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Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Why don’t you tell us what ‘Airplane Mode’ is about?
A: ‘Airplane Mode’ is a sort of alternative history of travel. And it’s both a personal history and a cultural history. So what I did was delve a little bit on the history of how tourism came about, how did modern tourism come into existence, but also the history of all these objects that we now associate with tourism, such as passports and guidebooks, and figure out what is their role in history instead of normalising them. Think about the context in which they became so important. Think about the context in which they actually became something that travellers feel that they need to take with them. But it’s also a personal history. So I weave in stories of my own travels in different parts of the world and show how the history of tourism, which is very much connected to the history of colonialism, the history of capitalism, how that history is connected to the way each of us travel in the world. So each of our individual tourist histories is very deeply linked to the larger colonialist, capitalist history of travel.
Q: When we want to travel from the Global South, as it’s called today, to other parts of the world, the amount of paperwork makes you think twice about it.
A: As Indians, we have been dealing with ‘passportism’ for all our lives. Anyone who wanted to travel abroad, whether it was for tourism, whether it was for a conference, student visa, has had to stand in long visa lines or submit reams and reams of paperwork. And so when Indian readers talk to me about the book, they’re like, ‘my God, passportism, I needed that word’. Whereas when readers from the UK and the US talk about the book, passportism has registered for the first time in their experience. So it’s really interesting to see how people from the Global South have this very visceral response to having passportism named for them and delving into the history of passportism. So that’s been a really interesting aspect of just having the book come out in two very different places with two very different positions.
Q: And forget just having access to the passport, but also the privileges that a certain kind of passport gives you or the kind of visas that get stamped on it.
A: It just defies my imagination that prior to sometime in the 19th century, passports were not even really used that much. And now they have this chokehold over the way we travel. So it’s impossible to think of traveling without a passport internationally. And it’s become not just a travel document, but also a way to show our national affiliation. And the nation-state itself is such a modern invention. And the passport has become this tool by which the nation-state has extended its surveillance and extended its control over how we live, how we present ourselves, who we are, all the identity markers in our passport.
Passports were mostly used as internal documents prior to the 19th century. Many medieval European countries had some forms of passports, but they were used to prevent mostly poor people from travelling to the cities and becoming a burden on cities, city govts, or becoming a burden on parishes in richer villages. And so the Europeans were able to take that system and apply that to around the world, thanks to colonialism. So this tool that was used to prevent peasants from moving to Paris has ultimately become the way people from the Third World are told to stay in their lane and stay in their countries and not have too many dreams.
Q: You say it is a fundamental paradox of visa regimes that the poorer your nation is, the more you have to pay to obtain a visa. And then you talk, you go on further to link it up to the injustice here at the level of human rights.
A: Passports are documents that limit us rather than free us to travel. We often talk about passports as these documents of mobility, like windows to the world or we talk about passport itself as a metaphor of a passport to the world, but they’re actually documents that circumscribe us and that sort of limit our travels.
Q: What was it to write this book from a point of security, I suppose by the fact that now you had an American passport, so you had this perspective on what you’d been through, experienced, but were also able to bring a point of view from being now on the other side of it?
A: So one of the reasons why I was able to write this book was definitely because I was able to see sort of both sides of the passportism coin. For instance, knowing that the humiliations and the time tax that you have to pay while I travelled with an Indian passport just completely evaporated when I got my US passport. I think that was just so eye-opening to me. And of course seeing my husband, who’s a US citizen, travel very freely through the world and just even talking about travel with him. So yes, having that contrast really be alive, really be so immediate in my life was definitely a huge part of how I wrote the book. I also want to say that I was not thinking about the history of tourism from the get go. I was mostly thinking about my own travels and I was mostly thinking of how I haven’t even travelled as much as I want to. Like most of my youth when I had the time and ability to travel freely, I did not have a US passport and I was travelling in these very limited straightened ways. And I want to say that I only started thinking about the history of travel as these experiences accumulated. Travel is our collective story. And I don’t even think of it as travel. I think of it as tourism. And the story of that tourism, the story of that collective travel that we call tourism, is the story of colonialism.
This post was originally published on here
