Indian Travel Narratives
Contents: 1. Introduction/Somdatta Mandal. I. Theoretical and critical perspectives: 2. In merchants' and pilgrims' footsteps: the Indian corpus of travel writing/Swapan Majumdar. 3. The poetics and politics of travel writing/Jayati Gupta. 4. Authorship and editorial construction: revisiting the "Travelogues' of Rabindranath Tagore/Supriya Roy. II. Crossing the Kalapani and the seven seas: 5. 'Uneasy relationships': Indian travel writes and their English editors/Translators 1794-1857/Amrit Sen. 6. Pilgrim's progress: Varthamaanappusthakam as a travelogue/Sreenath Muraleedharan K. 7. Swami Vivekananda's Memoirs of European Travel: a postcolonial reading/Divya Joshi. 8. Rabindranath Tagore and Hariprabha Takeda: two tales of Japan/Simonti Sen. 9. Two earliest Punjabi travelogues to the west/Tejwant Singh Gill. 10. Mapping the female Gaze: women's travel writing from colonial Bengal/Somdatta Mandal. III. The eternal Himalayas: 11. The Himalayan travels of the Bengalis/Rabin Pal. 12. Writing about the mountains of the Indian subcontinent in the 1930s/Shobhana Bhattacharji. 13. Braving Hassles and Hazards: women travellers in the Himalayas/Usha Bande. 14. Riding the Himalayas/Keki N. Daruwalla. IV. Internal journeys: 15. An 18th century travelogue and/or pilgrimage: Vijay Ram Sen Visharad's Tirtha Mangal/Nilanjana Sikdar Datta. 16. Kasiyatra Charitra: the 'First' travelogue in Telugu/K. Suneetha Rani. 17. A journey in the cultural space: Fakir Mohan Senapati's Utkala Bhramanam (1892)/Subhendu Mund. 18. Manoj Das's Antaranga Bharata: an intimate look/Khusi Pattanayak. 19. Travelling towards wholeness: Rajam Krishnan's Lamps in the Whirlpool/Bandana Chakrabarty. V. Miscellaneous journeys: 20. Slow rewind and fast forward: the travels of Balraj Sahni/Jasbir Jain. 21. Moving towards cultural periphery: Amitav Ghosh's Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma/Madhuri Chatterjee. 22. Koh-i-noor' or 'The Mountain of Light': Punjab and Khalsa sovereignty in travel narratives/Chhanda Chatterjee.
"Travel narratives are intimately linked with the construction of identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, they expose cultural fault lines and reveal the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reader. Although the travel writing has always attracted a wide readership, it has only recently won significant attention from scholars. This anthology brings out different kinds of travel narratives from India, written both in English and the Bhasha literatures. Divided into five sections, the essays in this anthology explore the ways in which travel writing has defined, reflected, or constructed Indian identity. They trace Indian journeys from the 18th century right up to the present times, creating Indian ‘selves’ and Indian landscapes through affirmation, exclusion, and negation of others. They also examine a wide range of issues such as ‘home’ to ‘self’ and the ‘other’, travels to the imperial West during the colonial period, visits to countries of the Far East, pilgrimages undertaken within the country, trips to the Himalayas, and also internal journeys. This anthology will be of interest to scholars of history, literature, culture studies, and also to the reader, who wishes to delve into the multifarious depths of Indian travel writing. "
