Dipesh Karmarkar

Travel has fascinated humans since ancient times. They travelled initially as curious observers and later as pilgrims, merchants, artisans, and so on. Travelling especially began after the development of trade and commerce around 4000 BC. People also travelled in search of new lands, resources, and markets. The Romans were the first pleasure travellers. In the Middle Ages, travel for religious purposes became significant. Even in India, the form of tourism called ‘teerthatan’ (pilgrimage) has been present since ancient times. The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent development in the modes of transport brought travel to the masses. It was the beginning of modern tourism. Towards the end of the 19th century, the concept of the paid holiday resulted in the phenomenon of mass tourism. The development of air transport after the Second World War brought about greater international travel and tourism.

There are various motives for which people travel. Holidays, relaxation, entertainment, fun, curiosity, adventure, etc. are general motives for travel. People also travel for specific motives, such as medical, personal interests and hobbies, religion, research and education, prestige or status enhancement, to witness national or international events (e.g., sports, an eclipse), to learn cultural practices of different regions, etc. However, the growth of tourism largely took place due to increased stress in urban life and the need for getaway moments, availability of faster, efficient, technologically advanced modes of transport,  larger disposable income available at hand, growing attitude towards travel and leisure, the efficient role of the mass media in propagating tourism, new concepts such as package tours, institutional and government interest in holiday and the concept of incentives, advantage of being a source of foreign exchange earnings for the developing nations, and also its multiplier effect.

Tourism, being a multi-disciplinary subject, has been studied from different disciplinary perspectives. The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the geographical perspective of studying tourism. The book does not explore the deep theoretical understanding of tourism geography but attempts to offer an outline of the geography of tourism. The first chapter discusses the basic concepts of leisure, recreation, tourism, tourists, etc., and also elaborates on different types of tourists and tourism. The second chapter talks about the geography of tourism as a discipline of geography by stating its meaning, nature, and scope. This chapter also explores the relationship between geography and tourism. Chapter three elaborately discusses the environmental bases of tourism in terms of natural and cultural elements. The fourth chapter clears out the concepts of tourism products and tourism promotion quite briefly. Chapters five and six highlight two important facets of tourism infrastructure – transport and accommodation. Chapter seven discusses how tourism planning is done at multiple spatial levels – international, national, and local. It also talks about tourism planning concerning time with an example of five-year planning and tourism policies in India. Lastly, chapter eight describes various impacts of tourism on the economy, society, culture, and environment. The book will give a fair idea of different facets of the geography of tourism to its readers so that they can explore the subject further deeply and widely as per their interest.

Geography, a significant socio-spatial science, has the unique potential of simultaneously connecting the physical and the natural world. While understanding physical space, Geography also studies how people as the ‘agents of change’ transform it, and produce human space. Accordingly, Geography is divided broadly into Physical Geography and Human Geography – the former studies physical space, while latter studies the human space. This book is an introduction to Human Geography for the beginners of the discipline. It is written keeping in view the entry-level syllabus of the undergraduate Geography courses of the Arts and Science Faculty. The book is useful for entry-level undergraduates, competitive examination aspirants, and all those who wish to learn Human Geography.
The book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the branch of Human Geography with the help of its nature, scope, sub-branches, approaches, and thoughts on the human-environment relationship. The following three chapters focus on three important themes of Human Geography - settlements, population, and migration. As maps are one of the tools to study human geography, the last chapter offers an introduction to maps with special reference to thematic maps.

Since last two decades, geographical researches, esp. in the South, are trying to comprehend the nature of globalisation and its impact on the people and their lives. Though globalisation was welcomed wholeheartedly by the governments, its inhuman face is now getting exposed with its deep impact on the livelihoods of the socio-economic groups and indigenous populations. This book, therefore, throws a spotlight on the changing livelihood of the indigenous fishermen community in Mumbai. It analyses the globalised policy frameworks of the fishery sector and explains its impact on deteriorating fishing environments and declining fish production and income of the fishermen communities. By piecing together a wide range of secondary data and the first-hand survey results, the present work shows how the fishermen are trading in the fishy spaces and are at crossroads trying to search their identity and existence. The analysis would be especially useful to the professionals and students alike in the fields of geography, environment, economics and policy.

"Mahim Before Bombay: The Story of a Lost Port" aims to trace the trajectory of a lost port named Mahim, located northwest of present Mumbai City. It attempts to explain the rise, growth, and decline of Mahim port that predates Mumbai port. While explaining the site and situation of Mahim, it also talks about the nature of Mahim harbour concerning its navigational attributes. Mahim was a significant trading port in the 13th century CE that gave recognition to the Mumbai archipelago. A sheltered site, a sand-free water channel, a well-connected hinterland, and a strategic situation made the medieval island of Mahim an excellent site for building the port and carrying out trade. The people who migrated to the island recognized and capitalized on these potentials and elevated the status of this port. Mahim passed through various phases of urban growth at a different pace. Its preeminence dwindled since the late 17th century due to its comparative territorial disadvantage vis-à-vis rising Mumbai port. The ecological degradation caused by land reclamation and development nailed the final decline of Mahim in the mid-19th century. Though the original port site is lost in the wake of developmental changes, the markers of Mahim’s history are still visible in the historic temples, mosques, churches, and its inhabitants.

The decade of the 1990s was the pivotal period in modern history. At world scale, this period was marked by the Gulf War, Yugoslavian War, Kargil War, a series of civil and guerrilla wars, the terrorist attacks by the Al Qaeda, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of Russia, and the rise of American power to name a few. India also went through a paradigm shift by opening up its economy and embracing globalization, with a series of subsequent events like the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, terrorist attacks on Red Fort and Indian Parliament, the fall of the Babri Masjid, serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Rudrapur, Chennai, etc., the underworld killings, communal riots and also the renaming of Bombay and Madras to Mumbai and Chennai respectively. Keeping with the change, the national, regional, and sub-regional political narrative was rewritten on the lines of communalism and regionalism. At such a disturbed and fabricated backdrop of the 1990s, it became necessary to problematize the past by raising pertinent questions, finding answers, and rationally interpreting the derived meanings without getting carried away by the communal and regional winds. Historical geography has a significant stake in such a problematization of the past. Reconstruction of the past by mapping the historical data and studying it in the context of the present is a subject matter of the modern historical geography that evolved at the turn of the 21 st century. Modern historical geography, thus, is not merely a combination of history and geography, but a much more interdisciplinary drawing on economic and social history, ecology, social theory as well as on feminism, environmental history, post-colonialism, and cultural history. It is inclined more towards culture and politics and recognized as the interplay between the past and the present. Thus, the questions like how did the socio-cultural landscape of a region evolve? Which factors had a bearing on the process of landscape evolution? What were the structure and patterns of the past landscape? What role did people as agents of landscape change play in the process? How did the cities act as nodes in the process-pattern network in this context? How far the evolved understanding of the past landscapes support and/or contradicts the present claims about the making and the makers of the landscape? are the significant historical-geographical problems relevant to the challenges posed by the decade of the 1990s. The doctoral study of the historical geography of Coastal Western India, particularly coastal Gujarat and Konkan (that included Mumbai and its hinterland) undertaken between the years 1999 and 2005, was situated in the broader framework of the above-mentioned problem. The present paper provides an outline of the research methodology adopted for the above-mentioned doctoral work (henceforth referred to as the study under review) and the major conclusions derived from it.

Human Geography has come a long way since its inception. As a spatial science, it takes into consideration various aspects of the spatiality of society and economy and the related dynamics of space. Historical Geography, a fold within Human Geography, can be further studied in space-time convergence incorporating longitudinal phenomena in a spatial framework. The present paper examines the evolution of Vasai as a product of space-time convergence with a perspective of historical materialism. From a spatial perspective, the paper analyses the rise and fall of Vasai and attempts to focus on its changing spatial organization, economic base, and social relations during Portuguese rule. The paper has used secondary data and analyzed it by employing a qualitative approach.

Trade and urbanisation in the littoral regions often reflect the calm and the crisis of the ocean. The Indian Ocean ‘crisis’ of the 17th century was no exception to it. The well-established Portuguese trading network in the Indian Ocean was disrupted in the early 17th century with the fall of Hormuz and Kandahar leading to its weakening. Taking advantage of the same, other European powers rushed in to control it, which further intensified the rivalries among the continental and maritime powers. These developments led to major disruptions in trade and the fall of ports and trading centers, esp. those dependent on the Portuguese along the western Indian Ocean-Red Sea route. This phase is referred to as the ‘crisis’. It compelled significant realignment of the Indian Ocean trade network, esp. along coastal Western India. These disturbances were evident in the fall of Dabhol along the Konkan coast. Against the backdrop of this decline, Vengurla port, located about 60 km north of Goa, rose to eminence. It did so because its spatial attributes fitted well with the political-economic motives of the Dutch and the Bijapur court. Although small and short-lived, the Dutch Vengurla upheld the coastal trading network and sustained the economic space of the region during the period of crisis. Once those political-economic motives disappeared, Venugrla witnessed the downfall. With a historical-geographical perspective, the present paper attempts to study the role of Vengurla during the crisis of the 17th century.

The investigation into the available and accessible literature of Geography and General Semantics (GS) reveals that both these fields of knowledge have remained largely blind to each other. While the presence of GS in Geography literature is feeble, the presence of Geography in GS literature is quite confined to the discussion on Map-Territory metaphor. Further, this discussion is more about the field of Cartography and not about Geography. The underlying causes for such a weak relationship need a full-fledged research treatment. The present paper attempts to explore this theme, albeit briefly. In addition, it also explores the possibility of a pedagogic relationship between them.

The paper is broadly divided into three sections. The first section identifies humanism as a common philosophical ground where Geography and GS meet each other. It further draws the trajectory of humanistic tradition in Geography and explores the exact point where its engagement with GS becomes highly relevant. The second section attempts to discover the Map-Territory relation anew with reference to certain cartographic procedures. The paper argues that the inclusion of these cartographic procedures as a pedagogic tool in teaching ‘abstraction’ and ‘Map-Territory’ relation will help the students to comprehend the fundamentals of GS better. Further, the paper states that GS provides a useful framework for deconstructionist school of thought in cartography and has a potential to play an important role in the growth of Critical Cartography. The third section discusses the concept of ‘place’ as developed by Humanistic Geographers, esp. by Yi-Fu Tuan. A place is realised not through its geometry of road networks and built-up areas but through the meanings ascribed to them by individuals. The paper proposes to use such concepts from Humanistic Geography as case studies while teaching of GS. The paper calls for a dialogue between Geography and GS. It believes that such a dialogue would take both, Geographers and General-Semanticists, a step ahead in becoming human.

Keywords: Geography, General-Semantics, Humanistic Geography, Cartographic Abstraction, Place

Certain world regions become a geopolitical unit due to their absolute and relative location, availability of strategic resources, closeness to trade routes, etc. The Middle-East is the best example, which has been an extremely important geopolitical unit since historical times. Since the silk route days, it has played a vital role of linking Asia with Europe and Africa. A glance at the world map would show the Middle-East as a territorial knot of the three continents. It is not just its absolute location that makes it a significant geopolitical unit but its location vis-à-vis its neighbouring political-economic environment. The Middle-Eastern countries either get influenced or influence developed countries of the European Union located to its northwest and developing countries located to its east and southwest. Further, availability of strategic resources like oil and petroleum and techno-economic capacity to exploit them allows these countries to manoeuvre the economic or political crisis. Most of the countries depend on the Middle-East for their energy demands and, therefore, oil prices make their national economics highly volatile. Suez Canal that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea route, is the major artery of the oil trade; adding into the geostrategic importance of the region. Consequently, control over oil reserves and Suez Canal is of prime geopolitical significance. How far the political regimes achieve success in exploiting the given geostrategic location to their advantages determine the geopolitical balance of the region. At this backdrop, the present paper attempts to understand the geopolitics in the Middle-East in the post-Arab Spring phase.

A Presentation Delivered in a Colloquium titled 'Art Education as Experience Education' organised by Rachana Sansad Academy of Arts and Craft, Mumbai, in association with Camlin-Kokuyo, on 26 May, 2017, on the occasion of UNESCO's Art Education Week.

" Even though we are now aware of how " we inescapably abstract, " reducing people, places, and things to one-word descriptors, how many of us will remember to introduce family members with more than a job title? Will we distinguish colleagues from their political and religious affiliations? We easily forget that we might be " focusing-on-some-details-while-neglecting-the-rest, " thus making it easier to act as if what we know is " all that we really need to know. " (Haney, 1992, p. 323)

Lecture Presentation during the Certificate Course on "Creative and Critical Thinking: A General Semantics Approach", organised by the Nodal Center of Balvant Parekh Center for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences (Baroda), Smt. CHM College, Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra, India