Abstract

            India witnessed a paradigm shift in the status of women in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result of the changes the newly evolving women stepped out from their ‘Home’ into the ‘World’. As an outcome of their literacy and the opportunity to be outside, they gradually started recording their experiences through their writings. This was the scenario when Atiya Fyzee, doubly marginalised – first as an Oriental subject and secondly, as a woman dared to ‘write’ Edwardian Britain while she visited the places in 1906-07. Remembered as the first full-fledged travel narrative with daily acquaintances by South Asiatic Muslim Indian woman, Zamana-i-tahsil (Trans. Atiya’s Journey) is significant because it records the cultural interaction between East and West as the woman ignores the territorial boundary which had previously confined her within home fold. In the contemporary time, the relevance of this travel writing is also due to the fact that the Western culture is described from the perspective of a Muslim woman from Colonial Bombay. The paper will attempt to define the way in which a Muslim woman traveller ‘look’, ‘describe’ and ‘compare’ a distant shore standing in opposition to her homeland.