One of the perks of travelling alone in a foreign country is the happy obscurity it affords. There is neither the tug of a family nor the social pressures of friends and rivals to influence one’s immediate thoughts.
On the flip side, such solitudinal travels reveal, in moments of weariness, the loneliness that modern societies can easily thrust on individuals, despite the grope and throb of megacities. More fundamentally, travelling can reveal to an individual how dependent we are on our immediate relations to discern the structure of social reality.
The world — the traveller realises — perpetually presents itself as a garden of forking paths and to choose wisely, without the benefit of experience and tradition, is perilous. To get away from one’s fold is dangerous, not just for one’s bodily safety but also for one’s mind, trapped as it can get in a wilderness of foreign mirrors. However, in this very danger also lies hidden the possibility of self-discovery.
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Rise of the solitary traveller
For much of human history, travelling alone was rare and, more importantly, tantamount to subversion of the established order. Right from the times of the Sramanas in India, the desert fathers of Palestine and the early-medieval knights of Europe, to be on one’s own was almost the exception. It was an act of abnegation in service of radical truth-seeking or in search of adventure to accrue prestige. By the mid-1700s, as rural societies began to undergo a churn, either through legislative fiat as in England, or through the effects of slavery, genocide and forced migration across swathes of Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America, the solitary straggler became a more common figure. The adventurer, the traveller, the runaway slave, the aborigine wasting away — archetypes that belonged to the peripheries now muscled their way into the core.
Eventually, when modernity cranked up its production of the disaffected and disconnected, there arose an effort to valorise the individual itself.
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Be it in the heroic biographies of Napoleon or Nelson, or in the novels of Dickens or Thackeray, or in Thoreau’s experiments with self — the possibility of breaking social and psychological chains, the conceit of being born anew into the world thanks, in parts, to spanning and conquering geographies entered popular Eurocentric imagination. Man, to this day, waddles afloat between the deep waters of nostalgia below and the sun drenched future above.
In fact, a particular kind of travel — difficult, life-threatening, and emancipatory — inspired the creation of new genres of fiction itself. The ‘naval novels’ or, as the French called it le roman maritime , was born thanks to James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel The Pilot . It borrowed motifs from extant historical fiction and set it into a world at the precipice of the ‘first Wave of Globalisation’. Since then, the literary descendants of Cooper’s novel — from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ibis trilogy’ — have relied on travel as a narrative technique to critique public institutions and private vanities.
Multiple roles
Historically, much like in fiction, the traveller performed many roles for himself and for others: those of an educator, a historian, a storyteller, a sociologist, and even an apologist. A well-travelled person meant living up to travel’s semantic origins: ‘travail’, or to labour.
However, closer to our times, travel has lost its frisson. Much of the world has become safer and many of travel’s historic roles have been usurped by specialisations.
Commodification of experience
In the mid-19th century, there began a transformation: travel transformed into sightseeing and the traveller was substituted by the ‘tourist’. No one nudged us more in this direction than Karl Baedeker, a German publisher, who dreamed up the idea of a travel guide (“Baedeker’s”). The result was the privileging of the seemingly eternal, the visual: monument-seeing became the ritual. The labour of travel — the anxiety and reality of foreignness — began to be carefully replaced by the bland simulacra of the familiar.
Today, so excellently packaged are travel routines that it is possible to visit entire countries or regions without even once talking to a native. In every major city, it is now easy to find tour groups, armed with cameras and maps, suntans and water bottles, bravely venturing to explore the cordon sanitaire approved by the tourism ministries. All this while the tourist and the local walk past each other, like warring relatives at a funeral, shamed by the occasion to maintain peace. Inevitably, such disembodied travel birth other ennuis.
Author Alain de Botton tells us of a 19th century novel by the British author J.K. Huysmans called À Rebours , wherein the protagonist concludes that the dream of London is better than the soot-filled reality. Much of modern travel industry is devised around eroding this precise suspicion that has gained ground. Tourism may not be what it is made out to be: an escape from one’s life. For many Americans, the experience of Europe is less attractive than the Europe of their minds — which perhaps explains why only 138 million Americans (total population: 332 million) have bothered to avail of a passport as of 2016.
Faced with the homogenisation of experiences on one end and recognition of truth in that Sartrean quip (“hell is other people”) on the other, what is the goal of travel today, especially for the young? One possible answer is that travel is a way to learn how to avoid mistaking ‘looking’ for ‘seeing’.