All over the map

To be interesting, an anthology must be more than the sum of its parts. Somewhat like ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, it must reveal new forms and way of looking, and allow a gentle but constructive tussle between the editor&rsquos proclivities and that of the authors.

By this yardstick, Travelling In, Travelling Out is a dismal failure &mdash flowers of varying lustre tossed higgledy-piggledy into a vase. The problem starts with Namita Gokhale&rsquos introduction, where she avers rather trivially that &ldquowe are all travelling, all the time.&rdquo For Gokhale, even when we&rsquore not travelling, the earth is going around the sun, so we&rsquore travel&shyling. If we&rsquore travelling all the time &mdash the word starts to lose its meaning &mdash we&rsquore never travelling.

The pieces in this collection reflect this lack of direction and order. That&rsquos not to say that there aren&rsquot some excellent pieces in this anthology &mdash there are, but apart from the editor&rsquos whimsy, there seems to be no clear reason why they&rsquore there.

Take, for example, the first chapter, Devdutt Pattanaik&rsquos interesting essay on historical and religious (Indian) concepts of travel, in which he talks about the parikrama, or circumambulation, travelling to return to the same place. And pilgrimages, which must be equitably undertaken, &ldquoas if one relative feels the other should not be neglected.&rdquo A pil&shygrimage to Badri, where Vishnu re&shysides, must therefore be followed by one to Kedar, Shiva&rsquos abode.

This piece is jarringly juxta&shyposed with Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferry&rsquos humorous fictional piece on the oddities thrown up by the canned tourist experi&shyence in Rajasthan. There&rsquos little to connect these two pieces, and nothing that emerges from their being placed next to each other.

Then there are pieces that have been brutally extricated from their contexts, like a chapter from Rahul Pandita&rsquos brave book on the Maoist struggle, Hello, Bastar. In the book, the chapter made sense as it was a short introduc&shytion to the movement, but in this anthology it is pointless. Similarly a piece on Tirupati that has been &ldquocompiled with extracts&rdquo from a book reads like a dull and very dense textbook.

What redeems the book are a clutch of extraordinary pieces &mdash like Mishi Saran&rsquos piece chroni&shycling the efforts of an old Parsi gentleman to reclaim his family house in Shanghai. His father, a trader, had settled in Shanghai in the early years of the 20th century. The Cultural Revolu&shytion forced them to flee, leaving everything that they&rsquod built.

In Saran&rsquos telling, Jehan&shygir Tata&rsquos quest is beautifully intertwined with memories of repeated displacements and a glimpse into the human costs of the Cultural Revolution. Urvashi Butalia&rsquos journey to Pakistan with Bir Bahadur, a Sardar whose family had been forced out during Partition, is possibly one of the most heart-breaking pieces writ&shyten on this tragedy.

The unique journey of Gond art from tradition to the market&shyplace, and the artists behind this transformation, are the subject of Nisha Susan&rsquos piece. The report&shyage is engaging, but its link to travel is tenuous at best.

Two fascinating &lsquotravel&rsquo pieces that stand out for being different from the rest &mdash Wendell Rodricks&rsquo linguistic foray along the India&rsquos west coast tracks the metamor&shyphosis of Konkani, a language with five different scripts. In &lsquoMaps for All Times&rsquo, Manosi Lahiri looks at the development of map-making in India, and how it has dovetailed with the economic and political needs of different times.

Even with these pieces, however, there seems to be little logic in how they&rsquove been placed. They&rsquore often interspersed with dubious ones like &lsquowitch&rsquo Ipsita Roy Chakraverti&rsquos sophomoric piece on a haunted fort. They don&rsquot play off and highlight each other. Unfortunately, they&rsquore probably best read somewhere outside this anthology.