The Hindu Business Line : From those travel memoirs

I've been wondering about the worthy who crafted the blurb adorning the back of this soft-cover tome on wanderlust specifically connected to the Raj. Edited and introduced by Sachidananda Mohanty, this volume brings to you, "the range of hidden discourses that constituted the classificatory grids of the project of colonialism."

It's possible, the blurb-writer was only trying to emulate the weighty terminology employed by scholarly souls. For, the volume contains a collection of essays, a few specially commissioned, the rest originating in a national seminar on travel writing that Prof. Mohanty coordinated under the UGC's Special Assistance Programme (SAP) of the Department of English, University of Hyderabad in March 1999.

A perusal of the bio-sketches of the nine contributors to the book reveals that seven are academics attached to various universities, the two exceptions being Narendra Luther, former Chief Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh, and William Dalrymple, author of the best-selling White Mughals.

Among the writers, Dalrymple is the only true-blue travel writer among the essayists. Should we then be surprised by the blurb? One is disappointed. Because seminars can be exercises in tedium and also because academics possess this wonderful tendency to lapse into jargon; it's a pity that the blurb identifies with professorial wordplay which seems calculated to exclude the NET/SET/doctorate-lacking layperson from the groves of academia. Had the back-cover been more reader-friendly, that is jargon-free, many more disciples of the travel genre would be inspired to acquire this otherwise engaging book. Fortunately, the writing, barring a few exceptions, is lucid and educative.

At the outset, the reader is apprised of the distinction between the explorer, traveller and the tourist: the one who seeks and finds the hitherto undiscovered; the one who traverses regions charted by history and the one who visits places mapped by publicity material.

Interestingly, an entire paper by Pramod K. Nayar, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Hyderabad, analyses the colonial rhetoric of tourist brochures.

In Colonialism, Surveillance and Memoirs of Travel, Tutun Mukherjee examines at length a single "particularly violent" text on the political network that ensured the Empire's continued power in India. This 340-page text called Memoir of an Indian Policeman was written by Kathleen Tegart, wife of Charles Augustus Tegart, a British loyalist who came to India in 1901 as a police inspector.

During their occupation of India, the British built on the Andaman Islands, the dreaded Cellular Jail to which all political prisoners were despatched. Marco Polo had visited the lush green island cluster in the 15th century; in the 19th century, crossing the kala pani to serve a life term in the penal colony meant oblivion. Even so, few could resist the charms of the beauty of the islands. Veer Savarkar would write: "The Island ornamented the sea like a palace built in the land of the fairies... It was so picturesque and compact that it could not fail to ravish the mind of even a prisoner in chains like me."

New mappings would be made by other writers. In Mother India, the American writer Katherine Mayo says, inter alia that (the Indian's) preoccupation with sex pre-empted possibilities of creative and constructive pursuits. It is instructive to note how rank prejudice and distortions inform the narratives of both colonial and colonised. Many 19th-century travel accounts of the Orient classify "good" as Western and Christian and "bad" as Oriental/Persian and Mussalman.

In her paper on the construction of native women in colonial India, Sindhu Menon examines European (mainly British travel texts) to show how the claims made by travellers regarding native women were grossly exaggerated. In Samudradaacheyinda, a travelogue written in the form of a diary, written by V.K. Gokak during his sojourn in England for higher studies, the behaviour of English women (they can swim, jump, laugh, smoke like men...) and the tradition in which men and women dance together is a matter for denunciation. Apart from this, Western women are generally represented as of immoral character ever ready to seduce men at any time and to squeeze men of their last penny.

Women are stereotyped as sexually dangerous. I don't know if things have changed all that much. A Briton I met very recently described Indian women as predators out to entrap Western men for a visa abroad.

Picture by R. Balaji

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