Studies in Tourism Geography of India: Definition, Approaches and Prospects

Abstract

Tourism geography is a novel area of research and broadly examines the interaction among such themes as ‘spatial organization’, ‘land-man relations’ and ‘areal differentiation’ (Taaffe 1974; Gibson 2008) in the study of the distribution and spatial pattern of tourist places. Tourist activities generate wealth and employment, attract foreign exchange, promote travel and hospitability industry, advance cross-cultural communication and understanding, build infrastructure, and lead to local as well as global development. Pearce (1979) examined the range and scope of tourism geography and opined the centrality of spatial interaction in the geographies of tourism. The geography of tourism examines a variety of areas like ‘the effects of scale’, ‘spatial distribution of tourist phenomenon’, ‘tourism impacts’, ‘planning for tourism’, and ‘spatial modeling for tourist development’ (Williams 1998). The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2016) reports that tourism will continue to grow in most Western developed economies. Recently, Indian geographers have been interested in the spatial dimension of tourism in India (Mir 2016). Given this overview, the objective of this chapter is to address two research questions: (1) how is tourism conceptualized by geographers? (2) what insights do Indian studies provide about tourism geography?.