Freedom and Fantasy: Russian Travelers at the Borders of India

• In Event: To Write and to Roam: Ambiguous Liberations and the Travelogue

Abstract

For Russian travelers to India, the most interesting locales were the ones off-limits: the northern frontiers of the Himalayas adjacent to Afghanistan and Tibet. The British were anxious to keep Russians out of this region and ensure their border’s security. In this paper, I consider trips made to the edge of the British Empire by two contemporary Russian zoologists, Andrey Avinoff (1884-1949) who visited Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh in 1912, and Sergei Nikolaivich Fon-Vik (1863-1933) who visited Assam in 1912-13. Both of their travelogues highlight how their trip was circumscribed by British laws about the border, as well as the significance of the act of crossing a boundary. Through their depictions of the landscape and peoples, they transform their border-crossing from British India and into “unclaimed” lands as an act of symbolic self-liberation. By defying British law, they reassert their European and masculine right to roam unconstrained throughout the non-West. I contrast these narratives of masculine privilege with the story of Sonia Lewin, a Belarussian Jewish woman who found a personal liberation by escaping from the Pale of Settlement and traveling to India. There, Sonia began work as a prostitute in Mumbai’s Red Light District, joining numerous other women from the Russian Empire who found financial and personal independence by moving from the restrictions of one empire to another.

Author

• John Webley, Yale U