While travelling, I have often experienced a state of mind that philosophers and clinicians alike have called melancholy. But what is melancholy? A disorder? An emotion? An aesthetic? Perhaps it is all of these. And when it grips one’s heart, as it did mine when I was a child, it becomes a constant companion. Melancholy is generally described as ‘pensive sadness’ or ‘prolonged depression’. Across the centuries, it has descended upon many, artists, lovers, scholars and devouts, subduing people and societies, time and again. But it is the travellers’ melancholy that I find the most peculiar.
Robert Burton, a 16th-century English author, prescribed recreation and travel as a cure for melancholy. He was not the only one to offer such a prescription. Travel as a way to ‘cure one’s imbalance of humors’ (a theory originally postulated by Hippocrates about the four vital bodily fluids) continued to be a prevalent idea in the later centuries. But melancholy can be the cause of travel and also its effect.
More often than not, social media platforms like Instagram portray picture-perfect destinations and experiences — the train passing centimetres from you at the train street in Hanoi, bungee jumping in Rishikesh, taking a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower and so on — urging an escape from the mundane and seeking the thrill of the new. However, travelling is not always a hunky-dory experience. It tests the traveller’s capacity to endure. Melancholy here alternates between a positive and a negative emotion, between pleasure and displeasure, which speaks of its duality. Ask travellers whether they’re to stand on top of a narrow cliff and gaze beyond at the vastness and they will ready themselves in an instant. But one experiences awe as well as anxiety when standing on that cliff, delight as well as despair, punishment as well as freedom. Perhaps these are the moments where the duality of melancholy unveils itself most clearly.
In this era of romanticised travel — journeys full of glamour, adventure, and self-discovery — melancholy continues to be our companion. We must make room for it, confront it, give it a name. I do that by travelling slow. I spend days, weeks, even perhaps a month at a place, experiencing my melancholy’s discomforts as well as its joys. I take pictures, make videos, write blogs, and let out the melancholic creature roaring inside me. It has fangs as well as wings. It is the cause of my journey as well as its conclusion.
In the past year, I have spent months volunteering at farms in South India and slow-travelling across Himachal Pradesh, reconciling this melancholy with the spirit that does not want to be ‘caged’. But a thought chafes at my heart: that travel may be a state of mind but it is not always one’s right. To go where others cannot, to reflect, and to contemplate are luxuries. One needs to be privileged to give voice to this kind of ‘sadness without a cause’. In the end, I sit with this quiet ache that has followed me from hostel beds to mountain ridges, from bustling markets to solitary lakes, forcing me to confront the privilege of wandering and the paradox of seeking freedom in places that are already packaged for us.
So the next time you book a ticket or lace up your boots, ask yourself if you are travelling to outrun melancholy or are you travelling to meet it where it already waits, and what might that reveal about the road you’re really on.
Mahika Mor is a critical food studies researcher and writer
