Postcolonial - Page 10

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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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?

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

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231 views

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

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

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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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

Looking In (/): A Case Study of Northeast with Special Reference to Tripura Buranji (1724)

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Bhaskar Jyoti Gogoi

Ph.D Research Scholar, English & Foreign Language University, Shillong Campus, Meghalaya. bhaskargogoi@hotmail.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.15

 Abstract

In the context of Assam, travel writing is an area which offers immense possibilities. Particularly, the pre-colonial period of Assam contains various neglected travelogues like the anonymous Loss of Ter Schelling (1682), Bartholomew Plaisted’s Journals (1767), James Renell’s Bengal Atlas (1779) and his Journals (1764-67) as well as John Peter Wade’s An Account of Assam (1800). These travelogues not only are precious testimonials to the political, social and economic demographics of the period but also offer valuable insight into early Anglo-Assamese relations. Even travel narratives written in the vernacular provide critical insights about various ethnic communities residing in Northeast India. The improvement of communication networks in the seventeenth century, like trade routes and river passageways, facilitated the greater movement of travellers to and from the Northeast in various garbs like that of the explorers, invaders, missionaries etc. A pioneer amongst travel texts in Assamese is Tripura Buranji (1724), written jointly by Ratna Kandali Sarma and Arjundas Bairagi, the two Assamese envoys of King Rudra Simha (1696-1714) who were sent to the court of Ratnamanikya, the King of Tripura in 1714 to seek assistance for the proposed invasion of Bengal. Owing to this event, there were various correspondences and envoys being sent to and fro from the Ahom court to the King of Tripura. The two envoys mentioned here undertook the journey to Tripura on foot accompanied by escorts through Cachar and the foothills of Lushai Hills (present day Mizoram) to the capital of Ratnamanikya. The most striking fact about the travelogue is that its authors supplemented their account of the diplomatic missions, either on their own accord or on the instructions of their Government, by their observations on the resources, topography, customs and history of the country which they visited and of the territories which they had passed. Such a compilation was expected to extend the bounds of knowledge of their countrymen and facilitate the prosecution of similar missions in future. It also marks the importance of the realization of such archiving and documentation of travel as early as the eighteenth century. This paper offers introspection into this medieval narrative and presents a comparative viewpoint with Bartholomew Plaisted’s Journals (1767), written around the same time period. This would offer us a comparative viewpoint vis-à-vis the insider and the outsider’s narration of/about the Northeast.

Keywords: Assamese travel, eighteenth century, Tripura, diplomatic mission

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Visa-Free Travel to Sri Kartarpur Sahib: Historic Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism from Indian Punjab to Pakistan Punjab

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Taranjeet Kaur Chawla,1 Rayaz Hassan,2 & Daljeet Kaur3

1PhD Research Scholar, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Manipal University Jaipur, Rajasthan-India. ORCID id: 0000-0002-5336-1964. Email id: ms.kaur011@gmail.com

2 Associate Professor & Head of the Department, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Manipal Universirty Jaipur, Rajasthan-India. Email id: rayaz.hassan@jaipur.manipal.edu                                                                                          

 3Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Government Medical College, Pali, Rajasthan- India. Email id: drkaur247@gmail.com  

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.09

Abstract

Kartarpur, the holiest shrine in Sikhism located across River Ravi in Pakistan, was founded in 1504 CE by Guru Nanak, the first guru of Sikhism, who also established the first Sikh commune there. This time, the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak was celebrated as the road to prosperity of the region. In November 2019, the government of India and Pakistan opened a Kartarpur corridor linking two significant Sikh shrines, namely Sri Dera Baba Nanak Sahib located in Indian Punjab and Gurudwara Darbar Sahib, located in Kartarpur, Pakistan. The visa-free travel of Sikh pilgrims through the Kartarpur corridor became a historic pilgrimage for both countries. Earlier scholarly research focused on symbolism, politics and impact on India-Pakistan relations with the construction of the Kartarpur corridor. The present study aims to examine the significance of the Kartarpur corridor among Sikh devotees and explores how Kartarpur as a site for religious tourism develops the region’s economic growth and boosts the tourism industry on both sides. Adopting a mixed methodology, the study collected data through quantitative and qualitative research methods with primary and secondary sources followed by data analysis. It tries to establish symbolic importance of the Kartarpur as historic pilgrimage and religious tourism to generate economic connectivity between both countries and offers overarching importance at both national and international levels.

Keywords:  Economic connectivity, Historic pilgrimage, Kartarpur corridor, Religious tourism.

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