LAUSR

Women’s travel writing in Bengal proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the popular form of serialized publications in journals such as Bharati (1877), Dasi (1892), Prabasi (1901), among others. However, to perceive this rich output of travel literature as a single, homogenous genre would be fallacious. Travel writing in this time undergoes several generic modifications as it journeys through the turn of the century. Through my paper I would like to trace these shifts within Bengali women’s travel narrative using the stretch of aryavarta as the anchoring landscape. From Prasannamae Debi in 1888 to Nanibala Ghosh in 1933, these travellers from Bengal travel to the north and north-west regions of India, mapping the same landscape but within diverse narrative frameworks, and in so doing, dramatically (and one could argue deliberately) alter the land they wish to represent. Their subjective position as women writers further inform and complicate their work, as do the contemporary political framework of the time they respectively inhabit. What the reader is left with can conservatively be termed travel writing, but can equally and with ease inhabit the roles of memoir, political writing, ethnographical study, among others.