Travel Without Domination : Reading Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe Against Robert Byron’s Imperial Gaze

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Abstract Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe (1948) recounts his years in Afghanistan between 1927 and 1929, and stands apart from the colonial travel writing of its era in one crucial respect: its author writes from inside colonial subjection rather than from above it. Ali's own experience of British rule in India, paired with a working knowledge of regional history, lets him read Afghanistan's social and political upheaval from the inside rather than diagnosing it from a distance. His treatment of Afghan identity — caught between foreign pressure and internal conflict — resists the impulse, common to colonial-era travel writing, to explain or classify its subject. Watching Afghanistan hold its ground against outside domination becomes, for Ali, a way of imagining his own country’s future, which is what allows this book to be read as postcolonial literature in the fullest sense. Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana (1937), written a few years later, offers the counter-case: a Western travelogue that treats Afghanistan as a fading historical artefact requiring British stewardship. Read against Byron, Ali's account does more than avoid that colonial posture — it actively argues, per Edwards and Graulund's account of postcolonial travel writing (2010, p. 3), against the assumed link between travel and domination, and gestures instead toward solidarity among colonised peoples of the global south. Keywords: Mujtaba Ali, Afghanistan, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Travel Writing, King Amanullah, Nationalism, Heteroglossia.

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Conclusion Set against Byron’s Road to Oxiana, Ali’s Deshe Bideshe reads less like a travelogue and more like an argument about how travel writing itself should work. His curiosity about Afghans, unfiltered by romanticism or contempt, pushes back against the standard posture of the Western explorer and offers instead a textured, self-questioning account of Afghan identity, culture, and nationhood. What the comparison leaves us with is a working alternative to the colonial travelogue: one where the traveller’s authority comes from proximity and shared history rather than distance and classification. That model matters beyond this one book — it’s a reminder that ‘postcolonial travel writing’ need not mean writing about colonialism from its aftermath, but can mean, as here, writing through it, from one colonised vantage point toward another, in search of solidarity rather than mastery. References Afroz, N. (Trans.). (2015). In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan [Deshe Bideshe, by S. M. Ali]. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books. ISBN 978-93-85288-02-9. Ali, M. S. (1995). Deshe Bideshe. In S. M. Ali Rachanabali (Vol. 9 & 10). Kolkata: Mitra O Ghosh. (Original work published 1948). Byron, R. (1937). The Road to Oxiana. London: Macmillan. Chaudhuri, S. (2022). The traveller as internationalist: Syed Mujtaba Ali. In The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (Ch. 1). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0254.01 Clifford, J. (1983). On ethnographic authority. Representations, 2, 118–146. Edwards, J. D., & Graulund, R. (Eds.). (2010). Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ghosh, A. (2020). Syed Mujtaba Ali's Deshe Bideshe: An Indian's perspective on Afghanistan. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 12(3). https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.23 Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Sen, S. (2020). Emergence of secular travel in Bengali cultural universe: Some passing thoughts. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 12(3), 4–14. https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.01 Tagore, R. (1991). Parasye. In Rabindra Rachanabali (Vol. 11). Kolkata: Visvabharati.

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• Bangabasi Morning College

  West Bengal, Kolkata

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