Fictional Voices and Urban Realities – A Postcolonial Perspective on Bishwanath Ghosh’s Indian Travel Writing

Abstract

This paper examines the juxtaposition between orality and fictionality in the travelogues of Indian Travel writer Bishwanath Ghosh, specifically Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began and Longing, Belonging: An Outsider at Home in Calcutta. By examining the texts through a postcolonial lens, the study argues that Ghosh's narrative style subverts the traditional objectivity of colonial travel writing by blending anecdotal storytelling, personal recollection, and fictional elements. In addition to documenting Indian cities, his works reimagine them as living environments, emotional locations that are influenced by voice, identity, and history. With its casual tone, asides, character sketches, and subjective observations, Ghosh's style reflects oral storytelling, which produces a hybrid form that celebrates narrative flexibility while rejecting strict factuality.

The study emphasises how Ghosh's depictions of places like Chennai and Calcutta reveal a profound interest in cultural memory and everyday life. His stories reanimate the city via a uniquely Indian perspective by turning strangers into storytellers and prominent monuments into personal interactions. The claim made by Carl Thompson that "travel writing occupies a liminal space between fact and fiction" lends support to the notion that Ghosh intentionally employs fictionality and orality as narrative devices in his works. From a postcolonial standpoint, these techniques become actions of regaining narrative agency and challenging Eurocentric travel writing conventions.

Ghosh's travel writing establishes itself as a form of self-representation rooted in Indian sensibilities by emphasizing voice, passion, and cultural uniqueness. The fictionality included in Ghosh's oral narrative technique is a way to reach the more complex and nuanced realities of postcolonial urban life rather than a diversion from reality.