WALKING THROUGH THE PINK CITY- A GYNOCRITICAL STUDY OF FEMINIST CARTOGRAPHIES AND CULTURAL MEDIATION IN DHARMENDAR KANWAR’S JAIPUR 10 EASY WALKS

Abstract

This paper examines Jaipur: 10 Easy Walks by Dharmendar Kanwar as a feminist reworking of authorship, place, and identity in Indian women's travel writing. Kanwar reclaims walking as a form of self-expression and cultural mediation, transcending the colonial and patriarchal norms that have traditionally defined the genre. It explores how her story turns ordinary urban experiences into a conversation between gender and history through qualitative feminist textual analysis. The study analyses Kanwar's depiction of Jaipur as an act of re-inscribing female agency into the city's environment, drawing on theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak's postcolonial critique, Virginia Woolf's spatial feminism, and Elaine Showalter's Gynocriticism. The depictions of home crafts, Hawa Mahal, and regional craftsmen show how women's inventiveness maintains ecological and cultural continuity. Walking becomes a metaphor for liberation and narrative serves as preservation in Kanwar's book, which represents an intersectional awareness. Jaipur: 10 Easy Walks turns the travelogue into a feminist archive of place and memory by fusing observation, empathy, and history. In addition to challenging patriarchal spatial hierarchies, the paper concludes that Kanwar's reimagining of the Pink City places Indian women's travel writing in a vital position for expressing identity, belonging, and cultural continuity within postcolonial feminist discourse.