An Experimental Meta-Travel to “The Headquarter of the Absolute”: The India of Giorgio Manganelli

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the travel book Esperimento con l'India (Experiment with India) by Giorgio Manganelli, highlighting especially the features that make it a “meta-travel”, an experience that reshapes the traveler's previous literary, popular or stereotyped knowledge. In Manganelli's work, a gradual abandonment of the eurocentrism typical of the western progressive intellectuals can be seen, which facilitates a total immersion in the Indian context, its culture, and its spirituality. The trip starts from Bombay and ends in Delhi, passing through Goa, Madras, and Calcutta and it is a gradual displacement of the writer who is shocked by a culture so distant from his own. This estrangement is felt as a deep unease and a psychological illness, culminating in the traveler's total self-loss and absorption in the Indian reality. Manganelli's experience, perhaps the most interesting travel “experiment” of the Italian literature of the 20th century, is, therefore, a journey to a special dimension of India, different from other European travelers' accounts.

Keywords

• Giorgio Manganelli
• Travel Literature
• India
• Meta-Travel
• Contemporary Italian Literature