The Possibility of ‘Counter Travel’ in the Age of
‘Belated Travelers’: Tahir Shah as a Counter Traveler in Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Rima
Barua
Rima Barua is a Ph.D Scholar
in the Department of English, North Eastern Hill University. Her doctoral
research investigates the travel narratives of the Anglo-Afghan travel writer,
Tahir Shah with the aim of analyzing the role of migration as an alternative
travel pattern in Travel Writing Studies.
Abstract
Travel
Writing as a genre has received critical attention only recently. The growing popularity of the genre among the
reading public led to an increase in its commercial success and academic
interest. However, the commercial
success and popularity enjoyed by the genre served as the cause of its
disapproval by various critics who discarded it as a morally dubious literary
form. The popularity of travel writing is believed to come from its ability to
promote racial and cultural superiority even in the present global world and
for maintaining the rigid divisions between home and abroad, occident and
orient, center and periphery. It was for
this ability that travel writing became a primary tool in the hands of the
European colonizers for the propagation of imperial designs. The use of the
genre in Empire building during the imperial period and its complicity with imperialism
is an important topic in Travel Writing Studies. What however, this paper seeks
to analyze is the present scenario of travel writing which highlights that
travel writing is still entangled in its imperial past. This has led to its
critique as a genre which rather than paying attention to contemporary
realities of the world, tries to escape from it. Gripped by a nostalgia for the days of
Empire, where differences between people and places were more prominent,
contemporary travelers have turned into ‘belated travelers’ who still knowingly
or unknowingly serve to secure the practices of Empire. But what is interesting
to note is that if contemporary travel writing is filled with ‘belated
travelers’, there are also ‘counter travelers’ trying to come to terms and
negotiate with the tainted past of travel writing looking for ways and means to
revitalize the genre. If globalization has caused travel writers to believe
that there is nothing new left to talk about the world, it has also paved the
way for new patterns of travel and new travelling subjects who have
problematized the fixed definitions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, ‘insider’ and
‘outsider,’ self and other and thus have provided a renewed look at the very
act of border crossing. Diasporic travelers or travelers with complex
hyphenated identities have contributed new inputs to the area of travel
writing. Such travelers being aware of their complex backgrounds defy settled
generic categories like borders, self, other, home, abroad etc. The paper thus
seeks to deal with the British Afghan travel writer, Tahir Shah whose works
have attained popularity for providing alternative ways of approaching cultures
and people. His works present a
departure from stereotypical ways of dealing with the self and the other and
clarify that though travel writing is enmeshed in the history of Empire, yet
the present global setup facilitates various ways of negotiating with the past.
The paper will try to highlight the major aspects of Shah’s writings with
reference to one of his popular texts, The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The novel traces Shah’s journey to India and thus
serves as an interesting site for analyzing a diasporic travel writer’s
representation of encounters, cultural clashes, and interpretation of
differences and familiarity in a country which was a former British colony.
Keywords: Travel, Nostalgia, Belated Travelers, Counter
Travelers, Globalization
Introduction
Travelers mostly see the world
and communicate their observation through an interpretive framework or through
the discourses provided by their cultures. Travel writing is identified by many
as a mode of colonialist discourse that continues to deploy imperialist
tendencies even after the end of the days of empire. Travel writing is enmeshed
in the history of empire and thus the role of empire in the production of
travel literature is irrefutable.It is a cultural form steeped
in imperialist attitudes and imagery. Both colonization and travel writing
function on the logic of ‘othering’ people and cultures. Carl Thomson observes
that there are two ways by which the process of othering works:
In a weaker, more general sense,
‘othering’
simply denotes the process by which the members of one culture identify and
highlight the differences between themselves and the members of another
culture. In a stronger sense, however it has come to refer more specifically to
the process and strategies by which one culture depicts another culture as not
only different but also inferior to itself.(Thomson 132-133)
It is the second sense that relates travel writing to
Western Imperialism because the tendency
of travel writers to portray other cultures as
patronizing served the primary purpose of imperialism as a justification for
dominance and colonization. Travelling accounts of colonial travelers thus not
only helped them to present their community as superior over the others they
describe but also provided a moral justification for their intervention in
these places. The connection of imperialism and travel writing during the
imperial period can thus be well understood. But the question is why is the
genre not able to come out of its connections to imperialist attitudes, myths
and prejudices even in contemporary times?
In the period of
globalization, travel writing is assumed to change its tone and depart from the
ways and power structures that existed in the imperial period but that does not
seem to be the case. Debbie Lisle in her
book, The Global Politics of Contemporary
Travel Writing (2006) has argued that though contemporary travel writers
have incorporated a cosmopolitan approach in their writings whereby differences
are celebrated and encounters with the other are shown in a more positive way
yet this approach is “not as emancipatory as it claims to be; rather, it is
underscored by the remnants of Orientalism, colonialism and Empire” ( Lisle 5) .
Such an approach though might be preferable is nevertheless a palatable means
of articulating and reproducing the same hierarchical relations as universal
standards of viewing ‘other’ cultures. This is done by a celebration of
differences whereby those differences are not judged as better or worse but are
simply accepted. Thus, contemporary travel narratives continue to function on
the logic of difference by sustaining the privileged position of the traveler
and his readers waiting to consume images of the ‘other’ that assure them of
their superiority. There however lies an important cause behind this tendency
on the part of the travel writers to fall back upon their colonial precursors
even in contemporary times. An analysis of this problem will help in
understanding Tahir Shah’s approach to travel writing which do not necessarily
use the guise of cosmopolitanism, tolerance and equality to produce accounts of
otherness. Lisle also clarifies that be it colonial or cosmopolitan travel
narratives, both categories “rely on stable geographical borders to locate
difference and secure identity” ( Lisle 9) . Shah on the other
hand addresses the ambiguities and intricacies brought about by the very act of
border crossing which question the stability of geopolitical borders as markers
of difference. He in fact shows not just the mobility of people but the
mobility of cultures and most importantly the shift and transgression of
borders of the mind formed during the imperial period which is still being
secured by travel writers.
A troubling question that
haunts travel writing in the contemporary times is regarding the relevance and
future of travel writing. The map of the world is almost definite at this stage
with its blank spaces filled and writers assume that there are no new spaces
left to be explored. Globalization on the other hand had made travel banal and
common place and no longer a risk and a challenge. Besides the access to the internet and google
maps have paved the way for virtual travel and made the existence of travel
writing problematic. Modern travel writing thus
is believed to be belated devoid of providing authentic experiences that can
cater to the needs of the readers. As such contemporary travel writers fall
prey to what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has termed as “Imperialist Nostalgia”
is “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people
mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed” (69) . The most
significant aspect of Imperialist Nostalgia is that ituses “a pose of innocent
yearning” to make “racial domination appear innocent and pure” (68; 70). Through this the writer and the
reader mourn the passing of a world, they themselves have altered and engage in
wistful reminiscences of the simpler ways of life. Contemporary travel writers
use this technique to conceal or to mystify their economic motives. Travel Narratives governed by
Imperialist Nostalgia become demonstrations of what Rojek and Urry call, “the
performativity of reminiscences”, a process by which objects lose their
original essence and get layered with secondary images, values and associations”
(14).Secondly instead of being located in
the space and time of the present, such travel narratives take the readers back
to the days of empire neglecting the need to grapple with present issues. Imperialist
Nostalgia thus has made travel writing outdated, redundant and highly clichéd. Travel writers who indulge in Imperialist Nostalgia
are referred to as ‘Belated Travelers’, a term used by Ali Behdad in his book, Belated
Travelers in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994). Such travelers experience a sense of nostalgic
desire to explore and discover the Orient which has long captured their
imagination but unfortunately, they collide with a sense of displacement, both
in time and place, after witnessing the complete disappearance of the Orient’s
glamour and enchantment because of globalization. As such they engage in
Imperialist Nostalgia, moving back in time, trying to make sense of places not
in accordance to the present realities but through a former discourse (colonialist
or orientalist) set as a rule for approaching the Orient.
However, writers like Carl
Thomson, Pattrick Holland and Graham Huggan are of the view that not all travel
writers are alike. While Holland and Huggan point out that “ it would be as
foolish to claim of travel writing that it is uniformly imperialistic as it
would be to defend travel writers as being harmless entertainers” (9), Carl Thomson similarly highlights a “surge
of travelogues by individuals from formerly colonized cultures or,
alternatively, by western travelers descendants of formerly subject,
‘subaltern’ peoples” which highlight the presence of other voices and other
perspectives on the world (163). These
writers seek to challenge western stereotypes and attitudes and are seen to
engage in a counter discourse as opposed to the colonialist discourse. As such
their travel narratives can to be referred to as “Counter travel writing” a
term used by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan in their seminal work, Tourists
with Typewriters to refer to those contemporary travel narratives that run
on a counter discourse, in opposition to the dominant tendency of the travel
writing genre (50). Counter Travel
Writing not only combats centuries of European prejudice that has wholly
consumed the genre but also encourages readers to adjust their attitudes and
perceptions to the contemporary cultural climate. These travel narratives not only
inspire crossing physical boundaries but also mental boundaries as they prefer
flexibility, resilience to rigidity and stillness. A special characteristic of
counter travel writing is that every obstacle that threatens or would have
threatened the existence of travel literature is converted into a strength.
Such narratives question the boundaries between experience and imagination,
movement and immobility, the virtual world and the real world, self and the
other, home and abroad. They also question the relevance of the definitions
that are given to the basic components of a travel narrative: movement, space
and experience. These texts are difficult to grasp as they encompass different
types of writing such as novels. Poems, diaries, pictures, fiction, non-fiction,
etc. Thus, counter travel writing push boundaries, are open to change and are
challenging to approach. As a diasporic travelling subject, Tahir Shah’s
subject position is complicated owing to his hyphenated identity and his
exposure to cultural diversity. He is a migrant who has never visited his
ancestral homeland, but he frequently visited Morocco which was told to be
similar to his homeland (Afghanistan) in many respects by his father. In 2003,
Shah uprooted himself and his family to Morocco. The mixed cultural
backgrounds, and complex hyphenated identities of diasporic travelers such as
Shah make them more conscious of the complex legacies of Empire carried by the
genre and networks of power and trade that connect the world today. Their connections
with several cultures produce dialectics of attachment and detachment and
present ways of inhabiting a space between individual privilege and
responsibility. Migration thus facilitates in the production of counter travel
narratives that challenge colonialist capitalist discourses and thereby to a
greater extent helps in resisting imperialist nostalgia. Besides Carl Thomson
has mentioned that these writers with hyphenated identities whose origins are
not in the west have some common experience of imperial subjugation or possess
knowledge of how it felt to be dominated and viewed as weak. As such they were
less inclined to vilify or patronize other cultures though at present they are
in some way related to the west (163-164).
Shah’s works therefore contribute towards reversing travel writing’s
traditional focus on the West.
At the same time however it is
also made clear that even travel writers aiming to reveal cultural and
historical perspectives which has otherwise been overlooked and suppressed because
of the dominance of colonial ideas, must struggle to convey their views through
a genre that is in many ways antithetical to such views of flexibility and
novelty. This is because travel writing thrives on otherness, is a product of
the consumer culture and relies on the most familiar of western myths for its
existence. Travel writers thus try to conceal the economic motive though they
try to fulfill it through various strategies and means, either by reproducing
the same stereotypes and essentialist views directly or by presenting those
same views differently from those of earlier times and places. Keeping in view
the complexities and problematics of utilizing a genre like travel writing the
article aims to showcase Tahir Shah’s struggles with it and his attempts at
utilizing the genre keeping in view its limitations to present his new
perspectives on the world. He does this by challenging the readers and
adjusting their gaze not to the former stereotypical views and hegemonic ideas
but to the contemporary climate.
Estrangement and
Defamiliarization
Sorcerer’s Apprentice like most of Tahir Shah’s works raises the
expectations of his readers by introducing a romantic motive for travel. Shah visits India in search of the conjuror Hafiz Jan in order to learn
magic. Hafiz Jan was not just a conjuror but the guardian of the mausoleum of
Shah’s ancestor Jan Fishan Khan, an Afghan warlord. Hafiz Jan visits Shah’s
family in England when Shah was a child. Shah develops a closeness with Hafiz
Jan who introduces him to the world of magic during his short stay in Shah’s
house. From then Shah develops a keen interest in magic. Though he goes to
India with the motive of learning magic from Hafiz Jan, Shah ends up being an
apprentice of the renowned conjuror, Hakim Feroze. The very motive of
travelling to India to learn magic seems to set the groundwork for exoticism
and romance. The motive of travel along with the title of the novel raises the
expectations of the readers just like any travel narrative governed by a
colonialist discourse to provide an escape (from the monotony of modern living)
into the world of magic and sorcery, to a former British colony where the
former glories of Empire can be revived. The motive provides the necessary
backdrop against which the traveler can present himself as an intrepid
adventurer and the place he visits as a playground for the readers also to
engage in thrilling adventures. The motive and the beginning of the novel
appears to be similar to a travel narrative governed by a colonialist discourse
providing complacency to its readers with the promise of taking them through a
land of magic and romance. However,the promise of romance, adventure and exoticism provided through the
motive and through the initial accounts of Shah’s arrival in India gradually
begins to come in striking contrast to the present scenario of India struggling
to support itself after the plunder and destruction caused by British
colonization.
The documentation of the
present realities of India not only de-romanticizes the place but also discards
any attempt on the part of the writer to take the readers back in time and
space to glorify the days of colonization in India. This is particularly
evident in the sights of crumbling British architecture and algae stained walls
of the British mansions which symbolize the death of the raj in India. This also suggests the country’s gradual
disentanglement from the past of British dominance. The pictures of present-day
India though include the ravages of empire yet they also seem to mock the herculean
efforts of the British colonizers to turn India into a replica of their
motherland. This is foregrounded by the observations put forward by a British
traveler whom Shah meets in Calcutta:
We British doted on a city which didn’t really exist… We put up
monuments to our heroes, whitewashed everything in sight, enjoyed our liveried
servants and our airy bungalows on the banks of the Hoogly. We got everyone
speaking English, and saluting our kings and queens: all in a desperation to
create Kensington in West Bengal. But as soon as we steamed away, after
Independence, Calcutta the real city- began to burgeon forth. (55-56)
In present day India the opulence and majesty of the
British architecture is seen as a striking contrast to the pictures of
hardships and struggles of people living in India. What Shah observes is the
uselessness of such opulent structures for a common Indian whose only reality
is the daily struggle for survival. An important element of imperialist
nostalgia is to escape from and avoid the descriptions of the political,
economic and social hardships faced by the people of the former colonies. Romanticized depictions of former colonies by
travel writers is a common trait of imperialist nostalgia and are made with the
aim of presenting the place as pristine, unspoiled and most importantly as
being in a state of historical stasis.
Contemporary travelers usually
in order to mark the difference between himself and the people of the place represent
places as being stuck in an earlier historical phase which the west has
supposedly outgrown. This temporal distance not only helps to highlight
differences but also allows the traveler to go back in time, encountering a
former colony which has not yet been able to come out of its British past. In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the pictures of
the crumbling British colonnades, decay of the imposing British palaces and
mansions, the use of the classical pavilions at present for billboards, and the
country with its own “agenda of survival” all discard any possibility of the
place being in a state of historical stasis (Shah 59) . What becomes
gradually more prominent through the descriptions are the economic, hardships
and the material currently being faced by the people of India rather than a
glorification of the former glories of British empire in India. India is not
presented as an infantile, uncorrupted place nostalgically looking back to a
time when it was an esteemed colonial outpost. By de-romanticizing India, Shah
breaks the expectations of the readers waiting to consume images of otherness
that assure them of their superiority by taking them back to the former colonies
to speak of the former glories of Empire. Shah therefore is seen to utilize the
troupe ofestrangement in order
to discard imperialist nostalgia. Through estrangement and defamiliarization
Shah questions the frivolous role of travel writing to merely entertain the
white readers by supplying images of exciting otherness of foreign cultures to
rejuvenate a world of domestic culture which their own cultures cannot provide.
He thus renders the otherness of the foreign place as ordinary. Elements of
excitement and romance associated with the strangeness and the difference of
the other are dismantled. The focus of the narrative is more on presenting the
immediate reality of the place rather than lapsing into nostalgia for the past.
The narrative does not set up a space for the readers to act out their private
fantasises and thereby resists such escapist fantasies of particularly the
western readers who read travel writing to temporarily escape into a world
romance and adventure.
The Wonders of the
Global world
Modern travel writing is regarded to be a literature
of disappointment. “Disappointment, disenchantment, disillusionment,
belatedness, nostalgia: these are some of the most recurrent terms in the
discussion of contemporary travel and its writings” (Cooke 2). As such there lies a dearth of the element of wonder in
contemporary travel writing with there being nothing novel to present. There however lies responses to such
assumptions.In the book, Travellers’
Tales of Wonder, Simon Cooke highlights the reductionist nature of such
assumptions and states that such assumptions express “a highly encultured
interpretation of travel and Travel Writing” (25). The problem of contemporary travel
writing is that it attaches the idea of wonder to the discovery of new
territories but fails to address the wonder that can arise from the various
encounters that takes place in a world of global movements. Such assumptions
also fail to consider the various perspectives that arises due to cultural
clashes in the postmodern, globalized world. Shah provides a challenge to such reductionist
assumptions of thinking the world as too well known. Simon Cooke in this regard
makes a major point that wonder in contemporary travel writing has become more
prominent because of the engagement of travel writing with the very issues that
threaten its existence. As mentioned
earlier, one of the characteristics of Counter travel writing is to transform
the very obstacles of modern travel writing into strengths. Globalization which
has an important hand in turning travel and travel writing into something that
is banal and commonplace, has also paved the way for elements of wonder in
modern travel. Shah recreates wonder in Sorcerer’s
Apprentice by focussing on the changes that globalization has caused in the
contemporary world.
In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Shah primarily
highlights people and their tactics of survival in the midst of hardships rather
than observing places. Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a travel account that pays tribute to the ingenuity of humans in
finding techniques and strategies of survival in the modern world. Modern day
India is devastated by problems of over population, poverty, superstition along
with natural calamities like draught, flood etc. The cause of most of the
social problems is unemployment. But people in India as described by Shah are
seen to have developed strategies to deal with the problem of employment. Shah
gets to know about unique forms of trade in India that shows that money can be
made from nothing. Here in lies the wonder of modern existence. Shah does not
limit himself in presenting India as a victim of colonization and as a place
devastated by the ravages of Empire but as a country which ingeniously
struggles to restore itself from the devastations of colonization and its own
social problems. It is while describing the various trade secrets, business
strategies of the lower sections of society that Shah attaches the element of
surprise and wonder to the varied ways in which sources of living are created
in India. Wonder unlike colonial travel narratives is not aroused by the
discovery of new places but by the discovery of new and unique tactics of
survival, by highlighting the harsh realities of living in the modern times and
the ability to survive under hostile conditions.
What Shah gets to see in India are unique forms of
trade like gold recycling, organizing of weddings in Metro stations, Garbage Banquet,
Skeleton Dealing, etc. which not only demonstrate unique ways of survival but
also highlight the ingenuity of the Indian people. As asked by Hakim Feroze,
Shah sets out to find insider information regarding the place and the people
there and is struck with amazement to see ingenious systems of making money. He
is amazed to see how the arrangement of hiring a cow from the owner for a day
can serve as a source of income for many.
Observing the genius of the arrangement Shah states:
Where else could you
find such an ingenious system? The milkman milks the cow and then, instead of
looking after it all day, gives it to a woman who pays him for the privilege of
looking after the animal . . .the women charges people to feed the creature a
few strands of grass. In turn, the cow’s devotees attain a sense of inner calm
from their charity. The woman sells the dung to fuel -brick makers as a
profitable side line. (132)
Shah is equally mesmerized to see the army of gold scroungers who sweep up
the workshops of the jewelers and collect every grain of dust meticulously and
then takes away the dirt for recycling in order to finally get a tiny nugget of
gold. Gold sweeping in India thus not only exemplifies the exalted heights to
which recycling can be taken but also sets the best example to make money out
of nothing. Shah also gets to meet an impressive entrepreneur, ‘the wedding man’
who hires metro platforms by offering some tips to the station manager to allow
him to use the platform for organizing weddings.
The platform solves the problem of finding a clean and
a large space for a wedding along with the required facilities of toilets,
televisions and speakers.In his search for insider information, Shah also gets
to eat in a restaurant that serves various delicacies prepared from refuse or
leftover food and in this way caters to the food cravings of the people who
cannot afford to go to a restaurant. The restaurant serves as the best example
of Garbage Banquet. At the same time Shah clarifies that though on one hand
unemployment forces people to device such unique forms of trade, it also forces
people to resort to even more unique but fraudulent and illegal ways of earning
money. Shah gets to learn about the trade secrets of the illegal business of
the skeleton dealers who collect unclaimed corpses and take them to the
skeleton processing factory to process them into medical skeletons which are
then exported to other countries. Among these fraudulent ways, the most popular
and the extraordinary strategy of survival is undertaken by the Godmen of India.
These so-called godmen are well acquainted with the science behind magical
feats. They are nothing but illusionists who excel in magical science. They use
this skill to rise themselves to the stature of god and present the illusions
as miracles. They are experts in their field, well equipped and have mastered
feats of illusion in such a way that unless a person is himself an expert in
the field of magic, he cannot find loopholes in the performance to prove that
it is science not magic. Although these godmen,
sadhus, sages, fortune tellers, healers are nothing but con-artists, yet Shah cannot
resist from admiring their extraordinary talents, imagination and
resourcefulness that they deploy in order to survive. The unique ways of using
the power of science for survival by Indian godmen is an evidence of the wonder
associated with the reality of life.
Wonder is also aroused through the representation of
the workings of a global world where “cultures get remade as a result of the
flows of people, objects and images across national borders…” (Bhabha, Clifford
and Gilroy qtd. in Rojek and Urry 11).The present world is of course a world of
anxieties and pressures brought about by late modernity but it is also the time
where easy mobility has filled the world with hordes of exchanges of people and
ideas. The representation of such exchanges is in itself a new challenge and
such presentations automatically remove banality and recreate the sense of
wonder associated with travel.Diasporic writers like
Shah reflect on a global diasporic world and can easily identify with the
instabilities prevalent in the contemporary world. The incessant flow of people and products has
brought about new changes in the world. This flow has not only produced people
with hyphenated identities but has also resulted in the emergence of hybrid
cultural forms. Shah in order to demonstrate the workings of a global world
talks about the consumer culture in India and India’s response to cultural
imperialism.
In India, Shah comes across various salesmen who reveals
to Shah their unique products advertising them with new business strategies. Indian
markets are not just filled with imported products but most interestingly with
‘indigenized’ products that are adopted and adapted to suit the Indian market. These
products actually provide a counterthrust to the west providing a mirror that
reflects the west in new angles and forms. Shah thus states that India’s commercial
strategies in fact make it presently one of the biggest capitalistic nations on
Earth. By referring to the process of indigenization Shah’s highlights India’s
response to cultural imperialism. Not only does India produce Indian versions
of foreign products but also advertises itself and its products for the western
consumers. From the profitable wig business in Tirupati, to marketing itself as
a place where one can receive spiritual enlightenment, India nurtures its
peculiarities and markets them. The representation of such developments and changes brought about by
globalization regenerates wonder in travelling and travel writing. Globalization
thus no longer remains an obstacle for travel writing rather it provides
opportunities for travel writing to look at places and people with renewed perspectives.
Encounters with the Travelee and the Conflicts of the
Contact Zone
One of the markers of travel narratives governed by
colonial discourse is to ignore interpersonal encounters and the moments and
spaces of contacts known as the contact zone between the traveler and the
travelee. According to Mary Louise Pratt, Contact Zones are
important because, “the contact zone is an attempt to invoke the spatial and
temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographical and
historical disjunctures and whose trajectories now intersect” (6-7).The subjects mentioned here are the
traveler and the travelee both of which are not shown as separate but as
interacting in the contact zones.
The
term ‘travelee’ was used by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Beyond Imperial
Eyes to mean “a person travelled to (or on) by the traveler, receptors of
travel” (6). According to Catherine Mee, the word ‘travelee’
does not merely designate the inhabitants of a place but “encompasses everyone
that comes into contact with the traveler, regardless of his identity” (4). The term ‘travelee’ can be seen as being
synonymous to the term ‘other’ but unlike the term ‘other’, travelee does not
carry exotic and mystical connotations. Travel Writing usually presents a traveler
who is at the center of the text and whose perspective provides glimpses of the
other. The traveler is seen to act on this passive travelee, photographing them,
conversing with them and commenting on them.
In the relation between the traveler and the travelee, the travelee is
always assumed to play a passive role as the existence of the travelee is
conditional to his /her encounter with the traveler and his representation of
those encounters in the text. But Mee in
her book, Interpersonal Encounters
points out that encounters are reciprocal and the role of the travelee is far
from being passive. The travelee can have an active role in not only
influencing the traveller but also transforming him in his journey. Studies of the contact zones and the
encounters between the traveler and travelee have questioned the passive
character of the travelee. Such encounters demonstrate the capacity of the
travelee to challenge and dismantle the self-sufficiency of the traveler
thereby questioning the conventional role of the traveler and the travelee. Yet
even in the midst of this the travelee in various travel narratives of conquest
and domination is silenced as inhabitants of the periphery.
Observing the
difficulty in prioritizing people over places in travel narratives, Mee points
out, “People have minds of their own, they do not always conform to
expectations, they can be awkward or intimidating, they can answer back” (6). As such travelers
prefer to present places over people and resist from representing encounters
with the travelee. The need to prioritize such encounters of conflict within
travel narratives is a matter of the writer’s discretion and as such in narratives
of domination, the travelee is denied agency. But Pratt talks about the
possibility of studying travel from the perspective of those who participate on
the receiving end of travel. This is clear in
Pratt’s observation,
If one studied only what the Europeans saw and said one reproduces
the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise
sought. This is a huge distortion because of course that monopoly did not
exist. People on the receiving end of European imperialism did their own
knowing and interpreting sometimes … using the Europeans own tools. (7)
In Sorcerer’s Apprentice Tahir Shah primarily focuses on such encounters of conflict thereby
providing the readers an opportunity to view the place through the travelee’s eyes.
India is thus seen not only through the eyes of Tahir Shah but also through the
eyes of various travelee that he encounters. It is important to note that most
of these encounters question and challenge Shah’s initial views of India.
Shah however chooses to represent
such encounters of conflict in his novel and this is what makes his work
different. In the initial chapters of the novel Shah is seen to focus on the
sordid aspects of India: the frenzied traffic, the crumbling British architecture,
the pot holes in the streets etc. When
he arrives in Calcutta, he deciphers the place as utterly chaotic. But in
striking contrast to Shah’s observation is placed the observation of a fellow
traveler or a travelee who presents a completely different picture of Calcutta.
Stressing on the need to look beyond the city’s day to day routine and the need
to open the mind to the wider picture of a place, he sees system even in the
midst of chaos. He states that Calcutta has a way of arranging systems. These
systems are everywhere and that once those systems are deciphered, the utter chaos
will reveal itself as methodical. Another travelee, this time, a resident of
Calcutta warns Shah that when he is in India he should never underestimate what
looks simple. Hakim Feroze, the magician whose apprentice Shah becomes suggests
an interesting view regarding travel. He asks Shah to go on a journey of
observation, not to observe places but people. According to Feroze there is
nothing left in observing places but what is important to observe is people.
The reason behind Feroze’s preference for observing people over places is that
people are interesting to observe as they change all the time. They are the
ones who do things and not the scenery which will be there forever. Hakim
Feroze also highlights another way of travelling: he asks Shah to undertake a
journey through India without the aim of reaching a particular destination thus
encouraging the nomadic mode of travel. Shah faces similar encounters of
conflict in Varanasi and other places he visits.
These encounters force Shah to
relativize his observations and gradually he gets more and more affected by the
travelee he meets. The focus on such encounters in the narrative gradually
renders the traveler marginal as the voices of various travelee take the centre.What
such encounters highlight is the reciprocal nature of the traveler-travelee
relationships. This reciprocal nature dismantles the naturalized set of opposed
relationships between the traveler and the ‘other’ established in the past by
the colonial travelers and now by the contemporary travelers suffering from
Imperialist Nostalgia. The presence of such encounters within a travel
narrative debunks a unidirectional relationship between the traveler and the
travelee, where the traveler plays the role of a privileged all-knowing
observer, not interested in knowing or giving importance to the views of the
travelee he meets. It also marks a
departure from those narratives where the travelee is either completely silent
or even if they are given a voice, such voices hardly are shown to be important
or capable of influencing.
Thus, the cultural hierarchies
that govern travel writing get challenged through such narratives where the
traveler chooses to provide space and voice to the travelee. Binaries such as
traveler/travelee, center/ periphery, travel/ dwelling on which travel writing
depends all get dismantled and challenged. Though travel writing thrives on
‘otherness’ and it is the most essential thing on which travel writing is
dependent but in terms of diasporic travel writing the concept of ‘otherness’
itself becomes questionable. Horace and the suggestions of other travelee to
look at India beyond its obscured appearances is better understood by Shah
during his training under Hakim Feroze. Shah’s training under Feroze exposes
him to the hidden world of magic and the science behind illusions. His training
helps him to see a resemblance between the way people visualizes the world of
magic and theway travelers approach a place. During a magical performance, the
audience see the illusion as reality but fail to see the reality behind the
illusion. Travelers similarly observe the superficial aspects of a place as the
only reality, looking at places through a vision mediated by a cultural baggage
but unable to accept the limitations of a mediated vision nor being able to see
without it. There is always the urge to capture the ‘other’ through the dominant
discourse that the traveler has at its disposal as rewriting the travel
narrative in the model provided by the colonial precursors lends authenticity
to the narrative.
But when travelers guided by
oriental knowledge visit India thinking that it is a land of adventure, they
become disillusioned to see the discrepancy between the reality and the images
and ideas made available to them by colonial narratives. In this regard Shah
asks a travelee as to how foreigners who come to India, react to see the
derelict condition of once majestic British architecture and the day to day
routine life of any city in India. The
travelee states that the city “has a strange effect on them… It tends to destabilize them” (55).
The word ‘destabilise’ thus refers to the negative effect that the
discrepancy between the images of a phantasmagoric place and the real place has
on a traveler. The present reality of India comes into conflict with the image
of the exotic India once ruled and designed by the Britishers. Behdad in his
book, Belated Travelers, makes a
major point in this regard. Pointing out the problems faced by travel writers
driven by a mediated discourse and the resultant effect of it, Behdad points out
that “the fantastic stories of the mediating text, ironically, make the real
experience of the city appear like a dream in which everything is thrown into
an oblique past” (27). Thus, the place
appears to be a fallen place and it begins to lose its presence. The traveler’s
relation with the immediate reality becomes problematic and the traveler’s
visions of the place perceived through his earlier readings gain the status of
the real. In the world of such mediated visions former colonies like India is deciphered
not as a place that is moving in time, struggling to come out of its disrupted
state brought about by colonization but as a place unable to move out of its
colonial past, lying with the remains of Empire.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice however is a different
text in this regard. In case of Shah though
he also seems to be destabilized by the sordid aspects of India, he does not
choose to present the place in its past or as a fallen place but he takes up
the views of the travelee and is able to see beyond the obscured appearances of
the place. Shah points an observation
made by a fellow traveler who states that “Calcutta has moved on . . . the
façade may be crumbling, the streets may be a mass of pot holes and the traffic
a frenzy of heaving buses and suicidal driving… but this is Calcutta…” (55). This observation discards any possibility
of presenting the place as being in a state of historical stasis. Rather it
highlights the changes that the place and particularly the people of the place are
undergoing with time. Shah’s initial disappointment with the place is replaced
soon by his search for insider information about India which clarifies that the
present reality of India not just lies in the ravages of empire or its sordid
aspects but there is more to it. Shah adopts the suggestions of Horace and Feroze:
to decipher India beyond its superficial reality. Soon Shah observes that India’s
unique ways of dealing with the pressures and demands of modernity and that
despites all its economic and social problems, people here are supporting
themselves by getting themselves employed in different ways and means as
available to them. The views of these travelee which seem to provide renewed
ways of approaching a place and their role in influencing Shah questions the
rigid boundary that exists between a traveler and a travelee. The travelee in Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not just given
a voice and agency but is capable of challenging the traveler’s central role in
a travel narrative.
Shah’s initial position of a
foreigner coming to India to study magic, his highlighting of the unpleasant
aspects of the places in the initial chapters and then gradually making
prominent his own limitations as a traveler by highlighting the views of the
travelee he meets, seems to be a strategy. This strategy highlights the
limitations of a colonialist discourse and its irrelevance in the present
times. Also, Shah’s ability to move from one perspective to the other, seems to
be a product of his hyphenated identity. While looking for insider information
Shah traces transnational forces and the interconnectedness of the consumer
culture. As a diasporic writer Shah is able to see these interconnections and
accept the productive result of the clashes that takes place because of
encounters between himself and the travelee.
The flexibility of Shah’s narrative
is the flexibility that is actually provided by border crossing. Shah utilizes
this to view the place he visits. The voice and agency
given to the travelee and the acknowledgement of the reciprocal relationship
between the traveller and the travelee, the disruption of the rigid boundaries
between the self and the ‘other’ and other hegemonic divisions, the creation of
estrangement to adjust the gaze of the readers to the contemporary times, the
transformation of the consequences of globalization that threaten the existence
of travel writing into strength and the use of such elements to recreate wonder
in contemporary travel writing, all direct to a counter travel writing that is
possible even in the midst of the limitations of the genre. Though the modern
experience of displacement puts the notion of a stable identity at stake, yet it
also paves the way for new possibilities and perspectives. Of course, the
negative impact of an unstable identity has also been a part of diaspora. However,
in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, one does not
get to witness a travel writer who is driven by a sense of loss, rather Shah’s
hyphenated position seems to endow him with a flexibility to use counter travel
writing to revive and restore travel writing from its redundant, jaded and clichéd
position. This contemporary world of uncertainty and fluidity presents travel
writers with diverse scopes to discover the already discovered world in a new
light and is in itself an immense source of wonder and enchantment. Be it
‘travel’, ‘exploration’ or ‘tourism’, each is assignable to its own age and
each fulfils the demands of its age. This clarifies the transient nature of the
world which will continue to come up with new changes and developments. The
present world is of course a world of anxieties and pressures brought about by
late modernity but it is also the time where easy mobility has filled the world
with varied exchanges of people and ideas. The representation of such exchanges
is in itself a new challenge. The fixed nature of the travelling subject as a
privileged superior knowledgeable observer is no longer suitable for the
present times.
However, there is no dearth of such travelling
subjects in contemporary Travel Writing. The inability to resist the call of
Imperialist Nostalgia has resulted in the continuous production of such
travelling subjects. The present global setup however challenges the stability
of such travelling subjects and demands subjects who can take up the task of
representing the complexities and anxieties of the postmodern world thereby
facilitating a counter travel writing in the age of belated travellers. As a migrant writer Tahir Shah cannot
discard the anxieties of the present world by seeking solace in a mythic past
and thereby presenting the place that he travels to as being outside the
present tense of the traveller. The place rather has to be looked at in
relation to its present and the writer’s present. The cultural encounters that
take place between himself and the locals reveal the problems of regarding
Travel Writing as a tool for consolidating stable unitary ideas. These
encounters in fact forces him to question the stable nature of notions such as
identity, nation, class, gender along with the stable binary divisions of self/
other, home/ abroad, etc. are questioned. Through Sorcerer’s Apprentice what
Shah ultimately suggests is that Travel Writing is not foredoomed to the
limited visions of colonial gaze but that it can aspire to look beyond the it.
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