Oriental Travel Accounts

Travel writing is popularly perceived to be a Western monopoly. National Geographic Travelers’ list of top 80 travel books has just three authors of Asian origin – Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Pico Iyer.

 

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/extras/travellibrary/library12.html

 

Asked to name legendary travelers of yore – most of us would rattle off names like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and the like. For popular history has mostly celebrated Western travelers and their accounts. It was this anomaly that poet Tabish Khair, an associate professor of English at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), set out to correct. ‘Other Routes – 1500 Years of Africa and Asian Travel Writings’ was the outcome. Put together with 3 other editors, this alternative to Western travel writing draws on writing from 5^th century to the 19^th. The editors have included spiritual journeys written in poetry format as travel writing. This anthology corrects the skewed view that only Europeans traveled.

Hiuen Tsiang was one of the very visitors to Indiato who wrote about the Kumbha Mela in his diary. He came here looking for Buddhist learning. Likewise Fa-Hein, a few centuries earlier, had Buddha on his mind when he came visiting India. He has been credited with providing precise details on when and how Buddhism was introduced in China.

 

Another great traveler of was Adi Shankaracharya who criss-crossed Indian foot. He did not write too much but his teachings were instrumental in the revival of Hinduism Advaita philosophy.

 

My favourite travelers though has to Zheng He. A famous naval chief, his fleet sailed the high seas from eastern China to the Africa coast of Kenya and Ethiopia. Many of his sailors’ married locals and creating a community of Chinese-Africans! Zheng He and his troops paid respects to local deities and customs wherever they traveled. In Sri Lanka they erected a monument honouring Buddha, Allah and Vishnu, according to one account.

 

According to another account, it is said that the combined fleets of Columbus and Vasco da Gama wouldn’t have stood a chance against a single file of vessels that used to set sail under Zheng He. Such was the scale of his naval might.  

 

The famous Chinese net of Kochi can also traced back to this legendary traveler.