Decolonizing Travel(ing Theory): Vernacular Travels in (Post)Colonial India

Abstract: Postcolonial scholars, in general, institute a clear distinction between the "pre-modern-religious" and the "modern-secular" practices of travel. The problem is not so much with using this framework as with the pervasive tendency to unreflectively project it onto certain alternative travel performances that do not fit into the taxonomy. In this essay, I argue that this framework is inadequate in making sense of the alternative imaginaries and conditions that rendered possible the emergence of a new decolonial episteme of traveling in the Indian context that occasioned the articulation of vernacular modernity. Here, I insist that, within the remit of postcolonial scholarship, vernacular travel cults, when approached from a longue durée perspective, become subservient to the telos of postcoloniality. Conversely, I situate the decolonial travel(er)s beyond the prevailing postcolonialist regime. I also furnish a preliminary but provocative framework for decolonial thinking as a gesture toward alternative imageries of vernacular travel.