India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity

by Rita Banerjee

Overview

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 jourbaneying 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789354356995
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/12/2023
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Rita Banerjee is a research scholar affiliated to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India. She was formerly Associate Professor of English Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She specialized in early modern British drama and has published articles, book chapters, and a monograph in early modern literature and related areas. Her current research interests include travel narratives, early modern literature, historiography, nineteenth- and twentieth -century Bengali literature and culture, women's writings, and Rabindranath Tagore. She has recently published India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and Toleration (Leiden: Brill, 2021) and an edited collection, Cultural Histories of India: Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography (London: Routledge, 2020).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Section 1: Europe and India
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
Section 2: Asian Travellers and India
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
Section 3: Self-Fashioning of Indian Travellers
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
Section 4: Travel and Fiction
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