The Travel Writer as Cultural Icon and Literary Predecessor: Negotiating the African Legacy of S. K. Pottekkat

Abstract

S. K. Pottekkat has been the most influential travel writer in Malayalam for many generations of Malayali readers. His travels in Africa in the year 1949-50, recorded in five travelogues beginning with the midtwentieth century Kappirikalude Nattil, have inspired generations of Malayalis to follow suit and pursue the African dream. This is much more pronounced in the case of well-known Malayali writers whose attempts to write about Africa have inevitably involved a "writing back" to Pottekkat. In this paper, I analyze the African travelogues of two such writers -Tatapuram Sukumaran's African Poorvadeshangalil in 1986 about his trip to Tanzania and Paul Zacharia's Oru African Yatra( 2005) about his travels from South Africa to Egypt in 2000. Sukumaran is hailed by the Malayali diaspora as the first Malayali writer after Pottekkat to visit the country while the writer-journalist Zacharia is on a self-proclaimed mission "to seek out the present-day form of that Africa which Pottekkat found 54 years ago". Unsurprisingly, the major part of his journeys is undertaken through the well-trodden paths taken by Pottekkat who himself was inspired by the celebrated travel accounts of Livingstone and Stanley. In this paper, I intend to explore how these two writers writing about Africa in the humungous literary shadow of Pottekkat negotiate his African legacy in the Malayali literary imaginary. How far does the "anxiety of influence" of Pottekkat's picture of Africa, which was colonial and Eurocentric, impinge on these writers who are trying to represent postcolonial Africa for a different audience in a different time? What are the strategies they adopt to create a distinct voice? These questions, in turn, lead to larger questions about how each tenderfoot traveller's gaze is mediated by the verisimilar lens of existing discourses as well as by the horizon of expectations of his/her reading public brought up on these canonical narratives.