Travel Writing in Assamese Literature

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Themed Issue on “India and Travel Narratives” (Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020) Guest-edited by: Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V12/n3/v12n314.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.14 Travelling Identities, Bodies and the Poetics of Difference: Travel Writing in Assamese Literature Shibashish Purkayastha PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. ORCID: 0000-0002-1630-0038. Email: [email protected] Abstract The purpose of this article shall be to trace a historical trajectory of the development of travel writing as a distinct genre in Assamese literature. In Assam, the germ of travel writing dates back to the nineteenth century in which European travellers wrote extensively on their visits to North East India, which were exotic accounts of their encounters with an alien culture. The first Assamese travelogue was Jnanadabhiram Barua’s BilatarSithi which was serialized in the Assamese monthly Banhi in 1909 which, for the first time, narrativized a non-westerners account of his travels to the United Kingdom in a series of letters. However, the genre of travel writing in Assam seemed to attain its growth and maturity in the days following Independence. In the late 1980s, the travel writer, as a move away from merely offering descriptive sketches eulogizing their travels, started looking back into the nuances of the self as a site of imaginative and critical reflections. The onus of this article shall be to trace the growth and development of travel writing in Assamese literature and shall then move on to reviewing some of the important travel narratives of Assamese literature which seem to problematize our understandings of the nation, identity, body and the gaze. Additionally, it shall also examine whether these travel narratives attempt to expand the discursive and generic boundaries of the form of postcolonial travel writing. Through close readings of select travel narratives, I argue that they posit a poetics of difference by attempting to engage in a dialogue between their encounters with foreign cultures vis-à-vis, the nuances of everyday material realities of the life of the traveller. Keywords: agency, travel, history, identity, body, empathy Introduction It would almost be a truism to state that postcolonial travel writing has been grappling with issues of globalization, cultural hybridization, and movements-of people and ideas. Carl Thompson in his essay on “Defining the Genre” in Travel Writing: A Critical Idiom rightly argues that, to travel is through make a movement through “space” (Thompson, 2011, p.9). Way back in 1929, the French writer Victor Segalen had first emphasized upon the centrality of the body in travel narratives, what he calls the ‘Aesthetics of Diversity’i challenging the similar aesthetic appeal of the physical landscapes to the senses of the traveler across travel writing discourses by foregrounding the varied ways in which physical landscapes appeal to the senses (of smell, touch and sound) of the traveller. Advocating a phenomenological theory of travel, Segalen argues that the body is the channel or the mediator between the interior and the exterior worlds. A journey often leads to places beyond the threshold of one’s familial environment and the traveller is quick to encounter “difference” or “otherness”, what he terms “alterity” (Segalen, 1929, p.14-15). This © AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected]. 120 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2020 underscores the complex negotiations, an interplay between different identities. Travel writing has been instrumental in describing different types of travel -- forced and chosen, tourism and exile, appropriation and return, movements of ideas and cultures, to list a few. The thrust of this paper shall be to explore Assamese travel writings and the ways in which they envision a poetics of difference by not only describing physical movements across different geographical spaces but also movements of ideas, forced movements, tourism etc. I particularly emphasize on the term ‘difference’ to show how travel narratives from Assam attempt to portray their material conditions while describing their empathetic engagements with non-native cultures in the travel accounts. Travel writing in Assam has had a curious history which initially began as a series of European encounters to the region often infantilizing and objectifying the natives of place to the documentations by the Assamese gentry whose accounts abounded in descriptive sketches and picturesque descriptions of the sights and scenes. Then there have been accounts of the traveller who, having been deprived of the facilities and requisite mobility and capital to travel, used his imaginative and creative faculties to account for the descriptions of people and places to the kind of traveller who consciously and with rigour, describes the self and the travelling body as the site of knowledge production, and the changes that had come about in his travel resulting from the encounter with different entangled subjectivities. Michael De Certeau opines that “Every story is a travel story” (Certeau, 1980, p.12). What seems to be apparent here is not merely the physical movements as a part of travel but also the various cognitive registers that the traveller or the travel writer takes stock of while penning down his story. Inderpal Grewal (1996) for instance, notes, travel writing has the propensity to unsettle certain assumptions about the “consolidation of stable unitary identities of nation, class, sexuality, or gender, and suggest forms of selfhood that evade such consolidations” (Grewal, 1996, p. 3). Travel writing from Assam is closely linked to the ideas of nationalism, identity, globalization, multiculturalism, insurgency, as is the case with travel writing from other parts of India. The travel writer wrestles with the ideas of the centre and the margin, border crossings, hybridity, location and displacement by espousing a poetics of difference. That said, the first section of this paper attempts to provide a brief introduction to postcolonial travel writing in general and Assam travel writings, in particular and the conceptualization of the idea of travelling identities, bodies and poetics of difference, the second section seeks to provide a chronological development of travel literature as a distinct genre in Assamese literature. The third section attempts to analyze select travel narratives as underscoring the importance of the self as the site of agency and knowledge and how they advocate for a poetics of difference. 1. Assamese Travel Writing and the Poetics of Difference In their book on postcolonial travel writing, Justin D Edwards and Rune Graulund write that the purpose of postcolonial travel writing is not merely about “writing back.” As the editors elaborate in their Introduction: The word ‘postcolonial’ imparts potential for dislocation, disjuncture and even rupture when it is combined with a genre -- travel writing -- that has been critiqued within postcolonial circles. Thus, we seek to shake the reader’s complacency through the unmapping of mapped critical areas and decentering dominant theatrical territories. (Edwards and Graulund, 2010, p. 6) 121 Travelling Identities, Bodies and the Poetics of Difference: Travel Writing in Assamese Literature The preoccupation of the postcolonial travel writer was to not only offer a critique of the mis- representation of the natives in the Western counterpart but to envision the poetics and politics of difference in their writings. Assamese travel writing for the longest time has been trying to shake off the veneer of offering descriptive accounts to critically engaging with ideas surrounding identity politics and challenging the hegemony of mainland India and the west in terms of biased representations of the people of the Northeast in their travel accounts. MacCannell (1976) envisions the idea of tourism as grappling with the ‘authentic other’-- an ‘imagined’ authenticity, exoticized the Orientalist other. Elsewhere, Graburn (1983) has argued that tourism is a practice of liminality --an escape from the here-and-now, which in the Deleuzean terms could be read as “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” (Graburn, 1983, pp.15-16). Postcolonial travel writing scholars from the Northeast in general, and of Assam in particular, have had a great deal of allegiance to pay to Edward Said’s Orientalism in the sense that, in reaction to the depictions of the “oriental other” in the popular depictions of the Orient in Western travel narratives, there emerged a counter “travel” narrative from the Northeast much later. By then, the images of the East or the Orient had come to form a “regularizing collectivity”ii (Edward Said’s term) in the travel archives of the West. His book came to establish how ‘travel’ came to be the central element in the epistemological construction of the other. Said’s thesis attempted to show how ‘travel’ was inextricably intertwined to ideas of

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