Discovering India Through Imagery in Postcolonial Travel Writings

During the colonial and the imperial era certain conceptions or images were held and cherished, largely by the white world of the non-white world. Drawing upon the postcolonial theories beginning with Said's Orientalism to Graham Huggan's ideas of postcolonial discourses being marketed and domesticated for Western consumption, an investigation is made here of travel writings about India over a period from 1977 to 2002. This article focuses on the perceptions of India in the following travel writing books: V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization, Mark Tully's No Full Stops in India, and Sarah MacDonald's Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. The article discusses the different impressions that the travelers have of India and the representations that they make motivated by their contrasting personal experience and ideas about traditions and culture. For these writers India becomes a fictional construct and a sum of the tourist attraction it lays out through a chronological sequence of events. The article unravels the postcolonial agenda of the postcolonial writers and attempts to build the real image of India through distorted representations in these three travel writing books. The article reflects important cues on the travel writings in India and at the same time openly reveals their transnational link to the global sphere.