Travel writing is one of the world’s oldest forms of literature

“In the years after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the exploration of the East — its peoples, habits, customs and past — by travelers from the West has become a target for scholarly bombardment. Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ the East as decayed and degenerate. This has always seemed to me to be a narrow and prescriptive way of looking at what is, after all, one of the world’s oldest and most universal forms of literature: it takes us right back to man’s deepest literary roots, to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wanderings of Abraham in the Old Testament, and the journeyings of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. Over time, like poetry, but unlike the novel, the travel book has appeared in almost all the world’s cultures, from the wanderings of Li Po in Japan, through to the medieval topographies of Marco Polo, Hiuen Tsang, Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Only with the multi-volume travelogues of the Victorians do we enter colonial territory, and hence arrive at the birth of the modern comic books of travel, invented two generations later by such writers as Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh — bright young things who passed lightly through a colonial world mapped, subdued and opened up by their Victorian grandparents with their Gatling guns and survey equipment. But the attitudes of today’s travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathizing with another culture necessarily ‘as an act of domination’.”
–William Dalrymple, “Home truths abroad,” The Guardian, September 18, 2009