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 chapter questions Bauman’s classificatory categories, his dualistic views, and the explanatory apparatus of ‘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’? The imagination of vagabonds as volition-stripped travelers can be assumed to be a product of the Western value system (that uses utility-maximized ‘tourists’ as the prototype of traveler), which anyway cannot be universalized. From a postcolonial vantage point, this chapter therefore argues that Bauman’s taxonomy of travelers has no resonance in South Asia.
