Decolonial Travel

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.

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.

1. Decolonizing Travel(ing Theory), or the Discursive Limits of the '(Post)Colonial' 2. To go is to know (that you never went): A Sanskrit Buddhist map of selected illusions 3. Vedic Travel: The Agnihotra and Beyond 4. Travel(-ing) to Write: Authorship and Agency in an Era of Inter-Polity Mobility 5. The power of itinerancy: Religious leaders in the Nepal-India borderland 6. "Floating straight obedient to the stream": Bibliomigrancy and riverine journeys in colonial Bengal 7. Moving in Circles: 'Chakkars' in Rajasthani Women's Songs 8. Homeless in Gujarat and India: On the curious love of lndulal Yagnik 9. The Homeless Gandhi