When words walk further

Lately, I have been following the vacation updates of a friend on social media. He happens to be what I like to call a hashtag traveller. That means he doesn’t just travel to exotic locations and post annoying updates, he is an #explorer, an #urbanwanderer, and is #livingthedream.

For the uninitiated, the hashtag traveller is not unlike the garden variety tourist who moseys across the world, except that this one has an overheated Instagram account. The minutiae of their journeys, however mundane the location, are photographed and slapped on with a suitable Instagram filter (added visual effects) and a hashtag (usually it is ‘#nofilter’). Additionally, there are brief and vague captions accompanying each ‘#travelgram’, as it is popularly known. It is the captions that intrigue me.

For instance, the friend in question went to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka. Fedora hat in full tilt, posing next to the stone feet of the 57ft Gommateshwara statue, the picture was captioned: “#Travelling — it leaves you speechless, then it turns you into a #storyteller — Ibn Battuta”.

While taking travel cues from the 14th century explorer might be par for the course, it is also interesting to note that all of what we know about Battuta’s famed journeys comes from a single book, which itself doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Conjuring reality

Unlike his tech-savvy successors on social media, Battuta did not keep meticulous records of his travels. In 1354, upon being commanded to return to Morocco by the sultan Abu Inan Faris, Battuta dictated the accounts of his expeditions to the scholar Ibn Juzazy. The resulting manuscript, magnificently titled ‘A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling’, borrowed liberally from the accounts of other travellers like Ibn Jubayr and Muhammad al-Abdari, some of which were published 150 years earlier.

Yet Battuta’s travels remain an important and enduring source of understanding about the 14th-century Arab world. This is not to pick on Juzazy’s editorial interventions or Battuta’s alleged fabulism, but to highlight that words travel a greater distance than the traveller.

Just to impress that point further, a key reference text for the Italian explorer and colonist Christopher Columbus was the 14th century book The Travels of Sir John Mandeville , which is renowned to be full of far-fetched details like a tree which had little lambs at the end of its branches (in all likelihood, a cotton tree) and Mandeville drinking from the Fountain of Youth, no less.

Strange fruit: Explorer John Mandeville’s travel account was filled with imaginative flourishes, such as a tree with lambs at the end of its branches (perhaps a cotton tree)

About 50 years before Columbus landed in America, Johannes Gutenberg changed the way information travelled by inventing the mechanical printing press. With the ease and promptness of distributing printed material, travel accounts and cartography boomed in Europe. There is ample research to show how such accounts that depict non-Occidental cultures as uncivilised and barbaric provided an added impetus to colonisation. For example, early European maps of the Americas invariably included warnings and depictions of cannibalism, despite the lack of evidence.

Closer home, among Gandhi’s preferred texts in his long journey towards Swaraj was ‘Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships’, commonly known as Gulliver’s Travels by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift. Published in 1726, the book presents a biting satire of both Empire and modern science. For a budding leader of a nation straining against the yoke of colonisation, Gulliver, his travels and his observations provided new, alternative readings of a white civilisation that was seemingly beyond reproach.

Historical accounts of explorers are less-benign versions of modern-day travel blogs and travelgrams. Since words have the ability to conjure a reality, travellers were, therefore, in the position to determine what one knew about a place and its people, and shape perspectives.

In this respect, Battuta was right. The impressive authority of telling stories about lesser-known places has been foisted on people who have dared to wander beyond familiar borders — as explorers, and, in later centuries, as colonisers, priests, anthropologists, naturalists, and archaeologists, and in the present day, as hashtag travellers, students taking a gap year, and aid workers.

Deciphering a promise

There is an intimate relationship between the act of travelling and, later, recounting it. So many great tales in literature involve perilous voyages and uncharted territories, as well as intrepid protagonists (usually male) charging into the unknown and triumphantly returning home, weather-beaten and wiser.

In the way the trope of voyages has been employed in novel after novel, travel is a metaphor for personal transformation, and the traveller cast in the role of an independent-minded seeker who eschews the dogmas of received wisdom. Perhaps that is why it is so favoured by soul-searching millennials with a DSLR camera and a 4G internet plan.

But what is the promise of travel? What is it meant to do to a character in a novel? What do we expect of it in our vacation itineraries?

From Homer’s Odyssey to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , characters embarking on a journey remove themselves from the strictures and monotony of daily life to experience life at a heightened pitch. They are faced with mounting odds, both within themselves and around them. Invariably, they are on a quest and, by the end of the voyage, they are irreparably altered by what they have gone through and what they now know.

This supposed ability of travel to mature us is another reason why an allied format of writing commonly brought up alongside travel fiction is the Bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age novel, which charts the journey of a character’s emotional and intellectual maturation.

Journeying from child to adult: Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is a tender coming-of-age story that follows the emotional maturation of the protagonist

For example, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis follows 10-year-old Marji, who witnesses the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the tumultuous events that led her to leaving Tehran as an adult.

In search of transitions

As much as we travel to take a break and to learn, we also travel with the hopes of being changed — to be able to go back to one’s life renewed. The ‘Journey of Self-Discovery’ trope finds form in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road , Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail , and the book that has become synonymous with, and almost a caricature of, self-discovery — Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia .

Finding oneself: Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love, later turned into a film starring Julia Roberts, has become the posterchild of books about people going on journeys of self-discovery

Rahul Bhattacharya summarises this impulse perfectly in his profoundly moving novel about travelling across Guyana, The Sly Company of People Who Care : “Life, as we know, is a living, shrinking affair, and somewhere down the line I became taken with the idea that man and his world should be renewed on a daily basis.”

Perhaps such a restlessness has deeper and older roots — of man’s eternal struggle against finitudes.

To acknowledge our time and reach as finite on earth has always been a hard pill to swallow, even before modern science gave us longer life-expectancy and the internet made the world a smaller place.

It is not for nothing that one of the oldest surviving works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh , has its eponymous central character undertake an arduous journey in order to learn the secret of eternal life. Gilgamesh toils to surmount various tasks in his quest for immortality, only to be foiled at every turn. Thwarted by futility, he is forced to confront the common fate of all humans — to accept one’s limitations.

Therein lies the point of return in all our journeys, the homecoming, the retracing of steps from the unknown to the familiar, the self-discovery, if you will, and the wisdom of knowing just how far our limits are, and going no farther. And then becoming a storyteller, so that your words overcome what you weren’t able to.

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