Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Campbell, Rebecca
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Tourism has emerged as an integral part of globalization and elicits complex responses from affected societies, especially in towns and regions that are undergoing significant social and economic change. As the worldâs largest movement of people, tourism influences and is influenced by societies in every part of the world (Appadurai 1997; Patil 2011; Urry 2002). In the context of a rising Indian middle class, young Indians are travelling in increasing numbers both internationally and domestically. Indian tourists are one of the greatest contributors to south Indiaâs tourism revenue (de Groot and van der Horst 2014: Saldanha 2005). This research will explore the varying ways Indian youth, ages eighteen to thirty-two, participate in tourism mobilities and what their motivations are for visiting a place like Gokarna in the state of Karnataka. How do tourists in Gokarna situate themselves physically (in where they stay, and what they do) and conceptually, in relation to locals and other tourists? How does the spatial environment of Gokarna, which appeals to both religious and recreational desires, give rise to certain social relations and heightened differences? Through the sacred backdrop of Gokarna town and the popularity of its neighboring beaches, this research provides an ethnographic study on the interrelationship between place, affect and the growing importance of tourism for Indian youth.
Om Away from Home: Indian tourists, affect and the politics of mobility in Gokarna by Rebecca Campbell B.A., Trent University, 2015 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) October 2020 © Rebecca Campbell, 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Om Away from Home: Indian tourists, affect and the politics of mobility in Gokarna. submitted by Rebecca Campbell in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies Examining Committee: Dr. David Geary, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisor Dr. Susan Frohlick, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Bonar Buffam, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Kyong Yoon, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner iii Abstract Tourism has emerged as an integral part of globalization and elicits complex responses from affected societies, especially in towns and regions that are undergoing significant social and economic change. As the worldâs largest movement of people, tourism influences and is influenced by societies in every part of the world (Appadurai 1997; Patil 2011; Urry 2002). In the context of a rising Indian middle class, young Indians are travelling in increasing numbers both internationally and domestically. Indian tourists are one of the greatest contributors to south Indiaâs tourism revenue (de Groot and van der Horst 2014: Saldanha 2005). This research will explore the varying ways Indian youth, ages eighteen to thirty-two, participate in tourism mobilities and what their motivations are for visiting a place like Gokarna in the state of Karnataka. How do tourists in Gokarna situate themselves physically (in where they stay, and what they do) and conceptually, in relation to locals and other tourists? How does the spatial environment of Gokarna, which appeals to both religious and recreational desires, give rise to certain social relations and heightened differences? Through the sacred backdrop of Gokarna town and the popularity of its neighboring beaches, this research provides an ethnographic study on the interrelationship between place, affect and the growing importance of tourism for Indian youth. iv Lay Summary India has one of the largest populations of young adults in the world. However, academic research on tourism in India often ignores the significance of Indians as tourists who are travelling domestically and recreationally. This research inquires into the motivations for young Indian travellers (ages eighteen to thirty-two) visiting the town of Gokarna. This town is known primarily for the famous Mahabaleshwar temple, but increasingly the nearby beautiful beaches are attracting many young domestic tourists as an alternative to Goa and a popular place for relaxation and social experimentation. This ethnographic research looks at how tourists in Gokarna are positioning themselves in relation to these different forms of mobility. v Table of Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... v List of Figures .........................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. viii Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Purpose of study ........................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Research questions ....................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Background literature and theory ................................................................................. 4 1.4 Tourism in India: Going Beyond Goa.......................................................................... 5 1.5 Backpackers, Affect and Embodiment ......................................................................... 9 1.9 Methodological approach ........................................................................................... 14 1.10 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2: From Hippies to Techies: Place Imaginaries across Goa and Gokarna ........ 31 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 31 2.2 Goa ............................................................................................................................. 31 2.3 Young Indians in Goa, now ....................................................................................... 35 2.4 Gokarna: the Goa alternative?.................................................................................... 39 2.5 Drug-use as impetus for visiting Gokarna? ................................................................ 45 2.6 âOtheringâ Indian travellers in Gokarna .................................................................... 48 2.7 Group travel ............................................................................................................... 53 2.8 Family dynamics ........................................................................................................ 59 vi 2.9 âGoaâs dead, man.â .................................................................................................... 63 2.10 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 65 Chapter 3: âThe Vibeâ .......................................................................................................... 67 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 67 3.2 What is affect? ........................................................................................................... 68 3.3 Contextualizing affect ................................................................................................ 70 3.4 Affect through landscape ........................................................................................... 71 3.5 The bodyâs potential .................................................................................................. 74 3.6 The spiritual âvibesâ of Gokarna ............................................................................... 76 3.8 Jobs, the process of becoming, safety and movement ............................................... 79 3.10 Touristsâ perceived threats to âthe vibeâ ................................................................. 82 3.11 Threats to the vibe: an autoethnographic account.................................................... 86 3.12 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 95 Chapter 4: The breaking down of dualisms ........................................................................ 98 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 98 4.2 The doctorâs orders .................................................................................................... 99 4.3 Beyond Brahmanical parameters ............................................................................. 101 Chapter 5: Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 113 Afterword: writing during a Pandemic ............................................................................. 118 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 122 Appendices ............................................................................................................................ 126 Appendix A: Interview Questions ................................................................. 127 Appendix B: Table of Interviews ................................................................... 128 Appendix C: Consent Form ........................................................................... 129 vii Appendix D: Letter of Introduction ............................................................... 131 Appendix E: Record of Oral Consent ............................................................ 132 viii List of Figures Figure 1: One of the walls in the dorm room ........................................................................... 23 Figure 2: House in Goa ............................................................................................................ 33 Figure 3: A single, large Banyan tree in North Goa ................................................................ 33 Figure 4: Me and a tiny, fully grown Gokarna cow ................................................................. 40 Figure 5: "Car Street" (the main temple road) during sunset ................................................... 41 Figure 6: The chariot being pulled through Car Street on an auspicious evening ................... 42 Figure 7: Rangoli design .......................................................................................................... 43 Figure 8: Tourists enjoying a beer and the view on Kudle Beach ........................................... 48 Figure 9: A tourist couple on Kudle beach walking to "negotiate" with police ....................... 51 Figure 10: A tourist's shirt on Kudle beach .............................................................................. 65 Figure 11: Garbage burning on Kudle beach ........................................................................... 88 Figure 12: Halakki Vokkaliga woman in a sarong-style sari and beaded necklaces, selling flowers outside of the Mahabaleshwar temple in Gokarna .................................................... 102 Figure 13: Views from the hostel property ............................................................................ 107 ix Acknowledgements I extend one million thank yous to Dr. David Geary, for reading what was essentially stream of consciousness writing, and helping me to make sense of it. Thank you for videocalling me at bizarre hours and providing me not only with academic support, but someone I can talk to in strange, lockdown times. I am grateful to know you, to hear your stories and to have you to bounce ideas off of. Thank you for being you. To Dr. Susan Frohlick- I am thankful for your pushing me towards what was initially (and perhaps remains) somewhat of an uncomfortable territory in its newness- affect, or âthe vibeâ. Dr. Bonar Buffam- I am so appreciative of your love for theory, as it helped me to remember the joy in academia. Thank you in advance to all other members of my committee who will be reviewing this: I am honoured to know experts and receive your feedback. I offer endless gratitude to my family, who never discouraged me from travelling on my own and always allowed me to be exactly who I was/am. To the land, skies, seas, fungi, flora and creatures of this Earth, for holding me and perpetually reminding me of what matters. And finally, to everyone else I have ever spoken to: you explaining yourself to me makes me want to bow at your feet. Thank you. x Dedication To the late Prajwal, You told me it was your dream to create a space for people to connect in Gokarna. Mission accomplished, my friend. Rest easy. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction This research, and the pursuit of an M.A degree, began with tourists. It began by being a tourist, watching tourists, talking to tourists, reading about tourists, and living in touristic places. When I first contacted Dr. David Geary in 2017 about applying to UBC, I thought that I would be looking into international travellers coming to an island in Thailand in search of âspiritualâ awakenings, while paradoxically ignoring Thai residentsâ culture and preferences. The growing field of spiritual tourism (Williams 2014; Badone 2016; Cheer, Belhassen and Kujawa 2017; Bowers and Cheer 2017) fascinated me because I was both attracted to and repelled by varying aspects of spiritual tourism. I wanted to know more. I had been living in Thailand for two years and found myself constantly thinking about tourism and its broader cultural and social implications. The year prior to studying at UBC, I also travelled throughout India. It was my second time visiting, and I spent most of my time volunteering in whatever capacity I could, in order to travel with minimal costs to as many places as possible. While in India, I developed many close relationships that I maintain to this day. I felt lucky to be in constant contact with young adults sharing their ideas with me about travelling and life. It inspired me. Reflecting on some of my initial ideas for this research, I came to see how tired this academic trajectory was: while I appreciate the efforts of scholars to critique the neo-colonial structures embedded with tourism mobilities, many of these conversations still continue to reify the idea that it is primarily white bodies who move for leisure around the world. It remains imperative to continue to critique these structures, but it is equally as important that research includes tourists who are not from colonial-settler nations. I realized that a more appropriate way to frame the research would be to examine an underrepresented demographic in academic literature on tourism: young Indian travelers themselves. In doing so it also important that I acknowledge and problematize my own privilege within this research endeavor. As an able- 2 bodied, cis-gendered white woman with the means to travel and undertake ethnographic research in India, I am still to a great extent, continuing this colonial narrative (through my own voice as the narrator) in the privileged sphere of academia. For these reasons, I felt it was important to include my own reflexive and autoethnographic engagement with this topic in order to position myself (and my privilege) alongside my interlocutors. 1.1 Purpose of study This research examines the growing culture of travel among young adult Indian recreational tourists at an important Hindu pilgrimage site and small seaside town in South India, called Gokarna. How does the spatial environment of Gokarna, which appeals to both religious and recreational desires, give rise to certain social relations and heightened differences that shape the townâs image as a tourist destination? Through the sacred backdrop of Gokarna town and the growing popularity of its neighboring beaches, this research will inquire more broadly into the motivations for travel as well as how tourists understand themselves through the process of undertaking travel to Gokarna, and how they feel once they arrive. Currently there is very limited academic literature on Gokarna1, and there has also been a dearth of publications regarding young Indian tourists travelling within India. While there has been quite extensive research done in many parts of the world on residentsâ perceptions of tourism and the negative physical and social impacts of tourism, there remains little on the rhetoric and dialogue about tourism from Indian travelers themselves (Mura; Sharif 2015). Much academic attention has been placed on international travelers in India, on the one hand, and, on the other, on diasporic Indians (DâAndrea 2007; Maoz 2007; Saldanha 2007; Lamb 2009; Cohen 2010; Hottola 2014). Because younger people in India, specifically 1 Maligiâs 2019 article âA Profile of New Age Tourists and the Technological Stimuli: A Case Study on the Coastal Town of Gokarna, Karnataka, Indiaâ was the only article specifically on Gokarna I could locate, and it focused exclusively on international travellers. 3 younger people employed by the Information Technology (I.T) and financial sectors, are gaining greater access to mobility, they are traveling both extensively and intensively throughout India without their families. This is a critically under-researched topic in tourism studies. Given that India is a country that participates in and contributes to globalization so intensively, these emerging social circumstances are critical in understanding broader cultural, economic, social and political forces at play. Placing attention on Indian tourists works to redirect the Eurocentric and western-dominant narrative of tourism to include emerging mobilities that may be specific to the domestic travel within India. 1.2 Research questions My research seeks to answer the following questions: 1. How do tourists in Gokarna situate themselves physically (in where they stay, and what they do) and conceptually in relation to other tourists? 2. How are tourists understanding the significance of their time spent in Gokarna, and what are their main motivations for being there? 3. How can Indian touristsâ motivations for being in Gokarna be considered within broader anthropological frameworks that have frequently placed Western tourists at the centre of understanding? As Sharpley notes, âstudying tourism and tourist interactions contributes to a knowledge and understanding of intercultural relationships within an increasingly interconnected and globalized worldâ (Sharpley 2011: 22). In spaces where processes of globalization are so starkly visible and under-researched, I argue that it is paramount for ethnographic research to be undertaken. 4 1.3 Background literature and theory Working through classic debates in tourism often ends up with theories oscillating between hedonistic and escapist tendencies of (Western) tourists and attempts to locate tourism among everyday patterns of activity. Generally, most of these works focus on tourists as departing from the global north and entering the global south to satiate colonially informed yearnings. Often these studies focus on tourism through sight-seeing (MacCannell 1998; Turner and Turner 1998; Urry 1990; Bruner 2005) and organized tours (Edensor 2000). Within this research, I saw the distinctions around tourism and everyday life and leisure consistently being blurred. These overlapping occurrences were witnessed through my own experiences living in a touristic place and a transitory space (a hostel), as well as through the experiences of domestic tourists coming to visit. Contemporary critical tourism studies includes ideas that expand (and occasionally refute) these foundational texts and complicate established frameworks for tourism. These frameworks are now working to include non- western tourists into academic conversations (Teo and Leong 2006; de Groot and van der Horst 2014; Lattimore Khoo and Yang 2018) and to consider more dynamic and affective spheres as being legitimate motivations for travel (McNaughton 2006; Maoz 2007; Cohen 2011; Huberman 2012; Hall 2013; Frohlick 2020). As young adult travellers (eighteen to thirty years old) are considered to be part of the âNew Middle Classâ (Fernandes and Heller 2006) in India, there is a need for knowledge about how this demographic embodies touristic practices and moves throughout the country and beyond. Sharpley notes that tourism can in many ways be used âas the entry point to understanding globalizationâ (2011: 22). It is through this entry point that we can begin to ask questions about desires, mobilities, privilege, affect, and delve into the dynamic histories of particular tourist destinations. I argue that there is a pressing need to understand a generation of Indians who are growing up in a political environment that is zealously 5 nationalist and also influenced by global flows of both commodities and knowledge (Hansen 1999; Fernandes and Heller 2006). My disciplinary orientation is cultural anthropology, and many of the texts that I have engaged with for this research are ethnographies written by anthropologists. My work, therefore, builds on several foundational and contemporary studies on tourism by social scientists, as well as key ethnographies related to Goa and tourism in India more broadly. In terms of my theoretical orientation, as I discuss below, I combine an interest in critical tourism studies drawing on postcolonial theory and more recent debates around embodiment and affect. 1.4 Tourism in India: Going Beyond Goa While many classic tourism studies texts have played a formative role in shaping this research, I see schisms within these theories in relation to contemporary forms of mobility. For example, it is difficult to find work on tourism that does not reference sociologist John Urryâs book The Tourist Gaze (1990). This work is critical in its attempts to elucidate power relations in tourist encounters through the act of âgazingâ. However, this study falls short in its oculocentrism, and in many ways does not imagine power in touristic environments as being held by actors other than tourists (Aitchison 2001). In this research, I begin from the premise that situating a distinct power relationship between the âtouristâ and the âlocalâ can function counter-intuitively to a post-colonial analysis. Conceiving of power being held only, or mainly in a unilateral trajectory (moving from the âcentreâ to the âperipheryâ) does not take into account power dynamics between tourists or the continual movement and exchange of power between tourists and residents. While complicating power relations is a main objective of my research, Urryâs work remains an important analytical entry to examine more nuanced understandings of the varying ways âgazesâ in tourism can be a result of power 6 expressed and inverted. Indiaâs diverse social and cultural landscapes helps to rupture some of the paradigmatic theories in tourism studies, moving beyond a bifurcation of âhosts and guestsâ to include subtler and more complex understanding of touristic environments (Bruner 2005; Rocha 2017). Although foreign travellers have undeniably played a significant role in shaping certain place imaginaries as tourist destinations in India, it is important that we do not ignore the role of domestic travellers who play an integral role in shaping these locales. For these reasons, this research aims to contribute to a growing literature on Asian travellers (Teo, Leong 2006; Winter 2008; De Groot and van der Horst 2014; Yang, Ling, Khoo- Lattimore and Arcordia 2018), and a shift away from focusing on Eurocentric notions of travel as the de facto mode of mobility. As I will demonstrate in the following chapter, it is primarily young Indians, as opposed to young international travelers, who are contributing the most to south Indiaâs tourism revenue (Groot and van der Horst 2014; Saldanha 2005). Extensive fieldwork has been done in Gokarnaâs neighbouring state of Goa (DâAndrea 2007; Saldanha 2007) and in Kerala (Ganguly and Green 2017), as well as many states in north India (Geary 2008, 2013, 2017; Brown 2015; Maoz 2006: 2007: 2009; Srinivas 1997). While undertaking my literature review, I found that much of the international conversation around young Indians is quieted by a prevailing obsession with âmillennialsâ born in the Global North and the âhippie movementâ of the past in India (DâAndrea 2007; Saldanha 2007). Because so much of what has been written on tourism in south India is based on fieldwork in Goa, many ethnographies that I considered in relation to my own work are written about Goa. For example, in an important study by D'Andrea (2007) entitled Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa he provides a detailed historical account of Goaâs subculture and its significance as a space of transgression 7 and a tourist node. With a focus on trance music specifically, he documents the ways in which countercultural movements organize themselves amidst transnational disconnections. DâAndreaâs research questions the underlying assumptions around flows of activities that include and exclude young Indian travellers. While Goa has been a space for travellers to come and experiment with alternate versions of themselves, often through the music scene, this invitation to experiment is not extended equally to all. The exclusivity created by the travellers in Goa and the successive tourism economy will be discussed more in detail in the next chapter. Although my work builds on some of DâAndreaâs important theoretical insights and findings, importantly, this study moves beyond international tourists as the primary object of focus. Similarly, Saldanha's (2007) Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race provides a cultural-geographical lens on the organization and embodiment of tourists in Goa. He does this through looking specifically at white bodies, in spaces that have been tailored to accommodate them. Incorporating Deleuzeâs philosophies to make sense of racialized spaces and places within the beaches of Goa, Saldanha utilizes a materialist analysis to conceive of the tendency of race to become thick and viscous, through various symbols and enactments (Saldanha 2007). While Saldanhaâs book, like D'Andrea's, focuses primarily on the trance music scene within Goa, many of the demographics he describes in his study are also now travelling to Gokarna. Saldanhaâs content on the visual economy is particularly relevant and provides an interpretation which contributes to the understanding of the ways in which people navigate and embody themselves through tourist sites. However, there is once again a focus on the movement of white tourists, which largely removes Indians from the narrative around tourist mobilities in India. My work builds upon Saldanhaâs work by taking into consideration why tourists happen to be organizing themselves, in where they stay, what they do and with whom. In my research in Gokarna, I tried to remain aware of 8 both physical performance and expressivity, while granting equal, if not more value to the ways in which interlocutors verbally communicated how and why they were doing what they did in Gokarna. One exception in the literature on Goa is the study by De Groot and van der Horst (2014) who describe young Indians as being there to enliven and reconnect with a kind of âexistential authenticity,â which they define as a liminal space that temporarily allows for the removal of oneself from restrictive and undesirable routines. This liminal space allows for the ârelaxation of norms and experienced loss of societal control [which] allows the development of behaviours and self-understandings the tourists perceive as being true to themselvesâ (De Groo van der Horst 2013: 305). As the authors suggest, these youth are engaging in highly repetitive activities that they know to be the performative expectation of tourists in Goa (drinking, raving, having sex, etc.), while simultaneously expressing the sentiment that these kinds of activities are who they truly feel themselves to be. These expressive sentiments, as the authors show, stand in opposition to the kinds of behaviours and social norms expected in most Indian homes. Working off of MacCannell and Brunerâs earlier ideas on authenticity, and De Groot and van der Horstâs more recent study, I also consider how young Indians in Gokarna are engaging in similar kinds of quests for âexistential authenticityâ. Highlighting the importance of how tourism mobilities âinform tourism, shape the places where tourism is performed and drive the making and unmaking of tourist destinationsâ (Hannam and Diekmann 2011; 117) is central to how I frame my own research in understanding the appeal of Gokarna as an emerging tourist destination. Hannamâs and Diekmannâs book Tourism and India: A Critical Introduction has contributed a wealth of information to my research, regarding the history and context of domestic tourism in India from a critical theoretical standpoint (Hannam and Diekmann 2011). Tourism and India is the only resource I have located that specifically focuses on the issues facing contemporary 9 Indian tourists, recognizing them as notable contributors to the economy and culture of tourism (Hannam and Diekmann 2011). Acknowledging the diversity of motivations and access to mobilities among travellers, both domestic and international to India, provides an important entry point into classic arguments in tourism studies and allows for my research to be situated in the ambiguity of these debates (Scheyvens 2002: 150). 1.5 Backpackers, Affect and Embodiment The interlocutors of my research never specifically defined themselves as âbackpackersâ, but often attributed qualities and values to travelling that we have come to associate with a western backpacking culture. Travel can be conceived of as an activity that can assist in reconfiguring oneself. Travel is suggested by Cohen (2010: 124) to be âa vehicle to engage in ongoing developmental processes of learning about the self.â Certainly, this was something that was echoed by the tourists in Gokarna, as I will explain in future chapters. Backpackers are often considered to be focused on frugality and to have a desire for an immersive experience in the âhost cultureâ. While these ideas remain central to a westernized perspective on international travel, I ask, how are domestic Indian tourists locating âauthenticityâ and fulfilling desires in tourism encounters within their own national borders? Creating enclaves and spaces of inclusion and exclusion to seek relief from what tourists may feel to be stressful situations encountered in their destination is an activity which many tourists, backpackers and beyond, are cited as doing. Within the context of India, enclavic tourism is a phenomenon that Maoz (2007) and Hottola (2005) write about. Hottola suggests that backpackers create âmetaspatialitiesâ (their âownâ spaces while travelling) amidst âmetaworldsâ (worlds which are placed in space and time that differ from the dominant reality) (Hottola 2005: 2). These metaspatialities are said to invoke feelings of control and stability amidst an environment where a of loss of control may be experienced through being 10 perhaps too immersed in the âhost cultureâ, or at the whim of an unfamiliar environment. In my ethnography, I explore what these enclavic tendencies may mean in the context of domestic leisure tourists in Gokarna. Many academics are calling for attention to be drawn to the growing number of Asian travellers participating in tourist activities, including backpacking (Teo and Leong 2006). Reclaiming a kind of epistemological space in critical tourism studies is essential to moving forward with contemporary analyses and new generative grounds for theory building (Teo and Leong 2006: 109). Similar to Cohenâs article, Teo and Leongâs article discusses how travel (and by extension, backpacking) has in many ways become a âa status symbol for those who engage in it and is an expression of identity as well as a coherent industrial complex in its own rightâ (Teo and Leong 2006:110). Despite not identifying as âbackpackersâ, many tourists in Gokarna idealize âsolo travelâ, which shares many values and qualities to backpacking culture. In chapter three I consider how these values contribute to expressions of identity, and more classic debates around personhood in tourism. Living in a touristic space also highlights the performative nature of tourism. Patterned behaviours and expected ways of being come into full expression when tourists arrive at their destination. This tendency towards performativity is well documented by Edensor (2000, 2001). While usually writing about travellers from Europe or the Americas, Edensor notes the desire among backpackers to distinguish themselves (through their performances as well as rhetorically) from package tourists. While the particular configuration of tourists in Gokarna did not fall neatly into âbackpackerâ or âpackage touristâ categories, interlocutors commonly expressed similar sentiments at maintaining definitive separations between themselves and other kinds of travellers. These ideas will be expounded on in chapters two and three. 11 Given the importance of place within tourist imaginaries and motivations, how do we understand the texture of everyday life in Gokarna? Is it the same for tourists as residents? What variables are contributing to how Gokarna feels to these young domestic travellers who visit? Social spaces, including those structured around and through tourism and the encounters that take place, remain emergent. As dâHauteserre argues, these places âcome about through the action of social agents. Places in turn are shaped by the multitude of practices and encounters experienced there. Transmission of affect then becomes one of their propertiesâ (dâHauteserre 2014: 80). It may be âdifficult to reach individuals to inflect their affect, but they may be pushed by the ambience created by group formationsâ (dâHauteserre 2014: 82). This âambienceâ, as we will come to see, is interpreted in specific ways by Indian tourists. The idea of group formations contributing to a quality of place is something I discuss in more detail in chapters two and three. In terms of the more recent âaffective turnâ (Spinoza 1996) in anthropology, it is important to acknowledge that writing on affect tends to give rise to multiple definitions and meanings. For this research I primarily draw upon Stewart and Lewisâ definitions of affect as âthe capacity to affect and be affectedâ, âa domain, register or machinery of intensity, speed, rhythm, and emergent formâ and as âthe sensation production in the encounter of bodies and forces and as the tipping point between the potential and the actualâ (2015: 237). Nigel Thriftâs (2008) book Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics and Affect was also utilized to ground my own understandings of affect in wider social theories. A variety of chapters throughout Thriftâs book have helped me to think through the ways in which tourists in Gokarna were expressing their own time, and the affective atmosphere of the place. Susan Frohlickâs (2020) article on âReproductive vibes: therapeutic atmospheres and the reproductive force of tourism mobilitiesâ was also pivotal in helping me to think through a seemingly ambiguous concept like âthe vibeâ as a legitimate entry point for looking at Indian 12 touristsâ experiences in Gokarna. This article assisted me in thinking more critically about what became, enhanced, diminished, and otherwise affected âthe vibeâ. In another important study, Andersonâs (2009) chapter on âAffective Atmospheresâ was helpful in embracing the ambiguities that tend to surround the concept, âto sense how things come to have an affective chargeâ (Anderson 2009: 138). Working with every definition of affect is simply not possible or relevant to the situation at hand, and as Anderson notes: âLike any version, the account of affective life has its own geography and historical contingentâ (2009: 164). As a result of these contingencies and the energetic qualities inherent in these concepts, the idea of âaffective atmospheresâ helps to foreground the ambivalence, while simultaneously, a sense of tangibility among those experiencing it. While I find this line of inquiry exciting as a novice researcher, I must also confess that affect theory can be frustrating in its elusiveness, both practically and conceptually. Theoretically, it is difficult to pin down precisely. What âmovesâ people can be so subtle and lacking in a consistent quality that it escapes rigid definitions. Practically, the slipperiness of the vibe is what keeps travellers on the move; it is what pushes people to new destinations and experiences, especially among young backpackers, with the hope that they will soak up an atmosphere with an affective charge. To me, the inconclusiveness of affect is what also gives it validity. It recognizes the inherent inexactitude in lived phenomena. When we look further into what gives qualities or essence to a place, and how these are communicated through bodies and ideas, an affectual translation of locations begins to take shape. Affect seems to me to be the appropriate continuation of a dialogue on power and space in critical tourism studies. Instead of relying on gazes or sights seen, affect points us beyond the ocular-focused dimensions towards more fully embodied energetic aspects of exchanges and experiences. Because this âenergyâ was discussed so frequently by my 13 interlocutors in Gokarna, I felt it was important to make this an integral part of the theoretical framework. Related to that, I also found through my fieldwork that young tourists who came to Gokarna were often seeking a break, or respite, from their daily routines. Desforges, building on the work of Urry, notes that âexperience of the world is produced rather than simply acquired...â and this is done through being in specific âgeohistoric places and momentsâ (Desforges 2000: 929). As a result of this, affect can contribute to the interior narrative of personhood. This necessitates taking into account which factors precipitate these narratives. Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Foucaultâs theories of body-world relations as discussed by Csordasâ (Ram, et al: 2015) also fit into how tourists were considering themselves in relation to the landscape of Gokarna. For these reasons, this research draws heavily on embodiment as described by Strathern and Stewart as âpatterns of behaviour inscribed on the body or enacted through expression in bodily formâ (2011: 389). In this way, the notion of embodiment provides an important approach to the study of Indian tourists by examining how the body is not passive, but active. Indian travellers in Gokarna often communicated a desire to be more in control and aware of themselves and their bodies. The act of taking oneâs body from passive to active was both intentional and preferable- it was a reclamation of independence and agency. This will be elaborated on more extensively in chapter three. Locating the body not only in space, but in time as well, is something that came up in multiple conversations with interlocutors in Gokarna. Understanding Gokarna as a place where young people are permitted to move more slowly, relates to Thriftâs ideas around a âgo faster worldâ (Thrift 2008: 63). He discusses the âembodied unconsciousâ tying together âa set of basic exfoliations of the body through which nature is constructed, planes of affect attuned to particular body parts (and senses) and corresponding elements of natureâ (Thrift 14 2008: 67). While texts on embodiment and phenomenology in anthropology have provided some background theories, they have also allowed for me to incorporate a perspective into this research that emphasizes what the interlocutors themselves are expressing. 1.9 Methodological approach This research uses ethnography as my main methodology, and my data collection methods were field notes, participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. While I had been to Gokarna earlier that year for two weeks, it was not until September 2019 that I settled in the town and began my fieldwork for the next five months. Initially, I thought my main field sites for participant-observation were Kudle and Om beach. However, after arriving in Gokarna for fieldwork, the hostel that I resided in, and another hostel nearby, proved to be important locations for participant-observation. As a result of two cyclones that hit Gokarna in September and October 2019, the weather was not always suitable for tourists, or researchers, to visit the beach. Many rainy days were spent in hostel cafes and common areas, observing and conversing with the tourists passing through. Through my fieldwork at these locations I was able to participate in the lived experience of tourism in Gokarna as both a researcher and tourist. I observed and partook in âeveryday life and social interactionâ as well as developed rapport with those who live in and visit these locations (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 56). As Geertz (1973) famously wrote several decades ago, the âthick descriptionâ resulting from ethnography âcan emerge only from a lengthy period of intimate study and residence in a given social settingâ and understanding of specific cultures can made most efficacious through âspending time with the group being studiedâ (cited in Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 29). Phenomenological approaches are also bolstered by participant- observation that involves examining the experiences of others while simultaneously locating the researcher in the same conditions and environments as those being researched. In other words, being immersed in the fieldsites allows for a firsthand synthesis of the information 15 that is being shared by the interlocutors as well as observations on how people in Gokarna are expressing themselves and spending their time in Gokarna. It is important to note that my own observations, though fortified through interviews and field notes, are influenced by my own experiences and ontological positioning. Failure to understand and/or misinterpret is always a possibility, particularly when working with interlocutors who do not share the same language. In addition, my own presence, whether recognized through my role as a researcher, my femininity, nationality, skin colour, economic status, or my experiences as a traveller can skew the ways that interlocutors speak with me. Despite these inherent methodological challenges that have been problematized by anthropologists for many decades, I still feel that participant-observation can be used to provide a reliable representation of âthe life experiences of participants more accurately than contrived or laboratory settingsâ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 244). Importantly, participant- observation also contributes to a kind of qualitative research that remains open and aware of the fluidity of the fieldsite. Seeing the faces, landscape, seasons, etc. change in Gokarna allowed me to have a more somatic and lived understanding of the fieldsite as a dynamic place, in flux and flow with the world it is encased by. This being said, there are limits to that which I can understand, and my own observations are largely the result of what is inscribed in me through my own experiences and position(s) of privilege. Utilizing âhorizontalizationâ, all of the data was examined by myself âas having equal weightâ and considered to be of âequal value at the initial data analysis stageâ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 27). I first sorted through the interview transcripts by âopen codingâ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 204). I used single-words or short phrases as descriptive codes (i.e. âidentityâ, âpleasureâ, âvibeâ etc.) to locate and describe themes within the interviews and my fieldnotes. After this open coding process, I began what Merriam and Tisdell (2016: 206) describe as âanalytical codingâ whereby I thematically grouped my previously made codes 16 together and expanded upon these themes using theoretical analysis. After generating a significant number of themes/categories, I worked to discernibly narrow them down to as few as possible without compromising the quality of the content, to ensure a âgreater ease with which findings can be communicated to othersâ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 214). Once these findings were organized in a cohesive way, theories were applied to help elucidate each category. This lent itself to a constant comparative method that is common in most qualitative research involving a grounded theory approach (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 228). Additionally, using an ethnographic analysis allowed for categories that are created to be a direct response to the data procured in the field, which includes both etic and emic perspectives. Utilizing a narrative analysis of the interviews contributes to an approach that helped to elaborate on âhow stories vary across cultures, as well as in the âcultural patterning of customs, beliefs, values, performance and social contexts of narrationââ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 232). These processes are both inductive and comparative. This research also used purposeful, nonprobability sampling to answer the research questions and fufill the research objectives. I conducted eleven interviews: ten with Indian tourists in Gokarna, and one with a local resident (who I ended up interviewing through snowball sampling, not knowing he was a local until the interview began). Out of the eleven interviewees, five were female-identifying and six were male-identifying persons. Participants were between the ages of 20-31 years old. The interviews I conducted were semi-structured. As part my fieldwork I also asked several informal questions to locals in the nearby town in order to get a broader sense of their opinions on topics related to tourism. These conversations were not recorded but were written up as part of my daily fieldnotes. Similarly, I had many casual conversations with tourists on beaches and in hostels whom I did not interview. Interviews took place in cafes and the outside of hostels in and around Kudle beach and Om beach. Knowing where to spend time to access tourists was important, 17 and snowball/network sampling was informed by the connections that I made while spending time in the town and on Kudle and Om beach. Often workers at the hostels that I frequented would let me know if there were activities happening where large groups of tourists would be participating. I was always permitted to join in these activities and met many interviewees through these activities. After obtaining consent, I recorded the interviews on my phone and transcribed them myself, usually immediately after the interview. During interviews I also took additional notes. In terms of disciplinary categories, these interviews are ethnographic in purpose, with a focus on how culture informs the behaviours and activities in which the participants are engaging in (Miriam and Tisdell 2016: 112). Additionally, these interviews can also be considered phenomenological, where the interviews âfocus on the deep, lived meanings that events have for individuals, assuming that these meanings guide actions and interactionsâ (Merriam and Tisdell 2016: 113). Combining these theoretical and disciplinary perspectives allows for a focus on the individuals that I interviewed, and the broader cultural milieus that they live in. Although anthropology values a critical interrogation of ethnocentric tendencies, as ethnographers how can we make our scholarly work less Eurocentric and more accessible? I believe that through reflecting on my own experiences in Gokarna, I can present a transparent and robust ethnography. My own experiences as a tourist in Gokarna reflect ideas that involve the common trope of the âlure of elsewhere,â and these experiences are foundational to this research. While the focus of this ethnography is Indian tourists, my personal background cannot be separated from the research and resulting analyses. Incorporating autoethnography into scholarly writing creates an opportunity to enact research as something living, transforming and moving alongside the researcher, and the 18 researched. More than once during my fieldwork I had the same existential question that tourism scholar Edward Bruner had when he pondered: âWas I a closet ethnographer on tour, or a closet tourist doing ethnography?â (Bruner 2005: 2). It was at times difficult to separate the two, particularly because I was living in a dorm room in a hostel for three months, and because I had been a tourist in Gokarna before I was a researcher. Without acknowledging the researcher in the research, biases and perspectives are more likely to go unexamined and unaccounted for, and so it is of vital importance to âlocate [oneâs] self in researchâ (Absolon, Willet 2005: 113). Like other works that have come out of the postmodern âcrisis of confidenceâ (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2010), this research is open to the possibilities that exist within a paradigm that refuses to claim ownership over âtruthâ, but instead embraces personal experiences as the mediator through which I have come to understand both this research and resulting analyses. In addition to autoethnography, within this research I present some photographs that I captured while in Gokarna. While utilizing photos in ethnography has its own kind of politics attached to it (Wolbert 2000; Picard and Robinson 2016), I felt that these images would provide a helpful compliment to my analysis regarding several aspects of Gokarna that I am writing about. Additionally, the usage of photographs helps give shape to that which may be difficult or unfamiliar to imagine (like rangolis, for example, or the landscape of Gokarna itself). Granting myself the permission to take and share pictures of tourists/ tourism phenomena in Gokarna speaks to a sense of entitlement that exists within myself, and perhaps within the discipline of anthropology at large. Using photographs within ethnography calls into question concerns around representation and power. The pictures that I present in this research have all been taken by me. Related to Urryâs notion of âthe gazeâ (2002), these are images as seen through my own perspective/eyes and are presented accordingly. There is a limit for photographsâ ability to âserve as the true witnessâ (Wolbert 2000: 332), but with 19 supplementary context they can assist in sharing with the readers what the researcher was viewing and interpreting. Photographs can aid in a more embodied understanding of ethnographic descriptions, as Clifford wrote: âYou are there, because I was thereâ (cited in Wolbert 2000: 331). Acknowledging kinds of authority granted to ethnographers remains significant in decolonizing the discipline of anthropology, and the power expressed through the taking and presenting of photographs remains no exception. While I am not a professional photographer by any means, the presence of smartphones with their self-focusing lenses has made the taking of photographs during fieldwork relatively easy and accessible. Photos have the capacity to add to a tourism imaginary (by presenting romanticized representations of tourists and tourist destinations) as well as to detract from it (i.e. pictures of garbage burning on beaches). My photographs, ultimately, depict a particular way of seeing- that is, through my own lens. This being said, I hope the pictures I have chosen to share here function to fortify the written passages of this research. As a white Canadian doing research in a previously colonized country like India, it is imperative to address notions of privilege and critically engage with my own reasons for being there. The power that I hold is represented in the texture of my hair, it is seen by the colour of my skin, and it heard by the sound of my voice talking in English and my mouth awkwardly fumbling to speak anything else. Of course, not all power is locked up in phenotypes or language, nor is power unilateral. Much like how the âtourist gazeâ can be reverted in its display of power (Urry 2002; Bandyopadhyay and Ganguly 2018; Maoz 2006; Zara 2015), power exists on multiple levels at once and is exchanged in various ways (Foucault 1982). Being an English-speaking westerner does not de facto grant me a greater amount of power, as most ethnographers would know that you are relatively powerless in many situations, particularly when you are new to your fieldsite. My own personal context does have attached to it a kind of privilege that in many cases, is structurally upheld. Before 20 arriving in India, my ability to conceive of this work as being viable is a result of the fact that I am a settler in Canada, who attends a university on unceded Syilx territory in British Columbia. Even before this, I am associated with a discipline (anthropology) whose foundations lie in colonial and imperial systems imposed by western nations that subjugated and attempted to dominate and categorize other parts of the world. Without these circumstances that have existed/continue to exist in a power matrix that hegemonically valorizes particular practices, people, beliefs and ideas over others, it is quite likely that this research, and my own story that takes place within this research, would not have occurred. In terms of the structure of this thesis, I have begun with an autoethnographic portion, and I conclude by returning back to my own personal story. This was not done in an attempt to place more importance on myself than the interlocutors whom I spoke with. Instead, this organization of material was in an effort to acknowledge the inherent impact that my experiences have had on this research. According to my own understanding, part of the purpose of incorporating autoethnography is to situate, rather than detach, the researcher within the research. Great efforts were made in an attempt to represent Indian tourists in Gokarna in a fashion that does not alter original quotes and remains true to what I was observing. Despite this, inevitably the work that is presented is an articulation of my own perceptions and ideas. I think it is important to organize this research in a way that serves as a reminder of this paradoxical circumstance of the ethnographer- as someone who describes and interprets the events of others but does so through the inescapable lens of their own perceptions. The first time I had heard about Gokarna was in 2017, from a woman I had met in Goa. She told me that there was a beach nearby that was exactly what we were both looking for. Exhausted by the party-scene of north Goa, a much talked about âOm beachâ in Gokarna 21 promised an escape for those looking to chill out without the overstimulation and commercialization that we were experiencing in north Goa. I had initially come to north Goa with the sole purpose of visiting the Anjuna market. I had read about the market as being a relic of the hippie community that once thrived there and thought it would be worth checking out. While I did not make it to Gokarna during that visit to India, I had mentally marked it as a place that I wanted to go. The next time I was in India, I was working on some farms in the South. After a few weeks on a family farm in Kerala, and a short-lived attempt at volunteering at a sustainable vegan community in Tamil Nadu, I decided that I wanted to go somewhere tranquil near the ocean. I took the train from Coimbatore to Gokarna Road station, planning to spend only a weekend there, and instead spent over two weeks on both Om and Kudle beach. I visited Gokarna twice more before deciding on it as a fieldsite. Making the decision to undertake research in Gokarna is a direct result of the kind of entitlement that anthropologyâs colonial legacy stems from. This decision was not directly questioned nor challenged by institutions or individuals. Gokarna was not a place that I had thought about too critically after my initial visit. The more that I heard people talking about it, and the ways in which they spoke about Gokarna, the more interesting it became as a space of desire that appeared to offer something unique for tourists, especially Indian tourists. I wondered, how did this small village appeal to young Indian tourists who used it as a weekend vacation spot to decompress (often with the help of illegal substances), while also carrying such an important role in the wider Hindu community as a pilgrimage site? As I was soon to learn, this was a limited and incomplete way of understanding the activities in Gokarna. I must confess that my own experience as a tourist in Gokarna was mostly shaped by my desire for a relaxing place that had cheap rooms to rent directly on the beaches, with clean and calm waters for swimming. Not all of Indiaâs beaches are ideal for swimming. The Bay 22 of Bengal on the east coast of India often has very rough tides, and many beaches are simply too dirty to (want to) swim in. Post-monsoon, the Arabian sea that outlines Gokarna is calm and comparably clean. Additionally, not nearly as many jewelry sellers or other beach hawkers as in Goa offer their services in Gokarna. In short, it felt like a place where I could be at peace near the ocean. From my experience, very few places that I have visited in India offered me the social distance and spaciousness to be âleft aloneâ in this way. As previously noted, Hottola (2005) opines that there is a desire among backpackers to have control over the spaces that they visit. According to Hottola, âpeople who interact in public space mentally establish a desirable level of privacy and behave accordingly to achieve and maintain itâ (Hottola 2005:11). He claims that backpackers, as opposed to package tourists, experience more of the âhost cultureâ, and in these instances have what he considers to be, less control. In order to regain a sense of control, mediated through drawing out boundaries of privacy, backpackers create âsegregated metaspatialitiesâ (Hottola 2005: 17). These allow for them to exist in enclaves, away from what they feel that they cannot control (i.e. the âhost cultureâ and its corollaries). While I was not intending to segregate myself from the âhost cultureâ in an attempt to connect solely with other backpackers from the same continent as me, I craved places within India to sit and read a book undisturbed. Much of my time in India was spent speaking with others in public spaces, and while I greatly enjoyed this, I also reveled in the opportunity to be alone. I desired a sense of privacy that allowed for me to retreat from persistent socializing. I wondered if this was something that young Indians were craving as well, and if this was why they were also being drawn to Gokarna? Was it only foreign backpackers, as Hottola suggests, who feel overwhelmed at a loss of control in public spaces in India, or was this something that is challenging for young Indians as well? Fieldwork in a dorm room 23 When I eventually returned to Gokarna for my fieldwork, I spent the first week or so deciding where to stay. Many locals advised me to find a room in the rural part of Gokarna (as opposed to the beach area), the most cost-effective option for long-term stays. In the interim period while I looked for a place, I stayed in the dorm room of a hostel, with six beds (three bunkbeds) and one washroom. It was located about a ten-minute walk from Kudle beach and beside the most popular and more expensive hostel in Gokarna. In the past, I had stayed in shacks on the beach, and prior to arriving for fieldwork, I was not even aware that there were hostels in Gokarna. Figure 1: One of the walls in the dorm room After spending a week in the dorm room, I had met a number of different Indian travellers, and had wonderful exchanges with each of them. I realized that the conversations I was having in the dorm were conversations that I was not going to be having, at least not as readily, if I were to be living on my own. Travellers were quite literally coming into âmyâ room and telling me stories of their lives before, during, and after Gokarna. While initially seeing the hostel and dormitory as a transitory space, I quickly learned that it was an exceptionally effective place for doing fieldwork. Of course, because the field had become my bedroom, the ethnographic work was so thoroughly embodying that at times it was utterly taxing and quite impossible to separate from. 24 The immediacy and intimacy that was forged when I was sleeping in the same room as other people is a beautiful example of how globalization compresses time and space beyond economic or technological variants. Knowing that I was spending only a few nights in extremely close quarters with someone else also contributed to a bypassing of certain inhibitions and an intensification of relationships. In one instance, a nineteen-year-old man was telling me about a deeply troubling experience he had while travelling on his own, on a train. He was molested in the middle of the night and carried significant trauma as a result. Still, he told me that he refused to let this dissuade him from travelling alone, and I was deeply moved by his honesty and bravery. I woke up the next morning to a note on my bag that he had written me (which I still have), thanking me for being âso nice to himâ and listening to him. I could not imagine people discussing these kinds of details with me if I was simply coming up to people on the beach or in cafes and asking them about travelling and their time in Gokarna. It was my experience that people, like this young man, displayed a kind of openness and concomitant vulnerability in the dorm room that perhaps would not make as much sense or would not be as intuitive as in a space structured for interviews. During the daytime I became more active with hostel visitors, joining beach treks, playing games and going on adventures to nearby landmarks like waterfalls and caves. I loved the conversations that occurred at all hours in the dorm and outside in the communal space. Having said that, I also found myself craving quietude and a break from the same kinds of leading questions that would undoubtedly be asked upon meeting a new traveller. Living long-term in a space marked by its fleeting visitors was at times difficult and disorienting. Constantly having to partake in activities that were new and exciting to tourists (but at times tiring and repetitive for me) was a task that I found difficult to maintain with alacrity. The only other people I knew who could relate to these feelings were those who 25 worked at hostels in Gokarna. We were fueled, stimulated and enlivened by the consistent turnover of new people while at the same time drained, jaded and in some cases, overworked. Overall, I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to do the type of fieldwork that I did. Luckily for me, my interlocutors had much more patience with answering my questions than I often felt like I displayed, and despite some inner turmoil, I thrived from the closeness that the hostel enabled. Dwelling in a hostel afforded me the opportunity to immerse myself in the everyday lives of young Indian tourists. I was there when they woke up and when they went to sleep. I knew when they were at the hostel or when they left. And, I had opportunities to speak with different tourists each day. Foundational questions that anthropologists may ask of their interlocutors were often inverted by the âguestsâ themselves upon arrival: âwhere are you from?â, âwhat do you do?â, âwhy did you come here?â, âare you alone?â, âhow old are you?â etc. Of course, these relationships were reciprocal in many ways. I was not simply extracting information from interlocutors, as they would do the same from me, utilizing my experiences and knowledge about Gokarna to ascertain which beaches they wanted to visit, where they wanted to eat, what kinds of things they could do around the town, etc. In this sense, there was a practical exchange, and in a more affectual way living in a dorm allowed me to, whether I was intentionally permitting it or not, access othersâ being through an energetic interchange facilitated by close physical proximity. If visitors came into the dorm and exhibited high energy, it felt like a different space than when calm and reserved guests would stay. It was also something I could sense within myself; there was a tempo or pace to these diverse exchanges. Some caused me stress, while others had me wishing that we lived together on a more permanent basis. The absence of guests was something palpable, too. I felt it when they left; not just in an emotionally sad (or happy) kind of way, but in a way that the 26 room, when cleared out, became a different space. Sometimes I welcomed this, and other times I lamented it. I could not have imagined gaining rapport, relationships and an understanding of tourists in Gokarna without the assistance of living with these tourists all day, every day. On a personal level, it helped to assuage loneliness that can often be a result of an immersive fieldsite and brought many cherished people into my life whom I remain in close contact with. Living in a hostel was a certain kind of âatmosphereâ that sometimes fit with how I was wanting to feel, and other times did not (Anderson 2009). From my fieldnotes, I express some of my feelings and experiences around living in a dorm room for three months: December 17th, 2019. Itâs 6am. The young man on the bottom bunk, two metres away from my bed, sleeps peacefully as his alarm cuts sharply through my dreams and up until that point, my undisturbed sleep. Waking up to the sound of someone elseâs alarm is not uncommon in a six-bed dorm room, though Iâm usually awake (and asleep) before most of the visiting travellers. I get up, fumble around with his phone to attempt to turn the alarm off as he continues to slumber, completely unaware of my meddling with his technology. Brushing my teeth in the common bathroom, I grab my yoga mat and leave the dorm. I set myself up in the shade of a giant lorry parked mysteriously without any explanation (one day it was equally as mysteriously moved), in the middle of a field on which the hostel has been built. I begin my morning yoga and meditation practice. It is the only time of day that I decidedly cut out for myself, attempting to not concern myself with what is going on around me. Even then, seeing as Iâm conspicuously placed on the middle of the property, I am occasionally approached by travellers who arrive in the early mornings, coming off of night 27 buses/trains, who walk along the property to admire the views and ask me questions about how to get to the beach. Living in a hostel means sharing everything: space, smells, light, time, stories, smiles, fear, laughter, discomfort, sounds, frictionâ¦ Privacy becomes something relegated to a space of seemingly untenable entitlement, and in many ways, the fact that this is a significant change from what Iâm used to denotes my own foreignness and privileges. Iâm used to having my own room, my own space, cut out and distinct from othersâ around me. I like sharing as much as I donât, in all honesty. Thatâs not something I feel particularly proud of, but it is something that Iâve been grappling with, living in a hostel. It has allowed me to continuously attempt to acknowledge and try to dismantle the individualistic and overly spacious sense of self imparted on me through my Canadian upbringing. Another excerpt from my fieldnotes relays some frustrating moments in sharing a room with tourists: October 12th, 2019. A boy snorts and sniffles his snotty nose endlessly throughout the night- it is uncomfortably intimate. His snores and laboured breathing are so loud and resonate at a decibel that makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. Exasperated, I leave the room to sleep outside. This is when I donât like shared environments, and these are some of the more embodied effects of sharing a dorm room with a myriad of different travellers: sometimes you donât sleep well, or at all. There was the night a belligerently drunken young man either threw himself off of the top bunk, or somehow rolled past the safety bars with a sickening thud onto the hard, tiled floor at three am. He moaned for minutes before my consciousness allowed me to realize what was happening. His friend woke up and made him go to the bathroom (to my confusion) 28 and then to his bed. As soon as he got back into his bed, he began humming so obnoxiously that everyone who was (previously) sleeping in the dorm woke up and were all begging him to stop. I threatened to throw him off his bed again. He slept for more than 20 hours the next day. Still, these experiences allow me to incorporate a motherly tone with myself, calming myself, assuring childish me that through this 24/7 act of sharing, I am increasing my tolerance and disempowering the neoliberal subjectivities which place my being in an impossibly parochial and suffocating box that separates me from those around me. Here I cannot be in that box, I simple have no choice but to expand into the worlds of others, and let others expand into the world(s) of me...â Incorporating autoethnography within my research is an attempt to decolonize the research process which has, for too long, assumed the researcher to be authoritative, objective, and ârightâ (Ellis 2011). Autoethnography situates me as a young woman within the institution of academia, within the discipline of anthropology, and within the world of travel and tourism. This methodology requires a rigorous, accountable and consistent process of reflexivity, while incorporating a positionality that values non-traditional and anti- oppressive methodologies, such as storytelling and experientially embodied contextual âtruthsâ (Denzin: 2018). Through experimenting with autoethnography, I assume that stories hold legitimacy to be told, read, and published. Traveling extensively as an independent traveler/tourist for over a decade has invariably informed this research. As a tourist and researcher, I recognize the bias that I hold as having occasionally experienced extraordinarily offensive behaviour from other tourists. I remain fastidious to not project this kind of behaviour onto those I am observing or insert this frame of reference within my analysis without sufficient contextual data and academic literature to support these claims. 29 This project is limited by time and space. Kudle and Om are only two beaches of many in Gokarna. Paradise beach and Halfmoon beach are much more isolated than Kudle or Om. The main Gokarna beach is closer to the temple and draws larger crowds of Indian families. I do not speak Kannada, the language spoken in Gokarna, but I have been taking Hindi-language training, which is a language understood and spoken by many people in Gokarna. Many people whom I interviewed spoke English as their second language but were thoroughly fluent. I recognize that my inability to connect with interlocutors in their mother tongue(s) is a considerable limitation, in terms of the accuracy of the language deployed during our interviews, and in terms of building rapport for me as an English-speaking researcher. 1.10 Conclusion In many ways, living somewhere that was not my home served to calibrate a sense of consciousness. I was acutely aware of some of what was going on around me, while simultaneously often had very little understanding of what else was going on around me that was imperceptible or unaccessible to me. This research relied on the kindness of strangers. It also leans on the ability of others (and myself) to deal with my shifting levels of competency as a new researcher. My uneven competency as a new researcher required me to be aware of how I presented myself on a daily basis, to ensure that I did my best to not offend residentsâ and touristsâ sensibilities and to put a veritable effort into learning how to hold a sense of respectful space as a researcher and foreign visitor in Gokarna. Researching a fieldsite which has no prior published academic work to build off of was challenging. I hope that my research will add to the literature which has excluded or ignored young Indiansâ perspectives as domestic tourists. Considering different fieldsites, such as dorm rooms, as legitimate and interesting is also something that I hope this research will contribute to. 30 In Chapter Two I describe the history of tourism development in north Goa and also look into the recent emergence of Gokarna as a tourist site. This chapter also explains how, in Gokarna, Indian travellers were often positioned as more problematic than other kinds of tourists. I also look at the reasons why young Indians were travelling to Gokarna, often in relation to their reasons for avoiding Goa. In Chapter Three I discuss affect theory and how affective dimensions of the hostel and other spaces contributed to what I refer to as the âthe vibeâ of Gokarna. I also eludicate how young Indian tourists were experiencing Gokarna through the words and forms of expressions that they communicated to me. In Chapter Four I discuss the limitations of my own perspectives in this research, and how accrued knowledge gained in the field led me to realize how my initial framing of Gokarna was insufficient in understanding the social dynamics at play. Finally, in the Conclusion I discuss the peculiarities of writing about mobility during a pandemic, and some final thoughts on my time and my findings as a researcher in Gokarna and review the answers to my research questions. 31 Chapter 2: From Hippies to Techies: Place Imaginaries across Goa and Gokarna âTourism is a mystifying subject because being a tourist is deprecated by almost everyone, even tourists themselves belittle tourism as it connotes something commercial, tacky, and superficialâ (Bruner 2005:7). âWe knew we needed to go somewhere, but it definitely wasnât going to be Goaâ - Anil from Gujarat. 2.1 Introduction In this chapter I provide a brief overview of the historical significance of Goa as a popular international tourist destination in Western/South India. After discussing some of the current patterns of domestic tourism in Goa, I describe the emergence of Gokarna as a tourist locale and how/why it has come to appeal to Indian tourists who are the focus of this study. In considering the ties between Goa and Gokarna, I explore Indian touristsâ motivations to travel to Goa and Gokarna, and how these motivations relate to broader theories and debates in critical tourism studies. The morality that was attached to notions of âgoodâ versus âbadâ tourists was something quite topical in conversations that I had with tourists in Gokarna. I present the good/bad moral binary as it relates to the shift in popularity from Goa to Gokarna and Indian touristsâ desires in both places. 2.2 Goa The emergence of Gokarna as a popular tourist site is undeniably shaped by broader histories of tourism flows in Goa, especially its ties to the 1960s counter-cultural movement in the United States. During this time huge cultural shifts were taking place amidst growing tensions over the Vietnam war. People were looking outside of Western philosophical traditions for meaning and there was a staunch resistance to the âAmerican dreamâ as it was popularly portrayed. The cultural constraints of life in the United States in the 1960s led to many counter-cultural (often middle-class) âhippiesâ from the U.S.A travelling to places considered to be alternative, mystical and/or romantic (King 1999). India was one such Orientalized place that served as a hub for an exodus of hippies from Europe and the 32 Americas to South Asia. India had also appealed to the bourgeoning interests of the American middle-class with large swaths of commercially undeveloped land, and religious and spiritual practices considered by seekers to be of higher value than that which was found in the West. Many travellers arrived on âmagic busesâ overland from Europe to their first point of entry into India: Goa. Goa is a former Portuguese colony with over eighty kilometers of beaches along the Arabian sea. Although these western travellers were attempting to abscond from the Judaeo- Christian structures of their home countries, the longstanding colonial presence of Christians in Goa allowed them to ironically âbenefit from Goansâ Christian-Portuguese legacy, which was somehow imagined by these travellers as accepting of their individualist dispositionsâ (DâAndrea 2007: 176). A few of these wanderers never left Goa, but the ones who did, left behind a legacy that still continues to shape the geographic place imaginary of tourism in Goa, and indeed in India to this day. Konkani-speaking Goa is Indiaâs smallest state, located on the southwest Konkan coast, about 600 kms south of Mumbai. Goa consists of approximately 44 towns and 360 villages (DâAndrea 2007: 182). With mountains, national parks, the ocean, gargantuan banyan trees, incredibly diverse cuisines and an explosive population of street dogs, Goa is in many ways a treat for the senses. In 2017-2018, 605 8667 tourists visited north Goa (Goa Tourism 2020). The high tourist season goes from November to March when the climate is dry and moderate. Inland Goa is built with a combination of southern Indian and Portuguese architecture, bright green, yellow, pink and turquoise or blindingly white. Temples, mosques and churches decorate the urban landscape, in addition to apartment buildings and corporate offices. With a population of around 1.5 million, the state of Goa is somewhat of an anomaly within India because of the large demographic of Christians, a relatively high quality of life (compared with many other Indian states), and the highest national per-capita income 33 (DâAndrea 2007: 183). The streets winding through the coastal region of Goa have also gained notoriety for the seasonal influx of tourists who arrive in large numbers each year, which until the pandemic in 2020 played an important role in shaping the regional economy. Tourists would be hard-pressed to go for a walk near the sea without being invited into every shop they passed, âjust for a look. Lookingâs for freeâ. Figure 2: House in Goa Figure 3: A single, large Banyan tree in North Goa Goa remains a popular destination on the travel circuit in India for international tourists and domestic tourists alike. It has also gained a reputation as the âIbiza of Asiaâ because of its raucous âGoa or psy-tranceâ rave parties, the large number of foreign visitors and its beaches (DâAndrea 2007: 182). The northern beaches such as Anjuna, Arambol, and 34 Vagator have longstanding reputations as the main party areas of Goa. Signs on these beaches are commonly written in Hebrew and Russian- catering to tourist demographics- and the nightlife is far more indulged in than day-time activities. The southern Agonda, Palolem, and Colva beaches are quieter, more family-friendly places to vacation, where nightlife culture is still present but minimal compared to the northern region. While visitors to the beaches of Goa and resulting tourism economy have had some positive impacts, such as cooperative community initiatives, increased income for residents, and creative developments in music production and entertainment, they have also generated conflict within the state. Locals have challenged partygoers with bans on loud music after 10pm (Saldanha 2007: 155), and anti- tourism lobbies partake in a constant social battle that seeks to erase the recursive belief that, because of these parties, Goa is an inherently âliberalâ state (DâAndrea 2007: 182). All of this takes place while residents have simultaneously found ways in formal and informal economies to profit off of their state acting as a hotbed for particular kinds of tourisms (Saldanha 2007: 124). In the early years, tourists from the global north who went to Goa tended to be middle, or upper class. Those middle- and upper-class preferences and tendencies have greatly shaped tourism patterns, behaviours and economies in Goa. In an attempt to abscond from what were thought to be oppressive norms and structures of 1960s America, hippies utilized Goa as a space and place for spiritual, physical, mental and emotional transformations. For them, Goa had a âplace imaginaryâ (Salazar and Graburn 2014) that allowed for the enactment of dreams and possibilities thought to be unattainable in their home countries. After the 1980s, drugs like heroin, MDMA and cocaine entered the scene more prominently in Goa. The nature of travel there became less about finding spiritual release or enlightenment in a like-minded community and took a turn towards a more individualized and insular direction (DâAndrea 2007: 218). âDarkâ psytrance 35 had also emerged as a genre of music made for people âtrippingâ on drugs, that utilizes mechanistic sounds pulsing loudly and monotonously. Although there are many ways in which the travelling scene in Goa brings together and separates those those visiting India from elsewhere and those from India itself (as can be seen in Saldanhaâs (2007) work), one thing that is certain, is that many people continue to be drawn to Goa with the expectation of having a transformative experience that they feel cannot adequately be reproduced elsewhere. It is no secret to tourism scholars that travel is often considered to be an important indicator in the process of becoming (Bruner 2005: Hottola 2005: Cohen 2010: Locke and Biehl 2010: Huberman 2012: De Groot and van der Horst 2014: Hannam 2014). As discussed above, the place imaginary of Goa is potentiated with a perceived transfiguring power, which then lends to âthe self and its body becoming a site of struggles wherein countercultural formations seek to engender alternative experiences of the selfâ (DâAndrea 2007: 184). In many ways this attempt to escape the structural confines of the nation-state, or cultural parameters in lieu of experiencing a more preferable version of oneself is something that can be seen in the motivations for travel amongst young Indian tourists, as well. Are all attempts at seeking something outside of our quotidian sphere longings to escape, or is this something that is salient primarily to those coming from cultures and countries outside of India? 2.3 Young Indians in Goa, now. Unfortunately, in recent years Goa has become a tourist destination that is rather unwelcoming towards young Indian travellers. In North Goa, parties are held exclusively for foreigners (with either a no-Indian entry policy, or exorbitant fees for Indians wishing to partake) and some restaurants illegally prohibit the serving of food and drinks to Indians. The long colonial history of European occupation and foreign tourism in north Goa has contributed to an on-going form of everyday racism that makes it more difficult for Indians to 36 experiment with the same types of freedoms and feelings of transcendence that international travellers have come to Goa to enjoy (Saldanha 2007; NDTV 2014). This unequal tolerance for similar expressions of liberties is something that is attributed by many people I spoke with to essentialized stereotypes of Indians as being more troublesome travellers than international visitors. Interlocutors I spoke to during my research repeated these ideas, which I found startling, and I discuss this in more detail later in this chapter. North Goa is a place in tourism discourses that encapsulates modern myths related to ânature, the noble savage, art, individual freedom and self-realization [which can hold] special significance for and are manifested in the social practice of tourismâ (Salazar and Graburn 2014: 4). Drawn to Goaâs place imaginary, many young Indians are now visiting as a rite of passage, on New Yearâs Eve, Christmas, weekend vacations or for popular music festivals like Hilltop, or Sunburn. With some of the lowest taxes on alcohol in the country, and a flock of foreigners who paved the way for transgressive behaviour and public intoxication, north Goa has gained a reputation for many young Indians as a place where people feel like they can temporarily remove themselves from the stressors of a âconventionalâ existence. They did this while at the same time engaging in lurid (often inebriated) behaviour that they otherwise do not have the opportunity to do pursue elsewhere, at least not without the same sense of imperviousness that Goa has been known to elicit. Emerging patterns of tourist behaviour in India fit into but also spill out of and contrast with existing theories in critical tourism studies literature. De Groot and van der Horst (2014) cite a chasing of common platitudes of modernity as the key motivations for youth visiting Goa. However, this runs in opposition to much of the Eurocentric tourism scholarship that claims the opposite: that tourists travel to imagine themselves to be removed from modernity to link back to a more ânaturalâ and âsimpleâ version of themselves (Chambers 2010: MacCannell 1998). De Groot and van der Horst argue that: 37 The search for existential authenticity is explicitly linked to the loss of that self in modern western society as âexistential authenticity denotes a special state of being in which one is true to oneself, and acts as a counter dose to the loss of âtrue selfâ in public roles and public spheres in modern Western societyâ (Wang, 1999, p. 358). To put it even more firmly, the entire notion of an authentic self, an identity uniquely distinguishable from others, is a preoccupation that is intrinsically bound up with modernity (Giddens, 1991). Thus, again, modern western experiences dominate in the conceptual under-pinnings of tourism studies (De Groot and van der Horst 2014: 205). This idea of the âsearch for authenticityâ in tourism has long been debated by tourism scholars, especially since the foundational work by Dean MacCannell (1998) on The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. The notion of seeking authenticity through touristic activities refers to a problematic, atavistic sensibility generated mainly by westerners. These travellers are said to attempt to harken back to a static place and time (usually in the global south) that never existed, and this cannot be neatly superimposed on young Indian travellers in India today. In addition, the predominant notion of escapism from the conditions of âmodernityâ2 found in tourism studies does not capture the diverse experiences of Indian youth travelling in Goa. Rather than escaping from modernity and its corollaries as many tourists from the West are said to do in India (Saldhana 2007: Maoz 2009: DâAndrea 2014), most Indian tourists associate Goa with a proverbial sense of the âmodernâ. Through its gaudy, flashy celebration of excess, this is what is allowing them to âescapeâ (from a supposed âlackâ of modernity) (De Groot and van der Horst 2014: 306). Salazar and Graburn discuss this in relation to tourism imaginaries: âAnother temporal aspect is the touristâs need to escape from the here and now to a more authentic life âelsewhereââ (2014: 10). An 2 With dominant narratives of modernity revolving largely around generative capitalist nations and a democratic governing system, India fits the bill. Of course, the idea that âmodernâ is positive or something to work towards is a part of what Trouillot (2002) describes as âNorth Atlantic universalsâ. Rather than having a clear and distinct definition, modernity is something that evokes âsensibilities, perceptions, choices and indeed states of affairs that are not captured as easily by other wordsâ (Trouillot 2002: 221). Loaded with normative endowments, modernity alludes to âa correct state of affairsâ (Trouillot 2002: 222). While remaining critical of the history and motivations behind these prescriptive ideals, it is still possible to acknowledge how this term and its associations are widely construed. 38 additional difference between young Indianâs experience of locating authenticity in a place, and that which is commonly discussed in academic literature based on western touristsâ desires, is that these tourists are not leaving their home countries to have this experience. De Groot and van der Horst note that in Goa: Escape appears as a prominent theme, as is the search for âtrue selvesâ. Still, those concepts, being defined from a western perspective, cannot be employed here just like that. Central to practices of middle-class Indian youth within a family or community setting is the need to acquiesce with the eldersâ opinions and desires. While room for the âtrue selfâ is not central to practices at home, it is fundamental to the interactions with peers, and its value is also spread through the media (2014: 314). Following De Groot and van der Horst, I argue that these tourists are stumbling forwards (often literally), attempting to latch onto identities which punctuate themselves as being integrated and relevant. These young adults in Goa are searching for authentic versions of themselves that they feel to be stifled by their home life and/or family and societal expectations. In this way there is a connection between the motivations of some international tourists to India, and domestic tourists in India. Through travelling, many of them are seeking to rework the cultural and social frameworks that they have grown up in, to better suit the versions of themselves that they aspire to embody. No place can readily be reduced to one defining characteristic, as inevitably there will be people, situations, or contexts that exist outside of the prevailing image of the place. Essentializing and distilling an entire state like Goa down to a place that exists solely for people to party, or a space only inhabited by tourists is a rather unfortunate consequence of international travellers brazenly using a land as an experimental playground. This perhaps unintended consequence has entrenched itself even deeper with the now growing influx of domestic travellers to Goa, who come to experience âbeaches, babes and boozeâ (De Groot and van der Horst: 2014). 39 As my fieldwork did not take place in Goa, I do not have the same kind of embodied knowledge and situated vocabulary that I gained while living in Gokarna. Though I have visited Goa thrice before, my experiences there were quite limited, as I often used it as a place of transit before heading south from the north (and to visit the Anjuna market, as aforementioned). Clearly there is more to a state than one activity people tend to partake in while visiting. The fact of the matter remains that the prevailing associations that particular groups of people have with Goa continues to perpetuate within particular contexts an image of a place known for experimentation and its transgressions of conventional behaviours. In a particularly conservative country, this popular narrative of Goa allows tourists to access kinds of freedoms that are both attainable in its place imaginary, and out of (long-term) reach in its temporariness as a weekend getaway locale. 2.4 Gokarna: the Goa alternative? Burning leaves, or depending on the time of year, burning garbage pushes thick smoke into the air and it is hard to tell if the smell is cleansing or polluting. Crows are in every corner of the surrounding trees. Well-fed cats stalk the fish market and dogs pink and balding with mange play with one another along the ocean front. The bats emerge after sunset to relieve you from the swarm of mosquitoes devouring your ankles. And of course, the cows; the unusually small but ever-present cows. Sometimes they run through town and seem especially rambunctious, but mostly they sit or stand placidly in the middle of streets, triumphantly stealing fruit and vegetables from roadside vendors when no one is watching. The summers hit thick and sticky, and the wintersâ¦ well, the winters are said to be not quite as cool as they used to, but all accommodations triple in price. The monsoon roars with a kind of power that knocks the wind out of you and the landscape breathes a sigh of relief as the dust and the clay is temporarily washed off of the leaves, and new growth emerges. Businesses are hit, literally, with the damage that high tide incurs, and the ocean spits out 40 garbage to cover the seashores with ugliness and a reminder of our wastefulness. High season means low tide, dry air, clean shorelines, which welcomes foreign travellers, notably Russians and Israelis who paint red tikkas on their foreheads and stare in awe at holy men. Pilgrims swarm the roads, grasping bananas and coconuts to offer as prasad at the temple. Young Indians travel in troves, one after another on motorbikes, winding through the bumpy and ill-kept roads- they, along with the pilgrims, visit in all seasons. Figure 4: Me and a tiny, fully grown Gokarna cow Gokarna is a village located in the Southern Indian state of Karnataka, in the Kannada-speaking Uttara Kannada district. It is around 100 kilometers south of Goa3. With approximately 30, 000 residents, Gokarna is not large enough to officially be considered a town by government statistics, though many people refer to Gokarna as a town. It is run by an elected, local governing body called the Gram Panchayat and is located approximately 500 kilometers away from the capital city of Bangalore, and about 670 kilometers away from Mumbai. Known for its beautiful beaches and the ancient Mahabaleshwar temple, Gokarna has attracted visitors for hundreds of years. For most of its history, Gokarna has been a site for Hindu pilgrimage due to its housing of the atma linga, a rock formation considered to be 3 There are few academic articles that refer to demographic statistics on Gokarna (Maligi 2019), nor does the Indian census include the villageâs specifics. For these reasons I draw on what the municipal members have told me. 41 part of the soul of one of Hinduismâs main gods, Shiva, which lies within the inner sanctums of the Mahabaleshwar temple. Figure 5: "Car Street" (the main temple road) during sunset Pilgrims have been visiting the Mahabaleshwar temple since it was built over 800 years ago, and in this way Gokarna has historically been an important destination due to its significance as site of religious devotion for Hindu pilgrims. The temple is located on Car Street, named after the cars/chariots that are taken out of the temple and pulled through the streets on special occasions. It is on this main street that most of the shops and restaurants have popped up, most run by families from Karnataka, and many from Gokarna itself. Car Street and the temple area of âmain Gokarnaâ is inhabited almost entirely by Hindus from the Brahmin jaati or caste. This predominance of a priestly demographic colours the town in a distinct way. Tiny toddler brahmins, with their ceremonial strings dangling across their chests, walk barefoot to the school where they learn to memorize and embody a sacred history of ancient Vedic texts. Four am pujas happen every single morning and sandalwood incense fills peopleâs noses as they pass the temple. Rangolis, intricate mandalas made from rice flour that women create outside of their homes decorate the streets on most mornings. 42 The interweaving of devotional practices and commerce in Gokarna also gives rise to a popular marketplace that appeals to various interests. When writing about another region of India, Edensor describes the pedestrian spheres of religious devotion: âAt village level [in India], sacred features mark everyday living and working spaceâ (Edensor 2013: 24). Families come from all over South India to perform the last rites for their deceased relatives at the Mahabaleshwar temple. It is for these reasons that Gokarna is often considered as the Kashi of the South (a reference to the city of Kashi, or Varanasi, the place where Hindus have their bodies burned to reach moksha, or liberation). Thus, when tourists talk about Gokarna, they refer primarily to the temple and the beaches. In short, it is âa temple town,â graced with beautiful beaches. Figure 6: The chariot being pulled through Car Street on an auspicious evening 43 Figure 7: Rangoli design According to several hotel/café operators I spoke with, in the 1980s Gokarna gained a reputation as âan alternative to Goaâ for many travelers seeking solitude and reprieve from its more populated neighbor. Both places boast Konkan coast topography of towering coconut and arak trees, the Western Ghatsâ flora and fauna next to the Arabian sea, and a rich, red clay that seems to work its way into everything. Visually, Gokarna, in its natural splendor, could hardly be distinguished from Goa. With a demographic that consists of largely two communities, the subsistence based Halakki Vokkaliga and Brahmins, Gokarna provides all the bucolic and natural benefits that many travellers expressed that north Goa âonce hadâ4. The temple in Gokarna and the presence of pious Brahmins adds a substantial spiritual, or religious field of devotion for those seeking it. Additionally, because of the small size of Gokarna, and the limited crowds in comparison to popular beach towns in north Goa, many visitors are attracted to the quaint village character. As Salazar and Graburn write, an important part of tourist imaginaries is that in order to âsuccumb to allotemporal imaginariesâ one often considers the impression that âthe absence of humans equals purityâ (2014: 10). As I will show in this thesis, the absence of humans equalling purity remains an important theme and motivation for the domestic tourists I spoke with in Gokarna. 4 There are some parts of Goa, particularly in the south that are less commercially developed than the north. Though it was consistent that when residents of Gokarna spoke to why Gokarna first appealed to the progenitors of recreational travel to the area, they spoke in these ways; that Gokarna provided what Goa had seemed to have âlostâ in its process of commercialization. 44 Although the first guesthouse to open for foreign travellers in Gokarna was remembered differently by residents there, every interlocutor noted that the first recreational tourists to the area came from Goa. These tourists took refuge on the beaches that had previously been little more than abandoned stretches of rocky coastline. In referencing these early travelers in Gokarna, the language used to describe them was often idealized in a romantic and heroic way. Local residents praised these tourists for living with Brahmin families, and eating what was offered to them, and for keeping mostly to themselves. Those who were not living with local families slept directly on the beach, in caves, or rented small dwellings that some locals had started to build along the beaches. Many people I talked with also described these foreigners as âeccentricâ and behaving in rather flagrant ways such as sunbathing nude. For example, one man, while attempting to explain to me why Gokarna was considered to be so âlaid back,â even described (perhaps in a hyperbolic attempt to get a point across, perhaps not) how these so-called âhippiesâ would have sex publicly on the beach, with little care for the surrounding residents living or farming in the nearby areas. Despite this troubling behaviour described by some of my interlocutors, after some time, the Brahmins and Halakki Vokkaligas of Gokarna became accustomed to these âeccentricâ practices by âoutsidersâ. At least, this was how it was described to me. It was my experience that even when conflict occurred between locals and tourists in the past, it was often downplayed by residents of Gokarna, particularly when they were describing the recent history of the place. Several people remarked how international tourists were often âtaken care of by Brahminsâ and emphasized amicable relations between these social groups, which is something I discuss in greater detail in the last chapter. The owner of one of the oldest and most popular cafes in Gokarna told me of a particular article in a Karnataka newspaper called Deccan Herald (which I was unable to locate) that printed a picture of naked foreigners lying on the beaches of Gokarna. He said 45 that this story prompted a wave of young domestic travellers to see for themselves what was happening in the small beachside village. Another person added that the increase of buses from Bangalore to Gokarna further contributed to the influx of Indian travellers. Whatever the initial impetus was, the dominant demographic of recreational tourists in Gokarna today are young Indians harkening primarily from the relatively nearby and well-connected metropolises of Mumbai and Bangalore. Additionally, at the time of my fieldwork, many tourists were students coming from the cities of Manipal and Pune visiting Gokarna on weekends or vacations. This is a development that has happened in the past five to ten years. When I asked about the motivations for these young Indians travelling to Gokarna, one frequent answer I received was the allure of recreational drug use. 2.5 Drug-use as impetus for visiting Gokarna? While drug use in Gokarna was evident during my fieldwork, I am not convinced that Gokarna, like Goa, has a notorious reputation as a place to buy drugs. In fact, I heard quite the opposite during my time there. Gokarna appears to be a more expensive place to buy poorer quality drugs (namely charas or cannabis) than in most other cities, and travellers tend to avoid buying the poor-quality drugs. Still, when I spoke with older Gokarna residents about tourism, they often attempted to deflect the conversation to focus on foreign travellers, rather than domestic. More often than not, they regarded the arrival of young Indians coming to Gokarna as nothing more than hedonistic ventures. It was as if most residents of Gokarna did not conceive of Indians as âlegitimateâ tourists, a term and type of performance that seemed to be reserved specifically for non-Indians. Whenever I spoke of tourism, it was assumed that I was referring to foreign visitors. When I would try to redirect the conversation towards domestic tourism, it was flippantly brushed aside as seemingly less meaningful than the âkindâ of tourism that international travellers partook in. Could their refusal of Indians as tourists have something to do with the value attached to long-term visitors rather than 46 weekend tourists? Economically, this does not add up, as Gokarna makes significantly more money off of Indians coming for weekend trips than foreigners residing for a week or two. Although I delve into this pattern in greater depth in future chapters, I note here the chasm between the ways in which Indian tourists and their behavior were understood in comparison to international tourists from local perspectives. In a nutshell, the former was considered to be more badly behaved than the latter. These sentiments were expressed by Indian tourists and residents alike. While touristsâ behaviours were disputed what remained undisputed was the common local belief that the âhippie trailâ from Goa to Gokarna was fuelled by an appetite for ingesting drugs and âdropping outâ in beautiful beach locales. While foreign travellers continue to perpetuate this image, in my experience, the use of drugs was a frequent point of discussion by locals with specific reference to young Indians visiting Gokarna. Undoubtedly, âgetting highâ was one of the most common activities that I observed among tourists in Gokarna. In one of my more memorable encounters, I was speaking with a group of very drunk men coming from Bangalore who were staying on Kudle beach. I was swimming in the ocean on my own, somewhat trying to avoid engaging with them, when they struck up conversation with me. They proudly proclaimed to me that they were going to the Mahabaleshwar temple to pray for LSD, because they had lost theirs just before arriving. Shocked by their unorthodox utilization of the temple, I laughed, wished them luck and swam away. Drinking, especially beer, was common, if not expected among tourists in Gokarna. Throughout the day in the hostel that I lived, there were always tourists in bean bag chairs with their feet up, drinking alcohol and/or rolling spliffs (joints with charas/hash or marijuana and tobacco mixed), playing music on Bluetooth speakers, chatting, or simply overlooking the ocean view. This seemed to be a popular activity for many tourists. Others would trek to various beaches only accessible by walking paths through the forest in search of more remote locations to enjoy the solitude and get high. Despite the prevalence of drug consumption 47 among many Indian tourists visiting Gokarna, it did not come up so frequently in conversation as being a key determinant for people visiting Gokarna. However, several tourists acknowledged that they came to Gokarna because there was a less likely chance of being caught smoking in the open than elsewhere (which after this year I am not so sure is the case)5. It seems though, for most people that do smoke and/or drink, it was just a regular activity that they would have been doing in any other place (but perhaps inside a room instead of overlooking a sublime landscape). In my own time doing fieldwork, I found that while drugs were used in Gokarna, drug use was by and large not a motivating factor for a number of visitors I spoke with over the course of four months. While the aforementioned laid-back atmosphere of Gokarna was thought to be conducive to âgood tripsâ, people I spoke with travelled there for other reasons. Before moving to the next section, I want to acknowledge an interesting tension at work here. On the one hand, an auspicious town built around a holy pilgrimage site calls for acts of purification and religious devotion. While on the other hand, Gokarna has become a popular spot to âtripâ or get high. None of my interlocutors found this to be problematic, as the spatial geography of Gokarna allowed for the pilgrims to remain on one beach, and the recreational tourists on the others. 5 While Goa is known for its robust âcapacityâ to sustain transgressive behaviours, it has also become a place with an astronomical number of police who routinely target tourists. This has made it a place where people do not feel as confident in breaking the law as they may have used to. 48 Figure 8: Tourists enjoying a beer and the view on Kudle Beach 2.6 âOtheringâ Indian travellers in Gokarna Another tension that was evident in my fieldwork was the frustration many young Indians expressed towards âotherâ Indian tourists in Gokarna. What is it that these young Indians find so off-putting and how are they setting themselves apart from other Indian visitors? A rather unsettling and recurring theme that I encountered throughout the duration of this research was the derogatory ways in which people would speak about Indian tourists. Not only from tourists themselves, but from café owners, police, and locals in town. One man who runs a popular café on Om beach told me that he refuses to rent rooms to Indians because âthey cause problems by drinking too much and make the [foreign] women uncomfortableâ. His grouping of Indians as drunk, male and heterosexual is inherently problematic for a variety of reasons, and he did not stand alone in his opinions. It should be said that when people were referring to tourists in India, it was generally men whom they were referring to as being (troublesome) tourists. Considering male travellers to be the default tourist in India is being challenged by the growing presence of independent (and otherwise) women travellers. Though, by and large, issues that interlocutors had with tourists were associated with males and with hyper-masculine behaviour (such as obnoxious public intoxication, being loud, or inappropriate sexual advances). One exception to this would be related to garbage and pollution- men and women were seen as equal harbingers for 49 environmental destruction. Both tourism and gender are thought to be expressed in a performative manner (Edensor 2001; Butler 1989), and there is the propensity for both of these performances to interact in various ways. Certain destinations can be considered to be more attractive to certain genders (Frohlick 2020) and, as is the case in Gokarna, particular touristsâ behaviours can have gendered connotations. Men occupy a very visible place in the public sphere in India, and occurences that are related to this public sphere, such as tourism, do tend have an overrepresentation of males within them. As noted in chapter three in this research, the ability for women to travel is largely mediated by their families, and perceptions of safety. While still beholden to their families, the male tourists I encountered in Gokarna more often than not had greater opportunities for mobility, both as individual and group travellers. While I do not focus in-depth on gender dynamics and representations in this research, it was clearly noted, as was the case with the café owner on Om beach, that most residents and tourists were considering the role of a tourist to be fulfilled mainly by men. As I mentioned previously, in choosing Gokarna over Goa as a place to vacation the participants I interviewed felt they had more freedom in a smaller place with less people and less surveillance. However, it was precisely this feature of the place imaginary that was being transformed as more and more tourists came to relax and engaged in smoking and drinking. As a result of the smoking and drinking, the presence of police had increased exponentially, as I witnessed in the past few years when I was visiting and also doing my fieldwork. What was alarming to me, rather than the mere presence of police, were the ways in which police were conducting their sweeps of Gokarna. On these occasions, they almost exclusively target Indians. Police were stopping groups and individuals walking on hills, beaches, roadsides, etc. and, without legal grounds, asking them to empty all the contents of their bags, pockets and wallets. These targeted sweeps led to a massive surge in bribes being paid to the police, as many travellers coming to Gokarna were carrying cannabis or hashish on them, something 50 the police seemed to be well aware of. From my fieldnotes, I document an incident that occurred in relation to these police interactions: September 28th, 2019. âI walked along the cliffs at Om beach. The water was so high that no one else was around, so I decided to go back to Kudle. As I was walking down the footpath towards the beach, I saw two police walking with two young Indian men. A little down the way I saw a group of four men looking very melancholic. One had a jean jacket on. I asked them if those were their friends with the police, and they said yes. I asked if they had been smoking weed, and they said yes. I kept walking and saw some more Indian tourists. They asked me if the cops checked me, and I said no.â Walking along the path to the beach, I often came across sullen groups of tourists hanging around one area and each time it turned out that a friend was detained by police until they all agreed upon a fair bribe price. I saw this happen over twenty times while I was in Gokarna, and never once was I stopped and/or searched by police. In one instance, I was walking with an Indian man when two police officers stopped and searched him, while they completely ignored me6. On one occasion, I had a chance to speak with a local politician about these police sweeps and their targeting of Indian tourists. He told me that police would not search foreigners because of the potentially negative ramifications on tourism in the area. Again, economically, this is incongruent, considering that Indian tourists are more frequent and are known to spend more money on their weekend vacations than European or North American backpackers. Moreover, a greater number of Indian tourists visit Gokarna in âoff- seasonâ than do international tourists. Foreigners have a kind of imperviousness against law enforcement in this way, even though everyone knows quite well that it is not only Indians who are coming to Gokarna and indulging in illegal substances. This remains quite disturbing 6 While male police officers would almost never search a female, there were times where female police officers were present, and still, I would not be searched. 51 to me and contributes to circuitous stereotyped ideologies that it is Indians who are âbadâ tourists and international travellers who add value to a touristic location/economy. Figure 9: A tourist couple on Kudle beach walking to "negotiate" with police These critiques of Indian tourists call into question the morality of what constitutes a âgoodâ tourist, particularly within a post-colonial framework, and is an attempt to navigate the perpetually murky waters of appropriate tourist behaviour. According to Edensor, âPerformers are also subject to the disciplinary gaze of co-participants and onlookers, and the appropriateness of the performance is equally reliant upon the ability of any audience to share the meaning the actor hopes to transmitâ (Edensor 2001: 72). Performance as defined here, is a ââdiscrete concretization of cultural assumptionsâ (Carlson, 1996: 16) which mingle every day and tourist codes of actionâ (Edensor 2001: 71). When there is a chasm amongst tourists about how one should act and why, contention and a purposeful separation arises. In an interview, Anil from Gujarat, a twenty-four-year-old man who I shared a dorm room with for over a week noted the following: A: And the best part of Gokarna is less Indians. Especially the west of Gujarat is not that aware of Gokarna. 52 B (researcher): Why is that a good thing? A: Itâs not a good thing. In that way, because seeâ¦ You know about Ladakh right? Ladakh is now so much full of waste. Here I see less amount of people than in other places like in Goa. See Goaâ¦ what is happening with Goa, right? Thatâs why this is a good place. B: But specifically, you said less Indians, rather than less people. A: Ah yes. Because I believe we do much more harm than others are doing to us. B: Right. You feel that in other tourist sites that Indians damage the environment more than international tourists? A: Yes, in India. Because theyâre, like, âitâs oursâ. When Kishant, a tourist from Mysore, spoke with me about international tourists in particular, he said: âSo, according to me, these kind of awareness [of the environment] things are done by the foreigners. So thatâs what I really love about them; they actually care about nature, no matter what they do, whatever theyâre doing, it might be anything, but still, they care about nature. Theyâll carry their own trash bag wherever theyâre going.â Similarly, in a rather common comparison between the north and south of India, Pratik from Mumbai said this about tourists in Goa: K: All the north Indians have taken over. North Indians are the worst related to such things in Goa. B: What do you mean? K: I find them too loud. Maybe their thing of vacation is different from my thing. Maybe that is why I find them weird. Placing a distinct stake between themselves and other Indian tourists, these young travellers in Gokarna often communicated a disassociation between how they, and how their Indian counterparts, considered to be loud, small-minded, and lewd, are choosing to travel. The above comments indicate what I interpret as a general separation between those people who act one way (disrespectful) versus those who do not. As Edensor writes, âOne of the sources of tension and contestation in tourist performance is that between unreflexive and reflexive dispositionsâ (Edensor 2001: 63). Building on this comment, I argue that young 53 Indian travellers in Gokarna feel there is in many ways a kind of crisis of consciousness in tourism, with many of them speaking to what they feel is a disproportionate number of Indian tourists acting unreflexively. Behaviour such as harming the natural environment and being loud was thought to negatively impact the desired atmosphere or vibe (as will be discussed in chapter three) of the places they visit. This behaviour was seen to be a particularly âIndianâ issue. For example, Devi, from Hyderabad, discussed how Indian tourists do not support the local economy by eating only at their hostels rather than at locally owned restaurants: D: Youâre taking over their fucking space, youâre not even giving them [an] economic boost. How do you expect them to be okay with that? Conscious travelling is not a thing. B (researcher): You feel that? D: Yeah, itâs not a thing. Forget feeling that, I know that to be a fact. Itâs not a thing. People do not ask themselves these questions. They donât. 2.7 Group travel While a lack of consideration for others was a critique that was frequently levelled at Indian tourists, another common point of criticism was the tendency for Indians to travel in groups. For example, Shruti from Mumbai told me that when Indians travel in groups, they are âdisruptive and unrelatableâ (her words). Their disruptive and unrelatable behaviour was in comparison to the behaviour of other independent Indian travellers in Gokarna who have: âgiven me a new perspective of how people are now traveling by themselves. First, Iâve never seen that happen. Especially with Indian travelers. Iâve seen a lot of foreigners who come who are most of the time by themselves. But it was very new to see so many [Indians]. I think thatâs coming up now. I think people are getting a little less scaredâ¦. It just makes me happy that people are changing their travel way, and theyâre not scared. Now I can chill with people of my own country also. Because when theyâre in big groups and Iâm alone, I would not be comfortable to go and sit in a group. But if theyâre alone and youâre so transparent, and youâre soâ¦ because itâs just like me.â I was relieved to hear her say this, because she relocated the issue from being essentially âIndiansâ to a critique of âIndians travelling in groupsâ. Her critique of Indians travelling in groups calls into question what cultural contexts and social imperatives 54 encourage Indians to travel together rather than individually. Certainly, traveling in groups is not a practice particular to Indian travellers, as many theorists discuss enclavic tourism, such as backpacking and all-inclusive resorts, and the tendency of nationals to group together (Edensor 2003; Hottola 2005; Maoz 2007). Though, in Gokarna, group travel was talked about as something that only Indians tended to do. An exception to the stereotyping of Indian tourists came up when one interviewee noted that foreigners generally tend to stick together in groups, making it difficult for her to interact with them. People travel in groups for a variety of reasons, but in a country where the extent and form of freedoms is often dictated by family (Jambunathan and Counselman 2002), many young people are not allowed to travel if they are not doing so with a group. This remains particularly pronounced for female-identifying travellers. It is in my experience that many travellers eager to go by themselves often lie to their families and tell them that they are going with friends when they are not. I met countless individuals who, by force of circumstance, lied in order to be in Gokarna. Shiva, one traveller whom I interviewed, even ran away from home and chose Gokarna as his hide-out place for a week. However, for some people traveling solo this was not viable, nor desirable. Mahina from Delhi explained to me why she thought Indians travel together in groups: Mmm... firstly, I think people donât know how liberating solo travel is. So, they feel that we will get bored. What will we do, you know? Travelling solo is just not my thing. And, secondly, even if they wanted to do solo travel their parents wonât allow them, again because of safety reasons. And girls especially wonât travel solo because theyâll feel that itâs not very safe. And I do a lot of research about a place before going there. So, probably if someone is going to a place for a second time, they still might think that they can go solo, but if itâs the first time, I think people have a lot of apprehensions, so first is safety and second is I think, people think that âIâll get boredâ. I think a lot of people donât take out time to be with their self, or their âme time,â or their need for me time is very low or limited, so they think that three or four days without meeting people or without being in that known group they wonât survive. And what they donât realize is you will definitely meet people on your solo travel, and you will meet more people than you would if you were in a group. So, you will get to know a lot more about a place if you travel solo rather than if you travel in a group. 55 If you travel in a group you will either end up drinking, playing cards, or anything, like after you have, for the day you have seen every place, in the night probably you will just be among your group and not explore. So yeah. Two reasons for not traveling solo: safety and I will get bored. Devi, focusing on the connections she made while travelling spoke to the ways in which travelling in groups can prevent this desired connection: Yeah. I know you want to travel because you want your alone time, but you also do crave company once in a while. When you go to these touristy places that doesnât happen, because theyâre all in their groups. Even here, Saturday was a different scene all together, in the hostel. Everybody was in groups. Look at it today. Today it is Tuesday- your long weekend is done. Everybodyâs engaged and becomes one circle, because theyâre not in their groups anymore. Evidently there is a valorization of a particular kind of traveller, which is how many people in Gokarna viewed themselves: as solo travellers, or travellers who have the propensity to travel solo. Many people claimed that the atmosphere of a place shifts when there are groups congregating, rather than travellers going around individually with an increased valence for connection. Those in groups are already bonded and are considered to have a lack of interest in engaging with others outside of their pre-established group. This counters the self-forming activities that could take place in new spaces with new people. Even at a popular hostel where I often undertook participant observation, their policies discouraged groups from staying there by maintaining that no more than four people could book beds in the dorm rooms together. Often people would sneak around this rule by making separate bookings under different names to try to get in the same dorm room. The hostel made this âno groupsâ policy to ensure that travellers would socialize with one another, and to help maintain âthe vibeâ of a travellerâs hostel as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter. Despite these efforts to mitigate tourist groupings, from my observations and inquiries to hostel management, most people travelling in Gokarna were coming in groups. Solo travel in Gokarna, while on the rise, is still far less likely than travelling with others. 56 As a result of this disposition towards group travel, I often felt uncomfortable with the colonial overtones in certain conversations that painted international travellers as heroic, capable, responsible and civil, while Indians were considered to be unruly, disruptive, inept and uneducated. There was an overwhelming refusal to acknowledge that it is not only Indians who organize themselves together when they travel, but most kinds of people. In this, there was a selective inclusion and exclusion of who it is who has a predilection to become âgood touristsâ or partake in âconscious travellingâ. Recognizing culturally informed circumstances that require Indians to travel in groups rather than on their own remains crucial in understanding why travellers are sticking together. It also points to why they are concurrently judged by fellow travellers for doing so. Not being able to shake free from these limiting frameworks based in collectivity was undesirable for many of my interlocutors coming from the respective metropolitan cities that they were living in. For most of them, their independence was a key component to the merit and meaning of their travels. While in the twenty-first century more young Indians are living separately from their families, the majority of young people continue to live with their parents. It is entirely feasible, and indeed is something I have experienced in speaking with tourists, that many travellers are not aware of the possibility that they can travel alone. Again, this is especially true for those who identify as women. It is simply not part of the dominant cultural narrative that one should, or even can, travel alone and concurrently enjoy their time. There does seem to be a class element to travelling alone as well: those who are in an economic position to be able to travel alone and bear the expenses were those who felt that group travel was undesirable. Many people acknowledged that there is a time and a place to travel in groups. Travelling with family, for celebratory occasions, and travelling with friends, were understood as being circumstantially necessary. That being said, all eleven 57 interviewees stated that solo travel was more valuable and liberating than group travel. A few quotes from travellers help illustrate this point: âWith friends itâs just us getting high. Going to places and getting high. We just go for getting high. With friends itâs always like that. Solo isâ¦ itâs similar, but youâre on your own, with your own thoughts. No one to talk too. Itâs fun. You can be whoever the fuck you want.â â Shiva from Ooty. ââ¦So yeah, prior to that I think I travelled with family, with groups of friends, batchmates, but that first solo trip made me realize how, I donât knowâ¦ how free and how nice it is to travel solo. Like, doing your own thing, doing whatever you like whenever you like. So, after that I think Iâve travelled solo always.â â Ved from Delhi. âI donât have to manage people. I can enjoy moments and I can enjoy things on my own. Not because I donât like company, but when youâre with people you have to also be mindful with their concerns and what they want. So, you have to compromise on that. Which is also okay. But then here, youâre on your own. If you want to stay at a place and enjoy a place, you can just sit back and enjoy the moment, which is the best thing about travelling solo.â â Rameez from Delhi. I ask, what kinds of desires are informing this need to sublimate a certain kind of tourism to become a more refined version of something idealized? How are new subjectivities that arise out of this desire being born into the landscape of Gokarna in the twenty-first century? And, what are the implications of these subjectivities in relation to the history of tourism in this area? It seems to me that the idea of travelling alone is conflated with a deeper appreciation for the place visited. A solo tourist is readily a conduit for new experiences, and this is what contributes to a sense of growth. If afraid or uncomfortable in doing so, travel experience seemed to be considered less formatively productive. âIf I also travel with people, I have my own time at certain periods. But the main purpose is to be rebalanced again, to have some time where you donât have to do anything. You just have to observe yourself, with what you like and donât, and come back and work again on yourself.â â Anil from Gujarat.â âWhile we travel, we, you know, get and especially in solo travels, we get to connect with ourselves, and, you know, be introspective about a lot of things. We also explore the place, meet new people, everything. Basically, you evolve as a person when you travel. Ideally you should evolve as a person when you travel.â â Shruti from Mumbai. 58 I began to interpret these narratives about solo travelling in Gokarna as being understood as âa vehicle to engage in ongoing developmental processes of learning about the selfâ (Cohen 2010: 124). This kind of thinking is in line with a neoliberal conception of the individualized self, but people who had participated in solo travel firsthand were noting the value of it. They had a lived experience of what it was like to be alone and travelling, versus the feeling of travelling with others. Tourism can allow individuals to define themselves according to their personal experiences of the world, rather than solely through paradigms offered by their society relating to their age, nationality, background, and gender. By redefining the foundations of their selfhood, tourists may attempt to shift away from the identity they share with others and to find space for a new individualized identity. This does not remove the neoliberal component of this developmental ideology as there is undoubtedly an emphasis on the individual, particularly surrounding ideas of âworkingâ on oneself. Though, alongside these ideas is the notion that when a tourist is alone, they are more receptive to connecting with others who they meet at the travel destination and to the destination itself. The experience is not just about the solo traveller. It is about the traveller as independent (and therefore available) to increase potentialities of unexplored relationships. In my research I found that young Indians in both cities and towns/villages were often looking for an opportunity to engage with the world in a new way; that is, alone. Having deeply involved and often controlling familial structures, it could be that in this way, âregulation calls incessantly for freedomâ (Edensor 2001: 62). This experimental journey into what may be understood to be a specific kind of âprocess of becomingâ (Locke and Biehl 2010: 323) opens up new forms of individual and collective subjectivity, as those travelling solo, bond with one another. Travel in groups and individually can prompt processes of becoming, but based on what interlocutors in Gokarna have told me, solo travel is considered to be of higher value in its ability to potentiate growth, than group travel. 59 2.8 Family dynamics Based on my fieldwork, I found that young people in India are generally not encouraged to work before they have completed further studies, granted they are studying. This is not a phenomenon relegated only to the upper classes or castes, despite the privilege that it seems to carry. While I have not been able to substantiate these claims through the wider literature, I feel confident in relaying these ideas as they have been expressed countless times to me by both friends and interlocutors in India. According to many of my interlocutors, as well as Indians that I have stayed with throughout the years, many parents who cannot afford to pay for their child(ren)âs tuition fees and costs of living will take out a loan formally with a bank, or informally through other means. The child attending school is not always aware of this. It may be that only after they have graduated or are nearing completion of their studies that their parents explicitly communicate their expectations to have this fiscal favour returned through frequent remittances and a subsequent life-long duty to ensure the parentsâ financial well-being. This is not the case for every family, but in speaking with hundreds of young people over the course of the past two years in India, I have come to see a pattern in this sort of familial insurance policy. Regardless of whether or not parents have to borrow money for their child(ren)âs further education, parents are assumed to bear the financial brunt of the expense of education. When students are studying, they are rarely expected to be working, and there is not arguably, the same set of expectations we often see here in North America for young adults to become fully, or mostly âindependentâ. The notion of being in oneâs early twenties without a job is not something that exists solely within a sphere of privilege among the young elite of India (though it certainly and predictably intersects with privilege in many regards). It is something that happens to be quite common in varying strata of society. This is also because in many respects young people do not need to have their own income. They are in most instances expected to stay with their 60 families. Independent living in the age bracket of eighteen to thirty-two, though increasing quickly, is still not the expectation or encouraged way to live (Economic Times 2016). As Jambunathan and Counselman argue, âIndian parents play an active role in their childrenâs lives until they have achieved a secure positionâ (2002: 112). In many âcollectivistâ cultures, as parts of India are often considered to be, it is argued that it is not common for younger people to rebel against traditional practices (Maher, Winston, Easvaradoss 2017: 302). While this may ring true, in that young people often do eventually accept their projected responsibilities, they are also negotiating these responsibilities on their own terms. While family often dictates important decisions for young Indians âsuch as marriage, religion and careersâ (Maher, Winston, Easvaradoss 2017: 307) making the decision to travel independently or with friends can be an extension of how young Indians are searching for sovereignty within their own lives. De Groot and van der Horst note, âIn the case of Indian youth, the desire for an authentic self should be understood in the context of traditional family circumstances that leave little room for individualityâ (2014: 306). This âauthentic selfâ, in this context, can be enacted through making decisions that define and express oneâs own agency. Although travel was by and large not perceived by my interlocutors as a renouncement of worldly existence as perhaps some travellers from the west to India have considered it to be, my research suggests that through opportunistic travel, some young Indians were attempting to relieve themselves of the broader social expectations imposed on them by their parents. My research shows that young Indians were travelling as much as they could because they knew that a kind of âhoneymoon periodâ was short-lived and that expectations to provide for their families will grow. Additionally, those who were either working and/or living outside of their familiesâ homes had the freedom to take vacations when they chose, without having to inform their parents or ask permission to travel. This 61 opportunity to travel away from family remains particularly pertinent for those who identify as females travelling. Many young Indian women I spoke with were taking advantage of the ruptures in time that allowed them to be both dependent (on their parents for income), and independent (of their families to travel). 2.9 Why are young Indians travelling to Gokarna? Interestingly, though De Groot and van der Horst (2014) found in their research that young Indians in Goa were looking to connect with a sense of modernity that embraced excessive consumption, my own research experience with Indian tourists in Gokarna was quite different. More along the lines of âescaping modernityâ and its reverberations, all of the tourists whom I interviewed in Gokarna were looking for a vacation that removed them from what they have come to associate with cities and their by-products. De Groot and van der Horst criticize the need to link âescape to the experience of modernityâ as being rooted in âa strikingly western interpretationâ (De Groot and van der Horst 2014: 204). I found that Indians in Gokarna were looking to escape their own particular version of modernity. Such desires for escape from modernity did not necessarily directly mirror the west, but were produced within Indian contexts of working jobs, studying, and engaging in social spheres. Amongst my research participants and in my casual conversations while living in Gokarna, I found that the most popular reason for the âneedâ to travel among Indian tourists at Om and Kudle beach was a desire for connection: to self, to nature, and to others. It was less about a nagging desire to become, or to escape becoming, a modern subject as dictated by the west and the habits of those residing in India. I ask, where are these desires for connection coming from? Who, if anyone, is projecting, suggesting or discouraging these desires? 62 A desire to connect is a prevalent theme in tourism studies (DâAndrea 2007: Cohen 2010: De Groot, van der Horst 2014: Hottola 2005: Huberman 2012), although these are not frameworks that young Indians are basing their desires on. They are not necessarily absconding from their own countries with a need to rebuild their lives anew. Nor are young Indian tourists attempting to connect to their own selves through âOthering,â foundational to theories on authenticity in tourism among western tourists. Often the physical distance travelled (and the perceived difference between the âhostâ and the âguestâ) is conceived to proportionately represent the thoroughness of the escape (Bruner 2005). Super-imposing western touristsâ behaviours and resulting theories onto young Indians may fail to address the particular cultural context through which young Indians are coming to visit Gokarna. âWeâre more exploratory, I guess, Indian travellers currently. Solo travellers have become so common now, so common. Back ten years ago, it was not a common thing to see. Like six, seven years back when I started travelling for work, my god. You want a single room? Is somebody joining you? No, nobodyâs joining me *laughs*, like Iâm staying here tonight and leaving tomorrow, Iâm here for work. Youâre travelling alone? Yeah, just get over it, please. And now, for the last three, four yearsâ¦ the initial two years when I started, around 2013/14 was a little different, but now theyâre very open to solo travellers, female solo travellers for that matter.â- Sundari from Kanpur. The longing that tourists in Gokarna have to remove themselves from their everyday capitalist environments are creating kinds of micro-resistance which are âbreaking open alternative pathwaysâ (Locke and Biehl 2010: 317) to happy and fulfilling lives while dealing with demanding work/school schedules, familial constraints/expectations and limited time off. Based on my interpretation of the responses deriving from the interviews I argue that the principal motivations for people coming to Gokarna is because they are looking for a place that provides ânaturalâ beauty, relaxation, fun, and a sense of freedom. All these variables are considered to be a combination of assets increasingly difficult to find in one location at an affordable price. Modernity (and its effects) is not simply escaping to annihilate oneâs senses with intoxicants and trying to get laid on the weekends at a beach party. Modernity includes 63 all experiences combined to form current trajectories, which are constantly mediated by social, political, spiritual, cultural and economic conditions. Edensor conceives of the idea of edgework as being âactivities that involve testing and challenging routine moral and cultural boundariesâ (Edensor 2001:71). Perhaps it is that the kind of edgework that young travellers in Gokarna are engaging with and challenging boundaries. While some tourists find issue with treating tourism as an escape, many people are creating a distinction between their working life and their vacation life. Despite the critiques from tourism scholars of separating these two worlds and dividing âontological worlds [between] the worlds of the mundane and exoticâ (Larsen 2008:22) this tendency was very much alive in the interlocutors of this research. Daily routines and places that one normally inhabits have the potential to be just as transformative as any other experience, and âeveryday life is not merely full of robotic and rigid praxis but contains a multitude of other potentialitiesâ (Edensor 2001: 62). Though, by and large, the interviewees felt as if their daily lives lacked the significance or meaning that they were able to locate in Gokarna and other places like it. Tourists visiting Gokarna, whom I spoke with were (according to their own considerations of meaningful tourism) intentionally transforming their daily routines, and perhaps by extension, themselves. They were seeking transformation through being in a place that they considered a catalyst for tapping into latent prospects which lay dormant in their daily lives. Perhaps there is a distinction made between active and passive experiences that allows for travel to expedite this process. These ideas will be revisited in chapter three. 2.9 âGoaâs dead, man.â As Shiva from Ooty told me: âVery few people go back to Goa a lot now. Itâs always new people coming in all the time, and then giving up on Goa. A lot of people I know personally say they wonât go back. Theyâre done.â How do these sentiments and views about 64 the unsavouriness of group travel relate to the growing unpopularity of Goa and the birth of Gokarna as a popular alternative for young Indians to visit? As Devi from Hyderabad described: âI maybe- I have a thing to go against mob behaviour. Maybe I do that [laughs] and Goa is mob behaviour. One goes there and just everybody else follows. So, Iâve discovered Gokarna at a time when it wasnât so big a deal- it is now. It wasnât so big a deal. Itâs always something that was raw, and I still carry that image in my head. I think thatâs why Iâll always, always be drawn towards it.â In asking why tourists came to Gokarna over Goa, all eleven interviewees replied with sentiments that Goa was âtoo crowdedâ and âtoo commercializedâ: âWhat donât I like about Goa? Mostly itâs very commercialized. Thatâs it. Too many people.â - Ved from Delhi. Rameez from Delhi told me that: âHey, Gokarna is a very, you know, off the reigns place. People always go to Goa or some other cliché.â In other words, Goa evokes the same distasteful characteristics that Indians travelling in groups are criticized for: ostentatious behaviours, overly concerned with appearances while simultaneously lacking critical reflexivity and an openness to connect, and, the dreaded group mentality. Despite the historical notoriety of Goa, its own popularity seems to be working to its disadvantage, and is now pushing people away from this site, because of the number of tourists that it draws. The Indian travellers in my study were looking for places to unwind; places that allow for a more expansive sense of relaxation and possibility rather than a commercialized visit to a place they feel is too densely populated with other tourists. This relates back to Salazar and Graburnâs (2014) point about tourists considering places with few tourists to have a greater sense of âpurityâ. The tourist imaginary of Goa that has been molded over the years has created a type of environment that young travellers utilize for very specific touristic purposes: mainly to party on the beaches in the north. Like other places that have seen rapid social changes as a result of increasing tourist numbers, the cost of staying in Goa has increased exponentially, and at the time of my fieldwork was one of the more 65 expensive locations in India to go for a weekend getaway. While the tourism industry benefits a variety of people in Goa, the concentration of activity in such a small area has led also to negative consequences. The exorbitant cost of vacationing in Goa was key determinant for young Indians to choose a cheaper alternative, specifically Gokarna. In some ways, trips to Goa are prescriptive: you know exactly what you are expected to do there, and this can serve to decrease the spontaneous potential that is desired in travelling. All these reasons, and more, added to the persistent feeling among many Indian urban youths that I spoke with that they sought to find a cheaper, cleaner, quieter, and more peaceful place to vacation than Goa. Figure 10: A tourist's shirt on Kudle beach 2.10 Conclusion Travelling is like any other example of the exalted and burdensome human condition. We, tourists, mold ourselves to what is around us. Tourists can respond, react, and reciprocate with our environments, and not always in a fashion that replicates those who have come before us, or stand beside us. This chapter gives a brief overview of Goa and Gokarna as travel desinations and some of the motivations travellers have for visiting each location. This chapter also looks at how Indian tourists are coming to understand the value of specific characteristics (such as an abundance of natural landscapes, less people and little 66 commercialization) of certain tourist locations, specifically Gokarna. While Goa continues to give rise to a place imaginary that is correlated with certain transgressive behavior and forms of experimentation, especially with drugs, based on the conversations that took place during my fieldwork in Gokarna, Indian tourists were drawn to the site because it was quieter. Another theme that also emerged in relation to discussions around Gokarna as an alternative was the way Indian tourists embodied moral overtones associated with âgoodâ and âbadâ behavior. Solo travel in a âconsciousâ manner was touted by many interlocutors such as Devi, Mahina, Shiva and Anil as the most valuable form of travel. Travelling independently works to separate the travellers from constraints they may feel more regularly in their day to day lives. There is something beautifully mutinous about a generation of young Indians embarking on experimental quests for glimpses of performative varieties of themselves, whilst so many other people have exploited India to do exactly this. During this time I also met upwards of one hundred Indian female-identifying travellers in Gokarna who were challenging gendered constraints and various entrenched social structures through these forms of mobility. This was done through travelling to places on their own in an attempt to break free from the widely held notion that they are not capable of experiencing this kind of freedom and expansion in their own country, on their own terms. This is a development in Gokarna that is evident and worthy of celebration. Moving from Goa to Gokarna also assumes a shift in priorities among some young Indian travellers, and throughout this chapter I considered these motivating factors as told to me by interlocutors in Gokarna. Prioritizing experience rather than continuity of social obligations is what is so exciting about the emerging middle-class travellers in India, and their decision to visit Gokarna. So then, what is the experience of Gokarna like? 67 Chapter 3: âThe Vibeâ âThe first thing that I liked about the place, the strongest part in my opinion, is completely the vibe.â- Pratik from Mumbai. 3.1 Introduction In the next chapter I examine some of the reasons why young Indians are travelling to Gokarna. In a country of 1.3 billion people, in addition to over 1 million international tourists (India Tourism Statistics 2019), finding a location which provides a sense of anonymity, freedom and spaciousness has become increasingly meaningful and challenging. Tourists repeatedly told me that past the point of initially visiting Gokarna, what kept them there and/or was encouraging them to return was âthe vibeâ (their words). What might âvibeâ be in anthropological terms? Anthropologist dâHauteserre suggests that âaffect might have little influence over tourists who consider a destination for the first time since there will have been no opportunity to touch them prior to arrival. Affect is, however, influential in determining return visitsâ (dâHauteserre 2014: 87). Throughout this chapter, I use the terms vibe, atmosphere and affect interchangeably. I interpret the vibe and atmosphere of the place as specific modulations of affect, and the ones I found to be most frequently discussed among tourists in Gokarna. While some scholars or theories may differentiate between these terms, the ways in which tourists in Gokarna were grappling with embodiment, feeling, consciousness and energy in the context of Gokarna fit into all three of these descriptors. Affect and atmospheres are terms I found more suitable to, and utilized in academic contexts, while âthe vibeâ, as described by my interlocutors, is a more vernacular term encapsulating both affect and atmospheres. I argue in this chapter that the main factors contributing to the âvibeâ in Gokarna were the natural environment (or affective atmospheres), embodiment, and a subsequent process of becoming. These factors, articulated by the interlocutors, are what I will be focusing on throughout this chapter. Threats to the 68 vibe were also commonly discussed by my research participants, fearing that the positivity they associated with Gokarna could be just as easily destroyed by a mishandling, or a transformation of the energy that they felt was tantamount to their experience of Gokarna. I will also discuss my own experiences with the vibe and instances that compromised it. 3.2 What is affect? Geographer Nigel Thrift, founder of non-representational theory, states that âan affective common-sense background does not existâ (Thrift 2008: 173), and that there is âno stable definition of affectâ (Thrift 2008: 175). Affect, as Spinoza (1985) originally interpreted it, is about the generative capacity for action. While there may be no universal definition of affect, a helpful point of departure for this research is: the bodyâs or bodiesâ âcapacity to affect and be affectedâ (Stewart & Lewis 2015: 237) and as âthe sensation produced in the encounter of bodies and forces as the tipping point between the potential and the actualâ (Stewart & Lewis 2015: 238). Affect can also be described as the âsensuous qualities of things and bodily presence [that] are both and constitutively productive of perceptions, experiences and atmospheresâ (Stewart & Lewis 2015: 237). Thus, affect can exist individually, in that single persons are capable of producing and imbibing it, but it is because of peopleâs embodied affiliations with other aspects of being and beings that allow bodies to integrate, respond to and move through affective components of the world. Affect is used as a noun and a transitive verb, implicating subjects, objects, the individual and the collective (Skoggard and Waterson 2015: 112). While the infinitively generative capacity of affect allows for it to be constantly reworked in definitions and understandings, âthe account of affective life has its own geographically and historically contingent conditions of formations in relation to a diverse set of topics, problems and concernsâ (Anderson 2014: 164). The ways in which affect in Gokarna is understood and felt by young Indian travellers is related to the specifics of time, history, and space. 69 As dâHauteserre suggests, in touristic environments, it is âlocal residents, tourism entrepreneurs and service workers together with tourists [who] are responsible for the âaffect vibesâ createdâ (dâHauteserre 2014: 78). These affect vibes can be formed through the ways in which people organize themselves and by how they are interacting with their environment(s). Depending on the space, different touristic performances are suggested, and different affects are rendered; âcertain spaces are more prone to produce specific kinds of emotions than othersâ (dâHauteserre 2014: 80). Affect is therefore, entangled with relationships, atmospheres, histories, the senses, consciousness and the body. To some, the vibe is considered to exist relatively untethered to circumstance; it is a generative quality created by social relations, and space or place itself. To others, the vibe has specific origins, and real compromises. Working through conversations in the field about how interlocutors described their time in Gokarna through affective considerations gives value to experiences that move beyond body/mind bifurcations. As Pratik from Mumbai alluded to in his decided inability to separate the mental from the physical: âIf I do it at that place, if Iâm getting connected mentally, I am also getting connected physically. It is not possible for me to just get connected mentally, because in the present I am there, right? So, Iâll be able to connect both.â Additionally, the ways in which tourists in Gokarna were describing their visits was through a vocabulary that alluded to emotive and sensorial rather than distinctly material and textual phenomena, and I wish to maintain recognition of that fact. In every single interview that I conducted, tourists used the term âthe vibeâ to describe the place and their motivation for being there. For these reasons, it became obvious that this nebulous concept required further consideration. 70 3.3 Contextualizing affect So why is it that so many Indian tourists are feeling a certain kind of way in Gokarna? How can we understand these feelings for or attributions to a place in relation to where these tourists are coming from? The body and the world are shaped by and give shape to affect (Csordas 2015; Ram 2015; Low 2017; Strathern & Stewart 2011). Potential, understood to be magnified or diminished by certain people in particular contexts, is etched into these relationships. Reciprocity and exchange between the body and the world often occur but cannot necessarily be determined how, why, when, or to what extent. Affect is not certain and not prescriptive, but it can be suggested and invoked. Certain places are thought to actualize the potential of the relationship between the body and the world, while others are felt or thought to diminish it. Geographer Ben Anderson considers that bodily capacities are affect; the blushing of oneâs cheeks, âthe heat of an angered bodyâ (Anderson 2014: 80). Both examples point to how affect is communicated and observed through the body. In incorporating this understanding of affect, I considered why tourists were motivated to visit Gokarna based on what they were feeling in their bodies while they were there. How do they feel in their own bodies when they arrive? What sensations are occurring? What factors can pull these tourists back to a place or a space (Gokarna) that exists beyond interpretive or analytical dimensions? While affectual analyses take into account aspects of experience that may be outside of the cognitive realm, placing these experiences within an economic, physiological, political and social context allows for a more robust and situated understanding of affectual phenomena. It can be said that âaffect is a domain, register or machinery of intensity, speed, rhythm and emergent form. It is the tone that moves bodies of all kinds into and out of states of beingâ (Stewart and Lewis 2015: 237). Taking this into account, the capacity of each body (as an open system) to register different kinds of affect is related to conditions which allow for some bodies to be less or more likely to experience 71 certain forms of affect than others. A bodyâs charge of affect enacts, reflects, and expresses encounters with other times and spaces. Affect specific to the vibe that is felt by tourists in Gokarna does not occur in a vacuum. It takes place in relation to the way that people feel outside of Gokarna and is connected to stories and imaginaries circulated about travel. It is also tied to economic and social relationships that people have with the world that allows them access to multiple spheres of engagement and interaction; in this case, the leisure world, the vacation world, the disposable income world. The ways that tourists feel in Gokarna may be tied to their class/caste/gender identities, to name a few variables, and certainly these feelings are related to the ability to be mobile as independent (or not) travellers who are visiting a place for a set amount of time. These identities and ways of moving through the world can transpose onto habits and behaviours that may influence where people choose to visit, how they feel in vacation destinations and why. Rather than placing a conclusive emphasis on what is felt, a larger and more detailed picture can be drawn when indicators leading up to sensorial engagements with a place are elucidated. Encounters and consequential affect are produced through repetition, either experiential or representational; âsomething of the part persists in an encounter, any encounter contains reference to past encounters and encounters are made through accumulated relations, dispositions and habitsâ (Anderson 2014: 82). 3.4 Affect through landscape Cleanliness, clean water, I know Kudle and Om are dirty beaches compared to other beaches, but then they are a lot better than the Goa beaches; especially the north Goa beaches. So, I guess the cleanliness and the topography. Because you can you know, just sit on a hilltop and just see water gushing against the rocks and little hills and stuff. And the sunsets. I think all of this contributes to the vibe because here there is no party scene as such. No late-night parties, sort of EDM music and bars and pubs opening all night. Itâs not a party scene thing, itâs more of chilling with friends, looking at the beach, looking at sunsets, meeting fellow travellers, making new friends and all of that. So probably this contributes to the vibe of Gokarna. - Roshi from Mumbai on what makes the vibe of Gokarna 72 In considering atmosphere in relation to the physical landscape of a place, Anderson asks: âwhat are some of the ways in which an atmosphere âgets intoâ a bodyâs force of existing as atmospheres resonate with bodily capacities?â (Anderson 2009: 157). How is it that Gokarna seems to seep, creep, or find its way into pressure points of a bodyâs abilities that are missed by other environments? Something that surprised me throughout the duration of this research was touristsâ affinity towards the land and the natural environment in Gokarna. Perhaps it was because I was influenced by how others spoke about Indian tourists (that they were travelling only to do drugs and party) and did not expect that young adult tourists would be coming to enjoy the environment. Many touristsâ reasons for being in Gokarna were directly related to the landscape; to the trees, the ocean, and the cleanliness of the area. From Mysore, a good friend who came to Gokarna to work at a hostel said this to me: I knew Gokarna was a place of complete nature. So, wherever there is nature, spirituality can just go through that. Because, thatâs what I felt. For me, spirituality was not about temples or any gods. Spirituality was something that you are surrounded by, the life, like, life as in... you get what Iâm saying. Nature, the life. Once you go to a city, there is lifeâ¦ but itâs not so prominent as this. Because this is natural. So many trees, so many plants, so many animals, with all that mountains and stuff. He attributed a sense of ânaturalnessâ to Gokarna that he felt was not present or was somehow obscured in urban settings. The life that he experienced in Gokarna was considered to be qualitatively and palpably different than the kind of life that one moved through and around in cities. This sentiment was repeated time and time again throughout my interviews and conversations in Gokarna. These ideas bolster an essentializing view that considers particular places to be âsimplerâ or more âconnected to natureâ than others. Pratik from Mumbai echoed similar statements when describing the vibe of Gokarna: âGokarna is very, very natural. Other places are natural, Iâm not saying itâs unnatural. But itâs more a form of business, in other places, most places.â Anderson suggests that atmospheres âare interlinked 73 with forms of enclosureâ¦ and forms of circulation- enveloping, surrounding and radiatingâ (Anderson 2009: 149). Atmospheres have a characteristic spatial form diffusing within a sphere and the nature within Gokarna is thought by many tourists to build this sphere that then informs the atmosphere, or the vibe. In my interview with Pratik, he described to me his bodily experience of âthe vibeâ related to the flora, fauna and feeling in the area: P: The vibe is like, something else. You know, you feel it inside. You feel it in your legs. Yesterday while seeing the sunset at the hilltop, you know, I was stuck to this place. Like, one rock, I was stuck for like, one hour maybe. And all the hostel people were just staring at me, they were sitting behind. I was just vibing, okay. Iâm seeing the transitions, the colours, the sounds, everything is activated in me. All the receivers are activated in me. I am in that zone, you know? I could feel that vibe from the place. And, second, I like the trees out here. When we went to the place called Blue Lagoon, we saw very nice dense cover of trees. That feels nice. Even if you sit under a tree you feel a little bit uplifted, maybe. B (researcher): Do you think that the trees have something to do with the vibe? P: Of course, they do, completely. We felt it at the Blue Lagoon. The tree that comes out from the water. Seems like a different tree all together. Feeling the vibe âin your legsâ moves the energy of a place from being out there to becoming internally accessible. This tourist was registering the vibe of Gokarna as something that he felt within him, and which allowed him to use its energy to become an activated receiver of sensations that, without the catalyst of the ecosystem in Gokarna, may not have been possible. The vibe or energy of Gokarna was considered to be transformative and/or pregnant with potential on many different levels. Stewart and Strathern (2011) describe embodiment as patterns of behaviour that take the body from passive to active. Through being present in a place and in the intentionality of taking yourself from (for example) a position working a job with specific regulations and demands inscribed upon you (passive) and into a journey that is more self-directed and self-pleasing (active), tourism is doubly inscribed in the embodiment of a place. In the way that Pratik was explaining, he experienced this process of becoming attuned or aware through a sensation felt in his body. This is similar to what Anil from 74 Gujarat stated, that when he was in Gokarna âit is way easier to communicate with my body here.â There is something about Gokarna that was making these tourists feel as if their attention was drawn towards something positive, and felt primarily within their body, which then lends to a shift in consciousness (taking them from passive to active). Pratik attributed this connection of being integrated into the landscape and feeling it within him to a good vibe: âLike when I connect such moments, I feel active in my body. I feel a good vibe around me.â. 3.5 The bodyâs potential Is it that cities themselves carry with them a particular âvibeâ, or is it that people in certain spaces and places allow for their own bodies to be affected or not by the atmospheres around? Perhaps it could be a combination of both, with a quality of space imbuing how we feel, and how we feel contributing to the qualities of a space. Affect is generally understood to be participatory, in that those experiencing it contribute to it. So then how is it that tourists in Gokarna are allowing for themselves to feel the world in a way that is different from the ways they engage in places like Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai? How do physical environments change the ways that these young travellers are feeling? Many tourists told me that they feel as if they can encode or tap into specific ways of being in Gokarna that they do not believe to be possible and/or accessible in other places. Anil discussed how his bodyâs capacity to learn different yoga postures or physical techniques was amplified in Gokarna: Trust me, if Iâm back in Gujarat and I practice a thingâ¦ If at first, Iâm not knowing that technique and I start learning it, it takes me two months, and I achieve that particular technique or something, in any form of exercise or yoga or whatever. It will take a week for me in Gokarna. Because now my energy here, I can sense my body more. I can sense my balance and stuff. It is way easier to communicate with my body here. And that again is because of the energy this place has. Back there itâs a concrete jungle, so you canât expect much. And inside there, there are dead bodies. Evidently, for Anil there is a sense that oneâs aptitudes are considered to be heightened and more readily accessed in specific locations- Gokarna being one of them. This 75 is in direct opposition to how bodies are described to experience affect in a city, or a âconcrete jungleâ where bodiesâ are âdeadâ (as he describes) and incapable of feeling deeply. This is an example of what Anderson elicits as the ways in which âan atmosphere âgets intoâ a bodyâs force of existing as atmospheres resonate with bodily capacitiesâ (Anderson 2014: 157). Some atmospheres are considered productive for self-development, while others are considered destructive. While the urban influence of Indian cities and their inhabitants are part of the affective qualities of Gokarna, interlocutors by and large distinguished the vibes in Gokarna from that of cities, with the vibes in Gokarna being more meaningfully productive than elsewhere. In this instance of speaking with Anil, when I asked him about why he thought Gokarna could provide him with the ability to âsenseâ his body more, he said this: Again, the place is beautiful, Goa is beautiful. The vibes here are different [from Goa]. Because you have temples here, this certain vortex of energies. It is coming out of the sea and earth, and a big thing is we have sea here. So saltwater and salt again keeps negativities off. You have a big drainage pool here, so it sucks the negativity out of everyone right. So, there is less [negativity], and good vibes are more. âKeeping negativities offâ by way of the natural environment is something that Anil thought to be integral to the vibes of Gokarna. The purifying properties associated with the sea and saltwater combined with the placement of the Mahabaleshwar temple was considered to transform the energy from potentially negative to positive. Shruti from Mumbai attributed importance to the saltwater in explaining how she experienced the vibe of Gokarna: Thereâs just something to do with water here, the vibe here, thatâs very calming. When you look at the sea as well, the sea is not too wild, either. The sea is not too wild, itâs actually calm, the waves are pretty calm. So yeah, Iâve always felt at peace and sort of connected to myself when I came here. For many tourists, the beach acts as a stage, or a playground where performances of pleasure are enacted that are supposed to contraindicate the heaviness of capitalismâs quotidian burdens (Löfren 1999). Although this statement by Löfgren is a Eurocentric 76 conception of the beach and its affectual tendencies, these same ideas were often expressed by my interlocutors in Gokarna. In a society marked by capitalist relations, many people felt as if they were unable to locate themselves fully within the present moment: that they were bound to a clock in and out daily life, with their only respite being weekends or a period of unemployment that allows for one to play with both time and space. A lack of awareness or presence can be a result of how âwhen things continue in an ordinary fashion, our bodyâs contribution to our everyday coping with life may be likened to an indistinct murmur, a steady rhythm, a medium of existence in the sense of a conduit through which existence flowsâ (Ram 2015: 12). This murmur becomes easier to sense and increases in its intensity when coupled with movement to new places and out of the ordinary cadences. Being conscious of oneâs body can assist people in feeling as if they are more connected to themselves, the immediate moment in time, and the land that they, their bodies, and their consciousness are experiencing. Here I argue that there is a kind of âembodied unconsciousâ where certain kinds of planes of affect are âattuned to particular body parts (and senses) and corresponding elements of nature (from trees and grass to river and sky)â (Thrift 2008: 67). Elements of nature in Gokarna assisted many Indian tourists in locating themselves as complimentary to and benefitting from the atmosphere. Shruti and Anil, along with other tourists I spoke with suggested that being proximal to these elements can then allow for a sense of actualization or release, that permits certain versions of oneself to simply be, and to experience that sense of being directly through an awareness of the body. 3.6 The spiritual âvibesâ of Gokarna. âIt is about the energy. You feel different. Waking up in the morning is different over here.â- Pratik from Mumbai. An affective charge is formed, felt and articulated through groupings of people and things coming together in a particular time and place. Tourist narratives and place images 77 associated with secluded beaches, ânatureâ and notions of purification rather than an office or a city produces particular affects among the travellers in Gokarna. Similarly, temples, like Mahabaleshwar temple also contribute to a certain kind of âvibeâ that is understood through a cultural narrative that recognizes an ability for people imbued with spiritual or religious authority to have the capacity to transform a land from neutral or negative, to one of auspiciousness and positivity. Even among young tourists who had very little affinity to, or interest in practicing Hinduism, some tourists thought that the temple and the atmosphere it created contributes to the peaceful vibes of the village: âSo I think Iâve always also craved mountains because of the whole connection with Shiva. You feel more powerful there. As a woman you know that the whole Shiva energy worships and encourages you so much. As a feminine energy you know that, you feel that in the mountains. This is the only place down south that I feel that.â For Devi, from Hyderabad, who described herself as âspiritual but not religious,â she associated the energy or vibes of Gokarna with the qualities of the god, Shiva, that she otherwise only felt in the north of India. The presence of the temple combined with the topographical layout which separates Gokarna town/the temple area from the beaches allowed for tourists to feel as if they could connect with more âspiritualâ aspects of being. They could do this, while simultaneously having the option to disengage from this and abscond to the beaches where Brahmins and their influence are absent, or at least, not as clearly defined. As Sundari from Kanpur explains, âThe balance. Itâs either touristy or pilgrim, right? Gokarna is both. Gokarna is absolutely a bit of both.â Though the temple was in a select few instances considered to be a contributing factor to the vibe of Gokarna, most tourists âfeltâ Gokarna to be a place separate from this holy Hindu site, or at least a place that has the atmospheric potential to keep the religious distinct from the recreational. Mahina from Delhi portrayed Gokarna as: a little sleepy temple town, when you go to the beaches itâs a completely different vibe. When you go to the town itâs a completely different vibe. So if somebody 78 wants to do many things in Gokarna, Gokarna has many things to offer. And if somebody wants to just chill in Gokarna, Gokarna has that vibe, too. Devi from Hyderabad discussed how she was able to access different aspects of her being through the separation of the temple town and as she described, the more âhippieâ areas of Gokarna: I love the fact that I can wake up, in a completely hippie establishment or tourist establishment, and I can go down to the temple and feel very connected to my culture, right? A lot of places donât offer you that. I can sit down with you, I can smoke joints, I can have wine, whatever. But I am not this conversation. By the end of the day, when you look at me from a cultural perspective, my DNA perspective; my roots go back there. I come from a family where they wake up and do puja. Thatâs who I really am. So, this place somehow gives me a balance of that. Like, fifteen minutes down the lane Iâm at a temple. Fifteen-minute walk and Iâm at a temple. Not a lot of other places give me that. Yeah. Here I can be that, and I can be this. I think thatâs what I love about Gokarna. Though most tourists whom I spoke with did not self-identify as religious, many often felt that the vibe of Gokarna contributed to their sense of spiritual growth (which according to many tourists was distinct from religion). This lends to a narrative which counters the pilgrimsâ story of Gokarna and was imbricated by young Indians trying to attune their senses to landscapes that contributed positively to their well-being, without attributing this directly to religion. Gokarna was perceived to encapsulate different imaginaries and visions of an atmosphere. This heterogeneity in narratives contributes to the notion that: âSocial and cultural ties are not presumed by association with abstracted structures but have to be tracked as moments of affinity and difference emergent in performanceâ (Stewart and Lewis 2015: 238). At this point in time, tourism in Gokarna can be tracked âas a co-merging of moments of affinity and difference emergent in performanceâ (Stewart and Lewis 2015: 238). It is a place where people with drastically different motivations for visiting attempted to realign themselves through intentional actions and specific practices. Here, Sundari expressed similar sentiments about the divided spaces of Gokarna as Mahina did, quoted above. 79 I like how much variety Gokarna has to offer. Itâs a little temple town, plus itâs a place with beautiful, beautiful beaches. Plus, itâs a place that has a chill vibe to it. Again, I would say that it has so many things to offer to those people who want to do so many things, and it has, if you want to just be laid back and relax and do nothing, it has that kind of vibe, too. Devout Hindu practices thrive in the village while twenty-year-olds relaxed and/or partied in beach shacks ten minutes away; these were considered separate spheres of activity for most of the visitors I talked to. The access that tourists had to both religious and recreational realms in Gokarna was what attracted many people who visit, and it was through placing themselves in distinct spheres of activity or atmospheres that they were able to feel âthe vibeâ. 3.8 Jobs, the process of becoming, safety and movement How are the desires of Indian travellers in Gokarna then contributing to a construction or configuration of themselves, and how is this creating something new? Recreational tourists in Gokarna, I would argue, are working through the constraints and liberties that result from wider socio-economic forces. These structural determinants place them in positions requiring them to relinquish certain desires (freedom of movement more regularly while having to work a job), while providing them with the monetary leverage to activate other kinds of desires (vacationing on weekends, or during time-off). Perhaps it is that young people visiting Gokarna are considering that their limits to freedom of movement are characterized by capitalism and the social pressures associated with working in high-paying, industry-specific jobs. These constrictions can also be enacted and enforced by kinship networks. Certainly, those who I interviewed who were purposefully unemployed felt that they had more freedom to be mobile and connect with meaning in their lives through their freedom from having to work. Devi had this to say about quitting her job: âSo I sort of quit my job a year ago, primarily because I realized that there were elements of my life I was not able to give enough time to, because work consumes so much time of it. I was not able to give enough time to the 80 other things, like art, travelling, or just being, you know?â While not everyone is in a financial or social position to quit their jobs, some tried to locate their own agency by acting upon the world through taking vacations on weekends. Ved from Delhi noted how the propensity to quit oneâs job to travel was unique (in India) to his generation: âThey can afford to quit jobs like me. I donât think my dad would have just quit a job. He couldnât afford it. I think thatâs the case for most Indian people. Plus, we are due to globalization, more globalization, you get to see more trends, you mix it up.â The movement of young Indians for pleasure to a place considered to be a conduit for âgood vibesâ is a form of mobility contributing to a sense of self that was previously not readily available to most working-class Indians. These mobilities are also informed by globalizing trends, as Ved points out, and also by âglobal roundsâ (Salazar and Graburn 2014: 10); these trends, or rounds move imaginaries and ideals circuitously from points of origin outwards and then back again. Images, discourses and ideas about self-development and motivations for travel are now taking forms that are both globally informed, and location specific. As mentioned previously, when tourists reached Gokarna they often told me that the âvibeâ of the place coincided with their intentions for travel. These intentions ranged from appreciating nature, heightening the awareness of oneself, snapping selfies in romanticized landscapes, to running away from home. When this meeting of space, place, and intent occurs, there was a mutual and preferable exchange of energy between the world and the body; the vibe then becomes positive. Many female-identifying tourists felt as if the positive vibes in Gokarna were created by and a result of feeling safe. Women, particularly when travelling on their own, often have a different set of motivating factors leading them to visit certain destinations (Aitchison 2005; Frohlick 2013). If a place is considered to be unsafe, it may be necessary to take extra precautions or consider a different destination altogether. I met countless women in Gokarna 81 who were travelling for their first time on their own and cited the safety of the place (that they had heard about from other travellers) as a primary reason for choosing Gokarna as their initiatory destination for solo travel. Sundari elaborated on the safety of spaces as contributing to the overall attractiveness of the destination: I think [the vibe] is very easy. Itâs very easy. It has limited things, and you know, spots to go around, and then itâs just â¦ you can just do your own thing. Itâs very easy to just do your own thing, climb a hill up and just sit there. Thereâs no, you know, cautious safety concern you have to keep in mind or anything you have to bother about.â When the same tourist spoke about the safety of Goa, she said this: âYeah, you have to be cautious there, and aware of things, and where you are. What time is it, and what place you are at, and where you have to get to. Because the city is huge. To get from one part to the other, itâs a risky zone. Youâre always worried if itâs too late, or going with, x y z, a driver, a bike-istâ¦ there are batches where thereâs absolutely nothing. Youâre scared. You have to think before acting. Here you donât really have to bother much Kishant, a previous manager at a hostel said this about the safety of Gokarna: Even when people call me in the morning, like, people who are coming from Pune they land early in the morning at three at the railway station or the bus. And the first time when they talk to me, theyâre really scaredâ¦ âis this a safe time to come?â âis this the right time or the right train? Should I land in the afternoon or something?â. No, literally, no. There are no such cases where, like, you know, females have been abused here or called to some bad things orâ¦ anything. Itâs kind of, surprisingly, itâs damn safe. That credit goes to the local people here. For female-identifying travellers specifically, part of what contributes to the atmosphere of a place and the resulting feelings that one has is how cautious they have to be while travelling. Because Gokarna is considered to be safe and âeasyâ, the vibe becomes accessible, more relaxed and readily absorbable. Constellations of social practice are continually informed, navigated and represented through the actions and articulations of those visiting Gokarna. That many tourists are relocating their preferred location for rejuvenation, relaxation or release from Goa to Gokarna suggests that tourists were considering Gokarna to be more appealing in its ability to facilitate good âvibesâ, felt more through nature than through establishments. 82 Below, we see how Ved considers the integration of new thought processes or biases as a part of the continuous process of becoming that results from travel: Yeah. I like travelling because I get to know more viewpointsâ¦ a lot more thought processes of people, a lot more interesting storylines in people. If youâre in a single place, just by proximity, you tend to share a big part of your life or your thought processes or your biases. People from different places have different biases, so thatâs interesting. That also makes you check your own biases. Or incorporate new ones. Here I argue that a process of becoming is considered to be present through travelling, but this process transforms only so far as the individual continues to move and shift their perspective(s). Authenticity, as previously noted, has been a central concept for debates in tourism studies for decades. How was authenticity being configured and expressed among my Indian interlocutors in Gokarna? In considering affect and processes of becoming, I suggest that many travellers to Gokarna were locating a sense of authenticity through embodiment that results from specific environments and atmospheres, rather than through a comparison of themselves to locals or residents (the âOtherâ). To many tourists, Goa has now become âfastâ and built-up; commercialization has led it to feel more like a city in its demands, which is what most recreational tourists in Gokarna were looking to avoid. Many interlocutors expressed that it was simply easier to gain an awareness of themselves in a space that fostered serenity, rather than stimulation. They were finding this sense of peacefulness (and perhaps a kind of perceived authenticity) in Gokarnaâ¦ at least, as long as things were flowing in accordance with âthe vibeâ. 3.10 Touristsâ perceived threats to âthe vibeâ. âYes, and thatâs why you are here. To know, to study, to feel, what is Gokarna? So, you must live like Gokarna. You cannot live like [you are] from the place that you are from, going and 83 spitting everywhere. You must not do this back at your place also, but if you are doing that, you must stop here.â- Anil from Gujarat. There were occasional threats to the vibe that tourists lamented or cautioned against, in an effort to maintain what they felt was a positively charged atmosphere. In general, compromises to the vibe can be connected to some of the factors I discussed in Chapter Two. These include Indian tourists who considered overly zealous/rambunctious and not conscious of their impact on the landscape, intensive regulation in the form of police, and an unsavoury incursion of large numbers of tourists in a concentrated area. When I asked the question in interviews of what they did not like about Gokarna, many people responded by saying things like this: And I hate the fact that itâs becoming another Goa. When you look at buses right, to Gokarna. Everything is almost practically full all the time. It wasnât the case earlier. It really wasnât the case earlier. Places are packed now. Thereâs no season or non-season, you just find people here all the time now. I donât like it. I really donât like that. -Devi from Hyderabad. Increasingly, Gokarna has been drawing so many tourists that, like Goa, it had become at the time of my fieldwork a place that people were anticipating will gradually become âtoo crowdedâ. Ved spoke to the growing popularity of Gokarna; âYeah, that might happen, given the amount of tourism that is increasing around here. I mean I came for the first time hereâ¦ more people are coming here. Iâll have to find someplace else [laughs]â. Kishant echoed these sentiments: âBut obviously, the more crowd, itâs going to lose its charm, for sureâ. There is an idea that tourism moves in predictable patterns of boom and bust (Butler 1980), and certainly it is not always this way; there is not necessarily a linear dimension to how people are moving through space and time in relation to leisure. It can be seen that those visiting Gokarna fear for a future where Gokarna resembles Goa and its presumed patterns of tourism. Shiva intimated at how an even greater influx of tourists in Gokarna could destroy the vibe: 84 They shouldnât disrupt the peace. They shouldnât destroy the place. They shouldnât make this some place it never was. This place should be the place is was. That originality of this place should always remain, and I think people should respect that, but itâs very difficult to control tourists. I just hope that doesnât happen. Harkening to an atavistic sense of harmony or to what Appadurai calls âarmchair nostalgiaâ (Appadurai 1996: 96), Shiva desires the âoriginalityâ (that he had not personally experienced) of a place like Gokarna remain âas it wasâ (which perhaps never was that way to begin with). This speaks to a very real fear of an overstepping of âthe vibe,â as well as concerns with interference of the perceived âpurityâ of a place and puts Gokarna at risk of becoming like âotherâ tourist destinations. Anil expressed his concerns with the growing number of (Indian) tourists: A: âI feel people will realize their own self when they have one journey in Gokarna. But bad thing will be if they started mistreating this place, it will be very uglier situation. So yes, that is a bad side. B (researcher): How would tourists mistreat the place? A: By not taking care of surroundings where they live. From throwing garbage to disturbing others around them. By disturbing I mean if you are partying or something or whatever. And if someone is not comfortable with you and youâre around them, you should go. And if you donât go and do this, it becomes like, negative vibes right? The peace we have now, it will be missed. The serene feeling.â Wanting to maintain a sense of tranquility that is felt while in Gokarna, many tourists dreaded that the growing number of tourists every year, particularly those coming from Goa, would come here to party and change the vibe. This would, some predicted, negate the âsereneâ feelings that this tourist had at that moment in time on his vacation. Shiva cautioned that âover-tourismâ in Gokarna âwill happen. It just shouldnât fuck with the ecology or the cleanliness of this place.â In connecting the atmospheric charges with the land and environment, many tourists were concerned about commercial development and ill-treatment of flora and fauna in Gokarna lending to a decrease in the quality of âthe vibeâ. There was the fear that the natural 85 environment would be decimated by an uncontrollable growth in tourists with little respect for the cleanliness of the land. These fears and threats to the vibe were often correlated to the feelings many travellers had about badly-behaved Indian tourists. Rarely did I hear tourists citing foreign visitors as potentiates for threatening or undermining the vibe of Gokarna. Kishant had this to say: What I donât like about Gokarna is maybe I would say it might come off as a bit racist, but I donât like the Indian crowd. Not all of them, but most of them. Most of the Indian crowd, kind of litter the place and the attitude of them, when they come to this place, especially the city people, when they come here. Iâve seen these people doing certain things that would annoy certain people that are having a good time here. Letâs say a few foreigners want to sunbathe in their bikinis; that is common for them. And that is definitely not common for the people who come from rural places in India. So, these guys, I donât know if theyâre really staring at them because theyâre wearing a bikini, or maybe theyâre just surprised that theyâre doing that or something. But, when youâre staring at someone, that is a kind ofâ¦ you knowâ¦ what do you say thatâ¦ maybe for the person whoâs sunbathing there, might feel a little bitâ¦uncomfortable. So that is one part that Iâve noticed a lot on those beaches. Where these foreigners are having a good time and theyâre suddenly uncomfortable when one kind of group walks in. So that is what I really hate about Gokarna. Youâre supposed to just let people do whatever theyâre doing. Youâve come for your own thing; do that and enjoy it. So, this kind of group bothers me a lot, who just comes trashing stuff, who just swears at people, who have this bad attitude towards everyone. And these kinds of attitude only Iâve seen from Indian crowd. Rameez shared similar opinions, focusing on the ignorant behaviour he felt was carried out by Indian tourists: So, what I mean to say is, the young Indian travellers still need to learn how to do responsible tourism and understand the meaning of travel. Itâs not just going in your car, you know, playing loud music, just drinking with your friends and having fun and coming back. Yes, this might be a priority for you, but then again, just be sensitive towards the place that you are going. In terms of structurally accommodating the âpositiveâ vibe of Gokarna, one popular hostel had established particular policies that has been previously mentioned, by limiting the amount of people who can book a room together. Devi praised the efforts of this hostel: âTheyâve done such a fabulous job at maintaining the vibe, Iâm always drawn to it.â Mahina postulated on how travellers coming in groups can âkill the vibeâ and impede on other people from sharing open and meaningful connections: 86 So, what these big groups do, one by one they do separate bookings, and just, you know, they come here then the manager gets to know this is a whole big group. I think at that very moment they should be sent off, because it kills the vibe of the whole hostel, and secondly, if you are six, eight, or ten people you can easily book a hotel room or a resort or anything. Despite the fact that the well-established tourist route had led them there in the first place, and that the atmospheres they were able to experience were in part because of trodden tourist paths from those who visited Gokarna before them, there was a sense that any more tourists who come will destroy the âpristineâ nature of the place. Anil voiced his concern about this issue: Just maintain the â¦ you are seeing the place in its pristine form. In its beautiful form. Include not only the physical features of a place, but also the locals, also the people. So just behave nicely and leave that place as it is. Like, donât put any negative stuff there, negative impression there, because of which future travellers or future of the tourism in that place might be affected. There are places, Iâm not talking about Gokarna, but there are places where, you know, the locals are so much fed up with the youth because they donât stick to the local laws, because they donât follow the civil code there, because they are insensitive towards the surroundings. So, because of this very thing, though tourism if flourishing in those places but the locals are not very happy. 3.11 Threats to the vibe: an autoethnographic account. Predictably, the more time I spent in Gokarna I began to âfeelâ differently about the place. With the passage of time I became more attuned to the daily noises, in the forms of both my own patterns and behaviours, and of the functioning of the town itself, that may not be as noticeable if I was visiting for a shorter period of time or staying only on the beaches. While I also considered Gokarna to be a safe place, relatively relaxed, and abundant in its natural beauty, it was now a place for me that was associated with the âworkâ of research (i.e. fieldwork). Because my primary role in Gokarna had shifted from vacationer to researcher, my own rhythms with the village changed; my relationship with âthe vibeâ had altered, or perhaps it is that I was attuning to multiple vibes at once. The longer I spent there, the more people, habits, and contexts I became aware of. I had to be cautious of how I presented myself to people, knowing that their impressions of me would impact me, not only as a 87 researcher but as a person who would be living there. Wanting to remain respected and respectful, I did not smoke and/or drink with interlocutors in Gokarna, because in such a small village, people find out what everyone is doing in a very short period of time. Partaking in these activities might run the risk of local people not taking me seriously as a researcher, and could lead to negative personal relations, as well as the potential for more serious consequences, like being stopped or caught by police. Gokarna was no longer a place for me to just relax or be âcare-freeâ but became a place where my primary objective was to observe others relaxing. As I discussed in the previous chapter, several Indian tourists noted that one of the most consequential threats to the vibe of Gokarna was the degradation of the natural landscape, primarily through pollution caused by individual or group (almost always conflated with Indian) tourists. An attractive feature of Gokarna to nearly every tourist that I spoke with, was the cleanliness of its beaches, especially when compared to beaches in Goa. When I first arrived in Gokarna during the pre-tourist (monsoon) season I saw the horrifying amount of trash spit up by the ocean and thrown along the shores of all the beaches. Dead fish rotted on Om beach, while thick oily sludge from fishing/tourist boats stuck to the sand at Kudle. During high-tourist season, I witnessed the accumulation of single-use plastics left behind by tourists in the hostel I was living in. Amazed by the waste that weekend travelling can produce, I saw the discarded lives of inanimate objects, travel-sized plastic memories strewn virtually everywhere and forgotten. Small tubes of toothpaste were carelessly left behind. One-rupee packets of shampoo ripped in half were placed on the side of the sink that the travellers will likely never wash themselves in again. The namkin, or snack wrappers left to dance in the wind, would eventually pollute the Arabian sea that most of us came here to enjoy. The soaps, the bottles (glass and plastic), the straws, the forgotten hair clips, sweaters, underwear, books, frisbeesâ¦ the list goes on. The objects of leisure whose use value are 88 relegated only to a celebrated time (the weekend) and a specific place (Gokarna/ away from home) are then left to live out the rest of their lives on hostel shelves, seashores, under beds, etc. without any further consideration. There seemed to be a sense among visitors that Gokarna had the capacity to absorb both these objects and the tendencies among tourists to abandon such objects robustly and without qualms. As the longest residing visitor in the hostel, and someone who had eventually seen Gokarna in all months of the year, I can confidently say that this is not the case. Gokarna is not necessarily cleaner than other places. However, directly before the tourist season garbage along the beaches of Gokarna is burnt by government employees. Garbage collection along the beaches is a problem and creates a lot of issues for the beach shack owners, as well. No one comes to the beaches to collect the garbage, so it is up to individuals, and unions formed by café owners along each beach, to decide how they dispose of waste. On top of this, sewage was not properly processed and often ran directly into the ocean. Figure 11: Garbage burning on Kudle beach I noticed a proclivity among tourists to criticize individual behaviour of other tourists, while not necessarily taking into account the broader structures that also contribute, often much more significantly, to the polluting of landscapes. This tendency alludes to the inevitable hypocrisy that we find ourselves wrapped up in when we judge the moral character 89 of othersâ behaviours, particularly under the guise of âgoodâ (tourist) versus âbadâ (tourist). While tourists were very quick to speak negatively about those who blatantly threw trash on the beaches (and rightfully so, I am not condemning this behaviour), the tourist industry as a whole, and the smaller implications of it (like single-use plastics being left in a bathroom) were never discussed by any of my interlocutors. From my fieldnotes, I wrote: November 1st, 2019: âMost tourists do not see the garbage piles, left to burn on the beach before the âtourist seasonâ begins. They do not see the waves, reaching up menacingly, higher than they ever have before (far past the should-be end of monsoon storms), pulling the beach shacks with them as they recede threateningly back into the ocean, leaving bottle caps, shoes and palpable destruction in their wake. They do not see the hostel owners (and the irate anthropologist), cursing ignorance as they pick up pieces of broken beer bottles on the volcanic rock, so no one, particularly the dogs who roam wild and shoe-less, will get hurt. They do not see the oily sludge that accumulates on the sands after âtourist seasonâ every year, caused by the fishing and tourist boats cleaning and dumping their waste into the life- giving ocean.â I organized beach clean-ups frequently in Gokarna and felt a slight twinge of annoyance when people would comment on the cleanliness of the area. They often spoke as if cleanliness was an inherent quality of the place, not something that was proactively cultivated by those who lived (or visited) there. Gokarna was no longer a place that I associated with being unpolluted. In fact, it seemed that the longer I spent there, the more attuned my senses were to the accumulation of garbage in virtually every stretch of land I found myself in. For me, the âclean vibesâ had been spoiled. The positivity that many tourists attributed to the beaches of Gokarna seemed to me to be none other than a failure to recognize the impact that 90 not only the tourism industry, but unsustainable practices/products in general have on ecosystems. I was shocked by the tendencies that many people I spoke with had in blaming the accumulation of trash solely on Indian tourists, and even more shocked to learn that the village of Gokarna did not have any kind of formally organized system in place for cafes, hotels and shacks to dispose of their waste. The sublime, âuntouchedâ mystique that Gokarna was frequently described as exuding, became to me a misinformed and ignorant comprehension. This is not to say that all tourists negatively impacted the ecology of Gokarna, or that tourism in general is a destructive force, but more so that the image that is circulated and romanticized of Gokarna, stopped being one that I myself recognized as an innate quality of the place. Related to misinformed understandings, there was a particular day in Gokarna that I doubt I will ever forget. A young man, so unsuspecting in his demeanour, carried within him the greatest (direct) threat to the vibe of Gokarna that I had witnessed in the duration of my fieldwork. Both of us were at the entrance to Kudle beach, drinking coconuts at the same time. We spoke casually (âwhere are you from?â, âBangaloreâ, âwhat are you doing here?â, âon a weekend vacation, waiting for friends to arriveâ), and then he rather abruptly hurried away. I noted his awkwardness, and that he was wearing a shirt with videogame controllers on it. I thought nothing more of him, until a few minutes later, when I saw all the auto drivers who normally languidly hang around their parked autos waiting for tourists to leave the beach, start to mill around him. Voices began to rise, and I asked my coconut seller friend, Raju what was happening. We both sat still, trying to hear what the commotion was about, and he vaguely told me âheâs looking for a girlâ. I got up and walked to my motorbike which was parked quite close to the group of men gathering around this tourist. Raju came towards me and we both watched in silence. This situation seemed to have more at stake than I had originally thought. Why would something so banal as looking for âa girlâ cause such a public 91 commotion? I thought he was searching for someone that he knew. I had spent quite a bit of time at the entrance to Kudle beach, watching tourists come in and out, hanging around with Raju and all the auto drivers, and had never witnessed such a volatile and tense situation before. Eventually I realized that âlooking for a girlâ meant looking for a sex worker. As I understood this, I saw one of the men who worked at the hostel that I was staying at driving up to the crowd. This was unusual, as I had never seen him at the beach before. He got off of his bike and started screaming at the tourist. He held his fists up threateningly as he yelled what I can only imagine were a series of abuses in the Kannada vernacular. The tourist then started crying, which took me by surprise, and he attempted to touch the feet of the elders around him in apology. No one wanted him near them, and they all jumped away from his reach. Two more men who worked at the hostel then arrived and started pushing the young man back in the direction of the hostel. He reluctantly walked with them. Having no clue what was happening, I drove ahead to the hostel, and sat outside the common area waiting for them to arrive. They pushed the boy around 300 meters away me, towards a structure that served as the kitchen for staff during the off-season. It stood half constructed but had one sealed room in it. I watched as the young man protested loudly, begging for them to stop, and then silence- they pushed him in, and the door was closed as they all entered inside. I waited anxiously from a distance, and then felt a wave of dread as I watched one man from the hostel leave the room with a cricket bat in his hand. He walked up to me and apologized for the unfolding events (and for what he knew I did not see) and then told me that âit had to be done.â Utterly perplexed, I asked him what exactly was going on. It turns out that this tourist, for some reason or another, had been asking auto drivers to take him to this particular hostel so he could purchase a sex worker and take her there. As per my knowledge of Gokarna, there are no sex workers who work in the area (at least not regularly) and this hostel is not a place where people go to have sex, because there are no private rooms. An auto-driver 92 quickly called the hostel to inform them of this touristsâ proposition. The workers (who are also close friends with the owner and partial owners themselves) were irate and, according to them, âneeded to teach him a lessonâ. The tourist from Bangalore eventually came out of the room and walked up to me as I was sheepishly hiding behind my laptop. He asked me âcan you tell them to have mercy on me?â I had no idea what to do and his desperation made me sympathetic to his foolishness. I understood what he was hoping for; he was wanting a vacation in Gokarna that was âunforgettableâ and hoped to secure a sex worker for himself and his friends to ensure this kind of experience. I stared at him until I heard myself say âthis isnât Goa, man. What were you thinking?â I am not sure if those were the most comforting or appropriate words, though at the time, it was all I could muster. I asked him why he did it, and he could not respond to me. He kept asking me to talk to the staff, to tell them to âgo easy on him". The hostel staff took the touristâs driving license and told him to come back in the evening to retrieve it from them while they decided if they would contact the police or not. They ended up giving him his license back without getting the police involved, but they explained to me that tourists need to know that these kinds of things do not happen in Gokarna, and that they certainly do not happen at this hostel. This touristâs ignorance to what was acceptable in Gokarna had the potential to put this hostelâs reputation at risk and was seen by many stakeholders as a direct threat to the vibe I have been describing. Surely it also must have affected the vibe that the tourist himself felt after being beaten by hostel workers wielding cricket bats, instigated by an angry mob of auto-drivers that he thought he could confide in with his weekend desires. He was the only tourist who I encountered that had such wildly incongruous expectations of what Gokarna could offer him and his friends and was brazen enough to make it quite public. This is, in my opinion, a direct result of Gokarna being associated with destinations like Goa, where such activities are not as strongly condemned, which is why I felt it 93 necessary to reify to him that Gokarna was not in fact, Goa. While most other threats to the vibe were accumulative, and were more related to the environment, this young man exemplified what can happen when one is unaware of the vibe that many people are trying to attune to and maintain, and bore the brunt of the intolerance to this kind of unawareness. Lastly, a threat to the vibe of Gokarna that occurred just a few days after I had left to begin writing up my research has to do with new proposed developments around the privatization of public space. Of course, Gokarna has been âcommercializedâ for as long as tourists have been visiting and staying in shacks and eating in restaurants geared towards them. When many tourists used the term âcommercializedâ it was often used to reflect on the demise of Goa and the pervasive sense of over-commercialization that is equated with swelling numbers of tourists and high prices. Gokarna has two well-known beaches that are inaccessible by road: Half-moon and Paradise beach. The most popular hostel in Gokarna started hosting paid night treks to Paradise beach, of whom the participants were almost exclusively Indian tourists. In the absence of light during the new moon on these beaches, bio-luminescent plankton can be seen. Tourists flocked each and every night to this beach for the trek to get a glimpse of the plankton and hiked in the daytime on their own to enjoy this isolated stretch of sea and sand. Some tourists would set up tents and spend their entire stay in Gokarna on Paradise beach, cooking their food over campfire and enjoying a more âoff the beaten pathâ kind of experience. Interestingly, Paradise beach was also a popular destination around ten years ago, with boats regularly taking tourists from the main beach or Om beach to Paradise beach, where there were cafes and shacks set up. Today there are no establishments on Paradise beach- it is completely empty, except for the dilapidated foundations left from these prior establishments. It is difficult to find documentation of this period in time in Gokarna, but from what people in the town told me, an Australian reporter was raped by a man from Bangalore on Paradise beach, and after this incident, official 94 tourism on the beach halted. All establishments were closed. Visitors started coming again in larger numbers only a few years ago. This year was the most I had heard people talk about Paradise beach, and I was surprised to learn that many Indian tourists visited Gokarna with the specific intention to stay and âtrekâ (it is an easy twenty-minute walk in the jungle from the nearest road, or an hour walk along the cliffs from Om beach) to Paradise beach. Right before I had left Gokarna, I found out that Paradise beach had been leased for around 10 years by a man who, in his own words, âwas looking to make moneyâ. The surge in tourists this year on Paradise beach had also left an extraordinary amount of trash on the shore. The man had proposed to the Gram Panchayat that he should lease the land. He told the elected representatives that someone needed to maintain the land to ensure that it would not become more polluted than it already was. The Panchayat agreed with this, and after many negotiations, decided to lease the land to this entrepreneur. He created a company that has now set up tents all along the shore and told me that he plans on adding water sports to the roster of activities that tourists can pay to enjoy. Paradise beach is free to visit until 9pm, but as of February 2020, you have to pay to stay overnight. Many people, myself included, were infuriated with this new development in Gokarna, but many saw it as predictable and inevitable due to the rising popularity. I do appreciate the effort at maintenance, particularly with the intention of preserving cleanliness along the shores and ocean. Due to the inaccessibility of the beach, no one could remove the garbage that was left there, and these new developments may have a positive impact if they keep more trash from accumulating. Because I had met with the man starting this business on Paradise beach and heard from him that his overarching intentions were to make a profit, I felt disheartened at the blatant capitalization on a land that for many provided respite and opportunities to disengage, even slightly, with capitalist relations in the cities that they were visiting from. I was even further upset when he told me that he was planning on charging Indian tourists more per night than 95 foreign tourists. An Indian himself, I asked him incredulously why he would do that, to which he just laughed and repeated to me his desires to make money. I have no idea if this plan to have different tiers of payment for different types of tourists has been applied as now, like everywhere, due to Covid-19, tourism in Gokarna is at a stand-still. The privatization of Paradise beach is an excellent example of how an embodied vibe can then be packaged in a way that sells a destination to tourists. It also exemplifies the âcommercializationâ that many of my interlocutors spoke out against in their attempts to find a more relaxing place to vacation. 3.12 Conclusion Affect theory is useful for thinking closely about how Indian tourists in Gokarna are placing so much attention on how a place feels to them. Tourism and its motivating factors are heavily influenced by how oneâs body sits in a place- by the rhythms that tourists are attuning themselves to and the pace at which they are desiring to move at/with (Little 2010; Picard 2011). Connecting theories on affect to conventional anthropological questions related to motivations for travel, attempts to weave together a narrative which acknowledges reasons for travel as being situated in practical, as well as corporeal factors. For many people whom I spoke to, the overly deterministic features of structural life related to work and familial relationships takes away oneâs ability to experience the magic or serendipity of life and oneâs own proclivity to be aware of oneâs body and self. In this way, Gokarna serves as the tipping point between potential and the actual and provides the appropriate energy for âsomething moving into beingâ (Stewart and Lewis 2015: 238). Without what might be considered the distracting persistence of obligation(s) that are present in the cities that they live in, tourists in Gokarna expressed that their potential was more magnetized and their intentions and focus calibrated. For these reasons by interlocutors generally found it quite easy in Gokarna to enjoy the âfeelâ of the place. Safe, relaxed, easy- adjectives were used to describe Gokarna 96 and indicate that it was a place where people were not overwhelmed by other responsibilities and everyday concerns that for them, exist elsewhere. MacCannell (1989) argues that the main feature of tourist consumption âis that it involves a search for the authentic which tourists use as a way of developing self- consciousness about their worldâ (Deforges 2000: 929). In Gokarna, tourists were consuming the vibe, which lends to self-awareness and a preferred way of being in the world. The âvibeâ, through external stimuli and phenomenological circumstances, sustains or aids in developing an âinterior narrative of personhoodâ (Deforges 2000: 930). This narrative can then be related back to broader social circumstances like travel histories, work experiences and an abrupt rise in a young middle-class. The vibe is sought after in its promise of feeling something better than what is felt at home and/or in cities. Through being in Gokarnaâs atmosphere, many tourists did hope to utilize this energy practically. Being aware of the ways a place can make them feel may be a result of intention, time, space, previous experience and/or stories that have been shared. It may also be a result of the unexplainable; that which simply happens unexpectedly in the realm of the phenomenological that defies what we may or may not know. The vibe is both created and residually present; it is fortified through the promulgation of stories and images, and it is also informed by past histories of places, visitors and residents. This chapter tries to shed light on how Gokarna is regarded by Indians travelling recreationally, as a place where they can sense their own bodies and surrounding environments as contributing positively to a process of becoming. This chapter also provides an example of the conflictual ways individual perceptions of the vibe can be at odds with a collective understanding of the vibe (for example, with the man looking for a sex worker). Multiple vibes can co-exist in one place, and in the case of Gokarna, one narrative of the vibe (as it being a place of serenity, purity and cleanliness) can dominate touristsâ perception of a 97 place. Though, there is always the possibility for new vibes to emerge and be felt. I have shown how the constellation of mobile bodies and tourism imaginaries have made Gokarna a place where âembodied space and intentionality of individual and group trajectories do more than create space and place, they also open up space to innovative political and social possibilities and imaginingsâ (Low 2017: 118). The vibes of Gokarna potentiate and add richness and dimension to lives that are considered to be at risk of being molded by predictable and limiting parameters, and in this way, they build up and expose hopes, desires, and the possibilities of a life both care-free and connected. 98 Chapter 4: The breaking down of dualisms 4.1 Introduction In the interdisciplinary field of tourism studies there are notable dualisms and oppositions within the literature. As Sharpley notes, these include: the profaneâsacred, the familiarâunfamiliar, workâleisure, the inauthenticâ authentic, and so on. There is little doubt that these dualisms continue to underpin much tourism theorizing, but Franklin (2009) goes on to claim that they have been transcended by a ânew waveâ in tourism studies, manifested in work drawing on the sociology of the body and the theme of performance as perhaps a defining element of tourism (Sharpley 2011: 63). While I have not expanded on performativity among young Indian tourists in Gokarna (though this may be an opportunity for future research), I consider the body through its affective components in Chapter Three. Before this consideration took place, I needed to tease apart my own judgements and bifurcations that I was projecting onto this research. I will elaborate on how this process took place, first through fateful encounters with a thoughtful doctor who challenged my limited understanding of Gokarna, and through conversations with interlocutors, and one interviewee in particular. Then I will discuss the importance of considering Gokarna with this alternative and more encompassing perspective, particularly given the political climate of India today. For me, the breaking down of some of these prevailing dualisms in Gokarna occurred after multiple conversations I had with local residents and tourists. Speaking with these interlocutors throughout my fieldwork helped me to link dynamics that are present in Gokarna with broader reaching social and cultural circumstances in India and in tourism studies more generally. Expanding my awareness of who lives in Gokarna beyond comparisons between Brahmins and tourists that, for much of the time I undertook this research, I held as a central tenant to inquiring into tourism and its consequences in Gokarna. 99 As I noted earlier, the residents of Gokarna were not the primary focus of this research. For these reasons, my understanding of the localized caste and class communities living in Gokarna is limited. Due to these limitations, I do not have a full understanding of the varying ways tourism may (or may not) be affecting them or how they are affecting tourism. Although I did not interview residents per se, as part of my fieldwork I did engage in regular conversation with locals as well as tourists, as well as non-locals who were working in Gokarna. Slowly, because of these conversations, some of my own biases were brought to light. The various communities living in Gokarna, especially how they aggregate around caste and class formations, is an area of research that would benefit immensely from a more focused and thorough inquiry. My lack of fluency in Kannada also greatly decreased my ability to speak with the Dalit and Halakki Vokkaliga (low caste and class) communities of Gokarna. Learning more about the people who exist outside of the temple and/or Brahminâs sphere of activity was a result of spending a significant amount of time in Gokarna. If I had more time for research, I would have wanted to shift more of the attention and consideration towards inquiring into how domestic tourism impacts and intersects with these âOther Scheduled Casteâ communities, and how they in turn, viewed young Indian travellers. 4.2 The doctorâs orders After stepping on poisonous thorns that had severely limited my mobility for months, I was directed by a friend in Gokarna to the house of a retired ayurvedic doctor. After the doctor looked at my foot and gave me some mysterious herbal-infused oil for the injury (I never found out what was in it!), we started speaking about the history of the village. He is over ninety years old and has unparalleled knowledge of Gokarna. He told me that if I was researching here, I needed to go to a specific area of the village to see what Gokarna âwas really about.â He spoke vaguely of the âGowdaâ people in his stories and urged me to go and see for myself. I left, eager to visit the location he suggested. 100 Joining me on the excursion was one of my Kannada-speaking friends, but when we arrived, I was quite confused. It was a rather unremarkable dirt path with fields along either side. My friend asked a man watering his garden if we were in the place we were seeking, and he confirmed that we were at the right spot. I looked around for something significant in the area- a so-called marker of the ârealâ Gokarna. After fifteen minutes or so, we were not able to locate anything specific, so we decided to leave. I continued to meet the doctor to get further treatment on my foot, and every week I looked forward to these appointments so I could listen to his stories and talk with him more about the history of Gokarna. Each time we met he told me something that changed my perspective of the place that I thought I had come to know so well. He was the one who had initially prompted me to examine Gokarna outside of the temple and beyond the influence of the Brahmin caste. Radical in his own political and social views, he was frustrated by the systemic and subtle ways in which the lower castes of Gokarna have been and continue to be oppressed. He started many initiatives on his own to force Brahmins and lower castes together (a profoundly bold move that was not often met with acceptance), in an effort to close what he saw was a harmful, and ultimately unnecessary social and economic gap between the people living in Gokarna. What I began to realize through these conversations was that the doctor was intending to rupture my simplified understanding of Gokarna through the lens of Hindu devotion and tourism. He did this directly, through chastising my ignorance of the people other than Brahmins who were living in Gokarna, and he did it obliquely, through directing me to places where people were living outside the parameters of the temple and its surrounding activities. In short, he was encouraging me to question the temple-centric, or Brahman-centric view that I held of Gokarna as a Western English-speaking tourist- ethnographer, by drawing my attention to the everyday lives of non-Brahmin communities living off the land, as well as on the beaches and in the town. From his viewpoint, this was 101 the foundation of Gokarna. I have this doctor to thank for not only healing my foot, but for mending my limited understanding of the land and people(s) residing in Gokarna. 4.3 Beyond Brahmanical parameters For example, the Halakki Vokkaligas (often confusingly referred to in Gokarna as âGowdasâ) are the Indigenous peoples of this area. While Gowda is a vernacular term used in many parts of Karnataka for multiple castes, Vokkaligas is primarily used to describe the farming communities, and the Halakki Vokkaligas are a tribe indigenous to the Uttara Kannada district (in which Gokarna is located). Dalits, also known as the former âuntouchable casteâ, live in Gokarna as well, though I was not able to accrue significant knowledge about them, or the potential roles they may be playing in the tourist economy at large. Currently the Halakki Vokkaligas are considered âOther Backward Classâ, but in 2011, they applied to be formally recognized and classified as a âScheduled Tribeâ7 (Times of India 2019). This classification has not formally been recognized by the state government, but many people within Gokarna refer to the Halakki Vokkaligas as tribal people. Most Halakki Vokkaligas are recognizable by their distinct dress: women wear a kind of thin cotton sari tied like a sarong around their necks, paired with many beaded necklaces and no blouse. Men wear a lungi, usually tied short around their waists, and are often shirtless with a cloth tied around their heads to sustain weight-bearing items like heavy baskets. 7 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/halakki-vokkaligas-await-inclusion-in-scheduled-tribes- list/articleshow/57260570.cms 102 Figure 12: Halakki Vokkaliga woman in a sarong-style sari and beaded necklaces, selling flowers outisde of the Mahabaleshwar temple in Gokarna Found on Kudle and Om beach selling fruit to tourists from large baskets carried on their heads, tending to vast vegetable fields in the surrounding agricultural areas and in the town selling prasad items (coconut and flowers) to pilgrims, Halakki Vokkaligas are distinct in their roles in the informal tourist economy of Gokarna. In comparison to the Brahmins of Gokarna, who have been known for their role in tourism to house/host (foreign) tourists and look after the temples and pilgrimage centre, Halakki Vokkaligas tend to be the people supplying food, or providing land for tourist accommodation and cafes, and so remain somewhat behind the scenes. Interestingly, though there is a clearly demarcated class/caste divide in Gokarna between the Halakki Vokkaligas and Brahmins, it is Halakki Vokkaliga people who are the majority of the owners of properties along the beachfront. They also continue to use this land for cultivation, and for their livestock to graze on. After the 1980s when international tourists started staying along the beaches of Gokarna, the Halakki Vokkaliga people found that their beachside properties had suddenly inflated in value, and they became the first people in Gokarna to build beach shacks for the tourists to stay in. Now 103 most of these shacks are run by people from various parts of Karnataka but have either been sold to these people by Halakki Vokkaligas or are on lease. In other words, the Halakki Vokkaligas have played an integral part in making tourism possible in Gokarna, and yet they are hardly ever referred to or acknowledged by those visiting the area. Positioning Gokarna as a village that centers only around the Brahmins who live there contributes to what an insightful interlocutor/interviewee, Rameez from Delhi, described to me as the âBrahmanical patriarchyâ; a system which indelibly grants utmost privilege to this caste, and to the more privileged gender (males) of this caste. To do this ignores the stories of those who are not taking up the same space, both systemically (in the caste and resulting social systems) and physically (in how Gokarna is seen), and in turn fails to provide an accurate representation of those who continue to contribute significantly to Gokarna in many regards. Another insightful observation from Rameez was that âthe most disgusting thing about this place is how white people and Brahmins are staying together and feeding into Brahmin supremacy and white supremacyâ. He was the only person who I interviewed who spoke frankly about these critical aspects of social relations within the village. No other tourist spoke (or seemed to be aware) of this mutually beneficial arrangement that privileged a certain caste community, as well as a certain tourist demographic. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter Two, whenever I spoke with local people about tourism, indelibly they would begin talking to me about the foreign tourists who stay with Brahmins in Gokarna. Time and time again this happened, and I started to feel frustrated at the lack of legitimacy given towards young Indian tourists visiting the place. The fact that Euro-American travellers and Brahmins got along is not necessarily some kind of social miracle. During the period of colonization by the British in India, Brahmins were often in administrative positions and served as advisors to colonial officials (Bayley 1999). Western travellers in India occupy, or are at least perceived to occupy a particular position on a social 104 hierarchy. Brahmins too sit at the top of this social hierarchy, and so a conjoining of these forces seems to be a fortification of a structural system of power already in place, rather than a unique union emerging from unexpected encounters. As Rameez made clear to me, as a Muslim, he would likely not be welcomed into the homes of Brahmins in Gokarna. The fact that Gokarna is known for its amicable relations between Brahmins and international tourists speaks nothing to the internal politics affecting marginalized classes and castes, as well as people of other faiths in India and, more pointedly, in Gokarna. Having tourism relegated as an activity legitimized only by western, or international tourists also infers a kind of inferiority status designated to Indians who travel and directs the narrative on tourism in Gokarna in a feedback loop between Brahmins and international tourists. To consider the Halakki Vokkaliga people as integral to tourism in Gokarna disrupts a neat bifurcation that I had originally conceived of; that Gokarna was a temple town that held religious values in high esteem, and that a new form of tourism with a domestic demographic was potentially jeopardizing those values. While to some extent, this may be an observation that one could make about the forms of tourism emerging in this village, it certainly is not the only way to conceive of (tourism in) Gokarna. When Halakki Vokkaliga people enter into the equation, more questions need to be asked. Is an emerging informal economy of tourism allowing the Halakki Vokkaliga people to profit off of their land and how does this threaten the Brahminsâ social positioning in Gokarna? If Brahmins in the town do find fault in the ways that young Indian tourists are embodying tourism in this village, are other local tribal people sharing these same sentiments? If not, what are the collective aspirations (if they exist at all) for those living in Gokarna; do they hope for recreational tourism to flourish and continue, or do they wish for a containment of such activities? It is important to question who is in the position to be critiquing recreational tourists. It is also imperative to inquire into how and if these critiques lead to recourse from local politicians. This ability to control who 105 occupies land and for what reasons they are allowed to do so, speaks both to micro-politics that exist in Gokarna, and broader caste and class relations that pervade India. The current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (a powerful Hindu nationalist volunteer organization) has a very unabashed political/ social mandate of identifying India as a Hindu nation. The ascendancy of this âHindutvaâ politics, as they are known, have become so blatant in the public sphere that there is little attempt to euphemize or deny oppressive policies, or to placate those uncomfortable with the idea of the worldâs largest secular nation being run by a Hindu-nationalist party. Many of the partyâs ideologies are proliferated and enacted by individuals or âmilitant protagonists of vigilante mobilisationsâ (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018: 473) that rely on inaction from states in terms of a refusal to legally hold perpetrators accountable or prosecute them for violent hate crimes. Jaffrelot notes that âa large number of Indians- in each community- are turning their backs to multiculturalism and are embracing ethno-religious nationalism. It is becoming the dominant identityâ (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018: 480). As a result, it is imperative for communities to be informed and actively aware of the propensity for Hindu nationalism to take the subtle and overt forms, through micro-aggressions to national policies, that it does in modern India today. To do fieldwork in India in this current political climate and not call into question the structural privileges, visibility, and legitimacy that higher castes and classes (as well as those with particular religious affiliations) receive would do a supreme disservice to those who are struggling against these structures that marginalize their input and existence. These hegemonic narratives are important to critically examine and re-evaluate, particularly when there are no prevailing public counter-narratives (such as is the case in Gokarna) to indicate that anything other than what is being commonly presented exists. 106 The ways in which people are navigating class and caste in Gokarna (and beyond) are continuously evolving, and this is evident in the ways that younger generations of Brahmins and Halakki Vokkaliga people are moving through the landscapes of Gokarna (or not). Ganpati, a man I interviewed who was born in Gokarna and had since moved out of Gokarna but was back visiting family, told me of how things were changing. He spoke of how Brahmin families, who historically had been involved exclusively with temple-related activities, now had children (mainly sons) in their twenties and thirties who were becoming involved in owning businesses in the tourism industry. These children are also moving to cities outside of Gokarna, Karnataka, or India and are pursuing careers in other areas, and moving away from pundit-prescribed activities for their careers. Could this be contributing to a sense among some Brahmins that recreational tourism is a threat to the longevity of their traditions, as it is pulling their lineage away from religious duties? The man who owned the hostel that I stayed in was part of a well-established Brahmin family in town, and he was the first in his family to digress from working in the temple. He leased land for nine years to build his own hostel and café. He told me it was his dream to build a place where young travellers could hang out together, and because he indulged in smoking cannabis throughout the day, no longer felt that it was appropriate to visit the temple for festivals or regular prasad. He had effectively cut himself off from the temple and 107 associated responsibilities, with a re-centering of his life on his entrepreneurial investment of a travellerâs hostel on one of the most scenic plots of land in Gokarna. Figure 13: Views from the hostel property While many people who live in Gokarna often discussed tourism as a halcyonid relationship between Brahmins and visiting Europeans or Americans, some of the Halakki 108 Vokkaliga people were able to establish the most lucrative form of business related to tourism in Gokarna. So, while in many cases lower caste connotes lower class and vice versa, in this instance, the tribal communities have become some of the wealthiest residents in Gokarna. Generally speaking, most Halakki Vokkaliga people in Gokarna are farmers, but also spend time selling the harvest in markets and/or to restaurants. With the growing need for food in restaurants catering to tourists, the farmers of Gokarna have a supportive and steady income throughout most of the year. This is not to say that all tribal or lower caste/class communities of Gokarna are wealthy, but the opportunity that tourism has granted the land-owning farming classes of Gokarna has made it so that their social positioning does not necessarily reflect their income levels. While Gokarna is often referred to as a prominent Hindu and Brahmanical town, to consider it only in these terms erases the history and continued presence of people who have lived in Gokarna prior to the building of the temple. It also fails to acknowledge a key player in the growing tourism economy in Gokarna: those who have helped to develop the coveted and continuously sought-after beach-front properties. One of the last questions I asked my interviewees was: âGiven the religious importance of Gokarna, how do you feel about Gokarna becoming a more popular place for tourism?â I was not considering the town in contexts other than its religious (Hindu) importance, and I thought that the ways in which young Indians were coming to Gokarna to experience it was in contrast to the religious significance of the place and to the Brahmins who uphold these beliefs. To acknowledge that a variety of different people live within Gokarna and contribute to tourism also complicates not only dualities related to the sacred and the profane, but also the standard âhost/guestâ relations that are often conceived of in tourism studies. When there are competing desires among residents who live in the tourist destination, there is not a clear-cut definition of who is the host, and who are guests. Could some âhostsâ (perhaps Halakki Vokkaligas) be 109 considered as unwanted guests by other âhostsâ (Brahmins)? And, what happens if the âhostsâ providing the land for tourism, are not recognized as such? Though I thought I was well-versed in the critical literature that warned against a framework of dualisms and dichotomies (host vs. guest, pilgrim vs. tourist, sacred vs profane, etc.), I must confess that these binary oppositions persisted throughout my research. This was not only a trite way of thinking, but it also does not provide an accurate representation of tourism in Gokarna, or of the village itself. I was only seeing the dominant story of a place (Gokarna as inhabited solely by Brahmins). In addition to this story, I was superimposing onto it another limiting narrative; Indian tourists endangering this way of being by being disruptive weekend tourists, contributing to a trope of the lifecycles of recreational tourism as well as ideas around tourists having overwhelmingly negative impacts. My own time spent with tourists in Gokarna helped me to see that tourists can be discerning, bringing an important reinvestment in the environment and local economy, as well as engaged with intentional forms of personal growth and accountability. Living in Gokarna made me realize that the âtemple townâ was not the only part of Gokarna with the potential to be affected by/the potential to affect tourism. It seems rudimentary in critical tourism studies to reduce the social landscape into these oppositions, such as a pilgrim/tourist, or partygoer âbadâ tourists versus responsible âgoodâ tourists, and yet, it remains easy to fall back into these myopic ways of structuring social life. I had stepped into this research in such a way that fit into these comparisons, because in some way the idea of a place bringing together starkly contrasting ontologies (leisure tourists compared to practicing Brahmins) seemed interesting to me. By remaining aware of tendencies within and beyond research to polarize facets of culture(s), we can continuously welcome into the narrative other experiences that have been silenced, subjugated and ignored. 110 The vibe, besides encouraging return visits to Gokarna, serves as a communicative tool, despite its slipperiness in exactitudes and definitions, through which people can then tell others about essential qualifying factors about a place that they âshouldâ visit. Affective dimensions of a particular place as a tourist destination, referred to as âthe vibeâ of a place, is experienced through the body, and seems to be something that can then be commodified and marketed to promote a location that speaks to the âexperience era economyâ (Pine and Gilmore 1998) of tourism. In other words, it is a buzz word that connotes what young travellers in Gokarna are looking for. That is, those visiting Gokarna are interested in travelling to a place because of how it feels to be there. As Mahina from Delhi stated, âYeah. And it is such a calmer and quieter place, and such a cleaner place. There have been travellers who have been coming here for [the] third or fourth time, they said that what pulls them, keeps pulling them back to Gokarna is the vibe here.â The vibe of Gokarna was often alluded to as an essence, a feeling, an unarticulatable sensation. As Shiva, a twenty-year-old traveller who ran away from his home in the hill station of Ooty in Tamil Nadu expressed it: âHow do I put this? Thereâs a vibe. Thereâs a certain vibe to these places. I donât know how else to put itâ. In thinking more about tourism in particular, another benefit of working beyond polarities is that âtourists are not seen as âpassiveâ consumers but rather as active agents who help shape the production of tourism via a continuous, dialectical process of ânegotiated (re)productionââ (Bianchi 2018: 95). In line with this, it is not that young Indian tourists are changing the shape of Gokarna, but it is through all the residents of Gokarna; Halakki Vokkaligas, Dalits, and Brahmins, and the tourists who come to enjoy Gokarna on their weekends or holidays, that an ongoing conversation and environment takes shape, which then influences a continually evolving form of tourism. Appadurai (1996) suggests that globalization is a complex process that creates hybridized expressions and cultures, and âFor 111 Bhabha (1994: 218-219), a hybrid is not simply a mixture of the two previous identities, but a âthird spaceâ a place for the âthe negotiation of incommensurable differences [â¦] where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-betweenâ (Rocha 2017: 111). This âthird spaceâ is what seems to me to be the place that recreational tourism, dominated by young Indian travelers, has occupied in Gokarna. It is not that Gokarna is only holy, or profane, or that those visiting are good, bad, responsible, or irresponsible. It is that there is an imbrication of circumstances through which Gokarna came into being as a recreational tourist destination, along with it being an ancient pilgrimage site for Hindus, as well as it being a spot that indigenous people have inhabited for hundreds of years before both of these occurrences. Depending on who you are and what you spend your time doing in Gokarna, the defining qualities of the place reflect that, and as I myself experienced, these qualities are not static or universally felt. It remains true that âself-gratification and indulgence may be the primary motivation for one category of backpackers, others may be driven by a genuine interest in learning about other people and environments, and many may fall somewhere between these extremesâ (Hannam and Diekmann 2011: 92). While tourism can create, contribute to and/or maintain imaginaries and reproduce expectations and performances, there always remains the possibility of an overhaul of oneâs previous ideas and subsequent behaviours, influenced by ânewâ places and people. It is this quality, about both travel and ethnography, that are held in the highest esteem for those who undergo this voluntary displacement of oneâs self. Just as an ethnographer has an influence on the research that they are undertaking, similarly, tourists have an impact on the places that they are visiting. It is in collaboration with all the conjoining factors in a place that spheres of experience fully come into being. These spheres can be encountered by others and have within them the infinite capacity to be re-invented. As Hannam and Diekmann (2014: 117) write: 112 We refer to âtourism mobilitiesâ, then, not simply to state the obvious (that tourism is a form of mobility), but to highlight that many different mobilities inform tourism, shape the places where tourism is performed, and drive the making and unmaking of tourist destinations. Mobilities of people and objects, airplanes and suitcases, plants and animals, images and brands, data systems and satellites, all go into âdoingâ tourism... Tourism mobilities involve complex combinations of movement and stillness, realities and fantasies, play and work. 113 Chapter 5: Conclusion The lack of movement and halting of tourism as a result of Covid-19 has implications beyond cancelled holidays or, in my case, being stuck in a hotel in the Himalayas. In areas where tourism is relied upon as the prime source of income, this lockdown has been absolutely devastating. Those providing the raw materials, land and services for tourism economies are inherently implicated in patterns of mobility. While vacations are often represented as being care-free and light, the reasons we end up in the places we do is informed by all the systems and institutions that we are a part of, and those we are excluded from. The way that we think about (or research) destinations is also informed by these systems and institutions. It is not only our suitcases or backpacks that we carry with us while travelling, but, as discussed by Edensor (2001), our culture baggage, too. In this baggage we hold stories, desires, privilege, adversity, biases, bravery, fear, and context. We share all these variables with others whom we meet on our travels, perhaps exchanging, adding, or removing a little weight here and there. Travel, like rhythm, âcreates opportunities for counter-rhythms, place-making and disruptionâ (Reid-Musson 2018: 893). In Gokarna, I witnessed tourists, and myself undertaking all of these opportunities, and sifting through the baggage that we arrived with. I genuinely have no idea what the future holds for Gokarna as a tourist site. I do know that through my own time travelling and conducting fieldwork, that young Indians are utilizing domestic travel to places like Gokarna in ways that are both purposeful and transformative. When travel pathways are amplified and woven together, we can connect to more than just ourselves. We can locate trajectories, patterns, and emergent qualities of places and people. In the first chapter, I explained my own journey in landing in Gokarna, and some of the rewards and challenges of doing fieldwork and living in a dorm for over three months. 114 In Chapter Two, I intended to piece together some of the interpolated histories of tourism in Goa and Gokarna, to paint a clearer picture of why so many Indian recreational tourists are choosing to visit Gokarna over Goa. For many, Gokarna is providing a space for tourists that is an alternative to Goa. Its beautiful landscape allows for an embodied experience that interlocutors expressed as not being as available, or available in the same way as in cities, or overly commercialized spaces. Gokarna permits a kind of reinvigoration that many believed to be drained by the societal constraints of urban life, jobs, and familial responsibilities. Gokarna is a place understood by tourists that allows or suggests for the releasing of oneself from the âdeterminedâ life of a regulated workday, relieving oneself of the (perceived) burdensome nature of familial/cultural obligations, and shaking loose inhibitions that prevent one from having a good time. Chapter Two also addresses my research question asking how tourists in Gokarna are conceiving of themselves in relation to other tourists. The emphasis that tourists in Gokarna placed on being a particular kind of traveller (solo, independent, conscious, connected to the land, etc.) placed them in direct opposition with tourists whom they thought exhibited opposing behaviours. Tourists whom I spoke with were by and large staying in hostels in Gokarna. This placed them in environments that they thought were conducive to meeting like-minded people who could enhance their travelling experience. Travellers who posed a threat to the ideal version of Gokarna (serene, clean, affordable and natural) were spoken of negatively by all of the interlocutors whom I interviewed. Additionally, Chapter Two introduces the idea of why it is that tourists are now choosing Gokarna over Goa. It was communicated by the interlocutors of this research, that tourists came to Gokarna to experience a more ânaturalâ vacation, that was not so bound by insitutions or a city kind of âfeelâ. This relates to my research questions on the motivations for young Indians coming to Gokarna. These motivations are presented more in detail in Chapter Three. 115 Chapter Three attempts to pull apart a quality of Gokarna thought to encompass the main attraction to the place- the vibe. Through listening to what tourists described as their embodied experiences, we can see that Gokarna is considered to be infused with potential. This potential has the ability to transform consciousness, and for some tourists, their bodies. Travelling to Gokarna, and synching with the vibe was considered by tourists to cultivate processes of becoming. This process of becoming is intricately tied to desires in that the process of becoming can be longed for, intentional and informed by imaginaries that shape and suggest forms of yearning and fulfilment. Some desires are considered to be magnetized by the environment(s) in Gokarna, as well as through the act of travelling itself, which then allows for a preferred process of becoming. Deleuze describes the process of becoming as âthose individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitionsâ (Locke and Biehl 2010: 317). âShaking loose from determinantsâ is a yearning that motivated many tourists whom I spoke with to visit Gokarna, and more broadly, to travel. Ved from Delhi suggested that: âMore people are trying to enjoy life more, and see more, learn more. So, more of them, the youngsters especially, are trying to question the existing social biases I would say, about what youâre supposed to do, how youâre supposed to live.â These notions of becoming are directly in line with what MacCannell (1984) has written on authenticity in tourism, on how locating oneself through the idea of removal from oneâs home contributes to a process of becoming or a sense of developing into oneâs âtrue selfâ. The vibe in Gokarna can be contested, and can exist in multiple ways, for various people, in the same place at the same time. While most tourists came to Gokarna to find a place that allowed for a break from tenuous social and economic obligations, some came with the intent to take full advantage of a new place to party. One research question that I posed, is inquiring into the motivations for visiting Gokarna. By and large, those who visited Gokarna 116 were motivated by what they heard as a positive âvibeâ, which then allows for ideal versions of oneself to be expressed. These motivations for travel have been considered within classical ethnographies on tourism (Urry 2002; MacCannell 1976). In this research, I included motivations that were related to the more perceptible realm (such as cost, topography, etc.) as well as those which were imperceptible (an indescribable feeling). This inclusion of affect into motivations attempts to merge theoretical inquiries and contemporary reasons for visiting Gokarna. It also reflects what my interlocutors were explaining to me as their reasons for initially visiting, or for coming back to Gokarna. The motivations for travel can be influenced by factors that occur beyond an everyday sense of consciousness. Moving beyond explanations based solely in written analysis, this research pays homage to the emerging sensibilities that young Indian travellers in Gokarna are noting as being paramount to their mobilities and desires- that is, the way oneâs body feels to be in a place. While motivations for travel related to escapism and âOtheringâ have been written about extensively in anthropology and tourism studies, the ways in which these travellers in Gokarna were understanding their reasons for being there, did not fit into these theroretical debates in a neat and overarching way. Motivations are seen in this research to come from very specific social circumstances, that allow or disallow for leisurely movement, which relates back to my research question on how to situate this research both inside and beyond broader anthropological frameworks in tourism studies. Chapter four speaks to my own ideological shortcomings, and how places take shape not only through our experiences, but through what we fail to acknowledge, as well. Through complicating the narrative about tourists and the residents in Gokarna, this research seeks to provide a more nuanced lens through which to view this âtemple townâ. Remaining reflexive through the research process lead me to realize that my own ethnographic inquiries into Gokarna were incomplete. Acknowleding the implications that the caste system has on 117 tourism in Gokarna connects this research to broader conversations in and about India regarding nationalism and caste. I see this research as being particularly microcosmic, in that it attempts to do what so many of the travellers I met were trying to do as well. That is, we are all making an effort to incorporate a kind of novel experience to reach more embodied and expansive understandings of the world. We are working to incorporate othersâ perspectives into our own to gain insights that will broaden our circles of consideration that can be limited by an adherence to that which we have previously known. This is the kind of intersubjective learning that takes place in fieldwork, and this is the kind of embodied knowledge that may become assimilated through travel. Of course, I found myself involved in this research, and indeed, in this discipline, because of my own propensity to travel. This connected me to my interlocutors before the research even began. On an analytical level, I realize that the âaffective turnâ in the social sciences is a result of a similar kind of intention among myself and travellers I encountered; to push oneself outside of the boundaries that can result in a restriction of possibility in understanding the multifarious ways in which humans experience their own, and a collective reality. To feel constricted by a chasm in experience, that is simultaneously suffocating and overwhelmingly vacuous pushes us all to a place that we have never been before. A place that relies on a meandering through lands both ideological and physical; epistemological and ontological. A journey to places that position us in direct sunlight, absorbing the sensations of new spaces and spaces that, if only for a moment, a school year or a weekend, takes us away from the perceived limits of the quotidian or scholastic, and uses these experiences to launch into new understandings of ourselves and others. The magic that can be found in both leisurely travel and ethnographic work is that it can incorporate the mysterious and the discordant into the known, and pave way for a more robust version of a life worth living, questioning, and exploring. 118 Afterword: writing during a Pandemic As I write this, I am sitting alone in my hotel room that I have now occupied for over three months amidst a nation-wide (and nearly globally spanning) lockdown. I have had ample time to reflect on (im)mobility and my ironic position as a student/researcher currently stuck, writing on travel. Lefebvre conceptualizes rhythms as âstarting points for studying biological, social, and economic ebbs and flows that constitute everyday life under capitalismâ (Reid-Musson 2018: 881). These rhythms bespoken of by Lefebvre and elaborated on by countless other scholars have unexpectedly had a wrench thrown in them (to say the least) with the onset of COVID-19. Our known tempos and successive daily patterns, at least for most of us, have dramatically altered and what we are left with is a distinct texture of immobility. Tourism has essentially come to a screeching halt the world over. Certainly, in my own lifetime, this is the first time that multiple countries have sealed borders with the addition of strict orders to stay inside. India had ordered one of the most draconian (and abruptly announced, with a mere four hoursâ notice) lockdowns in the world, leading to millions of people being stuck, especially migrant workers, in places that are far from their home and potentially deadly incubators for spreading the virus. After my fieldwork in Gokarna had concluded, I began travelling north to escape the oncoming heat of the summers and to write, away from my fieldsite. After days of train rides, a brief stop in Rajasthan, and visits with friends in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, I reached the village of Kasar Devi, in the state of Uttarakhand. All my romantic visions of cozying up in a home with a fireplace and writing a thesis were immediately dismantled by a series of unfortunate housing events that left me moving from dirty cold room, to dirty cold room. A surprising amount of what I later learned to be family vendettas in the village created issues with housing for me. I would meet someone who would tell me that I could rent a room in their establishment, and only after arriving was I informed that either they could not rent to 119 foreigners, or they wanted more money for the rent than their relative had initially told me. This happened four times in one week. Eventually, I ended up in a tent, and rather dramatically had to âsurrenderâ myself to local police once the lockdown began, so I could find a formal (read: legal) place to stay. All hoteliers and room-owners were refusing to rent to foreigners, fearing that they were vectors for this new virus, so I needed to be escorted to an accommodation by government tourism officials. After hours of negotiations between the officials and hoteliers, they had finally found me a place to stay. They had originally planned to shift me to a hotel in the nearest city, Almora, but for whatever reason it did not work out, and I was sent to a room in Kasar Devi. I started to regret the decision to come to Kasar Devi and began neurotically formulating an escape plan. Having hopes of this village being the perfect place to write, as it boasted many famous writers in residence (Herman Hesse, Timothy Leary, Cat Stevens, Walter Evans-Wentz, Bob Dylanâ¦to name a few), my expectations were shattered. And yet, every time I tried to leave, something prevented me from doing so. I was trying to get to Delhi, to be near to an airport when flights departed back to Canada. I bought a train ticket, and on my way to the Haldwani railway station, I suddenly got sick to my stomach and had to turn back to Kasar Devi. A few days later, while attempting to cross district borders to get to a friendâs house, I was stopped at a checkpoint. The checkpoint had been established that morning, and that afternoon the state of Uttarakhand decided to not let foreigners cross district borders. I again, had to return to Kasar Devi. When emergency evacuation flights to Canada became available, I obsessively called every outlet I could to assist me in getting a ticket. I was on a first name basis with workers at the consulate in Delhi, phoning at least twice a day to try to organize my return home. After weeks of waiting, I realized that I did not âqualifyâ for a seat on any of the returning flights, most likely because of my remote location. After what became an utterly onerous process of resisting a place- I surrendered. 120 This village is also known for its âvibesâ. Kasar Devi is said to have strong energetic properties, and has attracted many philosophers, artists, Buddhist practitioners, and psychedelic enthusiasts. Caught up in the stressful circumstances of navigating the onset of the pandemic while not having clarity on when I would be able to return to Canada, I struggled to feel this so-called positive energetic quality. I actually did not care about it; I was consumed by my aforementioned escape plans. One day I went for a walk and despite most establishments being closed, a man who owned a small shop let me in. Perhaps he sensed my desperation, or perhaps he was hoping, amidst economically precarious times, that I would buy some items. To my absolute astonishment, he started talking to me about the âvibesâ of the place- âit just has a feeling donât you think?â âBut tell me this, uncleâ, I asked him, feeling a little jaded: âdonât you think itâs easy to assume the vibes of a place when youâre just visiting as a tourist? When youâre not aware of all the politics and problems?â He looked at me and said, quite frankly, âwell yes, but you have to be above thatâ. In one fell swoop he restored a âcall to goodnessâ (Dillard and Dixson 2006) and brushed away my scholastic and heady concerns with âproblemsâ. He redirected my focus to the landscape, to that which exists as both a part of and beyond politics. He then asked me if I had experienced anything here that I thought was special. The prior month of failed escape attempts flashed through my mind. I do not remember how I responded to him, but I do remember that for the first time in many days, I laughed. This shifting of focus that he encouraged allowed for me to take advantage of the place that I was stuck in, which I came to realize was actually incredibly fortunate. I could have been stuck in a flat in Delhi, or in the south with the stifling heat of the summers. This shop owner reminded me to get outside, and to forget about issues that I was concerning myself with. After that day I began persistently hiking through the hills of Kasar Devi, locating a sense of peace and happiness amongst my quiet observations of the plants, fungi and animals in the area. 121 This conversation and the month leading up to it, really made me consider, not for the first time, but in a way with a newly embodied experience- how can a place affect tourists? Are tourists impervious to affect (the vibe, or the atmosphere) simply by knowing the local gossip and banal (or significant) tensions that exist in an area? Of course not. It can be harder to attune to, more difficult to embody or not valued as highly, but there is still in some places, a quality that makes you feel some kind of way, and in my case, does not let you leave. It may be easy to assume that because you have spent more time somewhere, you have a greater knowledge of the events that occur... But does that mean that you understand the essence or âvibeâ of somewhere more because of that? Or is it possible that to be mired in the micro- politics of a village, city or town (or of your own mind) can work to push you away from a different kind of connection with a place? Is it possible to essentialize the vibe, or does it always rely on subjective positionings? In pondering this, I thought about how I often waffled between sincerely recognizing and feeling the vibe that tourists spoke about in Gokarna and brushing it off as ignorance to what was âactuallyâ happening in the village. I realize now that all of it was âactuallyâ happening, and to be focused on tensions in an environment does not make one more attuned to that setting. In the social sciences, it is well known that if you go into research with an expectation, or an idea, you will surely locate it in your fieldsite. We all, arguably, have these biases that informs our research process. This conversation was a helpful reminder for me, once again, to acknowledge the tendency to situate experiences as thoroughly good, bad, aware, or ignorant, and to step outside of a relentlessly critical mind frame, which tends to valorize problems over harmony. In doing this, we can grant legitimacy to all of the experiences that we have in a place and deepen our understanding of the atmospheres- sublime, dirty, crowded, spacious, romantic, stressful, challenging, natural- that we find ourselves in. 122 Bibliography Absolon, Kathy. Willet, Cam 2005. Putting Ourselves Forward: Location in Aboriginal Research. In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti- Oppressive Approaches Pp. 97â126. Toronto: Canadian Scholarsâ Press. Aichison, C 2001. Theorizing other discourses of tourism, gender and culture: Can the subaltern speak (in tourism?) Tourist Studies 1(2): 133-147. Anderson, Ben 2009. Affective Atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society 2(2): 77â 81. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bandyopadhyay, Ranjan, and Duarte Morais 2005. Representative Dissonance. Annals of Tourism Research 32(4): 1006â1021. Bayly, Susan 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bianchi, Raoul 2018. The Political Economy of Tourism Development: A Critical Review. Annals of Tourism Research. Biehl, João, and Peter Locke 2010. Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming. Current Anthropology. Bruner, Edward 2005. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chiao, Elaine, Ling Yang, Catheryn Khoo-lattimore, and Charles Arcodia 2018. Constructing Space and Self through Risk Taking: A Case of Asian Solo Female Travelers. Journal of Travel Research 57(2): 260â272. Church, Andrew, and Tim Coles 2006. Tourism, Power and Space. London: Routledge. Cohen, Scott A. 2010. Chasing a Myth? Searching for âSelfâ Through Lifestyle Travel. Tourist Studies 10(2): 117â133. Csordas, Thomas 1990. Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethod 18(1): 5â 47. D'Andrea, Anthony. 2007. Global Nomads Group: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge. De Groot, Marlies., and Hilje vander Horst 2014. Indian Youth in Goa: Scripted Performances of âTrue Selves.â Tourism Geographies 16(2): 303â317. 123 Desforges, Luke 2000 Traveling the World: Identity and Travel Biography. Annals of Tourism Research 27(4): 926â945. ---- 2000b Identity and Travel Biography. Annals of Tourism Research 27(4): 926- 945. d'Hauteserre, Anne-marie 2014. Affect Theory and the Attractivity of Destinations. Annals of Tourism Research 55(1): 77â89. Dillard, Cynthia; Adrienne Dixson 2006. Affirming the Will and the Way of the Ancestors: Black Feminist Consciousness and the Search for âGoodâ[Ness] in Qualitative Science. In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies Pp. 227â 254. Sage Publications. Edensor, Tim 2001 Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism. Tourist Studies 1(1): 59â 81. Edensor, Tim. 2008 Tourists at the Taj: Performance and meaning at a symbolic site. London: Routledge. Ellis, Carolyn; Adams, Tony; Bochner, Arthur 2011. Autoethnography: An Overview. Forum: Forum Qualitative Social Research 12(1). Fernandes, Leela, and Patrick Heller 2006 Hegemonic Aspirations. Critical Asian Studies 38(4): 495â522. Frohlick, Susan 2020. Reproductive vibes: therapeutic atmospheres and the reproductive force of tourism mobilities. Mobilities 15(2): 120-134. Foucault, M 1979 Discipline and Punish. The Birth of a Prison. In Discipline and Punish. Geary, David 2013 Incredible India in a Global Age: The Cultural Politics of Image Branding in Tourism. Tourist Studies 13(1): 36â61. Green, Belinda, Timothy J. Scrase, and Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase 2017. Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala, South India. Asian Studies Review 41(1): 99â116. Hall, Michael C. 2013. Framing Tourism Geography: Notes from the Underground. Annals of Tourism Research 43(1): 601-623. Hannam, Kevin; Diekmann, Anya 2010. Tourism and India. London: Routledge. Hansen, Thomas Blom 2014. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hottola, Petri 2005. The Metaspatialities of Control Management in Tourism: Backpacking in India. Tourism Geographies 7(1): 1â22. 124 ---- 2014. Somewhat Empty Meeting Grounds: Travelers in South India. Annals of Tourism Research 44(1). Elsevier Ltd: 270â282.. Huberman, Jenny 2012. Ambivalent Encounters: Childhood, Tourism, and Social Change in Banaras, India. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. King, Richard 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and 'the Mystic East'. London: Routledge. Lamb, Sarah 2008. Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad. Indiana University Press. Larsen, Jonas 2008. De-Exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move. Leisure Studies 27(1): 21â34. Locke, Peter, and João Biehl 2010. Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming by Joa. Current Anthropology 51(3): 317â351. Löfgren, Orvar 1999. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacCannell, Dean 1973. Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings. American Journal of Sociology 79(1): 586-603. Maoz, Darya 2006. The Mutual Gaze. Annals of Tourism Research 33(1): 221â239. ----- 2007. Backpackersâ Motivations the Role of Culture and Nationality. Annals of Tourism Research 34(1): 122â140. Maoz, Darya, and Zvi Bekerman 2009. Searching for Jewish Answers in Indian Resorts. Annals of Tourism Research 37(2): 423â439. Merriam B, Sharan; Tisdell J, Elizabeth 2016. Qualitative Research. Fourth Edition. Jossey-Bass. Mkono, Muchazondida 2016. The Reflexive Tourist. Annals of Tourism Research 57(1): 206â219. Musson-Reid, Emily 2018. Intersectional Rhythm Analysis: Power, Rhythm and Everyday Life. Progress in Human Geography 42(6): 881â897. Pandey, Vikas 2020. Coronavirus Lockdown: The Indian Migrants Dying to Get Home. BBC, May 20. Pani, Narendar, and Soundarya Iyer 2015. Towards a Framework to Determine Backwardness: Caste, Inequality and Reservations in India. Journal of South Asian Development 10(1): 48â72. Pine B. Joseph and Gilmore James, H 1998. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business School Press. 125 Ram, Kalpana, Christopher Houston, and Michael Jackson 2015. Phenomenology in Anthropology. Indiana University Press. Rocha, Cristina 2006. John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. Oxford University Press. Saigeetha Jambunathan, Kenneth Counselman 2002. Parenting Attitudes of Asian Indian Mothers Living in the United States and in India. Early Child Development and Care 172(6): 657â662. Salazar, Noel B., and Graburn H Nelson 2014. Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. Noel Salazar and Nelson H Graburn, eds. New York: Berghahn Books. Saldanha, Arun 2002. Music, Space, Identity: Geographies of Youth Culture in Bangalore. Cultural Studies 16(3): 337â350. ---- 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscocity of Race. University of Minnesota Press. Sharpley, Richard 2011. The Study of Tourism: Past Trends and Future Directions. London: Routledge. Skoggard, Ian., and Alissa. Waterson 2015. Intro: Toward an Anthropology of Affect and Evocative Ethnography. Anthropology of Consciousness 26(2): 109â120. Stewart, Kathleen, and Elizabeth Lewis 2015. Anthropology of Affect and Emotion. International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences 1(2): 237â239. ----2015b. Anthropology of Affect and Emotion, vol.1. International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences. Second Edi. Elsevier. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0- 08-097086-8.12173-7. Teo, Peggy, and Sandra Leong 2006. A Postcolonial Analysis of Backpacking. Annals of Tourism Research 33(1): 109â131. Thrift, Nigel 2008. Spatialities of Feeling from Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics and Affect. London: Routledge Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2002. North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions 1492- 1945. South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4): 839â858. Winston, C, N., H. Maher, and V. Easvaradoss 2017. Needs and Values: An Exploration. The Humanistic Psychologist 45(3): 295â311. Winter, Tim 2008. Asian Tourism and the Retreat of Anglo-Western Centrism in Tourism Theory. Current Issues in Tourism 12(1): 21â31. Yang, Elaine Chiao Ling, Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore, and Charles Arcodia 2018. Power and Empowerment: How Asian Solo Female Travellers Perceive and Negotiate 126 Risks. Tourism Management. 127 Appendices Appendix A: Interview Questions 1. Where are you from? Prompts: Where were you born? Which state/province/city/territory/village, etc. 2. How old are you? 3. What kind of work do you do? Prompts: What kind of work have you done in the past? (if they are currently unemployed). 4. What are your motivations for coming to Gokarna? Prompts: Who told you about Gokarna? What did they tell you about it? 5. How did you get to Gokarna, and where did you come from directly before arriving? Prompts: Did you take a train, plane, boat, car, or other form of transportation to get here? 6. Where are you staying in Gokarna? 7. What do you like or dislike about this place? 8. How does Gokarna differ from other popular tourist/pilgrimage sites in South India? 9. What kinds of interactions with local people have you had since being here? Prompts: Who do you find yourself spending time with while you are in Gokarna? 10. What kinds of interactions with other tourists (domestic or international) have you had since being here? 11. Given the religious importance of Gokarna, how do you feel about Gokarna becoming a more popular site for tourism? 128 Appendix B: Table of Interviews Name Birthplace city + state (or where they identified as being from) Age Gender Shruti Mumbai (Maharashtra) 23 Female Anil Ahmedabad (Gujarat) 24 Male Sundari Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh) 30 Female Devi Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) 31 Female Shiva Ooty (Tamil Nadu) 24 Male Ved Delhi 24 Male Mahina Delhi 28 Female Pratik Mumbai (Maharashtra) 27 Male Kishant Mysore (Karnataka) 24 Male Rameez Delhi 25 Male Ganpati Gokarna 28 Male 129 Appendix C: Consent Form Principal Investigator: Dr. David Geary Anthropology Program, Community, Culture and Global Studies; Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences, 1147 Research Road, Arts 272, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada V1V 1V7, tel. 250-807-8165; email: david.geary@ubc.ca. Co-Investigator: Rebecca Campbell B.A Cultural Anthropology, B.A International Development Studies Graduate Student, Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies | Community, Culture and Global Studies The University of British Columbia | Okanagan | Syilx Okanagan Nation Territory 1147 Research Road | Kelowna British Columbia | V1V 1V7 Canada Your participation is entirely voluntary, so it is up to you to decide whether or not to take part in this part of the study. If you wish to participate, you will be invited to sign this form. If you do decide to take part in this study, you are free to withdraw at any time and without giving any reasons for your decision. Why is the researcher doing this study? The researcher is conducting this research to learn more about why young Indians are choosing to spend time in Gokarna. The researcher is interested in learning what Indian tourists are doing with their time while they are in Gokarna, and who they are spending their time with. Who can participate in this study? You are being invited to participate in this study because you are Indian, over the age of 18 and under the age of 35 and are currently visiting Gokarna. Non-Indian tourists are excluded from this study. What does participating involve? This research is using interviews to gather information. Participation means taking part in an interview that could take thirty (30) minutes to sixty (60) minutes. How will the results be used? The results of this study will be used to write the researcherâs thesis for the University of British Columbia. This thesis will be publicly available on the internet. The results may also be published in a journal article, conference presentation, or formal report. What are the risks of participating in this study? We do not anticipate that this interview process will pose any risks to you personally. However, some of the questions may seem personal or sensitive. You do not have to answer any question if you do not want to. If you are feeling uncomfortable, you may stop the interview or request a break at any time, with no negative consequences. There are no benefits or compensation to participate in this study other than contributing to developing a more general understanding of tourism practices among young Indians in Gokarna. If you 130 chose to withdraw from this study, your information will be used only with your permission, otherwise the data will not be used. You can withdraw from the study at any time by contacting the co-investigator either by email or phone. Will you be paid for participating in this study? The researcher is very grateful for your participation. However, you will not receive compensation of any kind for participating in this project. Confidentiality All the information you provide will be treated as confidential. At your request, you will be assigned a pseudonym and only the pseudonym will be recorded in the interview notes and used in any future publications and dissemination of information. Interview transcripts and audio file recordings will be password protected and kept private at all times. Only the Principal Investigator will have access to this data and will be kept in a locked file in the office of the for a period no longer than 5 years. After this period all research materials will be destroyed and/or returned to you if that is your preference. The identities of all people who participate will be kept confidential. Identifiable data will be stored securely in a password protected computer account. All data from individual participants will be coded so that their confidentiality will be protected in any reports, research papers, thesis documents, and presentations that result from this work. Short-term data storage will be on a password protected hard drive. Contact Information About the Project If you have any further questions or desire further information, or if you have any concerns about this study, you may contact the Principal Investigator, Rebecca Campbell, at the telephone number or email address provided on the business card provided. If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research subject, you may also contact the Research Subject Information Line or the UBC Okanagan Research Services Office at the numbers provided on card. Contact information for complaints or concerns If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the Research Participant Complaint Line in the UBC Office of Research Services at 1-877-822-8598. It is also possible to contact the Research Participant Complaint Line by email (RSIL@ors.ubc.ca). Please reference the study number (H19-01287) when contacting the Complaint Line so the staff can better assist you. Consent The researcher intends for your participation in this project to be pleasant and stress-free. Your participation is entirely voluntary, and you may refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time. Your signature below indicates that you have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Your signature indicates that you consent to participate in this project. You do not waive any legal rights by signing this consent form. I, , agree to be interviewed and participate in the project as outlined above. My participation in this project is voluntary and I understand that I may withdraw at any time. 131 Participantâs Signature Researcherâs Signature Date Date 132 Appendix D: Letter of Introduction Date: Dear , Research Project: Om Away from Home: Tourist Interactions and the Politics of Space in Gokarna. My name is Rebecca (Becca) Campbell and I am a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), Canada. I am currently undertaking research on tourism and tourists in Gokarna. In particular, I am interested in knowing why young Indian tourists are traveling to Gokarna and what they are doing when they visit Gokarna town, and Om and Kudle beach. I am living in Gokarna for a period of approximately 5 months, to become familiar with tourism on Om and Kudle beach, specifically. I am conducting interviews as a method to collect information from people who are visiting Gokarna. My main questions for this research project are: 1) Why are young Indians choosing to spend their vacations in Gokarna, as opposed to other tourism sites in South India? 2) How do the physical and relational orientations that young Indian tourists situate themselves within in Gokarna (in where they stay and with whom) give rise to certain social relationships as well as conflicts within spaces that are now being reimagined for recreational tourism, as opposed to strictly religious pilgrimages? I would be very thankful for your participation in this research project. Rebecca Campbell B.A Cultural Anthropology, B.A International Development Studies Graduate Student, Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies | Community, Culture and Global Studies The University of British Columbia | Okanagan | Syilx Okanagan Nation Territory 1147 Research Road | Kelowna British Columbia | V1V 1V7 Canada bec.campbell@ubc.ca 133 Appendix E: Record of Oral Consent Principal Investigator: Dr. David Geary Anthropology Program, Community, Culture and Global Studies; Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences, 1147 Research Road, Arts 272, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada V1V 1V7, tel. 250-807-8165; email: david.geary@ubc.ca. Co-Investigator: Rebecca Campbell B.A Cultural Anthropology, B.A International Development Studies Graduate Student, Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies | Community, Culture and Global Studies The University of British Columbia | Okanagan | Syilx Okanagan Nation Territory 1147 Research Road | Kelowna British Columbia | V1V 1V7 Canada Name of research participant: Date of interview: Greetings and Introduction Your participation is entirely voluntary, so it is up to you to decide whether or not to take part in this part of the study. If you wish to participate, you will be invited to confirm your participation. If you do decide to take part in this study, you are free to withdraw at any time and without giving any reasons for your decision. My name is Rebecca (Becca) Campbell, and I am a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). I am the co-investigator of this research project. The University of British Columbia Okanagan subscribes to the ethical conduct of research and to the protection at all times of the interests, comfort, and safety of study subjects. The information provided here is being given to you for your own protection and understanding of the procedures, risks and benefits associated with this research. This oral consent is only part of the process of informed consent. It should give you a basic idea of what the research is about and what your participation will involve. If you would like more details, feel free to ask the researcher at any time. You must be 19 years of age or older to participate in this study. Purpose of the Study: The researcher is conducting this research to learn more about why young Indians are choosing to spend time in Gokarna. The researcher is interested in learning what Indian tourists are doing with their time while they are in Gokarna, and who they are spending their time with. Who can participate in this study? You are being invited to participate in this study because you are Indian, over the age of 18 and under the age of 35 and are currently visiting Gokarna. Non-Indian tourists are excluded from this study. 134 What does participating involve? If you agree to participate in this study the interview should last between 30 minutes to 60 minutes. The interview will be conducted in a setting acceptable to you and mutually agreed upon by you and the researcher. Depending on the preferences of the researcher, you may be asked to permit an audio recording of the interview. During the interview you will be asked questions about your experiences as a tourist in Gokarna, and what lead you to visiting Gokarna as a tourist. At your request, you can also obtain a copy of the transcribed interview. The transcript will be sent via email. How will the results be used? The results of this study will be used to write the researcherâs thesis for the University of British Columbia. This thesis will be publicly available on the internet. The results may also be published in a journal article, conference presentation, or formal report. Who can participate in this study? You are being invited to participate in this study because you are Indian, over the age of 18 and under the age of 35 and are currently visiting Gokarna. Non-Indian tourists are excluded from this study. What does participating involve? If you agree to participate in this study the interview should last between 30 minutes to 60 minutes. The interview will be conducted in a setting acceptable to you and mutually agreed upon by you and the researcher. Depending on the preferences of the researcher, you may be asked to permit an audio recording of the interview. During the interview you will be asked questions about your experiences as a tourist in Gokarna, and what lead you to visiting Gokarna as a tourist. At your request, you can also obtain a copy of the transcribed interview. The transcript will be sent via email. How will the results be used? The results of this study will be used to write the researcherâs thesis for the University of British Columbia. This thesis will be publicly available on the internet. The results may also be published in a journal article, conference presentation, or formal report. What are the risks of participating in this survey? We do not anticipate that this interview process will pose any risks to you personally. However, some of the questions may seem personal or sensitive. You do not have to answer any question if you do not want to. If you are feeling uncomfortable, you may stop the interview or request a break at any time, with no negative consequences. There are no benefits or compensation to participate in this study other than contributing to developing a more general understanding of tourism practices among young Indians in Gokarna. If you chose to withdraw from this study, your information will be used only with your permission, otherwise the data will not be used. You can withdraw from the study at any time by contacting the co-investigator either by email or phone. Will you be paid for participating in this study? The researcher is very grateful for your participation. However, you will not receive compensation of any kind for participating in this project. Confidentiality: All the information you provide will be treated as confidential. At your request, you will be assigned a pseudonym and only the pseudonym will be recorded in the interview notes and used in any future publications and dissemination of information. Interview transcripts and audio file recordings will be password protected and kept private at all times. Only the Principal Investigator will have access to this data and will be kept in a locked file in the office of the for a period no longer than 5 years. After this period all research materials will 135 be destroyed and/or returned to you if that is your preference. The identities of all people who 136 participate will be kept confidential. Identifiable data will be stored securely in a password protected computer account. All data from individual participants will be coded so that their confidentiality will be protected in any reports, research papers, thesis documents, and presentations that result from this work. Short-term data storage will be on a password protected hard drive. Contact for Information or Concerns about the Study: If you have any further questions or desire further information, or if you have any concerns about this study, you may contact the Principal Investigator, Rebecca Campbell, at the telephone number or email address provided on this document [provide a print-out of this oral consent form which includes contact information]. If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research subject, you may also contact the Research Subject Information Line or the UBC Okanagan Research Services Office at the numbers provided on card. Consent: Your participation in this research is entirely voluntary and you may refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time. Your signature indicates that you consent to participate in this study and that you have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Questions and contacts Do you have any questions about what I have mentioned thus far? If you have any questions about the study in the future, following the interview, please feel free to contact me. All of my information is on the card I have given you. Do you agree to participate? If the participant agrees: Would you mind if I record our conversation? Again any information recorded would be kept entirely confidential. If you would like I can provide you with a printed transcript of the interview when I have it ready. The transcript is for you to keep. Pro Forma: Has the information been read out or explained? [ ]; has information been understood?; has agreement been shown?; does the person consent to be recorded? [if yes, you might then, if appropriate, ask for agreement to be recorded]. Principal Investigator Signature:
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Om away from home : Indian tourists, affect and the politics of mobility in Gokarna.
Text