Representation of India in Travel Writings by Latin American Women in the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of India in the works of Latin American women writers in the 20th Century. With the advent of Modernism in Latin America in the late 19th Century as a turn-of-the-century movement, Latin American intellectuals started engaging with India such as Rubén Darío in Azul (1888). However, it was Gabriela Mistral, a Nobel laureate from Chile, who although never travelled to India, may be considered the first Latin American woman writer who engaged with India through the appreciation of Tagore in her literary repertoire. Furthermore, in the 20th Century Cecília Meireles, one of the most famous Modernist poets from Brazil visited India in 1953 upon being invited by Jawaharlal Nehru. She noted in her diary that as paradoxical as it sounds, it is much easier to understand India if one knows Brazil. She drew similarities between the fundamental issues of the two countries then. She wrote the anthology Poemas Escritos Na Índia (1961). Another important performance artist is Josefina Báez who would combine yoga and her lived experience in the three spaces of New York, La Romana in the Dominican Republic and India to produce zany dance dramas like Dominicanish (2001). She uses the classical dance form of Kuchipudi originating in the south of India to restructure her Dominican cultural identity in New York. Another contemporary Mexican writer, Margo Glantz, wrote her work Coronada de Moscas (2012), which is a travelogue based on her three sojourns in India accompanied with photographs by Alina López Cámara. The paper analyses the works by the above-mentioned Latin American intellectuals vis-à-vis representation of India in them and focuses on what it is to travel to India and write on it for Latin American women in the 20th Century. This has been done using the theoretical perspective of bell hooks (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984) and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes, 1992).