“India, for the plain hell of it”: G. V. Desani’s The Indian Journal (1951–1958)

Abstract

In October of 1951, G. V. Desani returned to India from Britain, where he had been living and working for more than a decade. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, this article considers Desani’s return journey and experience of India through the written record he left in his unpublished travelogue, The Indian Journal (1951–1958). Reading the manuscript of the Journal as an example of “autoethnographic expression”, this study pays close attention to Desani’s engagement with the modalities of representation made familiar through the textual apparatus of earlier narratives of European exploration and travel to India, yet suggests that he enacts complex, and at times fraught negotiations with these discursive and symbolic modes of colonial space-making. Through reference to the sections of the journal recounting the formative months of his travels, where he restages psychically disruptive and spatially disorienting moments of encounter, this article explores the ways in which Desani charts the Indian environment through an alternative topography, one contrasting sharply with that conventionally narrativized in Eurocentric accounts of travel to India.