Inveterate Walkers, Literary Minds

Inveterate Walkers, Literary Minds: Bengal’s Pilgrims and Their Himalayan Journeys brings under its critical focus the writings of Bengal’s travellers (mostly pilgrims) who went, on foot, into Himalayan trails from the late nineteenth to the early and mid-twentieth century. Unlike many European travellers and climbers in the age of empire, who saw the mountain as an obstacle overcoming which was a matter of individual and national pride, these modest walkers, unkempt and raddled in their meagre ways of travel, produced a discourse of surrender in their intimate and reflecting engagement with the mountains. The book examines the writings of Jadunath Sarbadhikari, the first among Bengal’s pilgrims whose Himalayan travels were published as a book and the more popular writers including Jaladhar Sen, Umaprasad Mukherjee and Abadhut. It also traces emergent selfhoods and complex subjectivities of women travellers in particular, such as Ratnamala Devi, Rani Chanda and Nabanita Deb Sen whose accounts reveal both guarded, hesitant voices and self-assured, confident enunciation of the self.