Travel through remote terrains: Tibet in focus

Abstract

As Ramana Maharshi a twentieth century mystic reflects, travel is not just physical journey from one place to another but also subliminal from one thought to another. The outer journey implies meaning only when it is accompanied by an inner journey. Travel writing incorporates everyday explorations along with cultural mappings, musings and meditations on the encounters experienced in the course of the travel. Travelling solo on an impulse; out of the natural curiosity that life brings, is the delight of living the journey. This paper does a comparative analysis of Nabaneeta Dev Sen's On A Truck Alone, To McMahon (2018) and Vikram Seth's From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1990). Both the authors journey through remote territories and terrains while maintaining their focus towards the Roof of The World, Tibet. While the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China occupies the centre stage in Seth's travelogue, the soreness of the Indo China War shrouds a permeable veil in Sen's work. The paper further explores the thin line between pleasure and adventure keeping in mind the gender binaries in travel writing. The human imagination is a no-man's land that encounters the prickles of political hostilities and the precarious suspicions of the state machinery. The human dimensions of the territorial borders annihilate the joys of travel as an experiment in freedom. Travel acknowledges the constant fluidity of the cognitive entities, the rejection of the familiar and the embrace of the unfamiliar.