“Travel has been sold to us as the ultimate perspective-expanding, horizon-broadening, self-empowering experience,” says Shahnaz Habib. In her first book, Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel, she seeks to unpack this particular sentiment, examining the socio-cultural, economic and historical factors that influence different aspects of travel. While each chapter focuses on one aspect or the other, Habib is fond of interesting digressions that eventually coalesce unexpectedly into a central theme. Whether in the backstreets of Konya or the jungles of Wayanad, she zeroes in on topics ranging from the bougainvillea that spreads around the globe to the dominant mindset behind our wanderlust, making for fascinating reading.
Shadow of Enlightenment
In the Enlightenment worldview, man was the interpreter of nature, and science and travel were deeply intertwined. This man was decidedly white, European, who used his gaze to proclaim his dominance and, by default, claim objectivity. In colonial times and before, it was a deliberate strategy to distinguish between East and West to benefit imperial projects. Habib coined the term “pseudo-discoveries” to refer to all the things and places that Europeans claimed to have “discovered.” She writes:[D]”Discovery was tantamount to the transformation of local knowledge into European discourse. To assert by seeing was to assert by knowing.” Over the centuries, travel may have changed from a leisure activity of the wealthy and restless to a “cultural consumption activity of the middle classes,” but these foundations remain rooted in the travel enterprise.
From trade and commerce to imperial plunder, from the Atlantic slave trade to indentured servitude, travel (and travel writing) has been born of and intertwined within colonialism and its excesses. Roads, highways, ships, trains – “the further one digs into the history of modern tourism, the more one hits the pickaxe with its underground cable connections to colonialism”. Along with the perils of globalization, old forms of discrimination based on class, caste, race, region and religion have been transformed within the global tourist industrial complex. Yet Habib believes that the act of travel can be reconfigured if we open ourselves to the world and embrace our subjectivity in its vastness. “Wonder becomes possible when the witness is ready to acknowledge the limits of his knowledge”.
Perhaps the most common travel accessory is the travel guide, the ubiquitous Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide. Long before these modern iterations, it was first popularized in the 19th century by Karl Baedeker. According to Habib, Baedeker “created a kind of Eurotourism norm, while simultaneously embedding tourism in the act of seeing particular sights.” She details this process elsewhere as a phenomenon that continues to this day: “While institutional mechanisms such as travel agencies and travel guidebooks sacralize tourist destinations, tourists respond by ritualizing the act of visiting these sights.” There is a growing movement to distinguish a category of rarefied traveler against kitsch tourist, but such a distinction is meaningless given the costs of travel in a world hurtling toward climate catastrophe.
For a Muslim woman of colour who once held an Indian passport, travel is fraught with red tape and red tape that someone from her background must overcome to prove they are worthy of setting foot in the developed world. Passports and visas are the first line of immigration and have a long history of stripping civil rights and restricting free movement. Reflecting on the antiquity of travel documents, Habib asserts that “the power of a passport to facilitate travel is correlated with the power of a state to deny it and prevent travel. …Today, a first-world passport opens doors that a third-world passport can only dream of from afar.” This is made clear as she painstakingly plans a trip to Paris with her white American husband.
Different ways to travel
Habib also shows us that there are different ways of traveling other than getting on a plane and heading to faraway lands. In one chapter, she gives the example of her father, who hates traveling and avoids it as much as possible, but who is essentially a cosmopolitan thanks to his reading habit: “Reading is not just fat-free and gluten-free travel. For a country man, reading the world is an act of self-preservation.” Pushing the boundaries of travel, she looks at whether religious and mythological stories can be considered travel chronicles. “A mixture of fact and fiction,” as Habib puts it, “through these stories the narrator logically maps himself against the Other, against the domestic and the foreign.”
Apart from these spiritual journeys, there are others where the journey itself is more important than the destination. She talks about her bus trips with her daughter in Brooklyn when she was a new mother. Mostly, these were aimless, aimless journeys. “The city bus travels through the communities in which it lives,” she writes. “The world it travels through is not standardized or franchised, and there is room for the unexpected.” Walking the city in her own way, deepening her intimacy with the street, asserting her right as a woman in public space, and practicing lounging as an “embodied act” was her way of being a flâneuse. She later confesses that her favorite form of “public transportation” was the merry-go-round, which is always found in parks and fairgrounds.
The book ends on a note of quiet amazement: “When we travel, we are not moving from place to place; we are moving from one moment to another. We trick ourselves into paying attention to what is hardest to attend to. … It is the time that reveals itself.” It is precisely sections like this (and there are many in Airplane Mode) that really make us question the choices of subtitles (“An irreverent history of American travel” and “A passive-aggressive history of Indian travel”), which do a great disservice to the content and belie its intention. Shahnaz Habib's book is neither of these things; rather, it is an insightful and probing account of travel in all contexts.
Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel, Shahnaz Habib, Westland.
