Well-Documented Travel Impressions

Travel writing has been accorded literary recognition only recently. The yardsticks adopted for the study of this genre, are predictably western and broadly divide travel writing into colonial and post-colonial. The western scholar does not generally take into consideration travel accounts by non-western writers, especially those in the colonial time-frame and this can be seen in most anthologies of travel writing.

A few years back, while researching on colonial and post-colonial travel writing about India, background material essential for contextualising the study was difficult to come by. While looking for relevant travel anthologies, one came across Travellers India, chosen and edited by H K Kaul, and found it of great use. However, a visit to the bookshops in the capital was futile as the book was out of print. It is heartening that the publishers have reprinted it in paperback, at an affordable price.

 

The book starts with a select chronology, arranged countrywise, of travellers who visited India and wrote about their Indian experience. The list is not and cannot be comprehensive, for, as the editor points out in the introduction: ...A great many more visited the land. Their travel accounts exist in many languages, and are scattered in different archives and libraries all over the world.

This is followed by 24 sections, starting with one on general impressions. Some of them like religion, history, geography and others are divided into sub-sections. Each section and sub-section takes up a subject or aspect of a subject as the case might be and presents a selection of related extracts. Quite a few of them are blatantly colonial and condescending, some are orientalist; altogether the effect is quite interesting.

The same theme can evoke different views. Godfrey Charles Mundy found Indian women very graceful. To quote: Women with their graceful garments, and still more graceful persons, and with their well-poised water vessels on their duty, the drudgery of their manage. It does ones heart good to see these elegant creatures cheerfully performing their domestic offices, and rendering even labour graceful. An absolutely different viewpoint from a translation of Manusmriti by Monier Williams, spelling out the restraints which a woman has to face all her life:

In childhood must a father guard his daughter;

In youth the husband shields his wife; in age

A mother is protected by her sons -

Neer should a woman lean upon herself

Some of the pieces, like the extracts from William Henry Sleemans writings on Thuggee, strike the modern reader as biased, but they would have been considered knowledgeable when written. Some of his observations about lawlessness in India, are true, even today. To quote: ...Colonies of thieves and robbers....abound no less in our own territories than in those of native states; there are more than a thousand families of them in the districts of Mozuffeernugur, Sahrunpore, and Meerut... all well enough known to the local authorities, who can do nothing with them. They extend their depredations into remote districts, and the booty they bring home with them they share liberally with the native police and landlords under whose protection they live.

The discourse is sometimes orientalist, a perception of India, romantically expressed with a tinge of awe. An ideal inclusion would have been Rudyard Kiplings first impressions of Calcutta, first published in Pioneer and later included in his collection of travel essays From Sea to Sea- Volume II. However, this anthology excludes Kipling altogether. Also, one wonders why the section on cities offers nothing on Calcutta or Simla or Bombay, places which the English put their stamp on. One supposes that Kaul is trying to break out of the western stereotype in his choice of extracts.

Even so, including extracts from E M Forsters Indian impressions would have been in order. Reason: Forster, though he wrote in the colonial time-frame, sympathised with Indias efforts to attain freedom. Also, his perception of India is marked by a depth and sensitivity that is rare among western travellers to India, even today.

The illustrations in the earlier hardbacked edition have not been included in this edition, but that does not really matter. Travellers India in its present form is not just an interesting selection of travel impressions about India, the classified contents should be of great help in providing a context or starting point to academic papers on some aspect of life in India.

Travellers India Chosen and edited by H K Kaul Oxford University Press Rs 245/536 pages