To be interesting, an anthology must be more than the sum of its parts. Somewhat like ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, it must reveal new forms and way of looking, and allow a gentle but constructive tussle between the editor’s proclivities and that of the authors.
By this yardstick, Travelling In, Travelling Out is a dismal failure — flowers of varying lustre tossed higgledy-piggledy into a vase. The problem starts with Namita Gokhale’s introduction, where she avers rather trivially that “we are all travelling, all the time.” For Gokhale, even when we’re not travelling, the earth is going around the sun, so we’re travelling. If we’re travelling all the time — the word starts to lose its meaning — we’re never travelling.
The pieces in this collection reflect this lack of direction and order. That’s not to say that there aren’t some excellent pieces in this anthology — there are, but apart from the editor’s whimsy, there seems to be no clear reason why they’re there.
Take, for example, the first chapter, Devdutt Pattanaik’s interesting essay on historical and religious (Indian) concepts of travel, in which he talks about the parikrama, or circumambulation, travelling to return to the same place. And pilgrimages, which must be equitably undertaken, “as if one relative feels the other should not be neglected.” A pilgrimage to Badri, where Vishnu resides, must therefore be followed by one to Kedar, Shiva’s abode.
This piece is jarringly juxtaposed with Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferry’s humorous fictional piece on the oddities thrown up by the canned tourist experience in Rajasthan. There’s little to connect these two pieces, and nothing that emerges from their being placed next to each other.
Then there are pieces that have been brutally extricated from their contexts, like a chapter from Rahul Pandita’s brave book on the Maoist struggle, Hello, Bastar. In the book, the chapter made sense as it was a short introduction to the movement, but in this anthology it is pointless. Similarly a piece on Tirupati that has been “compiled with extracts” from a book reads like a dull and very dense textbook.
What redeems the book are a clutch of extraordinary pieces — like Mishi Saran’s piece chronicling the efforts of an old Parsi gentleman to reclaim his family house in Shanghai. His father, a trader, had settled in Shanghai in the early years of the 20th century. The Cultural Revolution forced them to flee, leaving everything that they’d built.
In Saran’s telling, Jehangir Tata’s quest is beautifully intertwined with memories of repeated displacements and a glimpse into the human costs of the Cultural Revolution. Urvashi Butalia’s journey to Pakistan with Bir Bahadur, a Sardar whose family had been forced out during Partition, is possibly one of the most heart-breaking pieces written on this tragedy.
The unique journey of Gond art from tradition to the marketplace, and the artists behind this transformation, are the subject of Nisha Susan’s piece. The reportage is engaging, but its link to travel is tenuous at best.
Two fascinating ‘travel’ pieces that stand out for being different from the rest — Wendell Rodricks’ linguistic foray along the India’s west coast tracks the metamorphosis of Konkani, a language with five different scripts. In ‘Maps for All Times’, Manosi Lahiri looks at the development of map-making in India, and how it has dovetailed with the economic and political needs of different times.
Even with these pieces, however, there seems to be little logic in how they’ve been placed. They’re often interspersed with dubious ones like ‘witch’ Ipsita Roy Chakraverti’s sophomoric piece on a haunted fort. They don’t play off and highlight each other. Unfortunately, they’re probably best read somewhere outside this anthology.