India and the Traveller
Subtitle: Aspects of Travelling identity
By: Rita Banerjee
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Published: 2022
Place of publication: New Delhi
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9789354359408
Subjects: Post-colonial literature; Literary essays; Literature & literary studies
Description: India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity, a collection of essays on travel writings related to India, focuses on the evolving persona of travelers to India as well as Indians journeying to other lands or within India. It examines India as a space, reflected on and interrogated by others, as also people associated intrinsically with this space, who move in and out of it.­ The essays focus on the self-fashioning of the traveller  -  Buddhist pilgrims of Asia, European visitors to the Mughal court, the British colonizer, the Indian anthropologist, historian or whimsical civil servant, the wanderer seeking spiritual insight in nature, and the woman traveller with her distinct perceptions and sensitivities. Engaging with issues related to identity, this book explores the need for cultural accommodation by African and European travellers, the discovery of affinity by Asian travellers, the instability of postcolonial selves and travel as a means of negotiating complex problems of fashioning personae in literary works..
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Table of contents: title: Introduction  <b>Section 1: Europe and India</b> 1. Outsiders and Insiders: European Perceptions of India and the Problem of Cultural Distance -  Joan-Pau Rubies 2. Durbar Personas: Thomas Roe and Thomas Coryate at the Mughal Court - Christoph Heyl and Christian Feser 3. Discovering the Other: Northeast India in Early 19th-Century British Travel Writing - Nandana Dutta 4. Witnessing and Recording Sociocultural Realities in the Indian Subcontinent: William Dalrymple's The Age of Kali - Ajie George <b>Section 2: Asian Travellers and India</b> 5. Chinese Pilgrims and Arab Traders in Medieval India - Rita Banerjee 6. In Search of the Buddha in India: Travelogues of Fuji Nichidatsu, a Buddhist Monk from Japan - Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya 7. India in the Eyes of Japanese Travellers: Kimura Nichiki in Bengal - Sumit Kumar Barua <b>Section 3: Self-Fashioning of Indian Travellers</b> 8. The Bhadralok and His 'Wild West': Reading Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay's Palamou - Saugata Bhaduri 9. Pilgrimage Briefs: Negotiating Faith, Aesthetics and Environment - Jayati Gupta 10. Bangamahilar Japanyatra (1915): The Earliest Record of an Asian Woman's Travel to Japan - Nandita Basu <b>Section 4: Travel and Fiction</b> 11. India Imagined and Imaged: 'Travel to India' in Modern Japanese Fiction and Non-fiction - M.V. Lakshmi 12. A Tale of Two Travels: Reading Historiography through Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land - Jaya Yadav 13. Narratives of Travelling Memory - Nishat Haider.