Sarbajaya Bhattacharya
Research Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. ORCID: 0000-0001-6294-7804. Email: sarbajaya.b@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.26
Abstract
Hugo’s description of a view from a moving train is one of many instances in travel writing which illustrates how the mode of travel (here, the railways) often plays a significant role in the creating of new landscapes within the text. The gaze of the traveller also plays a significant role in landscape production as does their relation to the land they are describing. This article seeks to examine the ways in which ‘literary landscape(s)’ produced by travel- writing are able to challenge the ‘imperial eye’ in the construction and representation of the colony, in this case, Bengal, with specific reference to Rabindranath Tagore’s letters written to his niece Indira Devi. This article shall locate Chhinnapatrabali within the broader framework of British landscape paintings of India in order to examine how Tagore’s text is formulating individual and cultural identities. It seeks to argue that the production of literary landscapes in the letters in Chhinnapatrabali must be seen within the larger colonial project of landscape production and be located within the efforts by the colonial subjects to explicitly and implicitly produce and reproduce landscapes of their own through travel narratives, where landscape becomes an interesting site/sight of Self and national identity.
Keywords: landscape, modernity, Tagore, letters, nation
