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.
Brief description: Rita Banerjee is a research scholar affiliated to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. 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, 19th- and 20th -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 and an edited collection, Cultural Histories of India: Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography.
Review Quotes: "[The] volume promotes an active practice of decolonization by including writings from Asian, Arabian and European travellers. Thus, the book is a welcome addition to the library of Asian- centric travel scholarship." --Tingting Zhong, University of St Andrews, Forum for Modern Language Studies