Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity

Abstract

Man's relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, thought essentially.-Martin Heidegger Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, "very much like the sky above our head," in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers. 1 the past of the modern Chaudhuri was not exceptional in this sense. The colonial Bengali visitors' first impression of England, as we will see, was tainted with a sense of deja vu. 2 For these colonial tourists, travel to England was not so much a journey into the unknown as a confirmation of what was already known about England thanks to 'print capitalism' and 'travel capitalism.' 3 Our travelers were not on the lookout for the marvelous and the unknown-their gaze constantly scrutinized whether the real England measured up to their hyperreal image of England. If it did not, whether the force needed to close the gap could have been productive of a certain 'critique' of colonialism is a question that has recently been 293

India in Bengali Travel Writing on Russia in the Twentieth Century: Travelling The World, Writing about Home

“…Narratives based on binaries are common in Bengali travel writing on England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most important being the opposition of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ (Sen, 2005: 4). For these travel writers, England remained the reference point to judge their country’s modernity and advancement, and they felt the need to evaluate their country against an ideal throughout their journeys (Mukhopadhyay, 2002; Raychaudhuri, 1988). One may argue, though, that all travellers see and report the world through lenses provided by their culture at a particular point in time, and focus on differences is a natural phenomenon.…”

The Aesthetic Gaze: Siting Nineteenth Century Indian Travel Writing

“…(Sen, 2005;Mukhopadhyay, 2002;Chatterjee, 1998). While the eighteenth century travel narratives had been exploratory-curious in nature, naively expressive of an immanent sense of awe and wonder about anything Western; the ones in the nineteenth century and beyond were all educative v .…”

Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan

“…As part of the new physical culture that attended the nationalist awakening in the early 1900s, Sarala Devi Ghoshal (1872-1945) established a Jujitsu school in Calcutta in 1904, while underground Swadeshi (home-rule) pamphlets invited comparisons between Japanese and Indian economic development (Ray 1988, 66-67). At the same time, Bengali travel accounts of Japan, such as the 1912 travelogue of Hariprabha Takeda, the Indian wife of a Japanese merchant, lent revealing glimpses into the domestic world of Japan (Mukhopadhyay 2002). However, in the decades before the Second World War, it was the travels and writings on Japan of Rabindranath Tagore that were most influential on Indian nationalist engagement with Japan, especially in Bengal.…”