Women and Wanderer: Postcolonial (Re)interpretations of Travel and Travel Writing

Even though late nineteenth century travel-writing in India is consonant with the desire of "appropriating from European writers the power to represent"1 the history of the nation, Indian women are often thought to lack this autonomous voice. That the aspect of gender has also brought about a generic shift in travel-writing is a gap left unassessed in academia in representations of women mediating their narratorial subjectivities through the extant masculine literary tradition2. From penning an apologia for transgressing on the literary domain to exhaustive accounts of the familial spaces, women perceived and wrote travel very differently from their male contemporaries. Colonial travel-writing from 1870s featured this radical deviance of several "upper-class Indian women utilizing the discourse of travel...according to the needs of their situations"3, thereby often subverting the hegemonic position.

Another such momentous shift in Indian travel-writing has transpired post 2010, with the proliferation of Internet travel blogs alongside conventional travelogues. Here too, the accounts are invariably gendered, but the figure of the traveller woman is no longer seen as an aberration, nor are they meant to participate in the transcontinental myth-making projects of a colonized nation. So, in this newfound freedom, their travel-writing is characterized by a renegotiated gender identity. A comparative study of these two periods reveals that in this transition are posited the elusive "racialized gendered selves...at the conjuncture of the transnational and postcolonial"4 . My research will delineate the changing interpretative strategies seen in Indian women's travel-writing from the first time zone (1870 - 1930s) to the second (2010- 2021), and establish in what ways these differences reflect the changing realities of the empire, and its global ramifications on their lives. Even though this is an attempt at a comparison between colonial and postcolonial travelogues within a gendered schema, this is not an exhaustive work. A few representative pieces have been chosen that will help gain an insight into the research questions.

Since most colonial travel-writing by women were in Bhasha languages, mostly texts with published English translations have been considered for the study. For the first group, travel narratives of ten women - conventional travelogues or disparate accounts embedded in autobiographies correspondence - will be used as primary texts. For the second, sixteen travelogues will form the corpus alongside travel blogs of content-creators on the Internet. Readings will be supplemented by travellers' interviews to get more of an insight into the industry.