Published Paper Details:

The relationship between language and travel provides a conduit to investigate the relationship between language and spatial practices, between representation and domination, mapping and politics. Travellers have an integral bond between their discourse of experiences and their ethos of interpretations. The investment in the act of travelling and writing has moved beyond the intention of merely describing a culture. The narratives of journeys woven with the author's imaginations and experiences, gave us travelogues. An ancient genre of literature, travelogues serve as the base for various fictional and non-fictional works. Travelogues inquired the unknown, making us aware of the existence of diversified cultural extremities present in this planet. Travel entails a group away from recognizable places to an unfamiliar one, a familiar place that is diverse from one's home. Modern Indian travel landscape is composed of variety of voices language from the varied ethno cultural spheres and from the spaces in-between cultures. Pankaj Mishra depicts the social and cultural changes in India in backdrop of globalization and modernization, in the shape of a travelogue. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. In the travelogue Pankaj Mishra captures an India which has shrugged off its sleepy, socialist air, and has become instead kitschy, clamorous and ostentatious. It is a book without any dull bits, and the language has a full, rich flavour - and the strength of its argument, often more implied than asserted, from the picture of small-town Indian life it offers. It is a book that can be just as easily read to pass the time as to understand our age. Unlike most travel books, which suffer from more than a touch of the random and the inessential, it forges something cohesive from the writer's widely scattered rovings. From a convent-educated beauty pageant aspirant to small shopkeepers planning their vacation in London, Pankaj Mishra paints a vivid picture of a people rushing headlong to their tryst with modernity. An absolute classic, this is a witty and insightful account of India's aspirational middle class.