Three Snap Shots: Scanning of Indian Rural LandscapesIn the travel writings of William Dalrymple

Abstract

This research paper focuses on the representation of the rural issues as capturing the attention of the foreign writers who visit India with or without certain predetermined design and thereafter documenting their visits to the world outside their impressions about India as well as the pattern of the issues arresting their attentions and their latent motives behind capturing such issues in general, and William Dalrymple’s representation of certain issues of the Indian Countryside in his travel book The Age of Kali in particular.
This study focuses on how the Indian landscape; more particularly the Rural Regions, is captured in the travel writings of William Dalrymple, a Scotsman, who has made India his second home. The study would also focus on to what extent “the common knowledge that the life in Post-Colonial India is marked by Internal clashes among people, especially inter-communal hatreds, jealousies, rivalries, struggle for power and survival, selfish motives masquerading as political service” is justified from the literary and historic perspectives. About 60-70 percent of Indian population lives in villages, finds no effective facelift and the plight of the villages remains the same even after six to seven decades of Independence. The issues as they are presented in the chapter 'In Rajasthan' in the travel book of William Dalrymple 'The Age of Kali'; are those extreme ones that they gained the stature of National Debate and all the national and international media came forward and provided a platform to discuss the validity of such occurrences at the time juncture when the claims of modernization and advancement at all fronts of social life are sounded with great pomp and gong.