‘In Search of Mammon’s Treasure Trove’: Hemendrakumar Roy’s Use of Travel in Children’s Adventure Literature

Abstract

Travel plays a critical role in twentieth-century Bengali adventure literature for adolescent males. Armchair journeys through the Empire and beyond let that audience discover the world: a panoply of high- to low-ranking cultures, utterly strange geographical spaces and, often, their ‘barbarous’, ‘uncivilized’ inhabitants. Exemplified by Hemendrakumar Roy’s works, the genre encourages boys to draw correlations between race, ethnicity and territory in a way that elevates Hindu elites within a civilizational hierarchy that borrows, but will not follow wholesale, the Western schema.

The literary trope of travel imaginatively transports the colonized protagonists and audience across their country’s borders. Yet the destinations, distanced from their experience by perilous voyages, are clearly chosen to spark reflection on their own domestic spaces. The adventures, in turn, fuel their individual and, ideally, national self-transformation. For Roy’s travel narratives promote such changes by featuring Bengali heroes defeating horrific hazards with courage, strength, intelligence, self-sacrifice and perseverance—‘masculine’ qualities the author hopes a new generation will imbibe and use to serve the nation. Doing so, he also hopes, will disprove in reality what he demolished in writing: colonizers’ stereotype of Bengalis as effeminate cowards, and their dismissal of Indian culture as beneath their own.