Doing the India trip: myths and paradoxes of a travel culture

© 1999 Josephine MatthiessonDoing the India Trip is a study of the Western travel culture in India since the influx of travellers in the late 1960s. This thesis explores the relationship between the reality of a diverse and changing India and the myths and continuities of the westerners' travel culture. It will be argued that this relationship produces dissonance, paradox and contradiction in the experiences and discourses of travellers. To show the continuities which constitute the travel culture I will compare some nineteenth century travelogues and travel guides with the alternative guidebooks of the last 25-30 years, with a particular emphasis on the changes and continuities in the content of the most successful of these, the Lonely Planet guides. The recent guidebooks will be shown to have developed both in relation to pre-existing guidebooks and in response to the emerging breed of travellers that drifted 'East' from the late 1960s. I will also demonstrate these continuities and changes in the travel culture through interviews conducted with a small group of travellers in Rajasthan in early 1998. A selection of travel writings from the sixties and seventies, and some snippets of travellers' gossip from the virtual world of travel at www.lonelyplanet.com.au have also been included where they elucidate these themes. The discourses of travellers' talk and travel guidebooks attempt to mediate the experience of India for travellers. But these discourses are unable to resolve the ambivalences - the dissonances, contradictions and paradoxes - that result from the juxtaposition of myth and reality. These moments of ambivalence and anxiety for the western traveller are suggestive of a counter-discourse that questions overdetermined myths about India and about travel there