Defining ‘real India’: representations of authenticity in independent travel

Abstract

As an alternative to the stereotypical mass tourism, independent travellers – travellers who travel for extended periods on low budgets while ostensibly avoiding formalized tourist activities and locales – are invested in constructing ‘authentic’ travel experiences. Practices such as ‘off-the-beaten-track’ travel and cultural engagement provide the means by which independent travellers are able to make claims to such authenticity. Authenticity is constructed by travellers through idealizations of intimacy and non-commodification. These idealizations are tangled in narrative representations of ‘real’ India and ‘real’ Indians, their ‘real’-ness typified by an absence of other travellers, tourists and, more generally, Western contamination. In these ways, ‘authentic’ travel is dependent upon actively constructed binaries of Western travelling subjects and exotic Indian objects. Yet travellers' fantasies of the Other are fragile and subject to collapse at moments in which so-called Others articulate their subjectivity in a way that is inconsistent with travellers' expectations. Through a focus on travellers' narratives of their experience, both the requirement for an Orientalist dichotomy as well as the ruptures that continually challenge this dichotomy, will emerge.

Keywords:

• identity
• travel
• tourism
• colonialism
• post-colonialism
• authenticity
• globalization
• Orientalism
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

Notes

1. Although scholarship in the areas of post-colonialism and globalization has rejected the notion of a ‘Western subject’, the idea (l) of such a subject persists. Indeed, it was evident in the comments of many of the travelers with whom I spoke. ‘The Western Subject’ was constructed through references to a range of qualities, including universalism, rationalism, individualism, and – significantly for the present argument – difference from Indians.

2. Quotations from travellers are reproduced verbatim.