Looking «East»: women’s travel writings in early 20th-century Bengal

This article analyses accounts of travels to Asia written by Bengali women in the early 20th century, a period when there was an immense intellectual curiosity about Asia in colonial India. Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 was widely interpreted as a victory over Western hegemony in Asia. The notion of a pan-Asian identity based on a shared history and cultural heritage was debated and popularized in the Bengal public sphere. Together with this, there was also a parallel representation of Asia shaped through European Orientalist ideas which many Bengali intellectuals, as colonized subjects of the British empire, had internalized. Thus, in contrast to India’s encounter with the West, travels to the Asian countries of the «East» had more complex cultural connotations in the articulations and representations of the self and the other. In this context, the writings of women travellers, marginalized both as colonized subjects and within the Bengali social structure, provide an interesting perspective. This article investigates how women’s travel writings provide a window to understanding colonial modernity in 19th-century India and explores the themes of alterity and otherness through an analysis of the experiences of three Bengali women, Saratrenu Debi, Sarala Debi Chaudhurani and Sarojnalini Debi, in the Persian Gulf, Burma and Japan respectively.