Travel Writings

From the observatory in India: Julio Cortázar´s Kaleidoscopic Gaze

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Lucía Caminada Rossetti

Tenured Professor, Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Argentina. Email: lucia.caminada@comunidad.unne.edu.ar

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.10

First published: October 8, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under the themed issue “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”)
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From the observatory in India: Julio Cortázar´s Kaleidoscopic Gaze

Abstract

This article investigates two texts that the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar produced in relation to his experience and trips to India:  Prose of the observatory (1972) and the text Turismo aconsejable [Advisable tourism] included in Último round (1969). Both texts contain photographs, which generate a kaleidoscopic gaze characterized by cultural distance and closeness, as well as aesthetic experience. The hypothesis is that a kind of observatory is generated from which the writer observes, perceives and interprets the sensitivity of Latin American and Indian cultures in dialogue. The objective of this study is to identify the Cortazarian kaleidoscopic gaze that permanently generates both an approach and a distance, through the reading of these hybrid texts whose photographs and words produce a playful and experimental space.

Keywords: Julio Cortázar, Prose of the Observatory, India, kaleidoscopic gaze, photography

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Representation of India in Travel Writings by Latin American Women in the 20th Century

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Mala Shikha1 & Ranjeeva Ranjan2

1Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish Studies, School of Languages, Doon University. Email id: malashikha@doonuniversity.ac.in

2Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Foundations, Faculty of Education, Universidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile. Email id: ranjan@ucm.cl

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.08

First published: October 7, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under the themed issue “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”)
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Representation of India in Travel Writings by Latin American Women in the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of India in the works of Latin American women writers in the 20th Century. With the advent of Modernism in Latin America in the late 19th Century as a turn-of-the-century movement, Latin American intellectuals started engaging with India such as Rubén Darío in Azul (1888). However, it was Gabriela Mistral, a Nobel laureate from Chile, who although never travelled to India, may be considered the first Latin American woman writer who engaged with India through the appreciation of Tagore in her literary repertoire. Furthermore, in the 20th Century Cecília Meireles, one of the most famous Modernist poets from Brazil visited India in 1953 upon being invited by Jawaharlal Nehru. She noted in her diary that as paradoxical as it sounds, it is much easier to understand India if one knows Brazil. She drew similarities between the fundamental issues of the two countries then. She wrote the anthology Poemas Escritos Na Índia (1961). Another important performance artist is Josefina Báez who would combine yoga and her lived experience in the three spaces of New York, La Romana in the Dominican Republic and India to produce zany dance dramas like Dominicanish (2001). She uses the classical dance form of Kuchipudi originating in the south of India to restructure her Dominican cultural identity in New York. Another contemporary Mexican writer, Margo Glantz, wrote her work Coronada de Moscas (2012), which is a travelogue based on her three sojourns in India accompanied with photographs by Alina López Cámara. The paper analyses the works by the above-mentioned Latin American intellectuals vis-à-vis representation of India in them and focuses on what it is to travel to India and write on it for Latin American women in the 20th Century. This has been done using the theoretical perspective of bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984) and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992).

Keywords: India, travel writings, Latin America, women, 20th century

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D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Writing: Concept of Nudity and Sexuality with a Difference

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Abhik Mukherjee

Assistant Professor of English, Vellore Institute of Technology Vellore. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8701-365. Email: abhik.mukherjee@vit.ac.in

Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.49   

Abstract

In that he spent most of his life outside Britain, D. H. Lawrence often seems the least British of the British Modernists. His interest in and willingness to be influenced by Italy, Sicily, the American Southwest, Mexico and Australia can be easily explored in his travel books. Whereas his novels are too didactic in nature, his philosophies get naturally matured as he travels and they are expressed very succinctly in his travel writing. In various parts of his four travel books, namely Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Morning in Mexico (1927), Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932) Lawrence depicts the difference between nudity and nakedness and how they influence him. The other contrast here is between art and life, with the nude standing for art and nakedness for life with the section on Florence and the art there. The essay focuses on how Lawrence views art differently when actually experiencing these works himself during his travels.  I show different phases in his response to nudity/nakedness as shown in his four travel books and what accounts for these changes. The thesis is the examination of Lawrence’s belief that the touch of amateurism and primitivism can inject new freshness into our lives and can salvage them from the clutches of habit, and the mechanized civilisation. Nudity and sexuality as part of primitive modes of life can balance and heal what Freud termed the discontents of civilisation. Situated on the thin line between nudity and sexuality, D.H. Lawrence’s travel writing recounts man’s true relationship with the cosmos. And finally, the paper shows some misunderstanding on the part of the second wave feminists on his representation of masculinity in nakedness.

Keywords: travel writing, nakedness, nudity, sexuality, feminism

 

The Dislocations and Transgressions in Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book (2004)

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Shikha Singh

PhD Scholar, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, shikha52_llg@jnu.ac.in, ORCID: 0000-0003-0255-8289

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.27

PlumX Metrics

  Abstract

The paper explores the multiple transgressions and border-crossings elaborated in the visual travelogue The London Jungle Book (2004), by Bhajju Shyam, a Pardhan-Gond artist and produced by Tara Books, an independent artists’ collective specialising in experimental visual literature. The paper discusses the cultural history of “Pardhan-Gond art” and the dislocations and relocations of the art form in the contemporary art world. The paper argues that the personal experience of the artist appears to reflect these shifting categorizations, movements and locations of performance of the art form. The images and metaphors of displacement and transgression have varied connotations in the visual travelogue as they reveal the complex mechanisms of travel and mobility in the contemporary world. The text also articulates the response of the artist to the social, political and economic conditions surrounding the production and circulation of his art, through reimagining his homeland, his cultural ties and his own identity. In a paradoxical sense, the experience of travel and mobility does not symbolise the uprootedness or detachment of the artist, but it brings into effect, with more immediacy, the cultural identity and ties of the artist, as a Pardhan-Gond artist, in the contemporary art world. Furthermore, the materiality of the crossover text challenges the notions of media, genre and readership, associated with the picturebook format, destabilising the categories and assumptions associated with the literary genre.

Keywords: Pardhan-Gond art, Bhajju Shyam, Tara Books, tribal art, book illustration.

India nel quattrocento: Fifteenth-Century Italian Travel Writings on India

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Jitamanyu Das

Doctoral Candidate (JRF), Department of English, Jadavpur University, ORCID: 0000-0001-5845-8098,  jitamanyudas@gmail.com,

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.33

India nel quattrocento: Fifteenth-Century Italian Travel Writings on India

Abstract

Fifteenth-century Italian travel narratives on India by Nicolò dei Conti and Gerolamo di Santo Stefano present a detailed account of the India they visited, following the narrative tradition of the Italian Marco Polo. These narratives of the Renaissance were published as descriptive authorial texts of travellers to the East. Their importance was due to the authors’ detailed first-hand experiences of the societies and cultures that they encountered, as well as the various trade centres of the period. These narratives were utilised by merchants, explorers, and Jesuits for a variety of purposes. The narratives of Nicolò dei Conti and Gerolamo di Santo Stefano thus became indispensable tools that were later distorted through numerous translations to suit the politics of Orientalism for the emerging colonial enterprises. In my paper, I have attempted a re-reading of the particular texts to identify how Italy saw India, while illustrating through their history of publication the transformation that these narratives underwent later in order to objectify India in the West through the lens of Orientalism in their manner of representation.

Keywords: India, Italian Travel Writing, Orientalism, Renaissance, Translation

Theorizing the Experience of Travel in the Film North 24 Kaatham

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Anupama A. P1 &  Vinod Balakrishnan2

1Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. National Institute of Technology,Tiruchirappalli. Tamil Nadu. India. E-mail: anupriya2621@gmail.com

2Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. Tamil Nadu. India. E-mail: winokrish@yahoo.co.uk

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.40

Abstract

There are two spaces in Anil Radhakrishnan’s travel narrative, North 24 Kaatham (2013), the topographical space outside and the psychological space inside. The film is read as a dialectical tension that plays out in the character of Harikrishnan who suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder. The fateful journey of Harikrishnan on a day of harthal (general strike) is, to all appearance, topographical though it is, in equal measure, a psychological one. The paper, through a formalist analysis of the film, draws a correspondence between the two journeys of Harikrishnan in the company of fellow passengers: Gopalan and Narayani (Nani), in order to demonstrate Hari’s transformation from a self-absorbed individual towards a sociable human being. The argument is structured by combining Walter Benjamin’s idea of “aura” and Gaston Bachelard’s dialectics of space to explain the protagonist’s psycho-spatial transformation.

Keywords: travel, outside/inside, topographical space, formalist analysis, spectator experience

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Anxious Encounters with the (Monstrous) Other: The Yakshi Tales of Medieval Kerala

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Meenu B.

Department of English, Amrita School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita ViswaVidyapeetham, Kochi Campus.ORCID: 0000-0002-9141-3921. Email: beingmeenu@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.39

 Abstract
Stories about monstrous encounters during travel are ubiquitous in every culture. Scholars see them as figurative representations of the cultural anxiety related to traversing the unknown and the encounter with the “Other”. For instance, the early Greek ‘monster-on-the-road’ tales are often read in the context of the expansion of trade among Greek city-states and the Greek colonization of far flung territories which necessitated going beyond the safety of familiar town boundaries. The Indian epics and folktales also abound with encounters of travellers with supernatural/monstrous beings. Whether it is episodes such as the “YakshaPrasna” in the Mahabharata, or the Bodhisatta’s encounter with the Naga and the Yaksha in Buddhist legends, or his encounter with Yakkhinis in the Jataka tales, travel often involved encountering the Dangerous “Other” who had to be defeated/satiated/converted. These early traveller’s tales can be read as records of the anxieties regarding expansion/establishment of the Kshatriya hero’s kingdom where the wild/primitive outside the bounds of civilization had to be conquered/appropriated. In the case of the religious hero, the monster represented a crisis of faith – either he/she was an embodiment of the allures of material pleasure the ascetic had to guard against or a staunch believer of another faith who had to be converted/conquered. All these “forgotten” traditions of travel come together in the Yakshi tales of medieval Kerala where a shape-shifting tree spirit haunting lonely pathways evokes memories of the ancient traveller’s encounter with the wilderness and its corresponding deities. This paper attempts to read these tales from medieval Kerala against earlier Indian traditions of travel as well as the literal and metaphorical crossings of caste and gender borders that travel entailed during the medieval period.

Keywords: monsters, travel, Indian epics, Jataka tales, medieval Kerala, Yakshi tales

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Journeying through the Indian Railways in Around India in 80 Trains (2012) by Monisha Rajesh and Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop But Get Never Off (2009) by Bishwanath Ghosh

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Siddharth Dubey

Ph.D Research Scholar, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR. ORCID id: 0000-0002-9438-787X. Email id: siddharthd888@gmail.com.

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.38

Abstract

An Indian train is a space that exemplifies a true sense of transient cultural pattern as it travels through different states of India constantly assimilating people of diverse cultures. In this liminal space, a passenger travels from known to unknown in terms of geography, culture, language, cuisine, sartorial configuration and psychological makeup. Indian Railways offers an insightful analysis of cohabitation – the conflict and the coexistence of people amidst cultural differences.An Indian train is an exemplar of an accurate secular structure, blurring the lines of discrepancies based on religion, caste, gender, sex and sexuality. Prejudices that are evident in spaces relatively marked by certain spatial permanence dilute in a train. A provisional spatial arrangement of a train therefore questions the idea of tolerance and intolerance compared to that of permanent arrangement. As the Indian train incorporates people of all ages and territories, the train is a specimen of the concept of Bakhtinian polyphony, wherein the dialogues occurring between passengers represent varied consciousness. Thus, a train travelogue encompasses unmerged voices, each carrying a unique conscious design. The people travelling in an Indian train are separated on one single ground: economy. Therefore, economic factor becomes an overarching pattern of base to assign a certain culture in a superstructure to each class and each offers a unique perspective to the travelogue. This paper will analyze the trope of the train in two Indian travelogues based on culture, Marxist economic structure, Bakhtinian concept of polyphony, secularism and the idea of tolerance.

Keywords: Indian trains, travelogue, liminality, polyphony, secularism

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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

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