Biographies, autobiographies, life narratives and travel narratives that present life histories are valuable sources for understanding the social development of the self and the society. One can argue that travel writing in India started with the fictional accounts of the digvijayas in the epics, the safarnamas, tirthya-mahatyas or devotional accounts of the pilgrimages or the famous lyrical Sanskrit reminiscences of a homesick lover like the Yaksha in Kalidasa’s Meghduta. In modern times, travel writing and first person narratives on travel were further amended by the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Rahul Sankrityayan, Satyadeva Parivrajak and others.

The genre of autobiography and travel writing in Hindi has developed extensively. They provide crucial historical documents that help us to understand society and different features of social development. As a modern development autobiography articulates itself in a variety of forms. Diaries, testimonies, journals, letters and memoirs are the privileged loci for life story expressions. But we find narratives of the self also in poetry, painting, film, and more recently new spaces for the publication of autobiographies are created in personal webpages, chat rooms, emails and social networks.

In this context, this workshop aims to consider different life narratives and analyse diverse stories of the travelling self that depict situations “away from home”.  This workshop will consider travel writings from different angles of society and look at how the author describes travelling to foreign places, nostalgic longing for home, the sense of seeing anew, prejudice, adaptation, and projections such as occidentalism. It aims to study and discuss how Hindi narrators created spaces for the self in different historical, political, social and cultural milieus which are described and problematized. In this workshop we would like to engage in an investigation of first person travel narratives and travel narratives melded in autobiographical writings in Hindi, taking into account different types of life narratives. We would like to explore theoretical issues and to analyse texts, focusing primarily on modern and contemporary issues, not excluding premodern concerns that might be interesting in order to develop a deeper knowledge of the processes that define travel narratives in the South Asian context. 

Program (PDF)