Abstract
The present chapter proposes to examine the dialogicity of travel which, in itself, is necessarily a two-way encounter between the worlds of exteriority and interiority, an encounter which allows for a multiplicity of reactions, emotions, ideas and reflections.
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Notes
- 1.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant priest of the Confessing Church, was arrested in April 1943 and executed in April 1945. During the two years he stayed in the prison he wrote an incomplete play and a fragment of a novel. For further details, see my paper “Fragments of a Life: Conflict and Creativity in the Face of Death,” presented at a Conference on Prison in Poland in 2010.
- 2.
Nanak had led the life of a householder before he proceeded on his travels. He was not very practical in worldly matters. Refer to my paper, “Nanak’s Travels: Journeys of a Seeker,” in Indian Travel Writings. Ed. Somdatta Mandal. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2013, pp. 72–85.
- 3.
Based on Puratan Janamsakhi, Fauja Singh and Kirpal Singh have defined the routes as follows: First Udasi: Sultanpur, Tulamba (Dist. Multan) Panipet, Delhi, Banaras, Nanaknata (Dist. Nainital) Tanda Vanjara (Dist. Rampur), Kamrup (Assam) Asa Desh (Assam) Pakpatan (Montgomery now in Pakistan), Kirian Pathanana (District Gurdaspur), Saidpur (Emmabad, now in Pakistan), Pasrur and Siakot (now in Pakistan). Second Udasi: Dhanasri Valley, sea route and Singladip (Sri Lanka). Third Udasi: Kashmir, Sumer Parbat and other Parbats. Fourth Udasi: Mecca and Medina and neighbouring regions. Fifth Udasi: within Punjab. I owe this tracing to the places identified by Map 3 by them. But Medina and Turkey can be safely added to the places mentioned in their list in the Fourth Udasi. Kirpal Singh has traced these routes mainly by tracing the gurudwaras built after Nanak had visited these places (pp. xxvii–xxix) and some inscriptions. Many of these gurudwaras are located on river banks. I would like to record here, that I myself have visited a groupware in Ladakh, where the imprint of Guru Nanak’s hand is traceable on a rock. He put up his hand to stop the rock from rolling down and controlled the power of its fall with it.
- 4.
Nanak’s travels carry a slight trace of Buddha’s wanderings; but the difference surmounts the resemblance. Born nearly two thousand years later, Nanak was located very differently in the social world. He was not in search of solitude and did not observe austerities; his questioning was directed at practices that divided people. Again, the recognition of a First Cause did not in any way detract him from life in the world. Buddha’s sense of compassion translated itself into understanding for Nanak. His experience at Veyi was a turning point early in his life in which there is a Kantian recognition of intuition. Both Buddha and Nanak rejected godhood.
- 5.
See Vadim Liapunov’s Notes to Toward a Philosophy of the Act In note 12, Liapunov writes, the ought as that ‘which ought to be’ is contrasted to ‘what is’. Referring to Rudolf Eisler’s work he quotes him “the ought is the correlate of a will, an expression for that which is required or demanded from a will (another’s or one’s own)” (p. 82).
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge with a deep sense of gratitude the help I received from various friends in collecting reference material and other interpretative guidance. They are Gurbhagat Singh, Dhanwant Kaur, and Tejinder Kaur all from Patiala. Surjit Sarna and Ruby Bedi from Delhi, Gurupdesh Singh from Amritsar, and Savyasaachi Jain (London). And, most of all, I need to thank Lakshmi Bandlamudi for her valuable suggestions. But for all lapses, interpretations, and views expressed here, I am solely responsible.
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Jain, J. (2018). The Dialogicity of Travel: Nanak’s Udasis . In: Bandlamudi, L., Ramakrishnan, E. (eds) Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6313-8_6
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