“TRADING PLACES IN THE PROMISED LANDS”:INDIAN PILGRIMAGE PARADIGMS IN POSTCOLONIAL TRAVEL NARRATIVES

Abstract

The paradigms of pilgrimage—and ideas of sacred space—in Hindu Indian culture are numerous and diverse. Described by Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj in Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography, the notion of pilgrimage derives from the Indian expression “t?rtha-y?tr?”: “undertaking journey to river fords.” This idea has been interpreted both literally and metaphorically, where a “t?rtha” is associated with a specific place, and where the distance traveled by the pilgrim also helps him or her to accumulate merit. Some elements of landscape are linked with the self-revelation of Hindu gods, such as rivers, running waters, hot springs, hills, and forests. However, scholars emphasize that the English expression “pilgrimage” is not synonymous with the Indian “t?rtha-y?tr?,” and often a simple view of physical journey to a particular site is imposed by Western travelers. In the Indian concept, the state of mind of the pilgrim is more important than a physical journey, there is no ranking of particular places as necessarily “more sacred” than others, and in some interpretations the whole of India is considered to be sacred. This latter notion, again, is read by Western travelers as requiring a “grand tour” of India—visiting most, if not all the places mentioned in the Indian epics. This paper examines how writers from other former British colonies translate the idea of “t?rtha-y?tr?” through a study of two recent travel narratives: Sylvia Fraser’s The Rope in the Water: A Pilgrimage to India and Sarah MacDonald’s Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. While the Canadian Fraser appropriates the idea of pilgrimage in her search for “something larger than myself,” the Australian MacDonald resists and parodies that idea. However, her book also reconfirms the notion of India as sacred space: in her chapter “Trading Places in the Promised Lands,” she compares these notions to those in Judaism and Christianity, stating finally that “[i]n India I’ve traveled a soul’s journey…a land that shares its sacred space, seems a spiritual home worth having.” Both texts, then, challenge the ideas of selection and spiritual homeland. To some extent, however, such narratives also adopt the colonialist discourse of exploration narratives, described for instance in Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions and Ryan’s The Cartographic Eye. My paper will therefore raise important questions about the implications of pilgrimage as a site of intersection between these diverse tropes of “t?rtha y?tr?” and exploration.