Travel is a state of mental as well as material transportation. The nature of travel is transforming with accelerations in technology and the ease with which we can know and access new places and cultures. There are few ‘voyages of discovery’ to be made in our times. The analytical and adjectival traditions of examining ‘foreign’ cultures in travel writing have been diluted by the all-knowing interconnectedness of our age.
It’s a much smaller world, with enforced cosmopolitanism and cheek by jowl multiculturalism changing the way we think about faraway people and places. Millennials tend to have a sense of unselfconscious entitlement about the process of belonging to different places at the same time. And the ever-expanding Indian and South Asian diaspora leaves its footprint in the most unexpected and expected places. There is a sense of déjà vu in encountering our countrymen and countrywomen wherever we go, as they footprint the globe with curry and masala, Bollywood rhythms and desi talk.
Many years ago, in the course of a reading, Salman Rushdie had declared that ‘trees have roots, men have boots’. He was perhaps referring to the diasporic experience, but the phrase stayed with me, changing context and meaning in my mind. The joys of rootedness and the quest for otherness seemed part of a perpetual pendulum of internal and external experience.
Then there are migrations, the usually disruptive mass passages of people in search safety and security. While the old nomadic communities, such as the gypsies and the Romani communities, are no longer as geographically fluid as they once were, migrants and refugees display a new and determined aspect of human mobility across borders, visas and barbed wire.
We are all travelling all the time. As our small blue planet continues its trajectory around the sun, migratory birds use stellar and solar cues to intuit the magnetic field of the spinning earth. Other migrating animals, like whales and sharks and porpoises, use the unseen magnetic grid and the position of the sun to orient themselves. Space travel and interplanetary tourism is no longer the stuff of speculative science fiction. At the Jaipur Literature Festival 2016, one of our speakers was the inspirational Anousheh Ansari. In 2006 she became the first Iranian woman in space, and the first self-funded woman to travel to the International Space Station. Her motivation? She had read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and wanted to see the stars.
Despite hiccups and setbacks, and a test flight crash in 2014, Richard Branson’s space travel programme ‘Virgin Galactic’ is set to send mega-wealthy celebrity civilian space tourists out unto the blue yonder. Singer-songwriter Justin Bieber, actors Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, physicist Stephen Hawking, are among those who have signed up for the trip. The SpaceShip Two cabin is reportedly ‘roomy enough for passengers to float during a few minutes of weightlessness’. Way to go.
The search for new frontiers is the motor of the authentic travel experience. But all too many modern tourists travel without seeing, never crossing built in comfort zones to make the leap to the farther shore. This holds especially true of well-off Indian travellers, who carry everything, from maids to pre-cooked masala meals, to circumvent the ‘otherness’ of their glamorous destinations. It is almost as though they want to travel to the celluloid interiors of their inner imaginations and to inhabit the foreign locales of great Bollywood travel busters. From Sangam through the entire Yash Chopra ouevre, with a special nod to DDLJ from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam to Dil Dhadakne Do and Queen, this is where Indian wanderlust takes us, without disconnecting the umbilical cord from Mothership India. And the desired outcome is greedy shopping and show-off selfies on Facebook and Instagram. Such travel is certainly not transformational, but if it works for them, and for airlines, hotels and travel companies, who am I to complain?
As for the monkey caps and khakra that were once the insignia of the Indian traveller, I wont even go down that road. Things have changed, and if perchance you actually encounter such nostalgia-feed, snap away, post away, for the times they are a ‘changing.
I am myself a lazy traveller, preferring to read and daydream about distant places rather than trudge tiredly through the cobbled streets of historic towns and heritage sites.
By the law of contraries, I travel constantly, within India and around the world. Wherever I go, I encounter fellow writers, and listen in to ideas and stories and arguments. I tend to take in new and changing surroundings with an oblique gaze, being careful not to startle the subject of my scrutiny. As a novelist, what I am seeking is both difference and commonality.
The object of travel is not to leave carbon footprints. It is, to quote T.S. Eliot, to ‘return where we began and see the place for the first time’. Yatras, pilgrimages, and circumambulations hold out just that promise, of the journey and the quest becoming one.
Reading remains, for some of us, the best way to travel. Literary festivals rate a close second, as they open up a cross section of informed understanding and cultural context. Bypassing the lazy eye syndrome and internalising experience is crucial to the process. In a recent anthology which I edited, titled ‘Travelling In, Travelling Out’, I sought precisely such startling moments of self recognition, exterior journeys, interior monologues, subtle shifts of perception.
The nature of travel, of one foot placed after the other, uphill and downhill, on horseback or bullock cart, perhaps astride a yak in Bhutan, palanquin or aeroplane or intergalactic ship, caravanserai or pilgrimage, stimulates both personal and economic growth, measuring out the miles on our spinning globe, rendering the world both a smaller and bigger place.
Traveller, venture forth…
Namita Gokhale is a writer, publisher and festival director. She has authored thirteen books. A new novel, Things to Leave Behind, will be published later this year
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