Travels in Italy. Bengali Writings in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This article analyses selected travelogues and writings of both short- and long-term Bengali visitors to Italy to understand their diverse and sometimes contradictory experiences and to examine whether their gaze was essentially derivative and complicit with the “disciplinary regimes” of imperialism. Many of the Bengali travellers, including renowned personalities like the civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt, Bijoy Chand Mahtab, the maharaja of Burdwan, the noted Bengali writer Trailokyanath Mukharji, as well as homemakers like Krishnabhabini Das and Durgabati Ghose, undertook a trip to the Continent to round off their visit to England. While their writings amply demonstrated the English-educated colonial elite’s “love” for Europe, they also acknowledged the centrality of England in European modernity. By relegating Italy to Europe’s ‘backwaters’, such writings underlined Europe as a differentiated rather than as a monolithic space. Since the 1930s, however, the writings of Indian students and scholars to Italy like Benoy Sarkar, Kalidas Nag and Monindra Mohan Moulik marked a deeper appreciation of contemporary Italian society, arts and culture. The chapter, moreover, explores the particularities of the female gaze manifested in the greater interest evinced by Bengali women travellers in Italian women they encountered and in the comparative situation of women in Italy and Bengal.