Dr Avishek Ray (National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India, Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, IASH): Literarizing Tourism: On the Aestheticsizing Gaze.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, more Indians would set sail to Europe than ever before, albeit people from India have reportedly been traveling to Europe since the seventeenth century and narrativizing their travel accounts at least since the mid-eighteenth century. However, ‘travelogue’, what we know by European standards, as a genre in the Indian context is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, the literary ‘modernity’ that purportedly ushered thereafter, and the high noon of Indian nationalism. This paper examines the stakes in the nineteenth century Indian travelers emulating the eighteenth century Grand Tourist, and demonstrates how their literary articulation is symptomatic of an ‘exclusionary’ mindset that strived to showcase cultural proximity with the colonizer on the one hand, and negotiate with a highly contingent process of classist-racial partisanship in the public sphere on the other.
IASH Work in Progress talk. All welcome.