Passage through India: self-fashioning in Santha Rama Rau’s Indian travel narratives

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the self-fashioning of the cosmopolitan travel writer Santha Rama Rau (1923–2009) as a quintessentially “Indian” memoirist for her metropolitan audience of the global North. The article explores how her self-fashioning involves a complex duality that underlines most of Rau’s travel writings on India with a characteristic sense of aporia. In these travel writings, Rau lays claim to her Indian identity on the basis of her Indian birth and parentage and her extensive travels within the subcontinent. However, Rau’s American education which had taught her to value individuality and economic independence made it difficult for her to associate completely with the patriarchal structure of contemporary Indian middle-class families. Thus, this piece analyses the way Rau negotiates with the crisis by dissociating herself from the Indian middle-class domestic space while framing her identity as a travelling “career woman” who claims the entire subcontinent for home.

KEYWORDS:

• Santha Rama Rau
• Indian woman traveller
• self-fashioning
• home
• cosmopolitan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Rau is merely mentioned as an Indian novelist in Naik (1982, 243) and Nandakumar (1972, 29).

2 Rau’s (1977) autobiography, An Inheritance, is distinctly different from her daughter’s.

3 The Battle of Plassey, as it is popularly referred to, helped the British East India Company gain a prominent foothold in Bengal and consequently the Indian subcontinent by overthrowing the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies.

4 See Korte’s (2000) chapter “Women’s Travel Writing” (106–126) for a discussion of the limitations under which European women travel writers travelled and narrativised their texts.

5 See Table 1.1 in the essay “The Travelling Eye” by Arnold (2019, 33).

6 Majeed (2007) refers to the autobiographies of Gandhi, Nehru, and Iqbal in this category.

7 Rau (1963) mentions that her notion of India was influenced by Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (21).

8 Some examples of such writings are J.B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934) and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

9 There are, however, a few exceptions and they are mostly from the nineteenth century. Arnold (2019) notes these writers in his table 1.1 (33).

10 For arguments against a generic category of colonial women, see Crenshaw (1991), Massey (1994), and Suleri (1992) and (2005).

11 The notion of an essential Indian self is prominent in the early twentieth-century “travelling autobiographies” of Indian nationalists (see Majeed [2007]). Such works can be compared to the travel narratives on India, produced later in the twentieth and twenty-first century by Indian writers like Ved Mehta, Dom Moraes, Amitava Kumar, among others.

12 For details on the notion of autoethnography, see Pratt (2008).