DR Sadaf Fatima’s study of women’s travelogues in the Urdu language is a promising introduction to the genre. Assistant Professor in the Department of Urdu at the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science, and Technology, Karachi, she has researched and written extensively on the topic, examining women’s travelogues written during the period of 1908-2012. Her study is divided into two volumes: the first volume covered travelogues written by women from 1908 to 1999, totalling over a hundred texts, and the latter covers the first 12 years of the 21st century (2000-2012), with a total of 34 accounts. Her second volume is being reviewed here.

Khwateen ke Urdu Safarnamay: 2000-2012 begins with an introductory chapter which provides an overview of the genesis of the travelogue in Urdu, in which Dr Fatima addresses the issue of who wrote the first Urdu travelogue, both amongst men and women writers in 19th-century India. In the same chapter, she lays down a theoretical framework for her critique by outlining various aspects that a good travelogue must have. She then introduces the 34 Urdu travelogues by including several excerpts of varying lengths from them. In the following chapters, Dr Fatima gives an overview of geographical and other aspects of women’s travelogues before concluding with a short examination of the issues in Urdu travel writing for women writers after 2012.

The first chapter is particularly noteworthy for its interesting theoretical content and delivers a promising start. In this chapter, Dr Fatima outlines the importance of travel in the history of humankind and identifies some important functions that the act of travelling provides.

Firstly, it gives birth to the tradition of storytelling, which goes on to form a society’s literary traditions. Secondly, travelling has a cross-culture educative function which allows the traveller to learn about other societies, and pass on this knowledge to their family and friends, and by extension their entire society in one way or the other. For this reason, the travelogue has the potential to become the most lasting and strongest method of sociocultural and anthropological studies — it can also become a method of discovering information about archaeological ruins of past civilisations.

One of the ways in which the oral tradition of telling stories was born is that in the past, those who had travelled far from their hometowns would return and narrate stories about their experiences to their family, friends, extended kin, and others.

Moving on, Dr Fatima postulates that the contemporary travelogue contains a sense of intellectual conflict rather than flattering descriptions or overly-critical comments about other cultures, particularly those of the Western world. She writes that when the Indian subcontinent became independent tourists from the region began to direct polite criticism towards Western society and culture. Dr Fatima connects this with a new-found sense of self-confidence among Indians, which allowed the subcontinent’s tourists to maintain a clear sense of their Eastern roots throughout their narratives and lead them to view the Western world from the same perspective.

Most critics consider the travelogue to be another form of journalistic writing in which the writer gives an eyewitness account of events and incidents. On the contrary, Dr Fatima believes it is necessary that travelogues should strike a balance between reportage and literary fiction. She further opines that a travelogue should be so engaging that the readers find themselves travelling alongside the writer. This, according to her, can be achieved by embellishing the normally insipid descriptions of external events with the writer’s own thoughts, emotions, and impressions of the places and sights they see and visit, and the people they meet. This will create a balance between the writer’s inner and outer worlds, and assist in imparting the traveller’s knowledge of different societies and their cultures.

The book would have been an absorbing read if it had not been for Dr Fatima’s sketchy, repetitive analyses of the 34 travelogues. Not only does this make up the second and longest chapter, but the content is repeated throughout, particularly in the second last chapter ‘Asloob-e-Bayyan’. Each analysis is written in a strict format and is so unchanging as to become repetitive. As a result, the text and her voice begin to get jarring. If Dr Fatima wasn’t an academic herself, this anomaly could be readily ignored. But the fact that she teaches Urdu at a university and has written a good first chapter heightens the reader’s sense of disappointment.

Furthermore, the arrangement of the chapters could have been improved by dividing all travelogues into categories based on their most prominent features and any thematic overlapping in the texts. If done carefully, this would have eliminated much of the repetition.

As indicated by Dr Fatima’s introductions to each travelogue, they all contain themes that could have been analysed in greater detail. It is unfortunate that the author merely mentioned the various social, political, literary, and aesthetic elements of the travelogues and did not attempt explore them further.

Khwateen ke Urdu Safarnamay: 2000-2012

(ANALYSIS)

By Dr Sadaf Fatima

Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu, Karachi

ISBN 978-9694031941

259pp.

The reviewer has written for several publications on literature, reading, and culture. She works at OUP as an editor.