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

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603 views

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

Cross- Culture Dialogue in R.K. Narayan’s My Dateless Diary

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Pulkita Anand

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Modern European Languages, Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan. ORCID: 0000-0003-0586-3975. Email: pulkitaanand@ymail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.27

 Abstract

Man has desires to explore the unexplored, to chart the uncharted, and to know the unknown. R K Narayan takes us to different terrain in his work My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1960). Though the book was written quite late by Narayan, it has an unmistakable stamp of his style and ease. Written in the first-person, it takes us directly to the core of the writer’s persona and his idiosyncrasies.  The book is about a journey to America and self in the act of writing, journeying inside and outside the world.  It is a conglomeration of fact and fiction, memories and desires, experience and observation, self and other, and the East and the West. The word ‘dateless’ is metaphoric in a way that many things are still prevalent in the present time.  In his witty and amusing tone, Narayan draws up the subtle difference in linguistic, cultural, social, economical, religious and professional aspects of American and Indian ways of life, which at once invites comparison and contrast. It seems to be a mingling of two cultures in literature. Narayan reveals how we Indians get easily adjusted and assimilated in any culture. He also depicts no desire on the parts of Indians to subvert this general representation. The paper aims to dwell on these aspects as reflected in the text. It also attempts to see how Narayan juxtaposed the Indian and American ways of life, and how they complement each other in their ways.

Keywords:  India, America, culture, life, travel, self.

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

“If possible, I too shall venture out into the world – that is my desire”: Reading Rabindranath Tagore’s Chhinnapatrabali as Travel Writing

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Sarbajaya Bhattacharya

Research Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. ORCID: 0000-0001-6294-7804. Email: sarbajaya.b@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.26

 Abstract

Hugo’s description of a view from a moving train is one of many instances in travel writing which illustrates how the mode of travel (here, the railways) often plays a significant role in the creating of new landscapes within the text. The gaze of the traveller also plays a significant role in landscape production as does their relation to the land they are describing. This article seeks to examine the ways in which ‘literary landscape(s)’ produced by travel- writing are able to challenge the ‘imperial eye’ in the construction and representation of the colony, in this case, Bengal, with specific reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s letters written to his niece Indira Devi. This article shall locate Chhinnapatrabali within the broader framework of British landscape paintings of India in order to examine how Tagore’s text is formulating individual and cultural identities. It seeks to argue that the production of literary landscapes in the letters in Chhinnapatrabali must be seen within the larger colonial project of landscape production and be located within the efforts by the colonial subjects to explicitly and implicitly produce and reproduce landscapes of their own through travel narratives, where landscape becomes an interesting site/sight of Self and national identity.

Keywords: landscape, modernity, Tagore, letters, nation

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Revisiting the Narrative Powers of the Global South through The Travels of Dean Mahomet

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Tanutrushna Panigrahi

Assistant Professor, Humanities Education, International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Email: tanutrushna@iiit-bh.ac.

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.25

Abstract

The Travels of Dean Mahomet is a 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as a camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company’s army between 1769 and 1784. Mahomet’s Travel includes his journey in India and to the West in which the Indian view of the British rule in India has been recorded. A rereading of the text from the Global South literary perspectives, both contests and agreements, unfolds how the text engages both in colonial and postcolonial concerns simultaneously and create spaces for new literary encounters. The book’s power to negotiate with postcolonial accounts; to demonstrate the existence of multilateral voices, and a multiculturalist’s north-south dialogues comes both from the act of travel and the act of writing. The text plays the victimological narrative take/approach; colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance binaries, non-Eurocentric perspectives and subsequently moves beyond the radical dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized and the imperialist/nationalist divide of the eighteenth century. More importantly, through the very act of writing it provides a shift of focus from postcolonial to the Global South. A significant literary voice from the non-western location needs to be revisited, established and re-established. This paper aims to read the travel narrative of Dean Mahomet in this context, to explore how the non-European perspectives demonstrate the existence of multilateral voices that participated in the process of imperialism.

Keywords: Global South, Colonial India, Cultural Hegemony, Eurocentric, Orientalism

The Travel Writer as Cultural Icon and Literary Predecessor: Negotiating the African Legacy of S. K. Pottekkat

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Meera B.

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Amrita School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham, Kochi Campus. ORCID: 0000-0002-8395-9051. Email: meerab8526@gmail.com.  

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.24

Abstract

S. K. Pottekkat has been the most influential travel writer in Malayalam for many generations of Malayali readers. His travels in Africa in the year 1949-50, recorded in five travelogues beginning with the mid-twentieth century Kappirikalude Nattil, have inspired generations of Malayalis to follow suit and pursue the African dream. This is much more pronounced in the case of well-known Malayali writers whose attempts to write about Africa have inevitably involved a “writing back” to Pottekkat. In this paper, I analyze the African travelogues of two such writers – Tatapuram Sukumaran’s African Poorvadeshangalil in 1986 about his trip to Tanzania and Paul Zacharia’s Oru African Yatra(2005) about his travels from South Africa to Egypt in 2000. Sukumaran is hailed by the Malayali diaspora as the first Malayali writer after Pottekkat to visit the country while the writer-journalist Zacharia is on a self-proclaimed mission “to seek out the present-day form of that Africa which Pottekkat found 54 years ago”. Unsurprisingly, the major part of his journeys is undertaken through the well-trodden paths taken by Pottekkat who himself was inspired by the celebrated travel accounts of Livingstone and Stanley. In this paper, I intend to explore how these two writers writing about Africa in the humungous literary shadow of Pottekkat negotiate his African legacy in the Malayali literary imaginary. How far does the “anxiety of influence” of Pottekkat’s picture of Africa, which was colonial and Eurocentric, impinge on these writers who are trying to represent postcolonial Africa for a different audience in a different time? What are the strategies they adopt to create a distinct voice? These questions, in turn, lead to larger questions about how each tenderfoot traveller’s gaze is mediated by the verisimilar lens of existing discourses as well as by the horizon of expectations of his/her reading public brought up on these canonical narratives.

Keywords: Pottekkat, Sukumaran, Zacharia, Malayali travel writing, Africa, anxiety of influence

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe: an Indian’s perspective on Afghanistan

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Abhijit Ghosh

Assistant Professor of English, Balagarh B. K. Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly, West Bengal. Email: abghosh2002@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.23

Abstract

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe, first published in 1948, is a travel account of enduring popularity based on his experiences in Afghanistan during the years 1927 to 1929. In this reading I wish to concentrate on the distinctive quality that sets it apart from the typical travel writing of the age produced by the colonial encounter. Mujtaba Ali’s experience of colonialism in India combined with his profound sense of history makes him uniquely capable of providing a glimpse of Afghanistan during a period of social and cultural transformation. His portrayal of the Afghan identity in confrontation with external colonial forces and internal upheaval is not only invigorating but also challenging because it is not directed at demystification or categorization as in colonial texts aiming to comprehend the oriental. His colonised self-consciousness finds in the independent Afghan a cause to celebrate and thus allows us to explore his work as a postcolonial text. According to Justine D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, postcolonial travel writing “subverts both colonial claims to truth making, as well as the nexus between travel and domination” (Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, 3). Therefore, while a typical European travelogue like Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937), written a few years after Ali’s visit provides an unabashed view of Afghanistan as a historical artefact requiring British protection, a colonised Indian’s account of Afghanistan hits out at the “nexus between travel and domination” and seeks to initiate a south-south dialogue inspired by the hope of regional collaboration.

Keywords: travel narrative, Afghanistan, colonialism, postcolonial text, Robert Byron

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Russia through the Eyes of the Tagores: Travelogues of Rabindranath and Saumyendranath

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Sajal Dey

Department of Russian Studies, the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong Campus, Umshing-Mawkynroh, Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Email: sajaldey07@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.22

Abstract

Two Tagores, two visionaries; one as a poet-educationist, another as a revolutionary-politician, both from colonial India, then reeling under the British yoke, visited Russia at about the same time. While the elder Tagore, Nobel-laureate Rabindranath, was moved by the huge scale of development, mainly on the educational front, — the younger and the more rebellious one, Soumyendranath, studied deeply, paused, and raised questions, debated and disputed the gap between the so-called socialist theory and practice in Soviet Russia. Rabindranath wanted to visit post-revolution Russia for quite some time. After a few futile attempts his desire was ultimately fulfilled in 1930. What he primarily wanted to see was the all-embracing spread of education in the Soviet system and its results. His Russiar Chithi, or Letters from Russia bears testimony to his impression of the new ‘awakened’ Russia. In the very first line of his first letter from Moscow he writes, “In Russia at last! Whichever way I look, I am filled with wonder.” In spite of a few adverse comments that he made later on, this feeling of ‘wonder’ about Russia lasted throughout the collection. Soumyendranath, grandson of Rabindranath’s elder brother Dwijendranath, was one of the pioneers of communist movement in India. After a short period of romance with Gandhism that failed to answer some of the basic questions he had in his mind, Soumyendranath was attracted to socialism. He went to Russia in 1927, took lessons of communism from Bukharin himself, got admitted in the Lenin course at the Marx-Engels Institute, and also learned Russian language very well. A formidable intellectual, Soumyendranath never faltered to express his opinion even in Stalinist Russia. He debated with Bukharin, disputed Gorky’s opinion regarding proletarian literature, and opposed the Kuusinen Thesis in the sixth world congress of Comintern held in 1928. Shortly after that he went away, but came back to Russia in 1930 along with Rabindranath. His travelogue Jatri or The Wayfarer, among other things, carries his impression of Russia.

In this paper a comparative study of these two outlooks of the two Tagores has been undertaken, showing how these two great minds differed, as far as Russia was concerned, as evident from the travelogues and books they wrote and other related materials. Their personal relationship as well as literary and ideological influences on each other is one of the pivotal points of investigation. The important thing kept in view was that, both of them in their own way represented the country they belonged to, and their lifelong mission was emancipation of their homeland and its people, again in their own distinctive ways.

Keywords: Russian revolution, socialism, Tagores, Rabindranath, Soumyendranath

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Writing Back Through Travel: A Study of The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan

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Arnab Chatterjee

Assistant Professor of English, Harishchandrapur College, Pipla, Malda. Email : arnabehia@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.21

Abstract

Mirza Abu Taleb Khan who travelled to England  from 1799-1802 is one of the early Indians who participated in what Michael Fisher calls ‘counterflows to colonialism’ and recorded his experience in the form of a travelogue. Taleb’s Travels foregrounds how a colonized subject from the periphery tries to understand and negotiate with the metropolitan centre that attempted to dominate and control the Other. It is pertinent to explore the cultural dialogue initiated by a ‘contact zone’ formed through the travel of an Indian. The oriental traveller who was both the gazer and the gazed, came up with a highly complex gaze that created a version of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘autoethnography’ and a space for ‘transculturation’. Taleb’s entry in print culture through writing a travelogue seems highly significant because he tried to write back a genre called travel writing that played an integral part in the consolidation of empire by mapping  the cultural topography as well as the flora and fauna of the Other. The travel of the ‘Persian Prince in London’ problematized an important binary created by colonial discourse– Britain’s mobility as opposed to the stasis of the Other. Though Taleb accepted some of the binaries created by the Orientalist discourse, there are areas where he refused to accept the superiority of the British culture. First published in 1810, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799-1803 brings out the dialectic of the acceptance and rejection of the dominant metropolitan culture. He admired the science and technology of Britain, their education system and law. He also sharply criticized the British as proud, insolent, intolerant, non-religious, luxurious and lazy and his criticism of British culture provides a strong sense of postcolonial resistance. He debunked the empirical codes of European travel writing by positing the worldview of the Other through the form of ‘safarnama’. This paper attempts to critically locate Taleb’s text as an ‘authoethnographic expression’ and the problematic position of an Indian traveller who can question empire and also serve the interest of empire by teaching oriental languages to the colonial masters.

Keywords: contact zone, autoethnography, transculturation, colonial discourse, postcolonial resistance

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Can the Hypnotized Subaltern Speak? Assessing 19th Century Gujarati Travelogues to England

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Dhwani Vaishnav

Assistant Professor, Shantilal Shah Engineering College, Bhavnagar, Gujarat. Orcid Id: 0000-0002-9528-7934. Email: dnv_07_eng@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.20

 Abstract

Travel broadens the mind but it would be interesting to trace how many people actually have the opportunity to travel and learn something new. Even if travel is one of the most natural human instincts, written expression of travel experiences, i.e., travelogue is considered as a minor genre of literature. It is only in the latter half of the 20th century that this genre gained popularity within literary circles. Indian travel writing and specially Gujarati travelogues started being written in the 19th century, an age of social reformation in India. This paper endeavours to study three early Gujarati travelogues about journeys to England made by Mahipatram Rupram Nilkanth, Karasandas Mulji (both written in Gujarati) and Behramji Malabari (written in English) as representative writing depicting how Indians were influenced by the English and took note of English life during the age of colonialism. Mahipatram and Mulji faced uproar from their community but ventured to visit the land of the masters. Malabari as a student of humanity, went to search the truths of life, especially the study of human progress in two different civilizations by travelling and adopting a comparative method for which he thought a metropolis like London was the best place. The age of social reformation had already injected sparks of bringing change in these travellers. The grandeur of the English land hypnotized these subalterns. Hence, Mahipatram and Karsandas have tried to present a beautiful picture of the places whereas Malabari does not make any exception in his criticism about the life and culture of England. This paper analyzes the experiences of these three travels which were made between 1860 and 1890 and show how these travellers perceived the function of the British Raj in India and actually in their own land. Their awe, pleasure and dislike about a culture and a nation that was governing their own land for a long time would also be highlighted.

Keywords: travel, social reformation, colonialism, subaltern, Gujarati travelogue

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