Abstract

This article investigates the politics of travel by focusing on the composite and overarching genre of adventure within Indian children’s literature. Conventionally seen as a boyhood genre, adventure fiction is characterized by home-away-home pattern, where the movement away from home takes the male protagonist away from accustomed safety toward unusual sights, challenges, and experiences. However, using the lens of feminist narratology, this article looks at how Indian texts with feminist orientation in Gujarati and English languages subvert the notion of travel. They do so by replacing the idea of quest with enjoyment, reversing the quest objective, undoing the female/passive plot position, re-defining obstacles as aids, and undoing the gendered opposition between quester and quest object positions. The conclusions advocate harnessing the potential of children’s literature as a resource to inculcate newer ways of traveling and un-gendering.