Journeying From the Perceived to the Real World

Travel literature is considered a major source of knowledge of customs, traditions and culture in a society. A traveller writes to inform others about his experiences. Chaudhuri went to England to share his experiences with the viewers of BBC. The memoir written by Nirad C. Chaudhuri is essentially subjective and is called A Passage to England. While some of his ideas based on his readings were close to reality, some others had to be recreated in the light of the reality. The first hand experience added to the knowledge gained through reading. For Chaudhuri as for many others “one half of his perception of England was the perception of something not India”. The differences in the two cultures as expressed by Chaudhuri strike the reader just as they must have been felt by Chaudhuri when he saw and experienced them. Comparisons have been made between Chaudhuri's A Passage to England and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Although the two belong to different genres both focus on the interactions between a majority group and an individual or a small group of individuals of an altogether different group.