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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsIndian travel writing is broader than destination guides or accounts of a journey: its range includes literary travel, food writing, small-town observation, memoir and blog-derived narratives. The pandemic-era reporting captured a moment of disruption, not a reliable forecast of today’s publishing market. Read together, the examples and later literary scholarship suggest that place, identity and belonging remain important ways to understand where the writing has come from—and where writers might take it next.
What counts as Indian travel writing?
Travel writing can use a journey to do more than describe a route. In the examples gathered by Scroll.in’s feature, the form moves among literary travel, food and local culture, small-town reporting, memoir, urban-nomad narratives and online travel writing. These works make travel a way to observe how people live and how places are represented, rather than simply a record of where an author went.
The feature names Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India and Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish as food-focused examples; Srinath Perur’s If It’s Monday, It Must Be Madurai and Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana as works engaging with particular places; and Shivya Nath’s The Shooting Star in connection with travel-blog narratives. These are examples of different approaches, not a ranked or comprehensive list of Indian travel books.
Where the tradition is coming from
Scroll.in frames the longer history by arguing that premodern Indian literary records contain relatively few travelogues compared with other traditions of travel accounts, and that English-language writing about travel in India gained pace after independence. That is the feature’s historical framing; it should not be generalized to every Indian language, literary tradition or kind of travel account.
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The more striking development in the feature is the widening of subject and form. Teesta Guha Sarkar, identified there as a senior commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan India, describes a field that includes newer work on food, fish and small towns alongside literary travel. The cited books show how a particular route or subject can open onto questions of culture and everyday life.
What later literary scholarship adds
A contemporary-literature discussion names Pankaj Mishra, Pradeep Damodaran and Bishwanath Ghosh among writers whose work takes readers to small towns and uses unconventional modes of travel. It reads some of these narratives through postcolonial questions of identity and belonging. A 2025 article on return memoirs in Indian writing in English similarly treats accounts of return as interventions in debates about Indian unity.
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These scholarly lenses help explain why a journey can matter beyond its destination. A narrative about going away, arriving somewhere unfamiliar or returning home may examine who feels at home, how a place is understood, and how ideas of identity shift across distance. The scholarship offers interpretive examples, not a census of the entire genre.
What the pandemic-era account can—and cannot—tell us
Scroll.in’s feature appeared during the early COVID-19 crisis. It described spontaneous travel as distant amid the pandemic and economic slowdown, noted reduced retail footfall as a challenge for publishing, and reported that emerging travel writers could struggle to find readers without an established online following. Those observations document the conditions discussed at that time; they do not establish current sales, readership, commissioning priorities or publishing practice.
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The distinction matters: disruption to travel and book retail does not, by itself, show whether the genre later grew, contracted or changed commercially. No directly comparable current figure for Indian travel-book sales, readership or publishing volume is established here. Tourism arrivals and counts of tourism research cannot fill that gap.
Where the writing might go next
The evidence points to promising directions for writers and readers, but not to proven market predictions. One is to look beyond familiar metropolitan routes and tourist centers, using small-town observation or less conventional travel to reveal how a place works. Another is to let food and local culture lead into broader accounts of community and everyday life. Memoir and return narratives can explore belonging, identity, borders and the meaning of home.
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These approaches connect naturally with documentary-minded storytelling: the journey supplies movement, while attention to people and place supplies context. They are possibilities suggested by the examples and scholarship, not claims about what publishers will prioritize or what will dominate the genre.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How tourism research can provide context
A 2025 bibliometric study published by Emerald analyzed 3,436 English-language journal articles indexed in Scopus for its study of Indian tourism research. The analyzed corpus covered 1973–2023. Its clusters include risk and pleasure, culture and religion, sustainability, destination image, medical tourism and service quality, tourist settings, and development.
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Those subjects can help frame the wider world in which travel takes place, but the study measures tourism scholarship—not travel books, literary themes, sales or readers. It is useful context, not evidence that any topic is more common in Indian travel writing.
Books to explore by approach
The titles below are among the examples named in Scroll.in’s 2020 feature. Grouping them by subject and form is more useful than ranking them without comparative reviews. Check current editions and availability before seeking them out.
| Book | Reading angle |
|---|---|
| Eating India by Chitrita Banerji | Food and culinary culture |
| Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian | Food, fish and local culture |
| Butter Chicken in Ludhiana by Pankaj Mishra | Small-town observation |
| If It’s Monday, It Must Be Madurai by Srinath Perur | Journey narrative |
| The Shooting Star by Shivya Nath | Memoir and travel-blog lineage |
Read across these approaches and the larger picture comes into focus: Indian travel writing is not a single kind of book. It can use a meal, a small town, an unconventional route or a return home to ask what it means to encounter a place—and to belong to one.
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