The Role Of Travelling In Society

The etymological origin of Travel as a word has come from the Middle English word, travailen meaning to toil or to make a toilsome journey.

Travel as a process can be defined by Helen Gilbert, “as a broadly defined practice featuring human movement through culturally conceived space, normally undertaken with at least some expectation of an eventual return to the place of origin”. Restiveness is evident in human nature and although the desire to escape to the foreign, the unknown lands allows a person to experience mental and physical discomfort but also provides the pleasure of adventure, learning and knowing. People have always traveled since the times of ancient caravans to modern flights. There can be various reasons for travelling such as: satisfying ones sense of wonder and curiosity, providing the illusion of flight from tired and bored existence by allowing the traveler to seek adventures and a rediscovery of oneself, political quest, military operation, trade and business opportunities, exile, flight from persecution, migration, pilgrimage, missionary activities, and educational prospects and many such reasons. As Frances Mayes very rightly opines about travel that, “Travel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages". Travelling played a major role in the formation of civilization all around the world. People have always traveled since the times of ancient caravans to modern flights in one form or another.

The mythology and folklore of almost every society recount the travels and associated hardships, losses, triumphs and failures endured by the hero or group to find their way back home after a period of warfare or imprisonment or exploration etcetera.

These instances of journeys are considered as having deep significance for that society. We all have one or other story of travel to tell. According to Susan Orlean, “Journeys are the essential text of the human experience — the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing — the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses — that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen”.

Travelling answers the questions one has about their identity by investigating their sense of self and communicating it to others, thus embarking on a journey of self-discovery, meant to reflect on and reshape their identities and in the process of this knowledge seeking and enlightenment, it confers on them the high position in a society. Travel broadens the confines of mind, brings people together by addressing the differences in manners and customs around the world and consenting to celebrate them and understanding the similarities and rejoicing in them.

It develops the spirit of fraternity. World would be a better place because of travel. As Maya Angelou would say “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends”.

Travelling allows a traveler to oust the cultural, social, racial, ethnic, and religious and gender based boundaries that exist among human race. Mark Twain is of the opinion that travel is very essential for understanding other people and places, according to him “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Travelling breaks the monotonuity of life by allowing people to unwind, offering enthusiasm and a refreshed attitude towards life. It can have therapeutic effect on our physical as well as mental health.

Travelling requires one to leave the comfort zones of homes and familiarities and step out into the unfamiliar environment thus encountering otherness and difference. But as there is no such place on earth which can turn out to be complete alien to us, we do share similarities with them or have read or heard about making a ground for familiarity. As in the words of Carl Thompson “all travel requires us to negotiate a complex and sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity." According to O’Brien – in the Introduction to Gertrude Bell’s, The Desert and the Sand, the purpose of travel is as follows: The real purpose of travel is a personal affirmation outside the narrow confines of one’s normal life. Travel literature ultimately is about the traveler. Artists and writers discovered exotic themes that evoked in them new realizations while discovering themselves. The resulting works reflected not just objective reality, but, as one scholar observes, a ‘subjective rhythm – the perceptions and feelings of a body moving through a space that is both real and visionary."