Paper short abstract:

The travelogues from the Red Corridor of India have redefined Travel Writing as a genre. They open up discourses on issues of democracy, development and displacement along with throwing light upon prevailing gender equations, power relations and the social hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

Jameson, Harvey and Harootunian dissociated the notion of 'modernity' from the 'west' and linked it to capitalist world system whereby 'world literature' is "the product of a singular logic transforming all areas of the globe: one that yields important insight into the dynamics of modernity taking place on the semi-peripheries of the world-literary system." However capitalist world system is a complex phenomenon in which different strategies of capitalist exploitation and accumulation unfold separately as well as simultaneously giving rise to different forms of 'modernity'. Both USA and India, the centre of world capitalism and one of the semi-peripheries of the capitalist world system respectively, follow such strategies. In USA the objective is not to deprive people of their means of production but in India this is precisely the primary objective of the state-capital combination.

The efforts of the central and state governments of India including relentless use of force and propaganda to grab the resource rich 'red corridor' areas for the last two decades and the large scale Maoist-tribal resistance to these are to be seen in the above context.

The ongoing 'war' between state and Maoists for the control of 'red corridor' has produced a distinct travelogues by activists and journalists which have to be contextualized at this backdrop.