Indian Travel Writing

This essay was first presented at the seminal conference on Indian travel writing organised by the Sahitya Akademi in 2004, when people would ask ‘Is there such a thing as travel writing?’ and walk away as w fumbled for answers. But even then there was enough evidence to consider Amitav Ghosh as chiefly a travel writer. At the end of his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), his protagonists are poised for further travel. Except for one character who travels to the West, the rest journey from Calcutta to North Africa. These elements will recur in Ghosh's later work. His first non-fiction travel book, In an Antique Land (1992),  also about travel in the East, as is Dancing in Cambodia; At Large in Burma (1998). Based on Ghosh’s travels in Cambodia and Burma in the 1993 and 1995-1960s, the two intertwine recent history with the past.  The essays in The Imam and the Indian (2002) are not all travel pieces, but the title essay was reprinted in The Best of Granta Travel, while some essays manifest his interest in other travellers.  This essay is a tentative exploration of questions like what kind of travel writer is Ghosh? Does he have a distinctive style? Where is Ghosh's place in Indian travel writing?

The field of travel writing studies is of a recent emergence which must be understood in the context of globalization and the rise of postcolonial studies. Therefore, in India, it has tended to focus largely on ‘West-East’ encounters and the politics of representing the colonized in colonial ‘Imperial Eyes’ or the other way round. It is yet to engage extensively with the significance of travel writing in non-English modern Indian languages like Marathi about other regions on the subcontinent. This essay discusses the depiction of Calcutta in the travel writings of C. V. Joshi, Pu.La Deshpande and Neelima Bhave .These three texts dealing with Kolkata written at three different moments in history, though all of them written before Calcutta became Kolkata, help us to map the changing image of Kolkata in Marathi travel writings. All the three writers come from the elite upper-caste, middle class location, a location that is commensurable with the ‘bhadralok’ of Bengal, but also different in significant ways due to historical and cultural processes. A critical reading of the representation of Kolkata in the three travel writing texts in Marathi, written at three different moments of history, not only reveals the cultural history of Kolkata but also discloses the cultural history of Marathi. While such reading complicates the conventional ‘East-West’ comparisons that inform the understanding of modernity as well as travel writing studies in India, they also divulge the subnational identitarian politics that colour the representation of the self and the other within the larger nationalist imaginings. Such depictions are also inflected by the ideologies of caste, class, and gender.

This analysis also reveals the construction of the Bangla cosmopolis through translations and other mediations like Bengali cinema and music. Travel writings of Pu. La Deshpande and Neelima Bhave also reveal the construction of Bangla cosmopolis through nostalgia and memory which is in tension with violent and often disagreeable social and political realities of contemporary Bengali society

This paper tries to examine the system of labour recruitment and migration from mainland Bengal to Burma. Besides, it seeks to understand the state of indentured labour recruited through Maistry system which may be conceptualised as a modern slavery. The bonded labour in this system was not only to explore the mining resources or not only for the developing industrial economy in colonial Burma but also to enslaving them with debtbondage system. They were bound to work in inhuman conditions and unable to break the contract with employers because of uncertain future and due to fear of being considered untouchable in society. Hence the said system can be understood as slavery in modern British Empire in Southeast Asia. Bengali Travel writings on Burma bear multiple testimonies to labour migration from Bengal. Primarily, this article will argue that the labour recruitment process was a well-crafted mechanism to enslave poor people and it will further look into the issues of displacement and labour migration through an analysis of selected Bengali travel writings on Burma.