 |
| Nishi Pulugurtha |
Title: Across and Beyond: Essays on Travel
It is travel that is the key to the wide world. Travelogue as a distinctive form of writing antedates almost all known genres and can comfortably be traced back to age-old antiquity where the limbos between the travelogue and the epic get inseparably blurry, like the Odyssey, and since then travelogues have been prevalent for signifying a more or less comprehensible tale. Travel is a close sibling to the French word Travail, fundamentally defining unpleasant work. 700 hundred years ago, traveling seemed to be a synonym for being tormented. In the introductory note to “Across and Beyond: Essays on Travel” the editor Nishi Pulugurtha writes, “travel is about negotiating the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. It brings in ideas of negotiation, urban planning, history, architecture, space, food, memory, exile, emigration, and colonialism. As a free, voluntary spontaneous movement travel could be contrasted to ideas of displacement. This brings into contention as to who can and who cannot travel, an important idea in today's world, where violence has caused forced displacement of people”. The urge to travel is in our genes driven by the magic wand of curiosity. Now that pandemic has forced us to restrict our moves this is one of the reasons that reading this book on travel embalms our travel crazy heart.
 |
| Sutanuka Ghosh Roy |
The next
section of the book is named ‘the solo woman traveller’ has three essays. These
personal narratives depict the perils of a solo woman traveller. Sometimes the
fear bug makes us unnerved and like a ritual we count each breath under our
chin. Sohini Chatterjee writes, ‘this is an offshoot of growing up with
anxieties congruent with cautionary tales I have been fed since childhood about
the vulnerability of the “female body” to violence and my own experiences of
harassment since childhood’ (“Travelling with Fear and the Baggage of
vulnerability: Reflections on Gender and Spatial Mobility”, 63). For Amrita
Mukherjee a journalist, travel is an integral part of her work. Travel helped
her to discover places as well as people. She writes, “I have realized that
while travelling on work, it’s not only about rediscovering yourself but it
also about discovering how people can be—both men and women out of their
comfort zones” (“How Work and Travel Taught me a Thing or Two in Life”,73). In
‘Journey’s Merceies please—The Female Traveller In Perspective’ Debasri Basu
speaks at length about the menaces of a solo woman traveller. The experiences
of foreign travellers in India are infected with all sorts of perils which
dampen the spirit of travel.
Literature and travel is the theme of the next section of the book. Nishat Haider’s essay ‘Travelling memory: A Study of Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire delineates travel as a key trope and revisits the terms ‘travel’ and ‘traveller’. Further, she questions the critical tendency to conflate radically different types of travel discourses that essentially define postcolonial spatiotemporal frames. “Re-mapping A Small Place: Examination of the Tourist Gaze and Postcolonial re-inscription of the Antiguan natural and social landscape in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place” by Arundhati Sethi’ analyses the tourist gaze of the narrator. The narrator takes the modern tourist on a guided tour per se to the tiny and obscure Caribbean island. Arundhati writes, “Thus, the tourist then is a sort of a modified extension of the early colonial traveller and his imperial gaze”. Gillian Dooley in “From Timor to Mauritius: Matthew Flinder’s Island Identity” writes about the British Captain Matthew Flinder’s voyage to Terra Australia. Nabanita Sengupta’s “A Bibliophile’s Sauntering in and Around London” is a pleasant read. We see London and around through her writing and have an impression of a writer who serves to be an informer, guide and advisor. The most overwhelming presence in her trip was a nineteenth-century Bengali woman Krishnabhamini Das the first Bengali lady to write a travelogue on England in 1885 named Englandey Bangamahila or A Bengali Lady in England. Sayan Aich Bhowmick’s essay “In Search of Lost Travellers: Tradition of Travel In the Bengali Milieu” substantiates the Bengali traveller’s love for travel---one being the literary repertoire of narratives the other being a Wordsworthian idea of nature as a healer and a nurse to bring a fresh whiff of air to the jaded soul.
The last section of the book ‘History and Travel’ has four essays. Sheila T. Cavanagh in “The Sun Shines Bright On Loch Lomond”: Geography meets Politics In The Scottish Highlands”, writes, “In March 2018, I joined a group of graduate students in Scotland under the direction of Georgia State University Professor Tanya Caldwell. The students were enrolled in a course investigating the travel narratives of renowned eighteenth-century writers Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell” (137). She knits together history, the Jacobite uprising, the battle of Culloden, the travel narratives of Johnson and Boswell in her narrative. Moreover, she has stitched together two completely different aeons and viewpoints and has effectively used the popular song “Bonnie Banks ‘o Loch Lomond” that adds to the visitors’ different attitudes even when the places remain the same. Himanshi Sharma’s “The Exotic Tropic of William and Thomas Daniell” is an exploration of the art of two talented engraver painters Thomas and William Daniell. They had travelled to British India between 1786 and 1796. She writes, “The travel of Daniells from one exotic location to another to produce exquisite prints as a purely artistic project causes us to break away from the available template of looking at travel in India during British colonial rule as simply an activity of knowledge creation”(149). As always we are fascinated by the memsahibs so the essay of Ankita Das “The Private Lives of Memsahibs: A Study of Emily Eden and Fanny Parkes’ Experiences in India” arouses our curiosity. Emily Eden did not enjoy her days in India, the sultry weather in India made her weak physically and mentally she was isolated. Fanny Park, on the other hand, was married to an East India Company official and her “Journals may be regarded as a great travel book of its time, filled with exciting descriptions of Indian life and customs”(160). The last essay of the book is by the editor Nishi Pulugurtha and she takes us on an exciting trip to “By The Ganga—Chinsurah”. Nishi Pulugurtha is a poet, academic and literary critic based in Kolkata. She has a monograph on Derozio, a collection of travel essays Out In the Open and a volume of poems called The Real and the Unreal and Other Poems.
Chinsurah or
Chunchura is about two kilometres from Kolkata and is located on the banks of
Ganga. This place has a historical significance as Pulugurtha writes, “Every
moment of our trip to this town has opened up to us rich treasures of the glorious
past of the place” (180). Across and Beyond
keeps you engaged and entertained. The tone is set right from the opening essay
and also packs in a lesson about how important it is to choose the right path
while travelling. In a year that’s been when one missed the opportunity to
travel, we’ll take all the entertainment —this book on travel delivers it in
spadeful—that as readers we get.
No comments :
Post a Comment
We welcome your comments related to the article and the topic being discussed. We expect the comments to be courteous, and respectful of the author and other commenters. Setu reserves the right to moderate, remove or reject comments that contain foul language, insult, hatred, personal information or indicate bad intention. The views expressed in comments reflect those of the commenter, not the official views of the Setu editorial board. рдк्рд░рдХाрд╢िрдд рд░рдЪрдиा рд╕े рд╕рдо्рдмंрдзिрдд рд╢ाрд▓ीрди рд╕рдо्рд╡ाрдж рдХा рд╕्рд╡ाрдЧрдд рд╣ै।