Travel writings have long served as important points of reference for Western academicians, travellers and those generally associated with the business of conquest and trade. More often than not, these sources of references had depicted the lands and people of the 'new world,' usually the East or Africa, as being wild, savage and in dire need of European intervention for the creation of civilized societies. Therefore, it would be of great interest to both scholars and travellers to find out if the colonialist representations still persist in a post-colonial era Western travel writing about the East. The current study examines the ways in which Redmond O'Hanlon, an English naturalist, constructs and represents the natives and the land of Sarawak in his travel writing, Into the Heart of Borneo (1984). The study aims to find out if O'Hanlon's representation of Sarawak and its natives have progressed from the depictions found in the travel writings of his colonialist predecessors. The discussion of findings is preceded by a brief explanation of Edward Said's notion of Orientalism, which provides the theoretical basis for the analysis of the travel novel. The paper highlights that there has been no real evolution in the travel narrative used by O'Hanlon to describe Sarawak and its natives from the colonial heyday of travel literature.

Yōko Ogawa's The Memory Police (1994) is set in an unknown island where objects and their meanings gradually disappear from society's collective memory. Spencer argues that "power imposes itself on society through spatial initiatives that reconfigure the entirety of social space." As memory is suppressed in this authoritarian society, the act of retaining memories of "disappeared" objects is a form of violation of that authoritarianism, as it is seen as the individual's resistance against the collective goals of the state. This article examines the ways in which memory and trauma play crucial roles in the lives of individuals in reclaiming their sense of space and individuality. To escape tyranny and oppressive real space, the narrator creates an imaginary space that preserves any remaining memory. As memory is associative, it functions to retrieve information related to particular objects or concepts and to connect this information with its relevant context to yield meanings. The move to preserve memory acts as a form of agency exhibited by the narrator and the novel foregrounds the various ways memory can also lead to liberation.

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The Forest of Enchantments (2019) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni narrates the epic Ramayana from Sita's voice, one of the prominent female characters in Indian Literature. Through myriads of Sita, the text focuses not just on her spiritual being but her identity as a woman. This novel warrants a study as it explores Sita's immense strength and humanises her journey amidst the unknown and mysterious forest. The study intends to examine the relationship between Sita and the nature, because the forest in this tale is an imperative source of empowerment. Sita draws her strength in her painful solidarity and exile in the forest. It provides her voice, wisdom and agency to concede that each individual has their own insights of dharma, Sita argues and challenges the stark dichotomy between good and bad, instating that perspective is something that differs. In the line the cultural ecofeminist current that initially dominated justified women's interest in the preservation or well-being of the environment in terms of their inherent caring or nurturing nature and their common subjection to patriarchal systems, the paper intends to investigate relationship between Sita and environment. The paper also aims to study the association of a woman with nature that is embraced as a source of power and the ways in which Sita's relationship to the environment empowers her to speak for all the other women of Ramayana, even those outcasts and undermined, creating a more modern and liberal version of women in Indian mythology. Thus, this is an important study in current time as it aims to explore Sita with agency in the different stages of the narrative.