ABSTRACT
By the nineteenth century, the anxiety around the heuristics of travel began to reflect on the new genres of literary expressions (including the travelogue). This chapter examines how postcolonial anxiety centering on the ethos of vagabondage finds symbolic expression in Premankur Atorthy, Rahul Sankrityayan, and Kalkut’s oeuvre, at a time when India’s face off with colonial governmentality had yielded defiantly nomadic practices of counter-mobility. The three writers reappropriate the ‘premodern’ iteration of itinerancy as a radical discourse – while self-identifying as ‘vagabonds’, in a self-complimentary fashion, though – gesturing toward an obtrusive Indianization of the trope.
