THE HIMALAYAN OTHER: ORIENTALISM, EXOTICISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEPAL IN WESTERN TRAVEL WRITING

Western travel writing has played a significant role in constructing cultural images of Nepal and the Himalayas for international audiences. Particularly since Nepal's opening to sustained foreign tourism in the mid-twentieth century, travellers, writers, mountaineers, journalists, and cultural observers have produced narratives that frequently represent the country through images of remoteness, mystery, spirituality, exoticism, danger, authenticity, and timelessness. Although such narratives have contributed to Nepal's international visibility and tourism appeal, they have also participated in processes of cultural simplification and Othering. This article examines the construction of Nepal as the “Himalayan Other” in Western travel writing through the theoretical perspectives of Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, Mary Louise Pratt's notion of the contact zone, Stuart Hall's theory of representation, and John Urry's concept of the tourist gaze. The study employs qualitative textual and discourse analysis of selected Western travel narratives alongside relevant scholarship on tourism, representation, and Himalayan studies. It argues that Western travel writing frequently transforms Nepal from a historically complex and internally diverse society into an imagined space of authenticity, spirituality, remoteness, and difference. Three interconnected representational mechanisms are identified: spatial exoticisation, temporal distancing, and cultural essentialisation. At the same time, the article challenges a purely binary understanding of traveller and travelled-to by examining Nepalese agency, local negotiation, tourism entrepreneurship, and the possibility of a counter-gaze. The article further argues that contemporary travel writing requires a movement from a unilateral traveller's gaze toward dialogic representation that recognises local voices, historical agency, and cultural complexity. By bringing postcolonial literary criticism into dialogue with tourism and Himalayan studies, this article contributes to a more critical understanding of how travel writing constructs, circulates, and contests representations of Nepal and the Himalayas.