Heterotopic Meanderings: A Study of Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake and Amitav Ghosh’s “Dancing in Cambodia”

Abstract

Travel writing, in today’s time is a marginalized genre if not a neglected one. The paper attempts to look at travelling from various perspectives. In case of postcolonial and postmodern travel writers it can be seen that travel writing is no more an act of mere ‘rhetoric or aesthetics.’ The travel writing genre can be seen as one that includes geography, history, economics, culture and a privileging as masculine. Seth’s From Heaven Lake and Ghosh’s “Dancing in Cambodia” besides being travel accounts acquire socio-economic and historical-political dynamics in a spatial sense that is Foucauldian. The paper attempts to look at the twin aspects of these texts where a traveller becomes a historian. Seth and Ghosh are able to write in a “third space,” as theorised by Homi K. Bhabha and developed by Edward Soja, juxtaposing the images of the past and present; contrasting the attempts of destruction (political forces) and preservation (social forces) and conveying the conflict of cultures in the place of visit. Both can be seen as attempts to historically construct what has been obliterated by the totalitarian manoeuvres. These travel writings create a world mixing their individual journeys with the contemporary political scenario which make their works “heterotopias,” of hybrid experience rather than conveying a single image of their utopia or feared dystopia.