In this session, Dr Saptarshi Mallick will present his recently published monograph, entitled Connecting Spaces: The Travelogues and Letters of Lady Abala Bose (Routledge, July 2024). This book examines how nineteenth-century Bengal witnessed women writers like Krishnabhabini Devi, Prasanyamoyee Devi, Swarnakumari Devi and Abala Bose interrogated social stereotypes. It presents the first translation of travel writings and letters by Abala Bose, and examines an Indian woman’s close observation as she toured India in colonial times and Europe, America and Japan at the height of British imperialism. Her travelogues in colonial India and imperial England relate to and interrogate the hegemonic role of Western ideologies and deconstruct stereotypes of women’s travelogues, thus contributing to the female consciousness and tradition of women’s writings. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and gender and women's studies
This book addresses the ‘performance of femininity’—often highly stereotyped in traditional travelogues of female authors—through an investigation of the travel writings by the Indian social activist and early feminist Lady Abala Bose (1865–1951), who became well-known through her initiatives for a better education of women. This study reads Bose’s travelogues as efforts in the nascent field of British-Indian literature to deconstruct hegemonies and debrief patriarchal ideologies that demarcate women’s spaces and bar them from venturing out into the world.
Through a critical discussion on Lady Bose’s travel writings and the letters exchanged with Rabindranath Tagore, along with its translation from Bangla to English, this book showcases how important it is to acculturate ourselves within environments known or unknown to us, thus achieving an alternative vision of heterogeneous unity, ‘an-Other way of understanding the world.’
Dr Saptarshi Mallick is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies (Research Area for American Literary and Cultural History with a Focus on (Trans-) Nationality and Space), University of Graz, Austria. He has been a Charles Wallace India Trust (doctoral) Fellow and an UK-IERI Fellow in the UK. He was an Ernst Mach Fellow (postdoctoral) at the Karl – Franzens – Universität Graz, Austria. Here, he has also been a visiting faculty in the Summer Semester of 2020. He has edited seven anthologies, among them most recently Śūdraka’s Mrcchakatikā: A Reader (Birutjatio, 2022), Connecting Spaces: The Travelogues and Letters of Lady Abala Bose (Routledge, 2024) and Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction: Redefining the Philosopher in Multicultural Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is an Associate Editor of Gitanjali and Beyond, an international, open access e-journal of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), Edinburgh. He is presently the Joseph Sassoon Visiting Fellow to the Bodleian, University of Oxford.
Rohan Chopra (discussant) read for the Master’s in Modern South Asian Studies at St Edmund Hall last year. His academic work cuts across multiple fields, including history, political theory and international relations. His Master’s thesis titled ‘“If they would run in Dihlí as they do here, it would be a perfect paradise”: Inclusion Through Familiarity in Mohan Lal’s Travelogue (1831-1834)”, which received a Distinction, was a study of a travelogue produced in 1831 by Mohan Lal, a Persian Secretary from Delhi. In the thesis, he explores how Mohan Lal accommodated European knowledge into the Persianate fold, exemplifying a ‘new-age cosmopolitanism’ owing to the Delhi Renaissance. Familiarity, he argues, was a different mode of inclusion than modern European similarity or proximity and was underpinned by different epistemological and representational rationales.
