ABSTRACT
Travel writing can be a representation of a journey in life with fictional techniques to make it interesting to readers, so the question of truth and feigning arises in this literary expression. Travel writing as autobiography, personal memoir, as a journey inward, is a key part of the genre, an important aspect of Vassanji's text. In travel there is also a matter of self and other, of word or image and the presentation of the world, of the self being other to itself, of identity or sameness and difference or otherness. Vassanji is writing about India in English, which – in fiction, travel writing and other genres – is quite a long-standing tradition, but its audience is not one in the native languages of the subcontinent. Travel is about outward movement but also concerns the quest, an inner journey that is also found in epic and romance.
