Travel Writings - Page 4

Travel through Remote Terrains: Tibet in Focus

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Kiron Susan Joseph Sebastine

MPhil Research Scholar, Dept. of English and Languages, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. ORCID: 0000-0002-0621-0303.Email: kiron.susan@gmail.com.

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.11

Abstract

As Ramana Maharshi a twentieth century mystic reflects, travel is not just physical journey from one place to another but also subliminal from one thought to another. The outer journey implies meaning only when it is accompanied by an inner journey. Travel writing incorporates everyday explorations along with cultural mappings, musings and meditations on the encounters experienced in the course of the travel. Travelling solo on an impulse; out of the natural curiosity that life brings, is the delight of living the journey. This paper does a comparative analysis of Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s On A Truck Alone, To McMahon (2018) and Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1990). Both the authors journey through remote territories and terrains while maintaining their focus towards the Roof of The World, Tibet. While the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China occupies the centre stage in Seth’s travelogue, the soreness of the Indo China War shrouds a permeable veil in Sen’s work. The paper further explores the thin line between pleasure and adventure keeping in mind the gender binaries in travel writing. The human imagination is a no-man’s land that encounters the prickles of political hostilities and the precarious suspicions of the state machinery. The human dimensions of the territorial borders annihilate the joys of travel as an experiment in freedom. Travel acknowledges the constant fluidity of the cognitive entities, the rejection of the familiar and the embrace of the unfamiliar.

Keywords: Travel writing, Subliminal, Cultural mappings, Self-writing, Freedom

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Akka Mahadevi Caves: Lingayat memory & poetic space

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Neeti Singh

Associate Professor, Department of English, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. Email: neeti.singh-eng@msubaroda.ac.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.10

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to map the tourist-pilgrim’s journey and experience of the Akka Mahadevi caves in a manner where the material experience of the entire yatra (journey) subtly combines with the travel-narratives and spiritual persona of the 12th century Lingayat Virashaiva woman-saint-poet, in such a way as to create a complete and deeply enriching experience for the 21st century traveller. The journey to Akka Mahadevi Caves on the banks of River Krishna takes less than five hours of road-travel from Hyderabad, and the highway weaves through miles of farmland and forest area.  Akka Mahadevi it is said was initiated to Shiva bhakti by a travelling sadhu when she was merely ten years of age; following a life ridden with challenges she fled from her marital home and was accepted into the Lingayat fold headed by Allama Prabhu and Bassavana. In the last phase of her ascetic life she left Kalyana city and moved to a forest where she devoted herself solely to the worship of Lord Shiva (Cenna Mallikarjuna) in a cave in the Srisailam-Nallamal forest on the banks of River Krishna across the temple town of Srisailam, Kurnool district. The essay weaves with actual travel, Akka’s poetry (her vacanas) and lifeline and concludes with an analysis of the complex, radical challenges that fashioned the life and struggles of women ascetics like Mahadevi in an era that was primal and patriarchal. A reflection of the same is apparent in the semiotics of Mahadevi Akka’s poetry. Such active-travel that fuses present with past, has the potential to yoke the travelling subject to a higher collective experience and memory.

Keywords: Pilgrimage, Lingayat, Virashaiva, Saguna Bhakti, Spiritual tourism.

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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.

Travel and Writing in the Period of ‘High Imperialism’: Hajj Pilgrimage Narratives by the Begums of Bhopal

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Shafana Shaffi

Assistant Professor, Department of English, T.K.M. College of Arts and Science, Kollam, Kerala. ORCID: 0000-0001-9337-1449. Email: shafanashaffi11@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.08

 Abstract

This paper aims to study narratives by two Indian Muslim women – the formidable Begums of Bhopal – who travelled to Mecca for pilgrimage in the latter half of the nineteenth and the early decade of the twentieth century.  It attempts to trace the notions of imperialism and femininity that guide the women narrators and study as to how these personal narratives fit into the larger framework of colonial enterprise without intending to do so. Also by adopting a unique style that was at once in compliance with power structures like imperialism but that which resisted others like patriarchy, the Begums’ succeeded in fashioning their narratives as a powerful tool to portray their selves as faithful subjects of the Raj and who were also the rightful rulers of Bhopal. The texts, by bearing in mind the intended audience and the expected reception, are as much the products of the time as they are of the author’s personal intentions.

Keywords: travel, pilgrimage narratives, colonialism, Western male narratives, femininity, Other

Bengali Hindu pilgrims and travellers to the Himalayas from the late 19th to the late 20th century

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Nilanjana Sikdar Datta

Former Associate Professor of Sanskrit, Dumdum Motijheel College, Kolkata. Email: nil_sd54@hotmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.06

Abstract

Bengali travel narratives have a rich repertoire of works that focus on travel as pilgrimage undertaken to the Himalayas, especially to the famous holy shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath and to Kailasa and Manas Sarovar. This paper focuses on the changing nature of Himalayan pilgrimage down the centuries. The first part discusses two lesser known pilgrimages to the Himalayas where two monks of the Ramakrishna Mission order, namely Swami Akhandananda and Swami Apurvananda undertake their journey in 1887 and 1939 respectively. Their travelogues were published many years later by Udbodhan Karyalaya, the official mouthpiece of the Mission. In both the narratives we get details of the travails of travelling in those times with very little financial security and material comfort. The second part of the paper discusses issues raised by Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay in his travelogue Pancha Kedar where he tells us how, with changing times, the manner of travelling to the same holy places have undergone remarkable changes. The discussion then focuses upon another observation by the famous writer Narayan Sanyal who in his book Pather Mahaprasthan laments the demise of the original trekking routes of the pilgrims. In 1986, Saroj Kumar Bandyopadhyay visited Kailasa and Manas Sarovar and his narrative describing his month long package trip vouches for the changes that both the pilgrim and the pilgrimage had undergone to the same places almost half a century later.

Keywords: pilgrimage, Himalayas, trek routes, multifarious observations, Kailasa, Kedarnath

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Beyond the Boundaries of Kochi: a Study of Raja Veera Keralavarma’s Travel Narrative to Kashi

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Niveditha Kalarikkal

Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. kunjikavu@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.05

Abstract

Pilgrim narratives constitute a significant number of travel narratives which appeared in Sanskrit, English and various Indian bhashas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Raja Veera Kerala Varma IV, who ruled the erstwhile princely state of Kochi (Cochin) in South Western India, wrote an account of his pilgrimage to Kashi (Benares) during the years 1852-53. This travelogue in English was later translated into Malayalam by M. Raman Namboothiri and was published as Kochirajavinte Kashiyatra (The Cochin Raja’s travel to Kashi) in 2013. The ‘travel notes of the Raja of Kochi’ which was available in the form of his personal journal describes his meetings with many British officials and common people on the way, in addition to sketching the varied geographies and religious places that he visited during the 220 days long pilgrimage. The Raja who started his pilgrimage from Trippunithura was accompanied by a royal retinue which included his tour manager, a white medical doctor named Bingle and a few other servants. Veera Kerala Varma, later referred to as the ‘Maharaja who passed away in Kashi’ had an untimely death due to smallpox and his travel narrative reached Kochi along with his physical remains. This paper attempts to do a close reading of the travelogue to reveal the inquisitiveness of a Raja who had close associations with the British administrators, as one who attempted to step out of the boundaries of his kingdom with an ethnographic intent. The description of people and their cultural practices that were different from his own ‘country’ can also throw light on how a member of the 19th C English educated Indian elites looked upon newly evolving territorial identities, scientific advancements and public institutions that were being established through colonization.

Keywords: pilgrim narrative, cultural boundaries, writing home, territorial identities, colonialism and technology, modern self

First Travel Narrative in Telugu: A Study of Yenugula Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra

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M. G. Prasuna

Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, ORCID: 0000-0001-5034-0992. Email: prasuna@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.04

Abstract

Yenugula Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra(1838) is considered the first book written in the genre of travel writing in Telugu. A seminal work, it faithfully reflects and records the social, religious, political and economic life of people in those times, along with aspects of tradition and culture. A well-recognised scholar of his times, Veeraswamaiyya embarked on his journey to Kasi (Varanasi) in May 1830 from Chennapatnam (Chennai). He travelled for 15 months and 15 days and returned to Chennapatnam on September 3rd, 1831. He wrote about his experiences of travelling through Tirupati, Kadapa, Kurnool, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Jabalpur and Allahabad to reach Kasi. On his return journey, he travelled across Patna, Gaya, Calcutta, Puri, Ganjam, Simhachalam, Machilipatnam and Nellore, and finally reached Chennapatnam. His journey was unique because he took along with him, nearly 100 people consisting of his family, friends and servants. A travel of this scale needed meticulous planning. It could have been extremely challenging and adventurous to travel through unknown territories. These journeys had to be made by walking on foot and sometimes in a palanquin, carried by servants.  According to Hindu belief, Kasi is the place where one attains moksha or liberation, and freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth. Hence, it is considered an important spiritual destination. This work is a storehouse of information and reflects the author’s keen observation. This paper will explore the historical, cultural, social, economic and religious significance of Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra.

Keywords: Travel writing, Kasi yatra, pilgrimage, Telugu

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Travelling another Country: An Exploration into Travel Writings by Bhojpuri Speakers of India

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Jullie Rani

Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110067. Email: jullie.jnu@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.03

Abstract

Travel writings by Bhojpuri speakers of India define stories of pain and separation, survival of lives in difficult situations and the aspect of being together as a group.  In the nineteenth century, Bhojpuri speakers from India were sent to countries such as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Surinam, and Guyana to work at sugar plantations under a five year agreement during the British rule. These Bhojpuri plantation workers were called girmitiya. In this context, this paper seeks to address issues of Bhojpuri diaspora, defining newer discussions towards political, social and economic and cultural spheres of their lives in another country, through an analysis of travel literature written by them.  Ample travel literature has been written by Bhojpuri speakers who went and settled in the respective countries to which they were sent, also called Bhojpuri diaspora. The aspect which makes this work different is that this paper specifically analyzes works of travel to another country written by Indian Bhojpuri speakers and not literature written by Bhojpuri diaspora.  The literary works analyzed here are written originally in Hindi and Bhojpuri namely– Fiji mein Kabir Panth ka Udbhav aur Vikas (Development of Kabir’s stories in Fiji) by Dr Kamta Kamlesh, Pravasi Bhojpuri ka Antardwand (Dilemma of the Bhojpuri diaspora) by Rasik Bihari Ojha, Pravasi Bhartiya kaha aur kitne (Number and location of the Indian diaspora) by Dr Prakash Chandra Jain and Bhojpuri kshetra ki jatiya pehchaan (Caste identity of Bhojpuri region) by Dr Shri Vilas Tiwary.

Keywords: Travel Literature, Pre-Independent Period, Indian Diaspora, Bhojpuri Speakers.

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Emergence of Secular Travel in Bengali Cultural Universe: Some Passing Thoughts

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Simonti Sen

Professor of History & Director in the Directorate of State Archives, West Bengal. Email: sensimonti@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.01

Abstract

This paper by no means presumes to provide a comprehensive analysis of the genesis and ramifications of Bengali travel consciousness either in thematic or chronological terms. It only seeks to highlight certain key aspects of Bengali ‘secular travel’ culture as it germinated in the colonial period. The term Bengali specifically implies the world of Hindu bhadralok and bhadramahila from where emerged the earliest writers of ‘secular’ travel accounts. This is of particular interest because travel, apart from pilgrimage, had no sanction within the traditional Brahamanical orthodoxy. The same cannot be said of the Islamic paedia, which was favourably inclined towards travel. Yet in the colonial period Bengali Muslims did not, in general, produce travel narratives of the ‘secular modern’ variety. One outstanding exception will be considered in this article. Travel among Bengalis took different forms. While there grew a tradition of travel within the country and producing books on them from the early eighteenth century, books on journeys to Europe and different eastern countries received the attention of publishers towards the end of nineteenth and early twentieth century. All these narratives are replete with binaries, such as we/they, home/ world and similar other usual tropes of articulation of ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. The essay will end with a brief discussion of Deshe Bideshe (account of Kabul from 1927 to early 1929) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, which was quite exceptional in terms of both content and mode of ‘telling’.

Keywords: secular travel, Bengali society, colonial period, binaries of vision, Hindu bhadralok

Editorial Introduction: India and Travel Narratives

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Somdatta Mandal

Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.00

Travelogues belong to an interdisciplinary realm where discourses like literature, history, politics, anthropology, geography, economics, ethnography and even linguistics cross one another thus turning it into a proper subject of cultural/intercultural studies. It can be used as a site for raising questions, not only of ideology but of subjectivity as well, as the travelling subject is as important in a travelogue as the country travelled to. Traditionally an identity-building enterprise, travel writing is particularly interesting, since the persona of the traveller tends to rest on a cluster of oppositional concepts such as home-away, centre-periphery, near-distant, etc. Travel writing is also the art of discovering the magic of ordinary persons, places and things. You can discover magic only if you can look beyond reality to the reality behind everything. The famous travel writers Hugh and Colleen Gantzer believe that seldom travel builds bridges between people and times and civilizations. But that they believe, is what travel is really all about. The urge to travel was built in our genes, driven by the magic of curiosity.

Though earlier not recognized as a canonical subject for writing research papers, in the last three decades, the protean and hybrid genre of travel writing have been accepted as one of the most interesting areas in transnational and cross-cultural research. The deluge of new publications related to this genre proves the enormous possibilities through which travel writing can be studied.  The nature of the writing includes several forms, namely letters, diaries, autobiographies or oral records but it is too complex and too varied to be subjected to any neat classification.

Indian travel writing is considered to be the product of the colonial encounter. It proliferated in the nineteenth century and borrowed the genre from English travel writing but with time a great deal else is yet to be discovered. One can trace the elements of travel writing to pre-colonial times as well. Elements of the travelogue exist in the fictional accounts of the digvijayas in the epics, the safarnamas, tirthya-mahatyas or devotional accounts of the pilgrimages undertaken by saints, religious heads and poets, and in the lyrical reminiscences of a homesick lover like the Yaksha in Kalidasa’s Meghdoot. Questions are often raised about the specific nature of Indian travel narratives. So when the call for papers for the special issue of this journal was announced, we made it clear that we would like to focus on the travel writings by Indians and thus hide the problems of definition. The travel writing could be within India or the journey undertaken maybe to anywhere in the world and can be written in either English or any regional language. The study can be on individual texts, overviews, and any other aspect of Indian travel narratives that can yield rare theoretical insights into the construction of culture, language, ideology and subjectivity. Also the time frame of the study was not defined and the sole criterion was that the writer must be Indian. When we received an unprecedented number of abstracts we were overwhelmed with the choice and range of topics proposed and it was quite difficult to make the final selection. So one criterion for selection was to choose lesser known and regional texts, many of them written in the bhasha languages. The other was to focus on texts and issues that were more contemporary, ranging from train travels, texts written for children, travel blogs, and even cinematic narrations.

As the final contents list will show, the diversity of subjects is really mind-boggling. Divided into seven sections, the papers prove once again the protean nature of Indian travel narratives. The ‘General Overviews’ section contains three articles, two of which focus on Bengali secular travel culture and texts penned by women. The third article talks about the Bjojpuri speakers who went as girmitiyas to work in various British plantations in different colonies around the world. Six articles comprise the second section entitled ‘Pilgrimages.’ These include nineteenth century travels of Hindus to the holy city of Benaras as well as to various places in the Himalayas, including Kedarnath, Badrinath, Kailash and Mansarovar. The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and the tourist potentials of the recently inaugurated corridor for Sikh pilgrims to visit Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan have also been addressed in two different articles. Tibet and mountaineering issues have been discussed in three articles of the third section through various perspectives. One paper focuses on the transformative agency of the Nanda Devi on Bill Aitken, another analyses two literary texts by Vikram Seth and Nabaneeta Dev Sen that narrate their sojourns in Tibet. The continuous exchange of scholars and scholarly texts between India and Tibet over the centuries is the subject of another essay. Apart from documenting their journeys, we are told how the scholars initiated huge influx of literary texts between these two ancient countries, including the birth of Buddhist literature in Tibet.

The North East has always been a neglected domain geographically, politically and literarily for the average pan-Indian public residing in the plains. Five very interesting articles on the Northeast give us an overview of travel narratives in Assamese literature from the 18th century onwards to the recently written Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) which shows how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. The fifth section is titled ‘Travelling West.’ Six articles discuss travels to Victorian England, Afghanistan, Russia and several places in Africa from different perspectives.  While two of them discuss individual texts in details, others focus on different reasons for each person travelling to the west, be it for religion, education, business, politics, wanderlust, or otherwise. The sixth section is the longest and comprises of eleven articles that analyze individual travel texts in details and from different points of view. Some of the texts are old and quite canonical whereas others are very recent, written in this twenty-first century. The last two articles of this section offer interesting study of one author, Shivya Nath and complement each other in a particular way. While one article discusses her 2018 text The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World as a journey of exploration and reconstruction of the feminine self,  the other analyses the blogspots the author maintains under the same title. It shows how travel narratives are also changing their nature in this age of technological advancement and instant communication.

In a sense of yoking heterogeneous elements together, the last miscellaneous section comprising six articles is in a way the most interesting. Very few people were aware of Solon Karthak’s Nepali travelogues till he was recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for 2019 (in February this year) for an anthology of travel narratives he published way back in 2013.  Also many readers don’t know much about Bhakti Mathur’s illustrated Amma, Take Me To… series for children or considered narrations of journeying through Indian trains to be part of travel texts worthy of study. Studying film texts by theorizing the experience of travel in a Malayalam film, North 24 Kaatham by Anil Radhakrishnan or studying the Goopy Bagha trilogy of children’s films made by Satyajit Ray and his son Sandip Ray, from the postcolonial queer dimension just proves once again how studying Indian travel narratives know no bounds.

A final note is necessary before concluding this introduction. The contributors for this collection comprise of senior academicians as well as young research scholars in the field. So, one should not expect the standard of all the articles to be the same. But I earnestly hope that everyone will enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed editing them and ruminate on how ‘India and Travel Narratives’ can be read and analyzed from multifarious and endless perspectives.

3 June, 2020

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