Traveller’s Nostalgia to Rewrite History of the Lost Land: Reading M. G. Vassanji’s A Place Within: Rediscovering India

Abstract

Indian history writing owes a lot to a number of keen travellers and envoys since ancient times that came here to seek knowledge, learning and customs and fell in love with diverse Indian traditions and cultures (unlike the European travellers who came in robes of businessmen, but later colonized the nation). A list of such important explorers of ancient and medieval India consists of the travel records of Megasthenes (302-298 BC)1, Fa-Hien (405-411 AD)2, Hiuen-Tsang (630-645 AD)3, I-tsing (671-695 AD)4, Al-Masudi (957 AD)5, Alberuni (1024-1030 AD)6 , Macro Polo (1292-1294 AD)7, Ibn Batuta (1333-1347 AD)8, Shihabuddin al-Umari (1348 AD)9, Nicolo Conti (1420-1421 AD)10, Abdur Razzaq (1443-1444 AD)11, and Athanasius Nikitin (1470-1474 AD)12. Later a category of European travellers came to India, mostly for business purposes, whose documentation helped them to raise the empire. This category may include Ralph Fitch (1583-91), the first traveller from England, gave written accounts about India and created interest among the English to start trade with India; William Hawkins (1608-1611 AD) and Sir Thomas Roe (British) (1615-1619 AD) ambassadors of British King James I, who were sent to the court of Jahangir the Mughal Emperor (1609); Fransciso Palsaert (1620-1627 AD); a Foreign Envoy from Dutch, who lived in Agra and gave a comprehensive account of flourishing trade at Ahmadabad, Surat, Broach Bombay, Multan, Lahore etc.; Peter Mundy (1630-34 AD) an Italian tourist, who gave a vivid account of the living conditions of the people in the reign of Shahjahan and so on. The growing knowledge of India’s past glory under the colonial rule inspired another category of spiritual seekers to travel India. The list of such travel writers includes spiritual seekers like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831 – 8 May 1891), a Russian-German occultist, philosopher, author, and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, who wrote memories about living in India which were published in the book From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan and Paul Brunton (21 October 1898 – 27 July 1981), a British theosophist and spiritualist, best known as one of the early popularizers of Neo-Hindu spiritualism in western esotericism, notably via his bestselling A Search in Secret India (1934). There is another category of travellers to India who, routed through the generations of migration and hyphenated identities, undertook sojourn in the post colonial India to find their ancestral roots. Unlike other travel writers, whose outside positioning keep them free of the anxiety to search the ‘home’, the inside/outside relational position of such diasporic travellers is fraught with the indisputable problem of ‘home’. Avtar Brah significantly points out that how ‘home’ generates an indisputable problem in the discourse of the Indian diaspora. …the ‘referent’ of ‘home’… [is] qualitatively different … ‘home’ in the form of a simultaneously floating and rooted signifier. It is an invocation of narratives of ‘the nation’. In racialised or nationalist discourses this signifier can become the basis of claims…that a group settled ‘in’ a place is not necessarily ‘of’ it. (3) This ‘floating and rooted signifier’ has always prompted Indian diasporic writers to invoke, discover and explore the ‘narrative of ‘the nation’’ through their exploration and recreation of history. The travel writings from Indian diasporic writers, which give broader dimensions to understanding of their complex relationship with India are no exception to it. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) and A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008) written by V. S. Naipaul and M.G. Vassanji respectively are examples of nostalgic self encounters with the ‘nation’ while reconnecting with India after a multi-generational gap intensified by multiple migrations. These reconnections with the nation reconnect them with the history and memory of the nation as well as with their respective communities. The present paper engages with the award-winning travel memoir of M. G. Vassanji A Place Within: Rediscovering India (this book bagged highest literary honour of Canada- The Governor-General’s Award in 2009), whose conflicting positions of “familiar and yet so alien; so frustrating and yet so enlightening and humbling” (2008 xiii) function both as subjects and as tools of a meta-textual enquiry into and past and the present of the nation. With a deep penetrating eyes of a historian and with an awareness of the epic proportion of the quest, this Indo-African- Canadian writer is not just a wayward tourist, but is bent on deciphering everything which comes in his ways; be it myths, stories, legends, history, family narratives, unforgettable characters, geographical conditions, riots, politics, religious discourses and finally question of identity. For him history is addiction.