Women and Wanderer: Postcolonial (Re)interpretations of Travel and Travel Writing

尽管印度世纪晚期的游记写作与“从欧洲作家那里获得代表国家历史的力量“的愿望是一致的，但印度妇女往往被认为缺乏这种自主的声音。性别方面也带来了旅行写作的一般性转变，这是学术界在女性通过现存的男性文学传统调解其叙事主体性的代表性中留下的一个空白。从为侵犯文学领域而写的辩解到对家庭空间的详尽描述，女性对旅行的感知和写作与同时代的男性截然不同。19世纪70年代的殖民地旅行写作突出了几个“上层印度妇女利用旅行话语”的激进偏离。印度旅游写作的另一个重大转变发生在2010年后，互联网旅游博客与传统的旅行日志一起激增。在这里，这些叙述也总是带有性别色彩，但旅行者女性的形象不再被视为一种反常现象，也不意味着她们参与了一个殖民国家的跨大陆神话创造项目。因此，在这种新发现的自由中，他们的旅行写作以重新协商的性别身份为特征。对这两个时期的比较研究表明，在这一转变中，人们提出了难以捉摸的“种族化的性别自我”。在跨国与后殖民的结合点上。我的研究将描绘从第一时区（1870 - 1930年代）到第二时区（2010- 2021年）印度女性旅行写作中看到的不断变化的解释策略，并确定这些差异以何种方式反映了帝国不断变化的现实，以及其对生活的全球影响。尽管这是一个试图在性别图式中比较殖民和后殖民游记的尝试，但这并不是一个详尽的工作。由于大多数殖民时期妇女的游记都是用Bhasha语写的，因此大多数已出版的英文译本都被考虑用于研究。对于第一组，十位女性的旅行叙述-传统的旅行见闻或嵌入自传通信中的不同帐户-将被用作主要文本。第二，16篇游记将与互联网上内容创作者的旅游博客一起形成语料库。阅读材料将辅以旅行者的采访，以更深入地了解该行业。

Even though late nineteenth century travel-writing in India is consonant with the desire of "appropriating from European writers the power to represent"1 the history of the nation, Indian women are often thought to lack this autonomous voice. That the aspect of gender has also brought about a generic shift in travel-writing is a gap left unassessed in academia in representations of women mediating their narratorial subjectivities through the extant masculine literary tradition2. From penning an apologia for transgressing on the literary domain to exhaustive accounts of the familial spaces, women perceived and wrote travel very differently from their male contemporaries. Colonial travel-writing from 1870s featured this radical deviance of several "upper-class Indian women utilizing the discourse of travel...according to the needs of their situations"3, thereby often subverting the hegemonic position.Another such momentous shift in Indian travel-writing has transpired post 2010, with the proliferation of Internet travel blogs alongside conventional travelogues. Here too, the accounts are invariably gendered, but the figure of the traveller woman is no longer seen as an aberration, nor are they meant to participate in the transcontinental myth-making projects of a colonized nation. So, in this newfound freedom, their travel-writing is characterized by a renegotiated gender identity. A comparative study of these two periods reveals that in this transition are posited the elusive "racialized gendered selves...at the conjuncture of the transnational and postcolonial"4 . My research will delineate the changing interpretative strategies seen in Indian women's travel-writing from the first time zone (1870 - 1930s) to the second (2010- 2021), and establish in what ways these differences reflect the changing realities of the empire, and its global ramifications on their lives. Even though this is an attempt at a comparison between colonial and postcolonial travelogues within a gendered schema, this is not an exhaustive work. A few representative pieces have been chosen that will help gain an insight into the research questions.Since most colonial travel-writing by women were in Bhasha languages, mostly texts with published English translations have been considered for the study. For the first group, travel narratives of ten women - conventional travelogues or disparate accounts embedded in autobiographies correspondence - will be used as primary texts. For the second, sixteen travelogues will form the corpus alongside travel blogs of content-creators on the Internet. Readings will be supplemented by travellers' interviews to get more of an insight into the industry.