Passage through India: self-fashioning in Santha Rama Rau’s Indian travel narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the self-fashioning of the cosmopolitan travel writer Santha Rama Rau (1923–2009) as a quintessentially “Indian” memoirist for her metropolitan audience of the global North. The article explores how her self-fashioning involves a complex duality that underlines most of Rau’s travel writings on India with a characteristic sense of aporia. In these travel writings, Rau lays claim to her Indian identity on the basis of her Indian birth and parentage and her extensive travels within the subcontinent. However, Rau’s American education which had taught her to value individuality and economic independence made it difficult for her to associate completely with the patriarchal structure of contemporary Indian middle-class families. Thus, this piece analyses the way Rau negotiates with the crisis by dissociating herself from the Indian middle-class domestic space while framing her identity as a travelling “career woman” who claims the entire subcontinent for home.