The "Vagabond" as a Nemesis of the Tourist: Toward a Postcolonial Critique of Zygmunt Bauman

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman invokes the trope of vagrancy, wherein the "vagabonds" are squarely juxtaposed with the "tourists" who are, in sum, the global elite. For him, there are no vagabonds, they are only forced to be. This article questions Bauman's classificatory categories, his dualistic views, and the explanatory apparatus of the "voluntary-versus-involuntary travel." If "vagabond" de facto means involuntary traveler, where in Bauman's schema are we going to place those itinerants—particularly, in the context of South Asia—who self-assert, and quite eloquently so, to be "vagabonds"? Using India as a case study, this article demonstrates how the trope of the vagabond has been perpetually leveraged—by certain political dissenters—to articulate a nonroutinized, noninstrumental, rhizomatic-style traveling, and by extension, political dissidence in the face of statist techniques of demographic control. Thinking in these terms, the imagination of vagabonds as volition-stripped travelers can be assumed to be a product of the Western value system (that uses the utility-maximized "tourists" as the prototype of traveler), which anyway cannot be universalized. This article, from a postcolonial vantage point, argues that Bauman's differentiation of the category "vagabond" has no resonance in India.