Border-Crossing as a Political Strategy: Indian Globetrotting and ‘Touristic Anti-Imperialism’ in the Late Colonial Era (c. 1900-1940)

Abstract

The acts of international traveling and travelogue-writing by South Asians during the colonial era have long been associated exclusively with social elites such as Indian aristocrats and students. While this holds true for most of the nineteenth century, new forms of transnational mobility emerged among South Asians from the lower middle classes by the first decades of twentieth century. Peripatetic globetrotters from the subcontinent such as Swami Satyadev Parivrajak (1879–1961), who explored Europe and North America on foot in the 1910s and 1920s and ‘globe cyclists’ like the Bengali Ramnath Biswas (1894-1955), who circumnavigated the globe on his bicycle in the 1930s and 1940s were just two examples of a new generation of ‘subaltern shoestring-travellers’. The paper argues that, following a strategy that can be dubbed ‘touristic anti-imperialism’, some of them consciously used their long-distance mobility in general and border- crossing in particular to debunk the racist underpinnings of the imperial world order and its mobility regime, making bold anti-colonial political claims in the process.