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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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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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The Story of our Experiments with London: The Victorian City in Indian Imagination (1870-1900)

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Arup K. Chatterjee

Associate Professor, OP Jindal Global University, ORCID: 0000-0001-8880-7762. Email: arupkchatterjee@jgu.edu.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.19

 Abstract

This paper argues for a hermeneutic shift in interpreting accounts of Victorian London in Indian travelogues written between 1870 and 1900, taking the founding of the Indian National Congress (1885) and the climate of anticolonial agitation as a political fulcrum for a new aesthetic drive in the ways in which the imperial capital was imagined as a new psychogeography by its colonial subjects. Drawing on travelogues by Pothum Ragaviah, Trailokyanath Mukharji, Behramji Malabari, Lala Baijnath, T.B. Pandian and G.P. Pillai, I outline how London was reinvented in the Indian imagination as a typographical experiment in pictograms and audiograms. The urban, domestic and atmospheric phenomena of the metropolis was recreated as archetypes in the colonized mind of the reader back home, as a new model of modernity, a new way of typographic expertise over the imperial capital, and a therapeutic means of overcoming the ongoing traumas of colonization. Pictograms of its intimate domestic quarters and atmospheric nuances or audiograms of its majestic choirs and ambient traffic noise, London’s phenomenology was brought alive in the Indian consciousness through these travelogues, which besides playing a literary role also politically empowered the colonized imagination for the wish-fulfilment of an autonomous geography. Seen in the light of the great morphological transformations in places like East Ham, Wembley, Southall or Brick Lane—those parts of present-day London with heavy concentrations of South Asians—late Victorian Indian accounts of the city and their typographical experiments were the early “ethno-scapes” and “kaleido-scapes” for the colonized imagination to inhabit the imperial capital in a psychogeographical capacity, much before South Asian immigrations since the 1950s.

Keywords: Victorian London; Gandhi; Ragaviah; Malabari; Mukharji; Baijnath; Pandian; Pillai

Writing Northeast: Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck

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Rosy Chamling

Department of English, Sikkim University. Email: rosychamling@gamil.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.18

Abstract

Traditionally travel literature has been a genre known for boosting colonial expansionist projects and the construction of the European ‘Other’. Travel writing as an imperialist discourse serving to connect with the ideological apparatus of the European nation-state has been explored in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992). But contemporary travel literature is more subject-oriented, focussing on both the place and the people therein and the politics involved in the formation of their identity. It assumes the form of a cultural critique, called the ‘countertravel’ writing. Countertravel writing, then, aims not to delight the readers in its presentation of the exotic ‘Other’ but rather serves to transport the complacent reader causing the “unmapping” of “mapped” worldviews. (Richard Phillip, 1997). Within this paradigm of the ‘countertravel’ narrative, my engagement with Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) will be to show how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. Travelling through the ‘chicken neck’ which is a narrow strip of land connecting the Northeast with the rest of India; this paper will show how the apparently homogeneous Northeast has a diversity of stories and histories to tell. Burdened with histories of secessionism and insurgencies, Haksar’s exploration exposes how these histories are subsumed by the larger national narrative.

Keywords : Northeast, Countertravel Writing, History, Identity.

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A Critical Review of the First Travelogue written in an Indian language on Assam Udaseen Satyashrabar Asam Bhraman by Ramkumar Bidyaratna

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Bibha Devi

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Indreswar Sarma Academy Degree College, JibanPhukan Nagar, Dibrugarh, Assam. ORCID: 0000-0003-0591-8737. Email: bibhadevi@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.17

Abstract

Travel narratives usually provide ethnographic information about a place and its inhabitants. The travelogue written in 1881 by Ramkumar Bidyaratna gives an excellent ethnographic account of contemporary Assam and Assamese society of the nineteenth century. The travelogue, which was originally written in Bengali, was translated into Assamese by Munin Sarma in 2014.  The book is significant for its prudent comments on various socio-cultural aspects of the Assamese society like – condition of Assamese women, widow remarriage, commerce, religion, etc. As stated in the translated version, Bidyaratna’s travelogue was probably the first travelogue on Assam written in an Indian language. There was an aim behind Bidyaratna’s travel to Assam. From his experiences from his travel to places outside Bengal he had developed a belief that unless one gets associated with another culture, it is natural to have a wrong notion about that culture. His aim was to eradicate misunderstandings between the Assamese and the Bengalis. In this present study, the Assamese version of the travelogue has been used to explore and interpret the socio-cultural milieu of Assam as represented in the narrative. This paper critically reviews the book, firstly, to explore the way ethnographic  information about Assam has been represented in it; and, secondly, to generate an understanding of the progressive thinking of the writer as evident from it.

Keywords: Travelogue, ethnography, Assam, culture, Assamese

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The Self and the Other in Jnanadabhiram Barua’s Bilator Sithi (Letters from Abroad)

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Nandini Kalita

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Email: nandinik970@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.16

Abstract

Jnanadabhiram Barua’s Bilator Sithi (Letters from Abroad), a travel narrative in Assamese depicts the author’s life in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. It consists of a series of letters where Barua attempts to understand the specificities of a culture that appears foreign to him. The narrative highlights the complex negotiations that the author has to make as a colonized subject in the colonizer’s land. I want to look at how these negotiations were shaped by the dominant discourse of imperial superiority. What are its implications on the subject’s sense of the self? What does encountering foreignness entail in this particular context? Travel writing has often been associated with the expansion of European imperialism. I plan to examine if this genre undergoes a change of perspective in the hands of a subject of European imperialism. How does the relationship between the self and the other play out in this text? Who is the other in Barua’s narrative? I want to probe deeper into how the construction of the other in this case is influenced by the popular notions about Assamese identity.

Keywords: Travel Writing, Self and Other, Identity, Colonialism, Recognition, Modernity

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