Colonial Nostalgia and Destabilizing the Imperial Voice: A Study of William Dalrymple and Vikram Seth’s Selected Travel Narratives

The proposed paper is an attempt to interrogate the concept of ‘Othering' which restricts a Western traveller to ‘know' the ‘other' culture. The cultural superiority of a Western traveller and his self-representation as a unique travel ego which legitimized ‘Othering' in the ‘Orient' was a result of the imperialist project. The imperial travel writers described the myths of a place, and emphasized on narrating the details of a place or monument, instead of bringing into life or giving voice to the people they encountered. As a result, these writers manage to furnish limited details about the place they visit. This trait is reflected in William Dalrymple's travel narratives. In this context, this paper aims at expanding the parameters of knowledge and space in travel narratives by destabilizing the colonial discourse, thereby offering an alternative epistemology to the imperial centre. By way of articulating experiences that are removed from dominant productions of knowledge, the travelogue of Vikram Seth offers frames of reference that exist outside the boundaries of essentialist ‘knowledge' production. He writes chiefly about the people he encounters throughout his journey and unlike Dalrymple, Seth prioritizes their voice, and strives to decipher the ‘other's' point of view. In the process, Seth dismantles the binary oppositions of self/other or the subject and the object positions. Thus, the paper aims to focus on the reversal of perspectives and presents the underlying differences in dealing with the travel narratives of both the writers and enables the readers to decipher the underlying meanings.