Abstract:
Around twenty cyclists from India embarked on long and arduous intercontinental journeys between 1923 and 1942 individually or in groups. The riders frequently received considerable media attention while en route and enthusiastic receptions when they arrived back home. Many of these 'globe cyclists', as they were often referred to by the Indian press, later wrote media articles and longer travelogues about their expeditions. Some of these found a wide readership and inspired generations of South Asian cyclists and globetrotters. This article examines the narratives of two of these long-distance cycling expeditions to argue that these journeys can illuminate new histories of the bicycle's socio-cultural impact beyond the West, the self-fashioning of Indian cyclo tourists as an example of complicit masculinity and world tours as a novel form of anti-imperial counter-mobility. It does so by drawing on several historiographical subfields that have hitherto rarely been mobilized together, namely the histories of sports, masculinity, colonialism and decolonization, tourism, and (every day) technology