This volume brings together scholarship on indigenous forms of travel to decolonize travel theory. It looks at certain minoritarian-vernacular traveling cults - very rarely examined - that compel us to rethink, on the one hand, the conventional tropes of and rationales for travel; and, on the other hand, notions of (post)coloniality, nationalism and modernity in the context of India. The book illustrates the enduring problematic of the 'colonial episteme': how it deploys pervasive categories through which travel practices are sought to be understood, and why such categories are inadequate in accounting for the vernacular traveling cults in question. In studying the vernacular world-making in and through these cults, this book offers critical insights on how they defy the log(ist)ics of the 'imperial categories' and why they must be read as expressions of decoloniality.

An important contribution to travel studies, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of South Asian studies, travel theory, Indian literary and cultural studies, cultural history and anthropology, sociology, and decoloniality.

About the Author

Avishek Ray teaches at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (2021) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (2020). His research interests span space and mobility, (post)nationalism and postcolonialism. In 2021, he was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.

Reviews

"This is an intriguing and challenging book. Its contributors, characters, and constituents seize upon and severally straddle the terms, textures, and tangles of long-ranging pasts and diverse practices in South Asia. Taken together, the explorations on offer of "vernacular mobilities" do more than what meets the eye. They underscore instead the urgent requirements today of rethinking and unthinking not only "coloniality" and "postcoloniality" but equally "decoloniality" and "travel." And to do so by tracking the enticements and incitements of these formidable fabulations - as metaphor, optic, and provocation."

Saurabh Dube, Distinguished Professor, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City & Distinguished Research Fellow, Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, Germany-India

"Departing wisely from the long-cherished prism of "precolonial-religious and postcolonial-secular," this important book builds upon recent work in the field of colonial and vernacular modernities project in South Asia. Drawing from the rich literary landscape of the Indian subcontinent, the contributors explore variously 'alternative travel performances,' in spatial and temporal terms, embracing a vast and rich cornucopia of travel narratives. This is a pioneering volume: original, insightful, and provocative. A valuable contribution to Indian Travel Writings and South Asia Studies."

Sachidananda Mohanty, Editor of Travel Writings and the Empire, Former Professor of English, University of Hyderabad & Former Vice-Chancellor, Central University of Odisha

Book Information
ISBN 9781032858081
Author Avishek Ray
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Routledge India
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd