인도·남아시아

Citation:John, Elwin Susan. “Sketches of Health in Travel Narratives on India.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.4 (2013): 85-97. Web. Abstract:Despite the popularity of India as a modern travel destination shaped by writings since Megasthenes to Dalrymple, health concerns and the fear of malaise underscores a formidable travel discourse in which even the indigenous capitalist plays its part to foster the culture of health fetishism, among native and foreign travellers. The paper suggests four constants namely; anticipation, appropriation, assimilation and augmentation with specific illustrations, as tools to read the representations of health discourses in travel writings featuring India. India has been regularly represented in foreign accounts as teeming with crowded streets, unhygienic practices, polluted water and miasmic air. Anticipation of diseases while travelling in the contemporary times has resulted in the creation of a large number of travel support sites. Today, India is flooded with tourists who come to experience the grandeur of India’s “enchanting splendour.” This health rhetoric plays on the glory of the past in terms of wisdom and purity to portray a land which is safe for travelling, while presuming, and therefore highlighting health as a commodity that is inherently adulterated, in keeping with colonial ideology, and must be guarded purified.