India in Bengali Travel Writing on Russia in the Twentieth Century: Travelling The World, Writing about Home

Abstract

This article examines the discourse on India in Bengali travelogues on Russia/the USSR. In the first half of the twentieth century, Russia attracted a particular type of Indian travellers, politically engaged individuals interested in the ongoing transformations in Russia, to learn potential lessons for India. Later, during the Cold War era, many members of India’s intellectual elite travelled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Soviet institutions and some wrote their accounts after these visits. A distinctive feature of these travelogues is the strong focus on providing readers with information regarding Soviet social and economic developments, together with frequent comments on the contrasts between the USSR and India. The article demonstrates how Bengali travel narratives on Russia are constructed around similarities and differences between the two countries, but ultimately concentrate on the challenges for India in fields such as education, poverty, agriculture, gender equality and housing. Seven travelogues were selected for this analysis. The earliest, on Revolutionary Russia, is Soumyendranath Tagore’s Biplabð Rå›iy˙å (Tagore, 1930), while the most recent sample is Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Rå›iy˙å Bhramaµ (Gangopadhyay, 2012 [1985]).