When the clown laughs back: Nabaneeta Dev Sen's global travel and the dynamics of humour

Abstract

Though moving across borders is a common phenomenon in the contemporary globalised world, travel writing as a genre has still retained its significance as well as some of its traits from its colonial predecessors. Thus, while many “Western” travelogues in non-Western destinations still narrate the non-west as exotic, dangerous and often ludicrous, the non-Western traveller's visit to a Western land is often accompanied by a sense of pride, privilege and even bitter experiences of discrimination. This essay discusses how the Bengali writer Nabanita Dev Sen's travelogue “Dr. Dev Sen's Bidesh Yatra” projects the post-colonial voice that subverts the paradigmatic tension between the power and lure of the Western land, and the apparent powerlessness of the non-Western traveller. Using the humorous technique of self-caricature, Dev Sen narrates the vagaries of an absent minded, messy, Indian woman travelling alone to Europe and the USA, and creating havoc with the Western immigration laws. In doing so, Dev Sen not only offers a counter-narrative to the still-persistent colonial trends in Euro-American travel writing, but also seeks to rewrite the long tradition of celebrating the West in Bengali travel writing.