Content: Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge (Issue 56)
Content: Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge (Issue 56)
Oct 23
Guest-Editorial – Travel Writing: A mode of constructing knowledge
By Raeesa Usmani
While encountering a variety of foreign customs and traditions, travel makes one aware of different culture, history, religion, belief, tradition, and lifestyle of the residents living at distant places. One might end up exploring, in the process, more about one’s own self, culture, society, which might lead one to appreciating one’s own culture and customs.
Decoding ‘progression’ through ‘intimacy’ as the anchoring aesthetics in Saikat Majumdar’s The Scent of God
By Sudeep Ghosh
In The Scent of God, intimacy is a mediator between experience and knowledge, knowledge and culture, sensory perception and spiritual redemption, truth and falsehood.
Montagu’s ‘The Turkish Embassy Letters’: The Questions of Perception and Representation in Travel Narratives
By Susmita Roy
In her letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu represents Turkish (Ottoman Empire) in a different way. Her letters neither reproduce nor complicate Eurocentrism. Rather, these letters replace Eurocentrism by representing moments of cultural confrontations.
Reading Travel beyond Stereotype in William Coxe’s ‘Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark’
By Basundhara Chakraborty
His upper-class status turned into a disadvantage to Coxe as it prevented him from any inter-class encounter in his travel destinations and he failed to get any insight into the lives of the people inhabiting there. Highly impersonal in tone, Coxe’s travel writings though abound in factual information, contained relatively few personal anecdotes or reflections.
Gender Troubles When Gender Travels: Locating the Discursive Identities in Shivya Nath’s ‘The Shooting Star’
By Puja Chakraborty
The paucity of the female agency in travel narratives foregrounds a critical point pertaining to the gender issue. Women, in general, as mobile subjects are placed in a subservient position considering their physical and mental resilience in comparison to men.
Decolonizing Whiteness in the early 18th century
By Guillermo Pupo-Pernet
The rhetoric of Whiteness has been presented in America since the first group of missionaries arrived. Whiteness not only focuses on nuances of skin colour, but it also works together with several discourses to assign a social position to other ethnic groups.
The Travels and Travails of a Bengali: Reading Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Palamau’
By Stella Chitralekha Biswas
The anxieties surrounding the performance of ‘civilized’ masculinity, with the display of sheer courage and pragmatism, appear to be bearing down upon the ‘Saheb’ who is almost idolized by the ‘noble savage’ and his ‘uncivilized’ masculinity.
The kaleidoscopic journey of Kolkata through a sketch diary
By Sohomdeep Sinha Roy & Debika Banerji
An urban sketcher’s diary typically is his/her active engagement with the neighbourhood and the landscape through the visual interpretations of food, clothes, architecture, nature, and so on.
Nostalgia for the Past: Durga Pujo at my hometown
By Suparna Barman
Travelling has always been very personal to me. My travel journeys are filled with family trips to our grandparents' homes – my mother's place in Kerala and my father’s place in West Bengal, every alternate summer. Then, in the middle of the year, my parents would take me on short trips to Haridwar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Nainital, etc.
Always on the Move: Stories of the Street Food Vendors at Police Bazaar, Shillong
By Richa Chilana & Rashi Bhargava
Having visited Police Bazaar at different times of the day, we realised that it is not only a marketplace that might offer insights into the changing dynamics of urban economy in a tourist destination but is also a space that is infused with meanings, metaphors and emotions.
Train Journey: Cultural memory of Indian people
By Radhakanta Barik
They abused and threatened us. Our concern was about the three elderly Sikhs passengers who were sitting in different places in the coach. They were requested to shift to the upper berths. As advised they went up to the upper berth and other co-passengers managed to keep them safe and away from any threat.
Travel is the essence of life
By Prithvijeet Sinha
while Seven Years In Tibet shares a spiritual arc of deep evolution through the protagonist's (Brad Pitt) travels in Tibet, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is perfectly clued to the metropolitan, global, post-millennial truth of young 30 plus Indians who can financially and emotionally commit to extended trips to foreign locations.
Christmas in Fiji
By Annie Surdi
I didn’t get to see the famous Fijian resorts. But I got to spend a lot of time with Evelyn and her family. I began learning so much more about their culture and their way of life. If I had had been in a resort, I would have just been sunbathing or scuba diving and I wouldn’t have been so immersed in their culture.
Some variety: : Translation of a few short stories of Subimal Misra
By Subimal Misra
They leave the young girls in such a state that they’re unable to stand up for the next two or three days. We didn’t like hearing all that. Ordering a few bottles of mahua and holding the two girls in my arms, I entered the room.
A boot of one’s own
By Ritushree Sengupta
The maker of the boots had chosen them over a sobbing lover probably because she knew the value of freedom which one has to earn over the wise and silly, silly and wise years of experiences.
Travelling with Mary Hopkins
By Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca
Being short in stature, I could not reach the handle bars in the train, so I had to hold on to my boyfriend’s waist. Once, I actually held on to another man’s waist, and apologized profusely when I discovered my mistake.
