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
