Years ago, an acquaintance, a white American man, went to check into a hotel near Mumbai airport the night before his flight back to the US. The reception denied him room because he had overstayed his Indian e-visa by a few days, something he was aware of but did not think would be a big issue. “I thought it would be fine,” he later told his Indian partner, who flew back to New York as planned.
For two weeks, his partner’s parents hosted him and accompanied him daily to the authorities to regularise his status. Apart from minor inconveniences, he faced no significant consequences. He eventually flew back home after an extended holiday. He was right; it was fine.
To think this way, you must be from a country where visa applications do not involve reams of paperwork detailing your finances, job, tax returns, and ties to your homeland. No Indian would overstay a visa without the crushing stress and anxiety that come with holding a passport considered “weak” in the hierarchy of passports.
It is this phenomenon of passportism (a term coined by the scholar Srdjan Mladenov Jovanovic)—with its racist and colonial undertones—that determines who gets to travel with ease and who does not.
What does it say about the geopolitical world we inhabit and attempt to traverse? How does it establish who decides what is worth seeing and doing in a new country and what is not? These are the questions the author Shahnaz Habib answers in her delightfully astute debut book titled Airplane Mode: A Passive Aggressive History of Travel.
The book begins with a confused and lonely Shahnaz Habib, ambling through Istanbul, “the nonchalantly multilayered and superbly hybrid city”, overwhelmed by all there is to see and do, cutting a completely contrary picture to a white American woman, “intrepid and adventurous”, slicing through the city and its famous landmarks like it belongs to her and she to it. “How intrepid you are as a traveller depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel,” Habib writes.
The book is a perfect blend of memoir, history, and research, sprinkled with erudite and humorous reflections as Habib boards buses, planes, and trains, taking us along for the ride. The book itself is a veritable journey—albeit a wildly circuitous one—spanning thousands of miles and years, arriving at the same destination again and again: Habib inverts the white gaze that has traditionally shaped how we consume travel narratives and, indeed, how we travel.
Over the years, the concept of a traveller has gained more popularity than that of a tourist. The word “tourist” evokes images of people who visit new cities and countries with checklists, rushing to see everything. This type is often viewed unfavourably by the seemingly superior “travellers”, who immerse themselves in experiences, meandering through new places, exploring off the beaten path, and returning home with a smugness that sets “one’s own tourism story apart from that of other tourists”. Habib herself wrestles between the two urges but concedes that no matter what, when we set out of home to travel, we are all tourists.
Airplane Mode: A Passive Aggressive History of Travel
Context
Pages: 288
Price: Rs.699
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Airplane Mode: A Passive Aggressive History of Travel by Shahnaz Habib | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
She also dispels the myth that a traveller is more broad-minded than the person who has never left home and is the wiser for having travelled. She illustrates this with delightful anecdotes of her non-motile father, who travelled to Brooklyn years after his daughter moved there, only after a grandchild was born. Once on that trip, when offered the terrifying prospect of a guided tour of monuments in Washington, DC, he whispered in her ear: “If the possibility of not going is not offensive, then that is the one that I would probably choose.” And yet, ask him for obscure facts about obscure corners of the world and he has the answers. “A certain kind of provincial can often be much more cosmopolitan than many world travellers”—who journey through the world not by trains or planes but afloat on the act of reading.
The book’s strength lies in all the detours and diversions Habib makes to arrive at an often-overlooked narrative of modern tourism. “The more we dig into the history of modern tourism, the more the pickaxe hits its underground cable connection with colonialism.”
In 1 CE, she tells us, the Roman Empire controlled the roads and handed out permissions of travel. In the 18th century, it was the British who inaugurated modern tourism. Now, US citizens enjoy jet-setting across the world, thanks to a passport and currency that eases travel.
“Empires enable travel… and then the world rearranges itself to suit the empire’s travellers,” she writes.
Habib attempts to remap the history of exploration to “free it from the European explorer-discover narrative”. She reminds us that long before Christopher Columbus set out in search of Indian pepper, Muziris, a city on the western coast of India, was trading pepper with Rome. Long before French admiral’s Louis Antoine de Bougainville, troop of explorers discovered the trees with bright mauve and magenta flowers lining the streets of Rio de Janeiro, prompting them to name the “new” genus after their boss, the flower had been native to places that are now Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. Long before an Englishman named the Earl of Sandwich got meat and cheese stuffed between slices of bread for his long mountain hikes, Mediterranean mezze platters featured such groupings.
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If Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, and Columbus are household names, it is not because it is a major achievement that a European discovered this or that but because “of the European investment in the idea of the first European to reach these ‘other’ places,” Habib writes.
On numerous occasions, Habib ditches the prosaic to embrace the poetic. While writing about an Indian man who emigrated to Mosul and ran a guest house in 1930s Iraq, she says she wants that story “written on the margins of colonialism”. Eventually, she creates a book that does just that – she tells a story written on the margins of colonialism. “The margin begs from the centre and borrows from next door and steals from itself. The margin is where the self gets to know itself,” she writes.
Does travel change us, even if momentarily? Does it make us shed the skin we cover our days with when we are extricated from the familiar? Habib’s mother, she says, would become a different person—“funny, delightful, relaxed” as opposed to the strict and practical woman she was at home—a stranger almost, on the long train journeys their family took across India when Habib was a child.
Away from the highfalutin ideas of becoming and unbecoming during travels, to travel, after all, is nothing but to sate that primal human urge to spread ourselves towards something that is beyond our reach. “We inherited it from the birds,” Habib writes beautifully, “this need to see for oneself what the world was like.”
Sukhada Tatke is a writer and reporter based in Edinburgh. She writes on books, culture, immigration, and history.
