Yi-Fu Tuan, an American geographer, propounded the concept of Literary Geography. ‘Literature is a source material for geographers, and literature provides a perspective for how people experience their world. In geography, it includes the topographical poem and the regional novel as well as the works of academic geographers’ (Tuan, 1978). Creative literature profoundly reflects the temporal and experiential dimensions of the space it portrays. In this aspect imaginative literature and its sources are ideal for studies focussing on the environment and sociocultural dimensions of the landscape of a region.

Literature serves the geographer by throwing light on: (i) possible modes of human experience and relationship, (ii) overview of social space, and (iii) environmental perceptions and values of a culture.

India is a vast country with a wide variety of physical and cultural landscapes. Poets and writers in various languages have described the unique regional structure of the different areas in the country. Geographers can discover this uniqueness of the region and the description of such unique features which, as Richard Hartshorne emphasizes, is the fundamental core of geographical research.

Hardly any attempt was made by geographers in India to learn geography from poetry and the regional novels.