Travel Writings - Page 3

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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Travelling Identities, Bodies and the Poetics of Difference: Travel Writing in Assamese Literature

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Shibashish Purkayastha

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. ORCID: 0000-0002-1630-0038. Email: shibashish.purkayastha@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.14

Abstract

The purpose of this article shall be to trace a historical trajectory of the development of travel writing as a distinct genre in Assamese literature. In Assam, the germ of travel writing dates back to the nineteenth century in which European travellers wrote extensively on their visits to North East India, which were exotic accounts of their encounters with an alien culture. The first Assamese travelogue was Jnanadabhiram Barua’s BilatarSithi which was serialized in the Assamese monthly Banhi in 1909 which, for the first time, narrativized a non-westerners account of his travels to the United Kingdom in a series of letters. However, the genre of travel writing in Assam seemed to attain its growth and maturity in the days following Independence. In the late 1980s, the travel writer, as a move away from merely offering descriptive sketches eulogizing their travels, started looking back into the nuances of the self as a site of imaginative and critical reflections. The onus of this article shall be to trace the growth and development of travel writing in Assamese literature and shall then move on to reviewing some of the important travel narratives of Assamese literature which seem to problematize our understandings of the nation, identity, body and the gaze. Additionally, it shall also examine whether these travel narratives attempt to expand the discursive and generic boundaries of the form of postcolonial travel writing. Through close readings of select travel narratives, I argue that they posit a poetics of difference by attempting to engage in a dialogue between their encounters with foreign cultures vis-à-vis, the nuances of everyday material realities of the life of the traveller.

Keywords: agency, travel, history, identity, body, empathy

The Ascent Within: Transformative Agency of the Nanda Devi in Bill Aitken’s The Nanda Devi Affair

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Arup Pal

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. ORCID: 0000-0001-9906-6007  Email: arup.listens@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.13

Abstract                                         

The Himalayas, it is commonly agreed, stupefy the traveler first by the immensity of the unknown and then elevate his journey by offering an almost unclimbable challenge—the imaginative recording of what is seen and felt. Overwhelmed by the accounts of numerous narratives, Bill Aitken, a Scottish-born-Indian in the early 1960s, travelled from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to the Nanda Devi, once considered the highest Indian peak. He narrated his experiences in The Nanda Devi Affair (1994). In this journey, the text suggests, the climber’s inbuilt intensity of life—from sheer physical pleasures to calm resignation—is tested. This study intends to explore how the altitude’s transformative vigor allows the travelling subject to participate in “an interaction of the human and natural” (Bainbridge, 2016, p. 628), thereby offering a space in which the self-before-the-journey (pre-climb episteme) and the self-endowed with physical actuality negotiate a new understanding. The study offers an introspection on how the Nanda Devi helps the travelling identity realize a psychic evolution from the mere sensual excitement of a lured mountaineer to, what Aitken notes, “the elusive understanding of slippery psychic subtleties” (2004, p.189), thereby questioning and purifying the preconceived ideas of the traveler to achieve a sense of selfhood.

Keywords: The Nanda Devi, Mountain literature, Bill Aitken, The Himalayas, Interactive space

Problematizing the Metaphor of Travel: A Study of the Journeys of Humans and Texts from India to Tibet

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Priyanka Chakraborty

Research Scholar, Department of English, Banaras Hindu University. ORCID: 0000-0003-2175-2239. Email-c.priyanka113@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.12

Abstract

Myths and legends travel just like humans to distant lands under different circumstances. One among the two most popular etiological myths of Tibet tells that the earliest settlers on the Tibetan plateau were refugees who escaped the conflicts described in the Indian epic Mahabharata. This serves as the first legend establishing the Indian connection with Tibet. Such journeys of humans, ideas and texts always stimulated imagination in human beings. The narratives of journeys woven with the author’s imaginations and experiences, gave us travelogues. An ancient genre of literature, travelogues serve as the base for various fictional and non-fictional works. Travelogues inquired the unknown, making us aware of the existence of diversified cultural extremities present in this planet and thereby playing a crucial role in cultural exchanges. However, very interestingly texts also embark on journeys along with humans; and create neo-textual sites for future discourse. In this paper the focus is on the exchanges between India and Tibet. Beginning from the first Indian Scholar Santarakshita, followed by Padmasambhava, Atisha et al to 20th century Rahul Sanskritiyan, there has been continuous movement of scholars to and fro Tibet. Apart from documenting their journeys, they initiated huge influx of literary texts between these two ancient countries. As a result of which Tibet became the store-house of ancient Nalanda Tradition while it faced destruction in India. So, the paper firstly seeks out to discuss the influences of Indian scholars and texts in Tibetan culture from ancient times. Secondly, it tries to chart out the representation of Tibet in the writings of these scholars and trace the birth of Buddhist literature in Tibet. Thirdly, since travelogues also supported cartographic purposes, they portrayed both the cultural and geo-political zones, it looks into the interpretation and misinterpretation of culture channelized through these documents.  Lastly, it attempts to problematize the various versions of documents written regarding such people and their journeys to understand the nature of perceptions and experiences.

Keywords: journey, texts, religion, tradition, culture, Tibet

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