An essay on the touristic representations of India presented in three postcolonial travelogues

This article analyzes the perceptions of postcolonial writers who visit India as tourists and project their vision about people, culture, and region in India in their respective travelogues. As a postcolonial discourse, studies of tourism in countries like India have great concerns over identity and representation. This discourse over culture, political and economic nature has implications for tourism encounters. The three travelogues chosen for the analysis are Sarah MacDonald's Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure, Anees Jung's Unveiling India: A Woman's Journey, and V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness. The article also argues for the postcolonial theory of Graham Huggan, which maintains that postcolonial discourses are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Thus, for these writers, India becomes a fictional construct and a sum of the tourist attractions it lays out through a chronological sequence of events. The article reflects important cues on the cultural patterns of globalization and, at the same time, openly reflects on the changing attitudes and perceptions of travel writers as tourists. The study also contributes to the existing literature by making a comparative assessment of these touristic projections.