been often positioned. Subramanian’s travel writing is an important departure from territorial historiographies via travel. His work traces the author’s movement across India’s coastal regions – the frontiers, as it were, of territoriality, literally following fish. Foregrounding a non-human subject as the travel writing’s object of investigation, the paper deploys actor-network theory to analyze Subramanian’s reconfiguration of the cultural imaginaries of India’s coastlines via mobility thus reassembling the social of India’s coastlines. His work, therefore, is argued to be an assemblage of the human and non-human actants creating a new water-based examination of socialities.  Fish is the central node of his navigation of India’s coastline assemblage, where he examines fish as food, as medicine, as commerce and as culture. By positing India’s coastal regions as waterscapes to track movement of people, objects, and every day practices vis-à-vis fish, and moving in-land with the fish in some instances, Subramanian’s work does not merely function as a commentary on the coastlines, but also emphasizes the need to interrogate mobility and travel across waterscapes.

Keywords: water histories; travel writing; Samanth Subramanian; actor-network theory; historiography

Travelling Across Borders: Temporality, Trauma, and Memory in Amitav Ghosh’s Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma

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Hariom Singh

Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of English, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Satellite Campus, Amethi (UP). Email: h.singh765@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.29

Abstract

In travel writing as a genre, the convergence of the words temporality, memory and trauma has occasioned an explosion of deliberations centred around the representation of the other(ness), the privilege of speaking of and for a foreign culture, and strategies used to perpetuate hierarchies and differences in cultural discourses. From having strong cultural affinities with Greater India in the ancient past, the countries of Southeast Asia like Cambodia, Myanmar have undergone sea changes in the present experiencing a long phase of colonisation and then ravaged by their own internal strife and upheavals. Writers from the erstwhile colonised countries like Amitav Ghosh have attempted in their travelogues to document the history and culture of Cambodia and Myanmar while traversing its rough terrain. Amitav Ghosh’s widely acclaimed Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma stands as the foremost example for understanding the travails of time and history of Cambodia and Myanmar. The narration of Ghosh’s travel experiences in these countries brings to the fore the complex temporal dimensions of history amalgamated with collective trauma caused to its people through seemingly unabated and intense phases of violence and bloodshed in Khmer Rouge revolution. The proposed paper explores the various couplings of history and memory to explore the perennial traumatic feeling of the people of Myanmar and Cambodia and attempts to locate it in a larger historical perspective generally shared with India. Some pertinent questions which the proposed paper seeks to reflect upon are: the dangers of homogenisation and using ahistorical vocabulary to replicate the hegemony of cosmopolitan models of postcoloniality over local models. Also, is ‘out of placeness’ of the narrator is a problematic identity or something permanent and worth celebrating? Is cosmopolitanism suitable for postcolonial societies or is it just another totalising discourse of colonialism spreading its tentacles in complicity with neo-liberalism?

Keywords: Memory, Travel, Trauma, Cosmopolitan

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The ‘Safar’ of a common man: Vijay Tendulkar’s travel play The Cyclist

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Shukla Chatterjee

Matrikiran High School, Gurgaon. ORCID: 0000-0003-3181-2725. Email: shuklachat@gmail.com  

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.28

Abstract

‘Travel narratives’ are primarily narratives or accounts of travel by the traveller or the narrator. With time this genre has journeyed from being just accounts to fictional stories as well. Though the nature of travel writing has taken up several forms, to proliferate the idea of travel through performance texts/plays is a rare to find. This is also because staging literal journeys on stage is a bit tricky. An Indian regional playwright of international acclaim, Vijay Tendulkar, explored this through his experimental play, Safar in Marathi which has been translated into English as The Cyclist. Beautifully crafted through the staging of various encounters by the protagonist, this play takes the form of a travel account. At the same time, by using ‘the cycle’ as a symbol, the playwright attempts to treat ‘journey’ as a metaphor and trace three types of journey – geographical, psychological and allegorical — which is quite obviously undertaken by every-man in life. This paper therefore attempts a detailed analysis of the play to show how performative language can also be used to create audio visual spectacle reifying the tale of the traveller/narrator on the stage.

Key words: travel narrative, travel play, Vijay Tendulkar, The Cyclist

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