Journeying through the Indian railways in around India in 80 trains (2012) by monisha rajesh and chai, chai: Travels in places where you stop but get never off (2009) by bishwanath ghosh
- Title
- Journeying through the Indian railways in around India in 80 trains (2012) by monisha rajesh and chai, chai: Travels in places where you stop but get never off (2009) by bishwanath ghosh
- Creator
- Dubey S.
- Description
- An Indian train is a space that exemplifies a true sense of transient cultural pattern as it travels through different states of India constantly assimilating people of diverse cultures. In this liminal space, a passenger travels from known to unknown in terms of geography, culture, language, cuisine, sartorial configuration and psychological makeup. Indian Railways offers an insightful analysis of cohabitation - the conflict and the coexistence of people amidst cultural differences.An Indian train is an exemplar of an accurate secular structure, blurring the lines of discrepancies based on religion, caste, gender, sex and sexuality. Prejudices that are evident in spaces relatively marked by certain spatial permanence dilute in a train. A provisional spatial arrangement of a train therefore questions the idea of tolerance and intolerance compared to that of permanent arrangement. As the Indian train incorporates people of all ages and territories, the train is a specimen of the concept of Bakhtinian polyphony, wherein the dialogues occurring between passengers represent varied consciousness. Thus, a train travelogue encompasses unmerged voices, each carrying a unique conscious design. The people travelling in an Indian train are separated on one single ground: economy. Therefore, economic factor becomes an overarching pattern of base to assign a certain culture in a superstructure to each class and each offers a unique perspective to the travelogue. This paper will analyze the trope of the train in two Indian travelogues based on culture, Marxist economic structure, Bakhtinian concept of polyphony, secularism and the idea of tolerance. AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com.
- Source
- Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Vol-12, No. 3, pp. 320-328.
- Date
- 2020-01-01
- Publisher
- Aesthetics Media Services
- Subject
- Indian trains; Liminality; Polyphony; Secularism; Travelogue
- Coverage
- Dubey S., CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR, India
- Rights
- All Open Access; Gold Open Access
- Relation
- ISSN: 9752935
- Format
- Online
- Language
- English
- Type
- Article
Collection
Citation
Dubey S., “Journeying through the Indian railways in around India in 80 trains (2012) by monisha rajesh and chai, chai: Travels in places where you stop but get never off (2009) by bishwanath ghosh,” CHRIST (Deemed To Be University) Institutional Repository, accessed February 24, 2025, https://archives.christuniversity.in/items/show/16398.