14
before they entering university. It is a new phenomenon which has spread all over the world.
c Ultralight backpacking
, backpacking while carrying very few or very lightweight supplies.
2.2 The backpacking History
Backpacking a new shocking phenomenon in the world which appears in this era, which all of the parts are system patterned, offers unlimited freedom and new
heaven for restless people, but before we discuss about backpacking furthermore we will root the history of the term of backpacking to the travel’s term. Man has
been a traveler for a long time. As a matter of fact, human were nomadic when they started. That was a way of life, more of a compulsion than a choice, even for
religious purpose. Rahul Sankratayan was known as a great Sanskrit scholar, philosopher,
literator, linguist and erudite pundit but perhaps few know that he was the first Indian writer to publish a book in Hindi on the art of travel Ghummakar Shastra,
unraveling the phenomena seminally. Forever footloose, he was an indefatigable wanderer, hungry to know about peoples and places, both in his homeland and
abroad. As a Himalayans, he traversed far and wide, deep into the remote valleys; stayed in forlorn caves and rock-shelters, mingled with indigenous people —
Marcchayas and Sherpas — spoke in their lingo and danced their way. His graphic account of Himalayan ethnography is mostly written in non-English
languages, not easily accessible. Rahul’s Himalayan travels came to a halt when
15
he was rendered almost crippled due to frost bite, yet he passionately longed to drink life to the lees. Sankratayan embodied in him the true spirit of a traveler —
‘it is not too late to seek a newer world’. Sankratayan, R. 1959. Ghummakkar Shastra Hindi. Allahabad. Kitab Mahal.
Another Indian who stands out as a great travel enthusiast was a missionary, Adi Shankracharya 800 CE who virtually democratized travel.
Taking cue from Puranaic literature, in religious framework, he firmly established the concept of pilgrimology what Indians practice in Tirthyatras. Over time, it
was developed into an institution, characterized by the notion of austerity, humility, simplicity, hardship and penance with high regard to geo-piety and
topophilia place attachment where a pilgrim undertakes ‘inner’ as well as physical journey to unfold the meaning of life. Hindu pilgrimages are
quintessentially community based, long-haul, monolithic, having specific code-of- conduct, and marked by ‘road-culture’, that kept the entire nation on the move,
more for ‘self-spirituality’ than ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’. Hindus were ordained to leave their homes for far flung peripheries, known as dhamas to earn
divine merits or to attain moksha salvation. They travelled on minimal support services while many preferred to cross vast distances bare-footed, half-fed, and
barely clad and often with the sky as their roof. The mantra was: the harder you work for, the better you gain. Pilgrims’ tales on return were narratives filled with
awe and wonder, mystery and mythologies — Himalayan wonder man Yeti, the invisible elves and fairies of the Valley of Flowers, the thunderous waterfalls,
dramatic emergence of the Ganga from the glacier’s cow-mouth, strange ways of
16
Bhotia tribals of Mana and the warm hospitality of Pandas. All this inspired listeners by the fireside for a yatra next summer, after the harvest. Return of the
Frugal Traveller: T. V. Singh, Tourism Recreation Research Vol. 31, No. 3, 2006 The processes of modernization have eroded the ethos of archaic
pilgrimages as most of these sites were considered ‘markers’ of tourism development. Mass tourism overwhelmed the character of many places beyond
recognition and to the detriment of pilgrimage-culture. Tourism literature is replete with what bad tourism can do. The story of developed societies is not
much different from the developing nations, particularly Europe, where medieval pilgrimages changed from spirituality to novelty and for bizarre touristic
experiences Sumption 1975. In India a pilgrim increasingly exchanged character with pleasure-seeking tourist when more tourists inroad religious landscape,
profaning the sublime and the sacred. Shrine resorts transformed to tourism, blurring spirituality between religious and secular domains – ‘religion became just
another marketable commodity’ Olsen 2003. Seeking spirituality became fad and travellers’ native instinct gradually faded away with secular overtones, what
Solomon 1999 termed ‘Spiritual Promiscuity’. Lord Byron laments in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘from mighty wrongs to petty perfidy, have I not seen what
human things could do’. Gladstone 2005 in his recent book From Pilgrimage to Package Tour elaborates on this subject more succinctly.
In pilgrimages we have almost lost a noble art of travel. Disgusted with modern life and living that appeared too materialistic, empty and meaningless,
‘nomads’ from the affluent-west began searching for existential reality in the
17
Orient and ‘exotic Other’. Cohen named them ‘drifters’, others called them ‘junkies’ and a few pronounced them ‘flower children’, euphemistically for their
atypical life-style. Finally, somewhere in the 1980s, they were seen as independent travelers who loved freedom and serendipity, donning typical
backpack. They wore a sanguine attitude towards life and were eager to integrate with local community; used accommodation owned by host society and made
efforts to consume locally produced commodities. They loved to be called a traveler or a backpacker rather than tourist, though academics classed them
amongst ‘alternative tourists’. Wedded to principles of austerity and travel ethics; oriented to self-development and acquisition of knowledge; parsimonious
backpackers are often considered as ‘secular pilgrims’. Within a period of about 40 years, the backpacking phenomenon has
grown worldwide with major concentration in Asian countries, such as South East Asia and Australasia besides South America. North America and Europe have the
lowest population of backpackers. Since they demand a different infrastructure, their destinations have developed a distinct backpacker market.
Backpacking may be fringe economy but it helps destination communities to sustain for all its indigenous touch that prevents leakages. Backpacking has
developed into an important socio-cultural and economic phenomenon around the world. It needs to be examined more seriously than to be taken as ‘time bubble’.
Since conventional tourism has a tendency to pre-date benevolent attributes of travel, backpacking could hardly remain untouched. Signs of distress
are discernible in the statements of backpacker-critics, who found that the scene
18
has lost its innocence; it is shaping into mass-backpackers market. That backpackers’ culture has suffered a setback by creating a rift between ideology
and practice and those backpackers’ newly discovered peripheries have paved way to mass tourism, it is getting more packaged than packaged tours. It promotes
ghettoish enclaves and that it is far from real travel; it is not what it used to be. The other root is nomadic youth on pre modern west, Youth nomads, as Judith
Adler 1985 reminds us, has been a widespread phenomenon in the pre-modern West. She argues that the lower-class tramp, wandering in quest of employment,
became the formative model or trope for the emergent modern middle-class youth traveler; traveling for enjoyment and experiences. While some degree of historical
continuity thus apparently exists between the ‘tramping’ of the past and contemporary backpacking, the emergence of the latter as a large-scale touristy
phenomenon is, in my view, related to some distinctive traits of modern Western societies Cohen, 1973 and the position of youth within them. These traits in turn
may have engendered the desire to adopt ‘tramping’ as a model for this mode of travelling, which in its aims, style and consequences differs markedly from all
Western precedents. Chief among these traits was the widespread alienation of Western youths from their societies of origin, especially in the United States and
Western Europe; which culminated during the 1960s, and led to the failed ‘student revolution’ and the various attempts to create alternative lifestyles. While
the extent of alienation may have receded to a significant extent towards the end of the last century, the stresses and uncertainties of late modern life are certainly a
disorienting factor that induces young men and women to take time out Elsrud,
19
1998 to gain a new perspective on their own life and future Noy Cohen, forthcoming, while having a challenging but enjoyable time in the world of
others. I propose to call the earlier, alienated individuals roaming the world alone, common in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘drifters’, and the more recent youth travelers,
following well-trodden paths in large numbers ‘backpackers’. If the model for the drifter was the tramp, the drifter is the model for the backpacker; but I wish to
stress that this chronological division is not strict: the Vermassung of drifting had started already in the 1970s Cohen, 1973 and even today, individual drifters can
be found in remote localities as yet untouched by mainstream ‘backpacker’ tourism. The very remoteness of the drifters, indeed, appears to hide them from
the fieldworker studying backpackers on the more popular itineraries and enclaves. My own conceptualization of the original ‘drifter’ was to a significant
extent influenced by a personal encounter in the later 1960s. The ‘original drifter’ Cohen, 1973 may have been an ideal to which many
youths were attracted, but only very few succeeded. Therefore at an early stage the concept and suggested several sub-types of drifters had been qualified Cohen,
1973: 100–101, emerging just as contemporary youth tourism became a mass phenomenon; those who at present would be loosely called ‘backpackers’. It also
described the alternative tourism infrastructure of itineraries, transportation services, accommodation and other facilities which had begun to emerge in
response to the growth of this kind of tourism Cohen, 1973: 95–97. However, it was not related with the early paper the concept of the drifter to
what has emerged as the dominant paradigm in tourism research from the mid-
20
1970s to the 1990s: MacCannell’s 1973, 1976 conceptualization of the tourist as a secular pilgrim in quest of authenticity, which is in turn staged for them by their
obliging hosts. The phenomenology of tourist experiences Cohen, 1979 that drifters – assumed to be the most alienated kind of tourists – would tend toward
the most intensive types of experiences, and especially the ‘experimental’ or ‘existential’ ones, as they sought an alternative ‘elective centre’, which they could
substitute for that of their home society. The drifter would thus strive more than the ordinary tourist to reach places and people that are ‘really’ authentic, and
would display considerable touristic angst that places or events that appear authentic are in fact stage.
While there is no definitive answer as to the precise origin of backpacking, its roots can be traced, at least partially, to the
Hippie trail of the 1960s and 70s
MacLean, Rory. Dark Side of the Hippie Trail
, The New Statesman which in turn followed sections of the old
Silk Road . In fact, some backpackers today
seek to re-create that journey, albeit in a more comfortable manner, while capitalizing on the current popularity of the green movement. Looking further
into history, Giovan Francesco Gemelli Careri has been cited by some as one of
the worlds first backpackers.
Although the term ‘backpacker’ has been used in the travel literature since the 1970s, the backpacker phenomenon has only more recently been widely analyzed
by academic researchers. An analysis of the bibliography compiled by members of the Association of Tourism and Leisure Education ATLAS Backpacker
Research Group BRG indicates that of 76 dated references relating to
21
backpacker and youth travel, only 11 were published before 1990. This was the year in which the term ‘backpacker’ was first noted in the academic literature
Pearce, 1990. The growing interest in the topic is underlined by the fact that the ATLAS BRG alone now has more than 30 members in 11 countries.
At least until recently, much of the backpacker research has been undertaken in countries where the impact of backpacking is particularly evident, notably in
South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand e.g. Elsrud, 1998;Hampton, 1998; Murphy, 2001; Ross, 1997. A second factor influencing the geographical
distribution of backpacking studies has been the tendency for research to be undertaken ‘on the road’, usually in the more popular backpacker destinations in
Asia and Australasia.
2.3 The motivation of Backpacking
