Session 124: South Asian Travelers in Image and Text: Photography, Tourism, and Travel Narratives

Organizer and Chair: Julie F. Codell, Arizona State University

Discussant: Barbara N. Ramusack, University of Cincinnati

Keywords: travel, photography, gender, tourism, modernity, Asian identity, reception.

This session will examine photographs, tourist publications and travel narratives about and by South Asians. The panel’s subject is original in its interdisciplinary study of modern South Asian travel writings, tourism and photography and in its integration of images and texts. Panelists will explore South Asians traveling around Asia, America and Europe. In their writings and photographs, South Asian subjects expressed more than their impressions and interpretations of the sites they visited in the contexts of South Asian colonial and post-colonial lives. They also articulated their own reflexivity, consciously producing modern South Asian identities. Photography, popular tourist publications, and travel narratives were deployed to convey new notions of South Asian modernity through changing and conflicted historical, social, cultural, and political conditions that shaped their travel, their interpretations of that travel, and their audiences’ reception of their images and texts.

Panel papers focus on gendered identities and images in examining how Indian travelers navigated their subjectivities from the late colonial period to the end of the 20th century as they addressed dual publics of Western and South Asian readers and spectators. In their self-conscious identities and relations with their audiences, these modern South Asian authors, photographers, and photographic subjects expressed a changing and evolving Asian global "eye," as they presented themselves in various guises: the "guest" in Western countries, autonomous women travelers, post1945 pan-Asians reflecting new balances of power in Cold War internationalism, and fashionable tourists.

Readership and Irony in Late 19th-Century Indian Travel Narratives

Julie F. Codell, Arizona State University

The trickle of Indian travel writing begun as early as around 1600 turned to a flood of books by the end of the nineteenth century, when Indians increasingly traveled to Europe (especially Britain), North America, and Australia. Strategically marking and evaluating cultural differences, Indian authors addressed Indian readers to coax them to travel and to consider a balance of Western and Indian social institutions to model a modern Indian identity.

In their accounts, Indian travel writers convey the complexities of Indian modernity as a potential outgrowth of travel itself. But they also incorporated subtextual critiques of the West through irony and contrasts between India and the West. Many employed a discourse of a guest visiting the West as host which permitted criticism and ironic subterfuge aimed differently and strategically for their different readers.

I will compare T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, 1889, written in English by an Indian administrator accompanying the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886 to London, and Pandita Ramabai, Conditions of Life in the United States and Travel There, 1889, published in Marathi when she was a prominent advocate of Hindu women’s rights. This comparison offers contrasts on readership, gender and nuances in their different experiences in England and the U.S. and their own authorial personae as models of cultural hybridity. Through irony and a carefully constructed relationship to their respective readers, these authors intervened into travel narrative conventions to suggest formations of Indian modernity and to offer interconnected critiques of Britain and America.

Escape through Travel: Vacation Photographs of Indian Women

Geraldine Forbes, State University of New York at Oswego

Travel and adventure are most often associated with European women, whose journeys provided "opportunities for emancipation and reinvention." Books on women travelers inevitably leave out non-Western women, either because the authors assume these women did not travel or leave behind accounts, or because they assume the accounts belong with slave narratives. These authors are wrong on both counts. Indian women traveled for a number of reasons: family ceremonies, religious pilgrimage, to attend schools and colleges, for social and political meetings, to practice their professions, and on holiday, and left behind written and photograph records of their experiences. This paper examines vacation travel photographs found in the family albums of middle-class Indians.

The paper features vacation photographs of four Indian women born between 1900 and 1914. Using photographs as historical documents, I will discuss what these images can tell us about these women and their lives. Although women seldom traveled alone (usually they were accompanied by their husbands and children), the photographs portray them in casual poses doing unusual things. Away from family and community conventions, women became companions to their husbands and children, interacted with strangers and foreigners, and acted autonomously. The photographs help us understand how women negotiated new relationships and the differences between their roles at home and away from home. Travel, for Indian women as well as European women, brought opportunities for "emancipation and reinvention."

"The New World of Asia": Images of Cold War Cosmopolitanism in Holiday Magazine

Antoinette M. Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Historians of travel and travel-writing have been remarkably uninterested in the Cold War period. Despite some scholarship on travel during this period (1945 to Berlin Wall’s fall), little attention has been paid to the Cold War as a framework for the meanings of mobility, representation, and difference in the late 20th century. This lacuna is more remarkable given that the 1950s witnessed a heightened appreciation of travel as a sign of status and cultural capital by the European and American bourgeoisie. The democratization and popularity of travel after 1945 occurred in the context of Third World nationalism, transfer of power from Britain to the U.S. and an emerging world order dominated by superpowers. Asian parts of the Third World were commodified as tourist destinations for the first time, as Americans watched Asia become a significant "problem" for U.S. foreign policy. The convergence of Euro-American tourism and dramatic geopolitical realignments meant that travelers imagined world tourism within new "compulsions" in the Cold War era that shaped cosmopolitanism as cultural performance and ideological capital.

I will focus on Holiday magazine (1945–77) turned toward Asia in the 1950s. "The New World of Asia" (its special feature section) committed visual space and resources to Asia through Asian writers. Holiday readers comprehended the "new world of Asia" through the eyes of Han Suyin and Santha Rama Rau, two non-white women freelancers who translated Asian images, histories, cultures, political values, and ideals to articulate the uneasy convergence of identification and disinterest that marked cold war cosmopolitanism.

Samosas and Stardust: Fashion Photography, Travel, Tourism, and the Popular Contemporary Indian Magazine

Romita Ray, University of Georgia

This paper examines how contemporary fashion photography defines ideals of Indian beauty in popular magazines read by South Asians at home and abroad. The most powerful visual channel after the razzle dazzle of Bollywood, photographs in such publications disperse images of starlets and fashion models posed in locations as wide-ranging as a desert in Rajasthan and the Great Barrier Reef. This paper, therefore, addresses how the camera promotes the landscape of Indian beauty as a global fantasy. Intensified further by the rhetoric of "filmi" language, photography and text are intertwined to construct fantasies of travel to far-flung destinations such that beauty is promoted as an exclusive commodity beyond the reach of the ordinary tourist. Instead, it is idealized within the framework of travel narratives, and thereby aligned more frequently with the domain of the intrepid traveler versus that of the mundane tourist. Can a new type of visual narrative be situated in such photographs? How do these images exoticize Indian beauty vis-à-vis the global locations of its readers? Once commodities that had to be mailed to relatives and friends settled outside India, magazines promoting such pictures now proliferate in Indian shops that in turn, sustain the taste for popular culture amidst the shifting terrain of the South Asian diaspora. Thus, this paper investigates how the global expanse of Indian immigration, together with the continual flood of images via the internet and television, have re-framed ideals of Indian beauty resurrected simultaneously through the aesthetic frameworks of travel and fashion photography.