Travel Literature

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 Travel Literature

Jan Morris, the Welsh historian and travel-writer turned ninety on 2^nd October this year. The greatest travel-writer of our times, her accounts are “a highly subjective, romantic, impressionistic picture, less of a city than of an experience.” Her stance is determined by two paradigms – E.M.Forster’s advice (who wrote about the Egyptian city of Alexandria), “one ought to wander around aimlessly.” The other she takes from the psalms; “grin like a dog and run about the city.”  

Her impressions about Venice, London, New York, Sydney, Bombay and many more places are less about facts and more about how the place feels like. For instance, in case of Sydney, she writes about its wistfulness. She felt that it comes across as macho and fun, but has a wistful quality about it.  It’s a feeling that grew within her when she spent some time there, thinking, breathing, nosing around the nooks and crannies of her surroundings. She says, “Yes. It’s a kind of yearning, a wistful quality. Often what I feel about the Australians themselves is that they resist it a bit because they don’t feel they ought to feel these sort of feelings. But they probably do, really, I think. It has something to do with the landscape.”

Venice remained the most beloved of her destinations, and she visited it again and again. “Streets full of water” (a saying by Robert Benchley), where you take a boat to supper, she writes about the vaporetto, “Except for the very latest vessels, the whole fleet has been successively modified, redesigned, rebuilt, re-engineered, so that each craft, like a great cathedral, is the product of generations of loving hands and skills – a steam-cock from one period, a funnel from another, a wheel-house from a third, all embellished and enhanced by some very fine early twentieth-century life-belts.” Reading this, a traveler would be inspired to visit Venice and experience these marvels, great cathedrals of craftsmanship.

In India, she encountered only kindness. A tolerance and a helpfulness. “An acceptance of differences”, she writes. A chaotic landscape where everything coexists - colour, noise, smells, temperaments; and yet there is a system in the anarchy. She went looking for remnants of the ‘British Raj,’ and she found that in abundance, the changes that the British brought on the landscape imbuing it with a hybrid culture.

The above account indicates that the best travel writers are not really writing about travel at all. They write a subjective account of the places they visit. They are recording the effects of places or events on their own psyche, rather than an objective relay-commentary of the place of visit. Another great writer who comes to mind at this juncture is Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Ryszard was proclaimed the “Journalist of the century” by the Polish Government in 1999. They say, he took journalism into literature, based on his literary reportage. His writing, with its rhythms and imagery, was that of a fine novelist. He, in turn, regarded his achievements as inspired by the travel records of the first ‘globist’ and travel-writer, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC and wrote about the Greco-Persian wars.

Ryszard graduated at the time when Stalin’s terror reign had far reaching effects in the Soviet-occupied Poland. He was immediately inflicted with the desire to ‘cross the border’. His first assignment landed him in India, his maiden encounter with otherness. He regarded it as a great lesson in humility. He realised that a culture does not reveal its mysteries, unless you are well-versed in its “language”- the harbinger of its culture and essence. He writes, “I was greatly intrigued by the ritual of small boys - like Rabi (Tagore), who would wake up in the morning and accompany his father to the fields to watch the sunrise, singing the Upanishads.” He doubted whether he would ever comprehend a country in which children start the day singing verses of philosophy.

On sighting Rome from a plane, the first illuminated city in his life, he was dumbstruck. He describes the experience thus, “Below me the entire length and breadth of the blackness through which we were flying was now filled with light. It was an intense light, blinding, quivering and flickering. One had the impression of a liquid substance, like molten lava, glimmering, with a sparkling surface that pulsated with brightness, rising and falling, expanding and contracting. The entire luminous apparition was something alive, full of movement, vibration and energy.”

It is more real than fiction, but more genuine than mere fact. Travel pieces are about places and experiences which reach us through the consciousness of another human being - the alliance of knowledge and sensation, nature and intellect, sight and interpretation, instinct and logic.