5.3 Maitra

Becoming Sahibs: Bengali Bhadralok Travel Cultures and a Colony in Paschim, c. 1850–1911

Ahana Maitra | Jadavpur University

Publication: Volume 5 Issue 3

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Abstract | From around the second half of the nineteenth century, the Bengali Bhadralok were no longer travelling only for the purposes of pilgrimage. By this time secular travel cultures were emerging, and the Bengali Bhadralok who had come into close contact with the discourses of colonial modernity began to travel extensively. Many of these Bhadralok travellers were converging on what was known as Paschim—a set of sites on the western end of undivided Bengal, and currently falling within the post-independence Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand. By situating this travel culture in relation to the history of precolonial travel as it was prevalent in the region, the paper proposes to understand the reasons for which the journeys to Paschim might be said to have constituted a new modality of travel—constituted by the Bhadralok’s discursive adaptation of the colonial gaze, which in turn, as the paper will argue, made it possible for such travellers to establish a Bengali colonial centre there. In this context, the paper analyzes to what extent travel narratives as cultural texts shaped such expeditions into the region. Three of the earliest instances of the new Bhadralok travellers’ documentation of their travels to the region—Bholanath Chunder’s The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay’s Palamau, and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Chotanagpur”—will be studied to trace the development of a discourse on the region which proved to be both textually and materially influential. In connection with this, the paper also proposes to attend to a predominant strand of this history: the practice of vacationing in the “west,” i.e., Paschim, as health tourists, which became an integral part of the leisure and recreational repertoire of the upper and upper middle class Bengali Bhadralok. Attending to this aspect of Bhadralok’s involvement with Paschim, the paper will attempt to investigate its particular role in furthering their emerging colonial ambitions.

Key words | Colonial traveller’s gaze, Paschim, Colonial ambitions, Utopia, Bengali Bhadralok Culture, South Asian Travel Writing, Nineteenth Century Health Tourism, Bholanath Chunder, Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore

Ahana Maitra (ahana.maitra@gmail.com) is a doctoral research student at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, India. Interested in moving beyond the colonial/anticolonial binary, her research focuses on assessing the role of native elite cultures in erecting hierarchies in the Bengal region. For her current project, she examines the links between Bhadralok travel practices to Paschim and its links to the disruptive socioeconomic transformations of the Chotanagpur region.