“Trading Places in the Promised Lands”: Indian Pilgrimage Paradigms in Postcolonial Travel Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE VATICAN DECLARED 2000 T? BE THE 'YEAR OF THE PILGRIM', calling upon Roman Catholics to engage in religiously motivated journey. But such apparently easy allusions to 'pilgrimage' suggest multiple meanings, specifically located in particular faith traditions, cultures, and spaces. In afterword to Mapping Sacred - subtitled Keeping Our Feet on Ground and Our Heads Up - Gareth Griffiths states that ideas of sacred space are tied directly to recovery of importance of physical land, which mixes categories of material and spiritual.2 He concludes:Across numerous differences among postcolonial societies and various people [...] who share these lands and landscapes, literary and other representations of practices of ritual, construction of sacred spaces, and linkages between these practices and specific material offer powerful topoi for [. . .] fruitful research.3It intriguing how expression feet on ground and heads up overlaps with aims of postcolonial reading and writing strategies, and ideas of pilgrimage.This essay examines pilgrimage paradigms in two contemporary travel narratives from settler-invader cultures: Canadian writer Sylvia Fraser' s Rope in Water (2001) and Australian writer Sarah MacDonald's Holy Cow (2002). Initially, I was fascinated and dismayed by Western preoccupation with India as focus of pilgrimage accounts, suggesting continuing construction of India as 'Oriental'. I drawn image of 'trading places' from Sarah MacDonald's book, but I also deliberately allude to Orientalism as both attitude and policy - conflating commercial and cultural aims and products - of English governors in India; British East India Company translated and transported aspects of India to England with their accumulated wealth.4 Three decades ago, Edward Said argued that label 'Orient' is for European observer, and a place of pilgrimage,5 and Steve Clark describes this as over-determined term, which conflates empirical reference to biblical domain; residual context of medieval journeying; and an internalization of this as spiritual quest.6 Travel narratives from settler-invader cultures seem to hit resounding and disappointing single note: recounting internal speculation and external journey, death and rebirth, loss and recovery; and simultaneously appropriating India materially for 'home culture'. But conjunction of what Griffiths terms ritual practices and specific material locations also offers an opportunity for reexamination of these labels and their articulations.Western scholarship and pedagogy repeatedly focuses on geographical space of subcontinent as 'Sacred India'.7 Indian religions are still characterized as irrational, mystical - emphasizing knowledge gained by means of an extraordinary experience or revelation of divine.8 In religious scholarship, the West liberal, egalitarian, secular and modern, whereas Indian culture authoritarian, hierarchical, religious and traditional; India mystically inclined, quietistic, otherworldly and lacking social orientation.9 Even labels used to identify Indian religious expressions are based on Western constructions; Richard King concludes:what required [...] an attempt to think across or beyond traditional Orientalist representations - to 'transgress boundaries' imposed by normative Western models of 'religion. ' 10The account of pilgrimage, its underlying assumptions, potentially based on comparable 'thinking across' - visible grappling with translation and cross-cultural dialogue.The meaning of 'pilgrimage', however, differs according to culture, place, and language, despite fact that Sanskrit term tirtha-yatra invariably translated into English as 'pilgrimage'. Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj acknowledges that travels of pilgrims to sacred sites have given meaning to India as cultural entity, and he also states that The concept of pilgrimage exists in all major religions, although [. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".