Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940. Jayati Gupta. Routledge, India, 2020, 290 pages, Hardcover, Rs. 995

Reviewed by Arindam Goswami

Abstract

Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940 by Jayati Gupta focuses on
the travel writings by Bengali women from the undivided Bengal province during the colonial
period. The book is one of its kind as it forwards the unheard voices of these women, most
of whom have never gained prominence in the field of travel writing study. One of the central
reasons for such oblivion is the male predominance over the genre of travel writing, as
travelling was often considered a male prerogative. Patriarchy has always imposed different
restrictions upon the movement of women. The allocated space for women, according to the
patriarchal notion, is the home, and henceforth women have always been associated with
immobility and domesticity. On the contrary, freedom, recklessness, and a fondness for
adventure have always been the best and ideal attributes of a man. Then there is no wonder
that the earlier travel narratives that survived through the ages were predominantly male
narratives where women had little or almost no role. But they were not completely absent
from the texts either. In each period, numerous women travellers travelled as companions to
their husbands or father, but the accounts of their experience of the journey have often been
dismissed as “quotidian and self-congratulatory” (Gupta xviii). It was only after the late
eighteenth century, as observed by Carl Thompson, when tourism flourished and became
more widespread, that the opportunity for women to travel for pleasure and recreational
purposes increased (169). Women started to travel and publish their travel accounts. But
most of these accounts are predominantly Western travel accounts. As Mary Morris
observed, “[E]arly women travel writers were women of the upper class in European society,
invariably white and privileged” (Morris, quoted in Siegel 2).