01:05 IST
The Downstairs Room, Inderpuri
New Delhi, India
Spent the whole day in the house, on the couch. Read and watched half a film and Facebooked quite a bit despite promising self that I won't. Bad girl.
Had borrowed a couple of books from BCL, broadly based on travel, and have been reading them and truly enjoying it so far. One book is about women travellers to India in the colonial era. It describes the 'female gaze' of the European traveller in India during the British rule. Rather fascinating stuff, despite the heavy duty academic language. According to one of the chapters, the East India Company had two kinds of schools of thoughts - the ones that appreciated the Indian culture, and the ones that didn't. The ones that didn't dominated and changed the entire thought process of the Indians - belittled their art, their texts and their lifestyles, and worked on 'improving' their lives by teaching them the 'superior' ways of the British. The book, I'm guessing is about those women travellers who had a fascination for the country. The thing about reading writings on travel is, it is heavy on interpretation. Two travellers will describe a single place in different ways - their own cultural references, their own prejudices, their own personal approaches will come into play. It is hard to objectify a travel write-up. But travelogues are an extremely important document for recording history. The travellers of the past, with their coloured gaze painted strange pictures of the norms and culture of the people of India, and some of those views have managed to trickle over a passage of generations. This makes me feel rather uncomfortable at times. Views and opinions are such transient things. The British themeselves as a community were perhaps going through a period of turmoil in their own country, and brought that baggage with them to India. And if they planned to rule, they did horrific things and a bloody good job at executing them. Not good.
The second book is an introduction to Human Geography. Human + Geo + Graphy - writing about the earth, and the humans' interaction with the earth. SUCH a vast subject. But superbly interesting all the same. There is this globe, this planet that we live on - the earth. It is land and water and atmosphere and climate and action phenomenon such as volcanoes, typhoons, tsunami etc. We as humans, have done SO MUCH to it - we have broken it up and categoriesed it into countries, continents etc. We have created bounded spaces. We have identified and given things names - earth is called earth because humans say so. Same goes for river, trees, plants and further categorising it. We have discovered food in it and so many resources to create objects and machines and run things. We have created environments for ourselves - built environments or second nature and are on our way to creating simulated environments of third nature. We are crazy. There is so much scope in this subject.
Dadi - still not sure how to put it into a framework - definitely taking a human geography approach to it. Maybe will focus on her travels and the way she engaged with the space that surrounds her. Uffooooo. Excited :)
The Downstairs Room, Inderpuri
New Delhi, India
Spent the whole day in the house, on the couch. Read and watched half a film and Facebooked quite a bit despite promising self that I won't. Bad girl.
Had borrowed a couple of books from BCL, broadly based on travel, and have been reading them and truly enjoying it so far. One book is about women travellers to India in the colonial era. It describes the 'female gaze' of the European traveller in India during the British rule. Rather fascinating stuff, despite the heavy duty academic language. According to one of the chapters, the East India Company had two kinds of schools of thoughts - the ones that appreciated the Indian culture, and the ones that didn't. The ones that didn't dominated and changed the entire thought process of the Indians - belittled their art, their texts and their lifestyles, and worked on 'improving' their lives by teaching them the 'superior' ways of the British. The book, I'm guessing is about those women travellers who had a fascination for the country. The thing about reading writings on travel is, it is heavy on interpretation. Two travellers will describe a single place in different ways - their own cultural references, their own prejudices, their own personal approaches will come into play. It is hard to objectify a travel write-up. But travelogues are an extremely important document for recording history. The travellers of the past, with their coloured gaze painted strange pictures of the norms and culture of the people of India, and some of those views have managed to trickle over a passage of generations. This makes me feel rather uncomfortable at times. Views and opinions are such transient things. The British themeselves as a community were perhaps going through a period of turmoil in their own country, and brought that baggage with them to India. And if they planned to rule, they did horrific things and a bloody good job at executing them. Not good.
The second book is an introduction to Human Geography. Human + Geo + Graphy - writing about the earth, and the humans' interaction with the earth. SUCH a vast subject. But superbly interesting all the same. There is this globe, this planet that we live on - the earth. It is land and water and atmosphere and climate and action phenomenon such as volcanoes, typhoons, tsunami etc. We as humans, have done SO MUCH to it - we have broken it up and categoriesed it into countries, continents etc. We have created bounded spaces. We have identified and given things names - earth is called earth because humans say so. Same goes for river, trees, plants and further categorising it. We have discovered food in it and so many resources to create objects and machines and run things. We have created environments for ourselves - built environments or second nature and are on our way to creating simulated environments of third nature. We are crazy. There is so much scope in this subject.
Dadi - still not sure how to put it into a framework - definitely taking a human geography approach to it. Maybe will focus on her travels and the way she engaged with the space that surrounds her. Uffooooo. Excited :)
