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From remote antiquity, men and women have travelled due to diverse reasons. Curiosity may be one cause but diplomacy, political pursuit, military campaigns, trade, business contacts, exile, flight from persecution, migration, pilgrimage, missionary activities, and the search for economic or educational opportunities were and still are common inducements for foreign travel. That is perhaps the reason that travel has emerged as one of the most popular idiom in the academic discourse of the modern world. Literature, history, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, gender and postcolonial studies have engaged with the study and analysis of travel. In fact, in the past few decades, literature of and on travel has reached enormous scale.1 A number of reasons can be assigned for its popularity. Bill Buford attributes it to its wonderful ambiguity" lying between fact and fiction."2 It can be considered as postmodern collage" encompassing and intersecting diverse pieces.3 Different academic disciplines have employed travel for different reasons. All those scholars who are working on colonialism, race, and cultural relations have rediscovered those travel narratives that accompanied, described, extended, even made possible, the expansion of capital and colonialism." Feminist scholars, working on women travellers, have focussed on their texts' relationship to male-authored accounts". While literary critics and biographers have concentrated on the travel writings of those authors who are famous for their other works in order to get a glimpse of their lives and motives. In the similar vein, cultural geographers working on spatiality have found travel an interesting area of attention. And post-modern theorists have directed their attention to travel for its expression of the themes and condition of exile, migration, nomadism, and boundary-crossings."4 Thus as a multidisciplinary genre, travel has been subjected to varied uses and purposes. However, it has developed close relationship with history and colonialism. The paper explores the inter-relationship of three concepts: travel, history and colonialism. It points out that, though travelogues and travel writing have been used as sources of history in the earlier times, particularly for reconstructing the ancient and medieval past, more and more attention has been drawn in modern times towards their mutual relationship. Same is the case with colonial studies. As (post)colonial studies developed as an area of inquiry in the last decades of the twentieth century, the academics...