MODES OF CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SUBCONTINENT: A CRITICAL STUDY OF WILLIAM DALRYMPLE’S TRAVEL WRITING
SHIREEN RAHIM
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE UNIVERSITY OF THE PUNJAB
2012
MODES OF CULTURAL REPRESENATION OF THE SUBCONTINENT: A CRITICAL STUDY OF WILLIAM DALRYMPLE’S TRAVEL WRITING
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PUNJAB IN FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
BY SHIREEN RAHIM
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE UNIVERSITY OF THE PUNJAB 2012 ii
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
This is to certify that the research work described in this thesis is the original work of Shireen
Rahim (Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature University of the Punjab) and has been carried out under my direct supervision. I have personally gone through all the date in the manuscript and certify its correctness and authenticity. I further certify that the material included in this thesis has not been used in part of full in a manuscript already submitted or in the process of submission in partial/complete fulfilment of the award of any degree from any other institution. I also certify that the thesis has been prepared under my supervision according to the prescribed format and I endorse its evaluation for award of
PhD Degree through the official procedures of the University.
Signature:…………………………………………..
Name:……………………………………………....
Designation:………………………………………..
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to Dr. Waseem Anwar, Dean of Humanities, Professor and
Chairperson of the Department of English, Forman Chrisitan College (A Chartered
University), Lahore, who was kind and patient enough to guide me in my research work. I have benefited greatly from his intellectual insights and constructive criticism.
I especially want to thank Professor Shaista Sonnu Sirajuddin, former Chairperson of the English Department Punjab University, for having initiated the Doctoral programme at the English Department and for expanding the resources in the department library. As an inspiring and exacting teacher and a dear friend, it is in large measure her support and encouragement that sustained me in bleak moments of this journey.
My friends and colleagues at the English Department have been very encouraging. I want to especially thank Amra Raza and Zareena Saeed for their interest, affection and wise counsel.
I am particularly grateful to Olya Mariam for her practical assistance in giving shape to the thesis.
The research could not have been completed without the active support of my family, both near and far and I want to thank each member for being patient and understanding.
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ABSTRACT
As an established literary genre, in which the factual and the fictive narrative conventions intersect, travel writing, with its vivid descriptions of people and places has had a consistent ethnographic focus. Literary and cultural theory during the last three decades, has led to critical debates over the definition of cultural boundaries and the aesthetics and politics of cultural representation. In representing a cultural space, the contemporary travel writer recognises that stories and histories are complexly interwoven across geographical and national boundaries. He therefore has to engage with the realities of transculturation, cultural displacement, and cultural hybridity as distinctive features of a complex global world.
William Dalrymple‘s travel writing is reflective of this engagement at both the thematic and the stylistic levels. It marks a sustained interest in the study and representation of the many layered cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent, both in terms of historical legacy and the dynamism of current social and political change. With a repertoire that draws extensively on archival research, intertextual reference and on direct observation and personal interaction during his travels across India and Pakistan, Dalrymple combines various narrative strands and gives authority to multiple voices. The research study contextualizes Dalrymple‘s travel narrative as a polyphonic cultural representation Towards this end it attempts to explore his use of the historical and ethnographic modes through which a range of articulations serve to represent the cultural diversity of the subcontinent.
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LIST OF ABRREVIATIONS
Quotations and references from William Dalrymple‘s work appear in brackets in the text with the indicated abbreviation.
Complete Titles Abbreviations
Age of Kali AK
City of Djinns CD
In Xanadu IX
Nine Lives NL
The Last Mughal TLM
White Mughals WM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
ABSTRACT iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1-37
CHAPTER 2:CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SUBCONTINENT: A
HISTORICALREVIEW 38-60
CHAPTER 3: THE HISTORICAL MODE 61-104
CHAPTER 4: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC MODE 105-150
CONCLUSION 151-153
WORKS CITED 154-161
WORKS CONSULTED 162-166
Rahim 1
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
Travel narrative forms an integral part of the oldest literary traditions across civilisations and cultures. An inherent curiosity about distant places and the compelling urge to imagine, explore and interpret that which is unfamiliar and therefore strange, explains the motif of the journey -- both literal and symbolic – that has inspired the literary imagination of many through the ages. This includes writers from antiquity such as Homer who represents the episodic adventures and the arduous journey of his protagonist Odysseus as a symbolic quest--- an ‗odyssey‘ of epic proportions. The
Greek historian Herodotus, in the Histories, 440 B.C. recording his journey to the
Mediterranean includes details of the physical landscape and documents the history of the Persians and Egyptians and also reports on their myths and exotic customs.
Medieval travel in the pilgrimage mode is represented through accounts of individual travellers, such as those in Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales which focuses on the sharing of diverse tales by a community of pilgrims, together on the road. The narratives of Marco Polo and John Mandeville mark ―the beginnings of a new impulse in the late Middle Ages which would transform the traditional paradigms of pilgrimage and crusade into new forms attentive to observed experience and curiosity towards other cultures‖
(qtd. in Hulme and Youngs 3). These travel texts came to be widely read and influenced successive generations of travel writers. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century fictional voyages represented most imaginatively in Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe came to be identified with travel writing as survival literature. First person accounts of shipwrecks, castaways and captivities contributed greatly to the popularity of the journey narrative and readers were often uncertain whether they were reading truth or fiction.
Swift‘s Gulliver‟s Travels extended the travel narrative to the form of satire. Laurence Rahim 2
Sterne‘s A Sentimental Journey drew on the conventions of the novel so that there is an overlap of fiction and fact. According to William Sherman these ―authors played with the boundaries between eyewitness testimony, second-hand information, and outright invention and readers were unsure whether they were reading truth or fiction‖ (31). In the nineteenth century literary writers such as Dickens, Trollope, Stendhal and Flaubert wrote about the actual journeys they undertook (Hulme and Youngs 7).
Early twentieth century imperial expansion saw writers such as Kipling, Conrad,
R.L.Stevenson and D.H. Lawrence incorporate their travels in parallel in fiction and travel writing as did for example Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming. Helen Carr is of the view that
―these modernist texts register a new consciousness of cultural heterogeneity, the condition and mark of the modern world‖ (74). Travel writing in the decades of the thirties and forties especially during the war years saw a shift to a more subjective mode. There was a tendency to examine the realities of the post-war fragmented world through an ironic vision. The journey itself becomes a metaphor for self-introspection and the search for meaning, as seen for example in the writing of Graham Greene (Blanton 60).
There was a great revival of travel writing in the last few decades of the twentieth century. The first special issue on travel writing by Granta magazine in 1984 directed attention to the innovations in both content and form in travel writing with the work of
V.S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Colin Thubron. Those writers who are identified with the contemporary forms of the genre for example William Dalrymple, Pico
Iyer and Rory Stewart have stretched the genre in keeping with the complex themes that travel generates in a complex global context.
The wide range of texts concerning travel, reveals that travel writing is marked by a generic fluidity that is singular, comprising as it does, various literary forms such as the epic poem, the journal, essay, memoir, the epistolary account and Rahim 3 the novel. The consensual view is that travel texts , both factual and fictive, are narrative accounts of a journey undertaken by the author/protagonist, in which there is a textual representation of landscape, place, people, events and objects. As such, there is a continuous interplay between the inner world of the traveller and the outer world in terms of a subjective response to the impersonal, which may be perceived and depicted in varied ways. Language therefore operates as the medium through which the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the traveller are conveyed to represent a place to others As Michael Cronin suggests: ―Travel implies return and the accounts are the fruit of that return, the returned traveller returning in memory and prose to the places and experiences of travel. Thus, at the end of the journey the traveller returns to language (writing up the account) and makes the journey once again in words‖ (35).
Though the physical journey may be spread over a longer duration of time, the written account follows the wanderings of the narrator‘s consciousness over a few hours at the most. Imagination, memory, and subjective interpretation all come into play in the secondary journey, undertaken as it were, through the textual representation. It follows then, that to convey the experience of travel, contextualised in space, time and event, the crafting of the narrative is of central importance. According to Mary Baine Campbell,
‗travel writing is a genre composed of other genres‘(6) for example autobiography and the novel. Elaborating this further she writes that
It is a genre that confronts at their extreme limits representational tasks proper
to a number of literary kinds: the translation of experience into narrative and
description, of observation into the verbal construct of fact; the deployment
of personal voice in the service of transmitting information (or of creating
devotional texts); the manipulation of rhetorical figures for ends other than
ornament. Some of these demands are familiar to the ‗participant observers‘ of Rahim 4
ethnography, others to writers of fictional realism or historiography. All of
them are important to the analysis of travel writing. (6)
This view emphasises the expressive range of the travel narrative as literary text, in that it can incorporate an array of formal features -- narrative fiction, ethnographic description, auto/ biography, historical narration, interpretive analysis and reportage.
There is also a significant overlap in narrative techniques and rhetorical conventions used by fiction and non-fiction writers , for example ‗the quest motif is central to the structure of both the travel account and the picaresque novel, common elements being the narrator/ protagonist and the characters and actions s/he meet on the way‘. As a genre, travel writing is also identified with certain paratextual features that are specific to it, for example frontspiece maps with route lines, illustrations, photographs and timelines which serve to inform the reader about the spatial and temporal aspects of the journey and serve to complement the representations of a specific place.
The discursive repertoire of travel texts therefore is complex, in terms of narrative form and modalities of representation. It also lends itself to interpretations across a wide array of disciplines -- literature, anthropology, history, geography, sociology and psychology. More recently in the last two decades, cultural studies with its interdisciplinary approach has aimed to expand the traditionally constituted framework of subject –matter in these discourses, leading to critical approaches as varied as the thematic concerns and the formal mechanisms of the primary texts themselves.
Under the growing influence of literary and cultural theory there has been a resurgence of academic interest in the concept of representation in the study of culture. In turn the discursive strategies of ethnographic writing have been increasingly critiqued and revised within the framework of literary theory. As Steven Connor suggests:
What links literary theory and ethnography is a strengthened sense of the Rahim 5
relationship between action and representation. On the literary side this
involves a new awareness of the ways in which literary texts and cultural
representations in general do not merely represent the socio-political world,
but in some primary way constitute or bring it about. (235)
The ethnographer as an observing self draws on his intellect, imagination and experience; as such s/he is a creative being who can convey meaning through the use of expressive modes such as allegorical or historical narration and employ different tropes to construct cultural reality.
Postcolonial theory most significantly has led to the exploration of one of the dominant concerns in literary and cultural studies, and travel writing by extension, that is, the construction of other societies and cultures. According to Homi Bhabha:
Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of
cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority
within the modern world order –---they formulate the critical revision around
issues of cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination in
order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the
rationalizations of modernity. (437)
This view emphasises the significance of the postcolonial revision of modernity that seeks to question the framework of established representational authority. The previous vocabulary of First and Third Worlds suggested a totalized conceptualization through the oppositions between tradition and modernity, East and West. Though the cultural present inevitably testifies to―sedimentation of colonial histories‖ (437), the critical intervention of postcolonial perspectives is significant. They serve to challenge received representational paradigms of colonial discourse which adopt ―a vocabulary of cliché and stereotype that freezes ‗other‘ (non-Western) cultures in time and place‖ (Holland and Rahim 6
Huggan, 140). Within such a revised conceptual framework one is able to direct attention towards a discursive shift regarding fundamental questions about the definition of culture and the representation of individual and national cultural identity.
The question of identity also relates to the changed perceptions of one‘s location both in the physical and metaphorical sense in the context of changed boundaries, migration, and frequent travel. A case in point is the travel writer Pico Iyer. He was born in 1952 of Indian parents in the United Kingdom. After his education in Britain, he moved to America. He has since lived in California where he works for Time magazine. He also spends much of his time in Japan and travels frequently to other parts of the world. As an acclaimed travel writer, he admits to feeling at home in different cultures; as he says in an interview from 1997—
I do feel less post-colonial than simply ―international‖, or unaffiliated, with no
particular relation to India or America or Britain, but perhaps, the ability to
look at all of them with something of the warmth of an insider and the
discernment of a visitor. This sense of partial estrangement does, of course
have its dangers, but I think it opens up new possibilities that a whole world
of ―global villages on two legs‖ is just beginning to experience, in its
lives and in its words. (n.p.)
The concept of culture as a construct has also over time changed. In the humanities, since the time of Mathew Arnold in the late nineteenth century, till almost the end of the twentieth century, culture was thought to include ―a refining and elevating element, each society‘s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought‖ (qtd. in Said xiii). The expression of a society‘s culture in terms of a canon, or categorised as ‗high‘ and ‗low‘ has been increasingly discounted since the decade of the seventies No longer is it aestheticized as the exquisite, whose repertoire is the fine arts, nor is it idealised as such. The term culture is now used expansively and includes those common practices Rahim 7 and every day activities which affect our daily lives, both at the individual and the societal levels. Renato Rosaldo is of the view that, ―in contrast with the classic view, which posits culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, culture can arguably be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes cross from within and beyond its borders‖ (20). By this token the cultural arena is not a restricted one. The economic, social, political and religious, are all domains that may be described within a cultural framework. The various dimensions of culture in the contemporary world are increasingly identified in the context of a particular sphere of human endeavour; there is for example, corporate culture, music culture, fast-food culture, sports culture, media culture to list the few most commonly used. In the context of the Indian subcontinent, the use of indigenous terms such as ‗dargah culture‘, ‗thana culture‘ and
‗biradari culture‘ are connotative of distinctive cultural processes and practices related to the social, religious and political spheres. Culture, therefore as Edward Said argues cannot be ―antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliations‖ (xv). The view suggests that cultural practices are linked to the community and society and have to be historically contextualised.
According to Stuart Hall in the introduction to Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices the ‗cultural turn‘ in the social and human sciences ―has tended to emphasize the importance of meaning to the definition of culture…Primarily culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings
– the ‗giving and taking of meaning‘ between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other‖(2).
The cultural sphere is also impacted upon by the force of historical Rahim 8 circumstance and institutional control, for example in the case of those places which have been subjected to various historical influences over the ages in the shape of foreign intrusion and have experienced long periods of colonial rule. The legacy of two centuries of British presence in the subcontinent is strongly visible in the forms of architecture, and in the infrastructure such as the railway and road network. It lives on in the institutional framework that shapes the judicial system, the civil service and the armed forces. The official status and use of the English language is another strong cultural influence that dates back to the colonial period. As such the significance of historical markers in shaping the cultural landscape of the subcontinent is a reality which cannot be denied.
The divisions between historical developments, in terms of cultural identity and its representation in travel writing, are also significant because travel itself in the global context, has acquired a radically changed status in both metaphorical and material terms. The traveller in the contemporary world may also be an immigrant, a refugee and a scholar, existing in a state described as ‗dwelling in travel‘(qtd. in Clifford 8).
Global market systems and the impact of communication and transportation have resulted in changed perceptions about the spatial and temporal aspects of travel. Pico Iyer makes a pertinent comment in this regard. According to him:
The lure of modern travel for many of us is that we don‘t go from A to B so
much as much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often we end up
somewhere between the two, not quite one, not quite the other . . . Jet lag in
some ways is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent . . . of
some long grey airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to
another. It speaks for much in the accelerated world where we speed between
continents and think we have conquered both space and time. (163) Rahim 9
However as Iyer emphasizes, experiencing this space- time compression of modern air travel results in an unnerving feeling of dislocation. It goes beyond the metaphorical and becomes painfully disorienting in a palpable way.
Technological innovation, especially increased connectivity through the internet and the electronic and print media have led to a dramatic transformation in the modes of travel and in the language of travel. Budget option travel, package tours and the proliferation of airline routes connecting travellers to a variety of holiday and business destinations across the globe have effected a phenomenal growth of the tourism industry and the movement of people around the globe. The surfeit of information about a particular location can often thwart the attempt to go there and represent its novelty by writing a book about it. As Colin Thubron argues, the travel writer in present times often has a problem deciding where he will go. He despairs that ―the globe has been too much covered already, the world homogenized. Other travellers we feel----or anthropologists, aid workers or movie makers---have fatally preceded us, and there may be nothing more to say‖ (6). Thubron‘s reservation against too great an exposure to travel is a telling one, in that it offers a comment on the challenges faced by travel writers in representing what has already been written about or shown through other media such as television, film and now increasingly through virtual travel and through specific blogs on the internet.
Travel, in all its present day manifestations, has however helped to demolish the cult of the exotic and has facilitated cultural encounter in the contemporary world.
According to sociologists Chris Rojek and John Urry, cultural exchange which may come about due to various factors impacts on cultural identity, ―all cultures get remade as a result of the flows of people, objects and images across national borders, whether these involve colonialism, work- based migration, individual travel or mass tourism‖ (26). The Rahim 10 new models of transnational cultural flows, cultural hybridity and assimilation in this context may be by necessity, the outcome of negotiation, rather than a passive acceptance of cultural norms, such as reflected for example, in migrancy, exile, diasporic identity and transculturation in the global context. The cultural domain now is therefore inclusive of issues that relate to the increasingly complex political, economic, aesthetic and ethical spheres of cross-cultural existence. Cultural identity has to be negotiated within emergent, ever changing parameters. The travel book in such a context can no longer be a guide to place and people nor can it limit itself to a monologic representation because culture itself defies definition in a univocal sense.
How then has globalization re-defined the characterization of a cultural landscape and its representation in travel writing? Is there then within contemporary travel literature, a form of narrative that can, in its depiction of cultural interchange and hybridity, resort to a textual practice that exhibits ―the multiple crossings from one form of writing into another and given the case, from one genre into another‖ (Borm 26).
It is in the context of a cultural representation grounded in a strong historical consciousness and emphasizing transculturality and syncretism, that the travel writing of William Dalrymple becomes particularly relevant; more specifically his sustained ethnohistorical focus on the Indian subcontinent is worthy of critical study. How does he as a traveller/travel writer stretch the genre to construct a narrative that is strikingly polyphonic in its representation of cultural heterogeneity. How does he explore the cultural history of a land marked by the colonial imprint of his own place of origin?
How does he position himself with respect to this? What are the dominant modes he employs to combine varied articulations with his own as he engages with cultural diversity, both as an outside observer and a privileged participant. Towards this end, this critical study aims to explore and interpret the historical and ethnographic Rahim 11 modes as contributing to the polyphonic representation in his travel narrative.
In terms of scope, the study undertakes to examine Dalrymple‘s innovative narrative in its attempt to represent the diverse culture of the subcontinent across a wide and richly textured canvas. The use of the historical mode involves a journeying into the past through archival research, allusions and intertextual references linked to historical personages and events, and through descriptions of monuments that represent a specific cultural history in their architectural form. In addition to Dalrymple‘s extensive historical research, his personal experience on the ground, with regard to social customs and cultural practices, has significance in terms of representing the subcontinent‘s varied cultural traditions from different timelines. The expository stance of the ethnographer is most effectively incorporated in the context of the travel writer as observer, participant and interlocutor travelling to diverse locales, listening to different narratives and recording the dynamics of social and political change as it impacts on the cultural landscape. His ethnohistorical focus through a polyphonic travel narrative, which in addition to the distinctive authorial voice incorporates multiple articulations and points of view, shall be interpreted as marking a discursive shift in contemporary travel writing.
A brief biographical introduction of William Dalrymple and a review of his travel writing, with specific reference to the subcontinent, would be in order here.
Born in Scotland, on 20th March 1965, Dalrymple was raised on the shores of the Firth of
Forth. He began his writing career at the young age of twenty two, just after completing his undergraduate studies in History, at Trinity College, Cambridge. In a writing career spanning twenty two years now, Dalrymple has written seven books out of which five are travel texts. In 2002 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish
Geographical Society for his ‗outstanding contribution to travel literature.‘ He also wrote and Rahim 12 presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys which won the Grierson
Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. Dalrymple is one of the co-founders and directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival, which has come to be recognised as one of the most significant literary events in South Asia. He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser and divides his time between London and Delhi.
Dalrymple‘s personal association with the subcontinent goes back to his father‘s generation. In an interview with the Pakistani TV channel, Geo, in 2010, he mentions that in
August 1947, when the Partition of the subcontinent took place, his father had been the young
ADC of General Messervy, the first Commander in Chief of the Pakistan army. As such he was actually present in Karachi at the raising of the flag of Pakistan and he lived in GHQ in
Rawalpindi (n.p.). However Dalrymple himself was acquainted with the subcontinent as a young boy at the age of eighteen.
Dalrymple‘s first travel book In Xanadu: A Quest, published in 1990, follows the structure of a popular convention in travel writing, the ‗in the footsteps of‘—genre,‘ in tracing the 1271 AD journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia. With a travel grant from his college in Cambridge in 1986, and after months of meticulous planning of the trip, he set out on the expedition with his friend Laura as his travel companion. They carried with them---in the manner of Marco Polo--- a phial of oil from the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Xanadu, now located in present day China. As Dalrymple explains in the opening chapter of the book, ―the previous summer I had walked from
Edinburgh to Jerusalem following the route of the First Crusade. That journey had ended at the Holy Sepulchre; Marco Polo‘s journey began where the other finished. It was the obvious sequel‖ (11).
Dalrymple‘s daring expedition was made possible only, as he elaborates, because of the opening in 1986 of the Karakoram Highway, the land route linking Pakistan with Rahim 13
China. Since Polo‘s time in the thirteenth century, it was the first overland journey from
Jerusalem to Xanadu-- following in the Venetian‘s footsteps-- to be completed successfully. The book itself, documents the journey in a fast paced predominantly first- person narrative. It was widely acclaimed as ‗a brilliant debut‘ in travel writing that combined scholarly research with exuberant cultural adventure, undercut by a strong sense of the comic. Patrick Leigh Fermor in his review for the Spectator described it as ‗a most gifted first book‘ and praised it for being ‗learned and comic‘. Dervla Murphy writing in the Literary Review commented-- ―In Xanadu is so uncommonly satisfying because of the rare skill with which William Dalrymple blends his ingredients: history, danger, humour, architecture, people, hardship, and politics‘ (n.p.). Another review in the Sunday Express described it as, ―Superb….the vivid, engaging and often hilarious account of an amazing
12,000 miles journey. His marvellous book — rich with the sights, smells, history and feel of
Asia — will become a classic‖ (n. p.).
It is to be noted that the praise for the book acknowledges Dalrymple‘s erudition, evident in the intensively researched historical detail that is interspersed with frequent intertextual references. The humorous anecdotal narration carries the reader along through a journey in which Dalrymple reports on a number of interactive encounters with people and reveals a sharp ear for the spoken idiom. Critics located his work in the long tradition of popular and engaging British travel writing of the modern period, for example that of Robert Byron and Evelyn Waugh in the richly described narrative and in the scenic evocation of a diverse cultural landscape. In Xanadu won the 1990 Yorkshire
Post, Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial prize.
In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for five years researching his second travel book City of Djinns which highlights the many intriguing aspects of Delhi, Rahim 14 both past and present. As he has written in his book The Last Mughal, he was unacquainted with India until he arrived in Delhi as an eighteen year old boy, in January 1984. Since his childhood had been spent in rural Scotland on the shores of the Firth of Forth, he admits that unlike ―more cosmopolitan teenagers:‖ (TLM 7), the city was a revelation to him in more ways than one. He soon found himself a job at a Mother Teresa‘s home in the far north of the city. While the patients were taking their siesta, he would set out to explore the older parts of
Delhi. ―I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me‖ (7).
Published in 1993, City of Djinns, was acclaimed as a scholarly and entertaining portrait of the historic city. In the prologue to the book Dalrymple admits to being completely overwhelmed by the ambience of the capital since the very first moment he set foot in it--
From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally
unlike anything I had seen before; Delhi, it seemed at first was full of riches
and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light
through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people,
a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices…Moreover the city -- so I soon discovered
-- possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history,
deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. (CD 7-8)
The self-reflexive tone serves to dramatize Dalrymple‘s strong personal response to the city. The use of metaphorical language and evocative imagery characterize the magical atmosphere of the ancient metropolis and the use of antitheses in the description captures dramatically, what according to him, signifies the paradoxical flavours of ―a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side Rahim 15 by side as in aspic, a city of djinns‖ (CD 9). He conveys the excitement of delving deep into the myths and legends associated with the city and of exploring the many layers of history that characterize its timeless image.
In her review of the book for The Independent, Jan Morris described it as being more than a travel book ―It is a kind of memoir recording the response of a single, gentle, merry and learned mind to the presence of an ancient city — Dalrymple is anything but a voyeur -- he is more a pilgrim than an observer, always trying to understand‖ (n. pg.).
This attempt at becoming a still more keen and sensitive observer and to
‗understand‘ a place that is so varied in terms of its historical and cultural legacy is reinforced by the fact that for the last twenty five years Dalrymple has chosen to make
Delhi his second home. The conscious attempt at ‗immersion‘ in subcontinental culture and the shift from observer to participant has seen an expansion in his repertoire. He is now resident travel writer, journalist, historian and ethnographer.
It is in City of Djinns that Dalrymple‘s polyphonic representation is employed to singular effect. The narrative intricately structured, as part memoir and part historical sketch and cultural archive combines multiple story strands and includes the voices of different characters, some fictional, others historical, but in the main those who inhabit the city, and talk and walk the streets with him. The book won the 1994 Thomas Cook
Travel Book Award and Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year award. It established his reputation as a scholarly and innovative historical researcher and a gifted storyteller and prose stylist.
The Age Of Kali sub-titled Indian Travels and Encounters published in 1998 is a collection of nineteen ‗peripatetic essays‘ spanning ten years of travel across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. In the introduction to the book, Dalrymple describes it as ‗a work of love‘ and explains his compelling interest in recording his travel Rahim 16 experiences in the book:
Its subject is an area of the world I revere like no other, and in which I have
chosen to spend most of my time since I was free to make that choice. From
my first visit to the region as an eighteen year old backpacker, I was
completely overwhelmed: India thrilled, surprised, daunted and excited me.
Since then it has never ceased to amaze; and I hope that ceaseless power to
delight and astonish, if nothing else, is conveyed by this book. (AK xii-xiii)
The choice of emotive vocabulary in--- ‗thrilled‘, ‗surprised‘, ‗daunted‘,
‗excited‘, ‗amaze‘, ‗delight‘, ‗astonish‘, registers very forcefully Dalrymple‘s spontaneous and exuberant response to the subcontinent and sets the terms for its representation from the very first moment he set foot there. Originally written as travel pieces and essays on culture and history for different British newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Independent and the Sunday Telegraph and for Granta, the Tatler, and the Spectator; these were subsequently ―edited, trimmed and rewritten‖ by Dalrymple and compiled into book form. The contents are divided into six sections according to the focus on different geographical locations across India and
Pakistan and the diverse cultural and social milieu that is covered in the representation.
Each of the pieces is entitled according to the main focus, sometimes provocatively so and mark the location and the date of Dalrymple‘s visit. As he elaborates:
My travels took me from the fortresses of the drug barons of the North -
West Frontier to the jungle lairs of the Tamil Tigers; from flashy Bombay
drink parties to murderous Bihari blood feuds; from the decaying palaces
of Lucknow to the Keralan exorcist temple of the bloodthirsty goddess
Parashakti, She who is seated on a throne of five corpses. All the pieces are
the product of personal experience and direct observation. (AK xi) Rahim 17
The dramatic use of evocative language sets the tone for travel writing that aims to take the reader on a journey across the length and breadth of the vast geographical expanse of the subcontinent. Dalrymple comes across as the curious, learned and intrepid traveller who reports closely on what he observes and savours the first hand experience of dangerous locales, racy lifestyles and a rich and diverse cultural heritage.
The book carries several accounts of encounters with people whom Dalrymple seeks out as representative of a specific social and cultural reality rooted in the past. It also includes profiles of individuals who have claim either to fame or notoriety and those who enjoy celebrity status-- Imran Khan, Shobha De and Benazir Bhutto amongst others. As such it combines historical narrative with ethnographic description. It frequently displays the immediacy of journalistic writing in its investigative tenor, embedding cultural criticism in its reportage of topical issues related to the changing social and political environment in the subcontinent.
The book‘s title, as explained by Dalrymple is a reference to the ancient Hindu concept-- presented in the seventh-century sacred tracts, the Puranas -- that time is divided into four great epochs. ―Each age (or yug) is named after one of the four throws, from best to worst, in a traditional Indian game of dice; accordingly, each successive age represents a period of increasing moral and social deterioration‖ (AK xi). The book therefore has a thematic unity as each of the travel essays serves to effectively highlight different aspects linked to the Kalyug -- the ―epoch of strife, corruption, darkness and disintegration‖ (Dalrymple, AK xi) that according to Hindu cosmology benights the subcontinent at present. The bleak and often violent and chaotic social reality is forcefully conveyed, very often with a brilliant use of dialogue and an undercurrent of irony and humour that makes the prose both engaging and entertaining. The book is structured so that its wide sweep makes it possible for Dalrymple to expand the narrative and Rahim 18 introduce different voices as he interacts with people in diverse cultural locations. The representation in the main employs the ethnographic mode to highlight historical sites, religious events and social practices that relate to deep rooted belief and tradition.
Dalrymple also offers reflective insights into the bleak aspects of contemporary social and political reality.
Dalrymple‘s most recent travel book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern
India (2009) is his first travel book in fifteen years. It looks at how The thematic focus serves to highlight how the subcontinent‘s ―diverse religious and mystical traditions have been caught in the vortex of rapid change that has recently engulfed South Asia‖(n.p.). As a polyphonic representation, it is worked mainly through the ethnographic mode. The different cultural settings of the stories cover the geographical diversity of the subcontinent, so that Dalrymple travels to the peaks of the Himalayas, and to the deserts of Rajasthan and Sindh. His journey covers the lush landscape of the south and the floodplains in the East and West. These settings in India and Pakistan form the backdrop against which Dalrymple focuses on the personal lives of nine individuals. The more specific locations evoke contexts in which ‗the persistence of faith and ritual‘(NL xv) seems to defy the fast paced transformations in the political, economic and cultural structures of subcontinental society.
The narrative is marked by formal experimentation. In the introduction to the book
Dalrymple elaborates that it is ―conceived as a collection of linked non-fiction stories with each life representing a different form of devotion or a different religious path‖ (NL xv). Dalrymple explains that his aim in writing the book was to record the spiritual journeys of the nine individuals. As such they are ‗travellers‘ who are made to recount their singular experiences; through their first person narration they share their stories, in the manner of a modern Indian Canterbury Tales. Dalrymple admits to having Rahim 19 planned the initial form of the narrative as similar to the one in From the Holy
Mountain, his earlier travel book on the Eastern Christian monks and monasteries, which is set in the Middle East. However as he points out the stories were extraordinary and so in in writing the stories, he decided to construct a narrative which would give central prominence to the individual voices of the characters and their expressions of a deep commitment to the specific spiritual vocations they have chosen for themselves.
Dalrymple marks the development in his perspective and his writing style, over the course of twenty years since his first travel book In Xanadu, was published at the height of the eighties. According to him, it was customary then for travel writing to
―highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were sometimes reduced to objects in the background‖ (NL xiv). In Nine Lives he inverts this technique. As the ethnographer/ narrator he engages his informants in dialogue, frequently asking searching questions to elicit information, but he positions himself in the shadows so as to restrict authorial intrusion. Dalrymple explains this strategy as follows:
By rooting many of the stories in the darker and less romantic sides of
modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story,
and with only the frame created by the narrator, I have made a conscious effort
to try avoid imposing myself on the stories told by my nine characters and so
hope to have escaped many of the clichés about ‗Mystic India‘ that blight so
much Western writing on Indian religion. (NL xv)
The auto/biographical register lends agency to the distinctive voices of the nine characters and their individual stories. It also serves to demystify the stereotypical cultural image of subcontinental spirituality which has been imagined and exoticised as the arcane. As Dalrymple elaborates, some of the questions the book addresses are: Rahim 20
―what does it actually mean to be a holy man or a Jain nun, a mystic or a tantric seeking salvation on the roads of modern India… how is each specific religious path surviving the changes India is currently undergoing? What changes and what remains the same? Does
India still offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?‖(n.p.). All these questions are extremely relevant to a changing twenty first century world. They also emphasize that a travel book can adopt a dialogic approach and set out to explore and represent the more personal aspects of human narrative against the broader relevance of complex social and cultural change.
This brief review of Dalrymple‘s work attempts to highlight that as a travel writer, his repertoire is innovative and expansive; with an intensive focus on the ethnohistorical, his narrative includes different voices and various points of view. The study therefore emphasizes that his work, is distinguished by a polyphonic cultural representation of the subcontinent which and marks a discursive shift in contemporary travel writing. Such a representation is characterized by the use of the historical and the ethnographic modes. These dominate the narrative and relate both to theme and form.
The primary sources for this research are four travel texts by Dalrymple which narrate his travel experiences in India and Pakistan. These are as follows:
In Xanadu: A Quest (1990)
City of Djinns-A Year in Delhi (1993)
The Age Of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (2004)
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009)
Secondary sources include Dalrymple‘s other books-- From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Rahim 21
In The Shadow Of Byzantium (1997), White Mughals (2002), and The Last Mughal, The Fall
Of A Dynasty,1857, (2006). His travel features and essays related to the subcontinent, articles for newspapers and magazines, book reviews, editorial introductions and contributions to various anthologies of travel literature will also be drawn upon and form part of the critical interpretation. Dalrymple‘s interviews in the press, or available from online sources and reviews of his writing will also be integrated into the discussion.
The research design selected for this purpose is interpretive in a historicist context. A content analysis through a close reading of Dalrymple‘s travel texts will enable the identification of distinctive polyphonic features of his writing which will be contextualised within the historical and the ethnographic modes. The textual analysis will also extend to specific thematic concerns, rhetorical features and narrative strategies that contribute to the cultural representation within these specific modes.
To contextualize Dalrymple‘s travel writing within the discursive framework of polyphonic ethnographic narrative, it would be illuminating to examine some of the theoretical approaches that have impacted on the issue of cultural identity, its representation in travel texts and recent trends in ethnographic writing.
Critical attention has increasingly been directed at describing and interpreting representational paradigms within a discursive framework. A notable example in this regard is the work of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom discourse refers to a diverse system of languages that ―mutually and ideologically interanimate each other‖
(47). As he elaborates, in a monologic artistic work the ideas are either those of the authorial consciousness in which case they are affirmed or if they do not accord with the authorial world view they are repudiated (81). As opposed to this he takes the example of the realist novel—Dostoevsky‘s writing specifically-- as a dialogic form and emphasises that novelistic discourse includes dialogue which reflects the diversity of voices, social Rahim 22 types, generational differences among characters, thus giving it a multiple voiced quality. This polyphony, as he terms it, also characterizes the relationship between the characters and the author. The authorial or narratorial voice does not dominate, instead it is mediated through the different voices of a narrative text, ―in the sense that voice embodies ideologies and expresses responses to particular historical conditions‖ (Keene 5).
Dialogue is perhaps the basic trope in all of Bakhtin‘s writing and he uses it in an inclusive way. As he emphasizes
There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the
dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless
future). Even past meanings, that is those born in the dialogue of past
centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they
will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent
development of the dialogue. (170)
According to this view meaning can never be cast in a final shape. Speakers will renew the meaning according to the demands of their particular situation. There is therefore a constant negotiation between speakers, in dialogue with each other, sand with language itself.
The Bakhtinian concept of the creation of the self through a dialogic encounter with the other is played out in the context of the travel writer as the traveller/observer who constantly interacts with others. The experience of being on the road, seeing and absorbing what is new both in terms of a place and people also leads to self-awareness. As such Dalrymple‘s narrative is self-reflexive and combines personal anecdote with close observation of the people he travels with or encounters. There is frequent recourse to intertextuality which also conveys the effect of a dialogue with other literary voices. In
Dalrymple‘s travel texts, the authorial voice that is heard reflects predominantly, the perspective of the historian and the ethnographer. This is negotiated through different Rahim 23 voices and disparate points of view, that are heard, understood and answered by still other voices, both from the historical past and from the present social and cultural milieu.
There is therefore a plurality of consciousness that is given expression through the polyphonic narrative. This approach is significant in expanding the text to effectively convey the heterogeneity of the vast and complex cultural landscape of the subcontinent.
Michel Foucault in the 1960‘s focussed on the production of knowledge through what he referred to as ‗discourse.‘ His project, as he elaborated was to analyse ―how human beings understand themselves in our culture and how our knowledge about the social, the embodied individual and shared meanings‘ comes to be produced in different periods.‖ (qtd. in Hall 43).
This marked a departure from Saussure‘s semiotic approach in which representation was dependent on ‗meaning‘ through words that functioned as signs in ‗language‘…..in a culture meaning often depends on larger units of analysis—narratives, statements, groups of images, whole discourses which operate across a variety of texts. Foucault‘s approach emphasised historic specificity and its bearing on the constructed nature of representational authority. He linked the production of knowledge to power, to the ―apparatuses and institutions‖ (131) through which discursive formations operate, the social and political systems that constitute the world we live in. Thus he argued that the practices of representation are inscribed by relations of power ---especially those which prevail between the people who are represented and the cultures which have the authority to represent them. Stuart Hall is of the view that Foucault‘s attempt in ―foregrounding of the relation between discourse, knowledge and power… rescued representation from the clutches of a purely formal theory, and gave it a historical, practical and worldly context of operation‖(47).
Drawing conceptually on Foucault‘s argument that knowledge or truth in whatever Rahim 24 form, belongs to that group which has the power to impress its version of knowledge on others and sustain it, Edward Said‘s seminal work Orientalism had a critical impact on problematizing the politics of identity and representation. Since then Orientalism has entered the literary canon as a generic term connoting the manner in which ‗other‘ cultures are perceived and represented. In theorizing the ideological, cultural and discursive processes involved in imperial domination, Said emphasized the significance of ―imaginative geographies and their representation‖ (49). These, he argued, go beyond physical space and ―construct boundaries around our very consciousness and attitudes‖ (qtd. in Hubbard et al 239). Said linked this concept to the politics of cultural representation and cultural imperialism. This attitude was also extended to the exercise of symbolic power through different representational practices such as literature, architecture, painting and sculpture. The analysis of the strategies of Orientalism is premised on the ideological nature of representation and the ways in which powerful representations become the true and accepted ones.
Orientalism was the first work of cultural criticism to direct attention to travel writing as an archive of knowledge which offered particular insight into the operation of colonial discourses, especially the politics of difference that define the sense of individual and cultural identity. Its publication led to a renewed interest in studying travel texts as anthropological accounts or descriptions of landscape that articulated an exoticised subjugated Other. The rhetorical force reflected in these texts was linked to the representational modalities of Orientalist discourse and interpreted as emphasising
European self-identity through a relationship of power. As an academic discipline
Orientalism emerged in the late eighteenth century and has since assembled an archive of knowledge that has served to perpetuate and reinforce Western representation of it. Travel writing is regarded as part of the archive. Rahim 25
Commenting on the spate of postcolonial critical readings of travel texts in the wake of Said‘s analysis, Dalrymple writes in the preface of Beyond the Three Seas:
Travellers‟ Tale of Mughal India: ―the exploration of the East –- its peoples, habits, customs and past — by European travellers has become the target for what has effectively become a major scholarly assault. ‗Orientalist‘ has been transformed from a simple descriptive label into a term of outright academic abuse‖ (ix). He argues that this is an essentialized viewpoint and does not attempt to recognize that — ―travellers are individuals whose responses, motives, aims and enthusiasms vary from person to person; indeed travellers are often driven more by their fascination to see, than by motives of power or profit‖ (Beyond the Three Seas: Traveller‟s Tale of Mughal India x). In his view, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often a rejection of home and an embrace of the other. The history of travel is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures and other parts of the world in this way.
This opinion is endorsed by scholars such as Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs who have critically examined different aspects related to travel writing. They argue that travellers will usually follow their instincts and opportunities, rather than directions from home, and it is travellers‘ eccentricities and extravagances--- in the literal sense of wanderings off----which have attracted many readers to the genre of travel writing (5). These views emphasize that it is important to consider the intellectual curiosity of individual travellers who are motivated by their inclination to take to the road, to satisfy their urge to leave home to see the outside world and to engage with its strangeness. It is then largely, this motivation that is brought to bear on their experiences of travel.
Amartya Sen draws attention to the scepticism which is expressed in recent social theory about the possibility of any approach to seeking knowledge that ―is innocent of Rahim 26 power‖ (143). He makes a significant argument in this regard in his essay Indian Traditions and The Western Imagination. According to him
The process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational
variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some grosser kind.
An epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely
congruent with the pursuit of power is a great deal more cunning than wise. It
can needlessly undermine the value of knowledge in satisfying curiosity and
interest. (143)
One could extrapolate from this argument that a lot of learning comes about as a result of an inherently curious disposition and the desire to explore what seems to be interesting. In the context of the textual representations of diverse travellers who journeyed to the subcontinent and spent a length of time there engaging with its society and cultural traditions, there have been many whose motivation cannot be ascribed to ambitions of power and profit alone.
Sen proceeds to categorize in three distinct approaches that underlie the attempt by outsiders to understand and interpret the Indian subcontinent. As he points out:
…..the first (exoticist) category concentrates on the wondrous aspects of India.
The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in the country that as
Hegel put it ‗has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans.‘
The second (magisterial) category strongly relates to the exercise of imperial
power and sees India as a subject territory from the point of view of its British
governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of superiority and guardianhood---
.The third (curatorial) category is the most catholic of the three and includes
various attempts at noting, classifying and exhibiting diverse aspects of Indian
culture---as very special and extraordinarily interesting.(142) Rahim 27
With regard to Dalrymple‘s sustained engagement with the social and aesthetic world of the subcontinent, one can claim that his approach combines the curatorial with the dialogic. His work in the main, as travel writer, historian and ethnographer reflects a scholarly interest in the diverse aspects of the subcontinent‘s history and culture.
The extensive use of archival sources from the India Office Library in London, the
Indian National Archives in Delhi and the Punjab Public Library in Lahore, testify to the painstaking research into primary sources that he incorporates into his narrative.
The historical traditions of transcultural sharing and heterodoxy, the rich cultural legacy of the Mughal dynasty, its architecture, and iconography, the Twilight years of this period and colonial inscriptions on the cultural landscape of the subcontinent are, more specifically, areas he has assiduously researched and written about. However
Dalrymple‘s curiosity and sensibility as a travel writer extend in equal measure to what can be described as extensive interpretive ethnographic enquiry.
In an essay entitled ―The Poetics And The Politics Of Exhibiting Other Cultures‖,
Henrietta Lidchi elaborates on the meaning of the word ethnography …[it] ―comes from ethnos meaning ‗people/ race/ nation‘, and graphein meaning ‗writing/ description‘. A common definition might state that ethnography seeks to describe nations of people with their customs, habits and points of difference‖(160) The Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory defines ethnography as ―anthropological research based on direct or participant observation of a select group of people‘s way of life. Traditionally the observed group would be outside of the observer‘s own ethnic group …The aim of the research would be to discover the ways in which its behaviours, habits and practices differed from that of the observer‘s. In the context of Dalrymple‘s travels to different cultural sites and locations to observe closely and interact with people in their particular social and cultural environment can be equated with fieldwork A large part of his narrative draws on his experience on the ground as he Rahim 28 engages his ‗informants‘ in dialogue into the individual histories of people and the rapidly changing social environment that impacts on their cultural identities.
In an important essay, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖, Stuart Hall attempts to explore the issue of cultural identity and its forms of representation in a historicized framework. According to him such practices of representation are subject to change through a selective and interpretive process marked by historical change. As such they always
implicate the positions from which we speak or write ----the positions of
enunciation ---- Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think.
Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact,
which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of
identity as a ‗production‘ which is never complete, always in process, and
always constituted within, not outside representation. (393)
This suggests that the boundaries of cultural identity are ever changing as they are continually being repositioned and rearticulated through varying points of reference in the process of representation. Drawing on Frantz Fanon‘s insights on the damaging effects of colonisation on the colonized psyche, Hall relates this to the ‗intervention of history‘ which brings about an awareness that cultural identity is marked by ―ruptures and discontinuities‖ (393). He emphasises how ―it is then in this sense that cultural identity is a matter of ‗becoming‘ as well as ‗being‘. It belongs to the future as well as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture‖ (393). This becomes evident from a critical reading of cultural representation in travel texts about the subcontinent from different historical periods. It reinforces the idea that literature and culture are sites of power and resistance, and any meanings that a text conveys reflect changing historical contingencies and as such have to be contextualised in the Rahim 29 wider social, political and cultural framework. This process of making meaning then also relates to the historically generated assumptions of the contemporary culture in which the text is being read and emphasizes the temporal aspect in the process of reading and interpretation.
Hayden White argues that there is no single ‗correct‘ view of historical ‗reality‘ and by recognizing the possibility of shifting methodological approaches---
we should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or
complex of events in the past ‗correspond‘ to some pre-existent body of ‗raw
facts.‘ For we should recognise that what constitutes the facts themselves
is the problem that the historian…..has tried to solve in the choice of
metaphor in which he orders his world, past, present and future. (47)
This viewpoint directs attention to the subjectivity involved in reading and interpreting aspects of historical reality and to the literary choices involved in their formal representation, in short, to the constructed nature of all historical narrative.
Dalrymple‘s use of the historical mode is dominant in all his travel texts. Frequently the polylayered narrative frame within this mode is structured through extensive intertextual references to passages that echo cultural representations from the past.
According to Michael Cronin, intertextual travel provides the means by which ―the actual travel of the writers can be contrasted with the virtual experience of travel through the language of printed text. This involves splicing extracts from earlier accounts to the text or juxtaposing the solemn pronouncements of guidebooks with descriptions of the wayward reality of place‖ (36). Many travel writers draw on the writing of other travellers and their impressions about a particular locale. The Irish travel writer
Dervla Murphy explains her use of textual references as ― a means by which I can compare my own impressions, difficulties and the situations I am in, to those of an earlier Rahim 30 traveller. Moreover, references to imperial travellers are a way of emphasizing their different approach to the country in comparison to my own‖(n.p.).
The marked intertextuality in Dalrymple‘s narrative characterizes a prominent thematic and stylistic concern in his work-- the dialogic inter-play between the past and present, between the journeying and writing of other travellers and his own. Apart from the distinctive authorial voice, there are several voices that he connects with.
These are heard through allusions, quotations and interpolated passages from varied sources such as travelogues, histories, literary writing and architectural inscriptions. The polyphony thus created, works as a functional stylistic device in the narrative reconstruction of past events and cultural traditions, in the vivid portrayal of historical and cultural icons and in the architectural detail of monuments, such as tombs, mosques, churches and shrines which have their own stories of the past to tell.
Recognising the need to debate issues of cultural representation in a postcolonial world of revised geographical and political boundaries, anthropologist
James Clifford, writing in the collection of essays entitled Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, posed the following questions: ―Who has the authority to speak for a group‘s identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern inter-ethnic relations?‖ ( 8). These questions directed attention towards the ethnographer‘s authority in the practice of observation and representation of a culture‘s identity, what is perceived as ethnography‘s tendency towards an elitist paternalism, the arrogance implicit in the intrusion into someone else‘s cultural site, and assuming its transparency before one‘s own mode of evaluation and interpretation. It underscored the necessity of a paradigm shift in developing a sensitivity to cross- cultural representation in a postcolonial world where mobility, transnational cultural Rahim 31 flow and cultural hybridity are a complex reality for both individuals and societies.
Revised discursive strategies in ethnographic writing and an awareness of difference between cultures and ethnicities also brought to the fore the critical issue of cultural relativism which highlights
the view that fundamentally different standards of morality, practices and
belief systems operate in different cultures and cannot be judged with
regard to their worth from a standpoint exterior to them --- that there is a
fundamental incommensurability between the value systems of different
cultures. (Edgar and Sedgewick 99)
The subjectivity of the ethnographer in response to that which is unfamiliar and the proclivity to relate it to one‘s own frame of reference is also emphasised. In
Dalrymple‘s own case, this has been problematic to an extent, notwithstanding his immersion in subcontinental culture—having lived in Delhi for over two decades-- and the sharpness of his observation honed by frequent travel to different parts of the country and across the border to Pakistan. For his detractors he is still the British ‗ gora‘, the patronizing outsider who has come back to speak for a territory and people his forebears had colonized. The difficulty of positioning oneself in relation to the study of a people and their culture is troubling in many ways. Claude Levi Strauss in Tristes
Tropiques comments upon his own situation as the field worker and theorist and expresses this concern. As he writes: ―all the while wishing to be human, the ethnographer seeks to know and judge man from a sufficiently elevated and distant point of view to abstract particular contingencies from such a society or civilisation‖(57). The difficulty of representing a culture from a suitably distanced and stable perspective is a topic that anthropologists and cultural theorists have debated increasingly in the last two decades. The discourse of the ethnographer has become more self-reflexive and interpersonal. Rahim 32
In his reappraisal of ethnographic composition in a changed and complex global context, James Clifford emphasises that ethnography is an emergent interdisciplinary process. Its authority and rhetoric have spread to many fields where ―culture‖ is a newly problematic object of description and critique-----the notion that literary procedures pervade any work of cultural representation is a recent idea in the discipline---- Literary processes –metaphor, figuration, narrative—affect the way cultural phenomena are registered, from the first ‗jotted‘ observations to the completed book (3).
He also links this literary trend in ethnographic writing to those aspects of cultural description that are intrinsically allegorical, that is, conjure up other patterns of associations, ideas and events. As he suggests, this aspect draws special attention to ―the narrative character of cultural representations, to the stories built into the representational process itself ‖(100).
Building on this observation, one can suggest that discursive approaches and formal experimentation in representing cultural reality have undergone a significant change in the last three decades. Contemporary forms of travel writing which incorporate an ethnographic focus display increasingly inventive expressive modes. This finds expression in V.S. Naipaul‘s comment on his own work. In an interview with Ahmed Rashid, for the Observer, Naipaul says:
My books have to be called ‗ travel writing,‘ but that can be misleading
because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men
describing the routes they were taking…What I do is quite different. I
travel on a theme. I travel to make an enquiry. I am not a journalist. I am
taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation and curiosity that I
developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are
really constructed narratives. There is the narrative of the journey and within Rahim 33
that there are many little patterns that are part of the larger pattern. (16)
The three gifts—-―sympathy, observation and curiosity‖ ---that Naipaul highlights draw on feeling, intellect and experience and in my view would stand a sensitive traveller in good stead. However the imaginative force that is reflected in the textual representation of the journey is carried forward in the themes and the formal distinctiveness of the narrative. One has to then contend with the ‗constructed‘ nature of representation within a discursive paradigm that is shifting and complex.
According to Paul Theroux ― a [travel] book has the capacity to express a country‘s heart---as long as it stays away from vacations, holidays, sight seeing and the half- truths in official handouts; as long as it concentrates on people in their landscape, and its dissonance as well as the melodies‖(41). This viewpoint highlights the travel writers role in acquainting himself with the nuances of a cultural setting.
In a feature for The Guardian written in 2009, the year his most recent travel book Nine Lives was published, Dalrymple discusses whether travel writing as a genre can ‗adapt to a changed world.‘ According to him:
the globalised world has now become so complex that notions of national
character and particularity – the essence of so many 20th century travelogues –
is becoming increasingly untenable, and distasteful. So has the concept of the
western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a
Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captive to the pages
of his album. In an age when East to West migrations are so much more
common than those from West to East ―the funny foreigners‖ who were once
regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of
the best travel pieces themselves… – Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav
Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra – (n.p.) Rahim 34
Dalrymple emphasizes the broader relevance of a pluralistic approach to culture. The idea of discrete cultures does not hold in a global world where movement across borders is not restricted to a one way traffic from West to East. The paradigm of the Orientalist is no longer relevant in such a complex world. He cites the example of writers from the Indian diaspora whose work as travel writers is highly regarded.
He makes the strong assertion that travel writing ―has a great deal of life in it yet.
For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. Its possible to cross-fertilize the genre with other literary forms –biography, or anthropological writing—or perhaps more interesting still, to follow in
[Bruce] Chatwin‘s footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction with some of the wilder forms of the novel‖. (n.p.) This view takes one back to an earlier description, by Colin Thubron, of the travel book as ‗postmodern collage‘ but as he points out the mosaic of different pieces is still ―prescribed by the traveller‘s experience on the ground‖
(qtd. in Hulme and Youngs 10).
Dalrymple as a contemporary travel writer seeks to convey the complexity of cultural identity through a polyphonic narrative in which the personal and subjective are interwoven with the interpretive. His writing relates to a range of other genres and forms so that the reader is introduced to history, cultural criticism, and biography in the broader framework of cultural representation. In his position as ethnographer Dalrymple shifts back and forth as he learns from and speaks for the culture he represents. As George Marcus argues:
Dialogic interchanges between ethnographer and other, the sharing of textual
authority with subjects themselves, autobiographical recounting as the
only appropriate response for merging other cultural experience with the
ethnographer‘s own----these are all attempts to change radically the way the Rahim 35
conventional subject matter of ethnography has been constituted in order
to convey authentically other cultural experience.(168)
Dalrymple‘s travel narrative is representative of this dialogic approach. The polyphony in the texts, is created by combining the authorial voice with varied articulations which echo the past and narrate the present. In terms of cultural representation it characterizes the relationship between the setting of the Indian subcontinent and his curiosity as a traveller, cultural historian, ethnographer and above all a story teller.
This critical study attempts to read and interpret the polyphonic travel narrative of William Dalrymple as distinctive in the cultural representation of the subcontinent.
As such it identifies and focuses on the historical and ethnographic modes as dominant in contributing to the polyphony in the narrative. The theoretical framework limits itself to the context of postcolonial and global cultural and literary criticism. It is within these parameters that Dalrymple‘s thematic focus and rhetorical strategies will be identified and interpreted. Since the connections between cultural representation and travel writing are being emphasized in terms of emerging formal and critical trends, the study employs an investigative approach. The goals of the research are thus exploratory, descriptive and explanatory. A secondary focus of this research is to analyse the discursive shift between representations of the subcontinent from previous times and those in the contemporary context. A brief historical overview of the development in the modalities of travel writing about the subcontinent, may serve to highlight the breaks between one discursive formation and another.
Chapter One: The introductory chapter introduces travel writing as a genre which has a complex literary history. Since its generic boundaries overlap with other genres and forms therefore it can draw on different discursive modes such as ethnographic description, historical narration, biography and fiction. The impact of critical theory and cultural Rahim 36 criticism on the reading and interpretation of the discursive aspects of travel writing is examined with reference to relevant critical insights.
The chapter also introduces Dalrymple‘s travel writing as a polyphonic narrative which focuses on a sustained ethnohistorical representation of the subcontinent. This is highlighted through a brief review of four travel texts published during a period covering roughly two decades, from 1990 to 2009. It also identifies the historical and the ethnographic as the dominant discursive modes through which Dalrymple structures his polyphonic narrative and elaborates his thematic concerns in his representation of the cultural diversity of the subcontinent.
This is followed by a literature review of theoretical paradigms related to literary discourse and cultural representation and their impact on the discursive parameters of historical and ethnographic travel narrative in the contemporary context. The chapter refers to the insights of highly regarded travel writers and concludes with a discussion on the varied themes and innovative forms of travel writing that travel generates in the global context.
Chapter Two undertakes a historical review of cultural representation of the
Indian subcontinent in travel accounts from past ages. To emphasize that travel writing has long been associated with imperial and colonial attitudes, a part of the review shall trace the cultural representation in travel accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main part of the review will focus on the shift in the thematic and formal representational dimensions of subcontinental culture in contemporary travel writing for example railway content in travel writing. This shall be highlighted with a critical interpretation of the work of selected travel writers as well as examples from Dalrymple‘s travel texts.
Chapter Three introduces the historical mode with relevant critical insights related Rahim 37 to the formal construction of historical narrative. It aims to contextualise the polyphony in the Dalrymple‘s use of the historical mode in both the thematic and formal will emphasize the different ways in which he engages with the past. A detailed textual analysis of excerpts drawn from Dalrymple‘s travel texts and supplemented by textual support from his other books will highlight features of historical narration. These relate to his use of intertextuality, and the evocation of the historical and cultural past through the nostalgic recall of different characters Dalrymple‘s representation of the distinctive architecture and the culture of diverse historical locales such as Delhi, Lucknow, Goa and
Hyderabad will also be highlighted.
Chapter Four examines in detail the ethnographic mode in Dalrymple‘s travel writing in the discursive framework of polyphonic ethnographic writing. His interactive role as an observer and participant in recording cultural tradition and social customs for example the culture of the shrine, eunuchry and the oral tradition in the subcontinent will be examined through textual analysis of his writing. The analysis will extend to themes, rhetorical strategies and narrative structure. The ethnographic mode also extends to biographical profiles so that Dalrymple locates his subjects in their social and cultural context. This aspect will be elaborated with examples from his writing. Dalrymple‘s use of ethnography as cultural critique will also be discussed with reference to his focus on caste divisions, the politics of violence, and drug culture.
Rahim 38
CHAPTER TWO
Cultural Representation Of The Subcontinent: A Historical Review
The earliest representations of the Indian subcontinent as an antique land of exotic beauty and wealth, home to an ancient civilisation combining strands of distinctive religions and mystic philosophies, was established due to accounts of ancient travellers.
As conquerors, adventurers, missionaries, ambassadors and merchants, they reached the subcontinent through land and sea routes and were overwhelmed by the vastness of its geography. This is probably one of the main reasons why early travellers also ascribed to the land a mystery which in later representations became a recurrent theme. The range of subjects described and interpreted variously in travel accounts indicate the fascination with other aspects for example The detailed descriptions of people related for example to their physiognomy, customs, rituals, religion and language found in the earliest travel texts, could be ascribed to a general curiosity about the unfamiliar, or in the case of missionaries, merchants and navigators, to a necessity of information gathered and shared for practical purposes.
The earliest documented accounts with an ethnographic focus indicate a regular flow of travellers to the subcontinent from antique lands such as Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece,
Egypt and China. The East-West contact in the classical age goes back to the. Greek historians and chroniclers such as Herodotus (489-425 B.C.) and Ctesias (c.416-398 B.C.).
Their writing includes detail about Indian produce, merchandise and forms of dress. The first dated account of his travels to India in 302 B.C. is Indica by Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador who was sent to the court of Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra, the capital city of the Mauryan Empire. Spending nearly a decade in the subcontinent, he had ample opportunity to experience the Indian way of life. The following excerpts are examples of Rahim 39 elaborate objectified descriptions. These representations are recorded in a linear and factual mode and indicate close observation of local customs and practices.
[The Indians] a people who have no written laws, but are ignorant of writing,
and must therefore in all the business of life trust to memory. They live,
nevertheless, happily enough, being simple in their manners and frugal. They
never drink wine except at sacrifices. Their beverage is aliquor composed
from rice instead of barley, and their food is principally a rice pottage. The
simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they
seldom go to law. They have no suits about pledges or deposits, nor do they
require either seals or witnesses, but make their deposits and confide in each
other. Their houses and property they generally leave unguarded. These things
indicate that they possess good, sober sense. (qtd. in Kaul 255)
The detail related to food, drink, and religious ritual is combined with deductive commentary pertaining to laws and transactional relationships amongst the community.
Secondary historical accounts from the early period testify to the increasing religious and political exchange of pilgrims, missionaries and envoys to and from the subcontinent.
During the reign of Asoka, the Indian emperor during the third century B.C., Buddhist monks were sent to Egypt and Greece and Lanka through sea routes to spread
Buddhism. Many others travelled to Mongolia and China through caravan trade routes. As a result the subcontinent became accessible to travellers of different hues and faiths.
Amongst the most significant ethnographic accounts of the early period are those of the Chinese priests Fa-Hien and Huin Tsiang who travelled to the subcontinent to study the teachings of Buddha. In his account, Fa-Hien describes amongst other things
Asoka‘s practice of erecting stone tablets with inscriptions about virtuous conduct and good governance across the kingdom. Rahim 40
The advent of the Christian era saw the arrival of travellers from Europe in the form of Jesuit missionaries. St.Thomas is reputed to have preached Christianity in southern
India from A.D.21-52. This led to the growth of large Christian communities in the region by the fourth century. At around the same time large numbers of Jewish merchants under the threat of Roman persecution, settled along the Malabar coast and traded in sugar, rice and pearls. This mingling of different faiths had a significant impact on the history and the syncretic religious and cultural traditions of the subcontinent in later centuries.
The invasion of Sind by the Arabs in 712 A.D. marked an era of Muslim conquest and influence in the subcontinent. With the decline of the Byzantine Empire, the major trade routes to the subcontinent through which Indian merchandise was routed, were controlled by the Arabs. It was during this period that there emerged a strong tradition of
Arabic-Persian travel writing which can be linked to the ethnological focus in modern day anthropology. It is in Al-Beruni‘s Tarikh al Hind , written in Arabic in the early eleventh century, that we see the beginnings of travel writing that has a pronounced and systematic ethnographic focus. Commissioned by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental work on the intellectual traditions and cultural practices of India, Al-Beruni travelled extensively for thirteen years, observing, questioning and studying. Conversant with Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, he learned Sanskrit and read Indian texts on religion, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy and literature. In his accounts he highlights passages from the Gita and the Vedic scriptures, scientific texts of the period and There is also frequent reference to stories from Hindu mythology. Stylistically, he employs a referential mode comparing Indian thought to that of the Greeks such as Socrates,
Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and others and at times with Sufi teachings. His book is a comprehensive and analytical account of early eleventh century India. His writing Rahim 41 reveals a sensitivity to the profound differences between cultural systems and the difficulties of achieving an understanding of a foreign land and people. The following excerpt specifically highlights this aspect for his readers
In all manners and usages, [the Indians] differ from us to such a degree as to
frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and
as to declare us to be devil‘s breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all
that is good and proper. By the bye we must confess, in order to be just, that a
similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and [the
Indians], but is common to all nations towards each other. (qtd in Sen 145)
These remarks indicate that Al-Beruni‘s work is a product of serious reflection on comparative features of societies; his insights into human nature in its response to cultural aspects reveal a curious philosophical bent of mind. As a traveller and historian his account is not just a source of information. It also reveals a sympathetic observer who is sensitive to the interpretation of difference and to the fact that it may express itself in unfair criticism of other communities and societies.
According to Mary Louise Pratt, the dominant tropes of ethnographic writing namely personal narrative and impersonal description derive partly from discursive conventions of travel writing, such as those established in Europe in the early sixteenth century. As she elaborates the convention was for travel accounts to combine ―first-person narration, recounting one‘s trip, and the description of flora and fauna of regions passed through and the manners and customs of the inhabitants. These two discourses were quite clearly distinguished in travel books, narrative predominating over description‖ (33).
The discovery of the Cape route by Vasco de Gama provided access to European travellers from Portugal, Spain and England who came to the subcontinent mainly for purposes of trade and for preaching Christianity. Many of the travel accounts by these Rahim 42 merchants and Jesuit monks included descriptions of the religious practices and social customs of the people they encountered.
According to Michael Fisher, the Portuguese were not powerful enough to pose a threat to the Mughal Empire yet there were efforts by individual travellers and emissaries to convert the Mughal imperial family to Catholicism(15). One such attempt was made in 1579 by Father Antonio Monserrate who travelled from Goa to the court of the Mughal emperor
Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri near Agra. After two years of futile efforts to try and convert the
Emperor, Monserrate joined Akbar‘s expedition across north India and the Punjab.
Eventually he returned to Goa In another part of the account, Monserrate narrates an interesting tale about one of the wives of the Mughal emperor Humayun. It was said that the
Empress had loved him so deeply that after his death she had a small house built close by his tomb and had watched over it till the day she died. Her widowhood had been spent in prayer and alms-giving. Indeed five hundred poor people had been maintained by this charity. Praising this act of piety Monserrate writes: ―Had she only been a Christian, hers would have been the life of a heroine. For, as some writer has wisely said, the Musalmans are the apes of the Christians. In many ways they imitate the piety of the Christians, though without gaining the reward of that piety; for they have wandered away from the true faith and the true charity‖ (77). The comment reveals his prejudice against those who did not subscribe to his own religious beliefs.
Writing in similar vein, he pours scorn over the religious beliefs of the Hindus and their many Gods. The god Krishna is especially vilified. The perspective of the Jesuit missionary is strongly reflected in the condemnation in his narrative
These tales which I have been writing down are indeed unworthy of the ears of wise and pious and clean-minded men. But I have recorded them in order that my readers may feel pity for the ignorance of these poor people and pray to God that His light may illuminate Rahim 43 their minds (76). At one point in his account he writes: ―How true was the saying of Cicero--- the father of eloquence--- what land is more savage than India: what land more barbarous‖(74)? The reference to Cicero serves to convey an authority that cannot be challenged and Monseratte draws on it to substantiate his own argument.
According to Joan Pau Rubies the ethnographic convention found its most fundamental form in ―the ‗relation‘, a synthetic descriptive account which could be narrative or analytical‖ (244). William Methwold‘s relation on Golconda (in present day Andhra
Pradesh) published in 1626, is cited as the most representative example of this form. It contains a systematic description of kingship, the caste system, religion and observations on the religious tolerance between Muslims and Hindus. Social customs of birth, marriage, sati, and forms of dress and the physiognomy of the natives are other aspects described in detail(244).
The historian Michael Wood is of the view that until the mid-seventeenth century,
the Mughal court was one of the most brilliant in the world. Cosmopolitan,
tolerant in religion, it was a place where literature, painting and music
flourished, and magnificent palaces and mosques were constructed in Agra,
Delhi, Lahore and Fatehpur. The nobility lived in walled castles with
harems, gardens and large retinues------it was as one visitor put it -‗a world
of great superfluity and absolute power‘(201).
The travel account of the French traveller Francois Bernier is considered amongst the most comprehensive from the Mughal period. Bernier was a physician and natural philosopher. An inveterate traveller he reached the subcontinent in 1658, after travelling in
Syria and Egypt. Bernier stayed there till 1667. He travelled as a member of Aurangzeb‘s retinue across northern India, Punjab and Kashmir – an expedition which lasted eighteen months. His travel account is in the form of a series of letters written to a friend in Paris. The Rahim 44 epistolary form makes for a personal first person narration expressed in an intimate tone.
Bernier recounts his experiences and dwells at length on the vast retinues of the Rajas and the
Omrahs. In a vivid account he describes the scene when the Emperor Aurangzeb‘s sister
Princess Roshanara sets forth from the royal quarters:
Stretch imagination to its utmost limits and you can conceive no exhibition
more grand and imposing than Roshanara Begum, mounted on a stupendous
Pegu elephant and seated in a large latticed howdah covered with a silken tent,
blazing with gold and azure, followed by other elephants with howdahs nearly
as resplendent as her own, all filled with ladies attached to her household…
In front of Roshanara‘s litter, which was open, sat a young, well dressed
female slave, with a peacock‘s tail in her hand, brushing away the dust and
keeping off the flies from the Princess… Close to the Princess‘s elephant are
the chief eunuchs, richly adorned and finely mounted, each with a wand of
office in his hand. Besides these are several [more] eunuchs on horseback,
accompanied by a multitude of lackeys on foot, who advance a great way
before the Princess, for the purpose of clearing the road before them… ( 252)
The picture he paints in florid language and using many superlatives expresses the opulence of the Mughal court. Describing the different modes of travelling of the Great
Mogol, Bernier mentions the tact-ravan the field throne, horse back and the elephant throne.
By the end of the seventeeth century a standard format for reporting information gathered by travellers was established and instructions were published to guide them to record the information under suggested headings. These ‗methods,‘ as they were called, inscribed the travel narrative within a scientific project in which more theoretical issues could be discussed. The very structure of these methods encouraged touching upon all relevant subjects and taking account of previous narratives, but not addressing ‗cultural Rahim 45 interpretation‘ as a problem. It was therefore up to individual observers to bring their own education, experience and intelligence to their ethnographic practices.
The selections from travel accounts by Jesuit missionaries, and emissaries to the
Mughal court such as Thomas Roe and Francois Bernier provide textual evidence of a preoccupation with a wide-ranging set of questions about authority in India----- This concentration on issues of power provides a discursive framework that is particularly amenable to later colonial use. But at the same time it must be stressed that representations of India are diverse, shifting, historically contingent, complex and competitive, many of these texts are determined by national and religious rivalries, by domestic concerns both political and cultural.
In 1784, Sir William Jones founded the Asiatick Society for ‗inquiring into the
History, Civil and Natural‘, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia. This ambitious agenda was largely directed towards interpreting India for curious Europeans and especially for metropolitan society.
The acknowledged antiquity of the civilization of the Hindus, their ancient literature, and the mystery attached to writings locked up in a dead language, excited the imagination of all who took an interest in the history of human civilization.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries travel writing became increasingly identified with the economic and political interests of European imperial expansion. As the need for raw materials and markets for industrial goods led to the conquest of Indian states and expansion of direct British administrative control in the subcontinent, the land
―became increasingly subject to the quantifying and typifying scrutiny of colonial surveillance as well as to European aesthetic judgement‖ (Leask: 3).
The concept of transculturation, incorporated into literary criticism, in the 1970‘s, was coined by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in his major work, Contrapunteo Cubano Rahim 46
(1940). He used the term to define ‗a process from which a new reality emerges, transformed and complex, a reality that is not a mechanical agglomeration of traits, nor even a mosaic, but a new phenomenon, original and independent‘ (qtd. in Hulme 92). In ethnography the term was used to describe how the interaction between persons belonging to a dominant or metropolitan culture and those from subordinate groups results in the transformation of both and the emergence of a new cultural reality.
Mary Louise Pratt in her seminal work Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation relates transculturation to the ‗contact zone‘, which she describes as –
―The space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict‖ (6). She describes transculturation as ―a phenomenon of the contact zone which impacts on the cultures of both the metropolis and the periphery‖ (6). The imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the subjects. Pratt elaborates that this reality was suppressed by imperial Europe in its construction of their ―subordinates others‖, through institutions and representations such as those in colonial travel accounts… A ―contact‖ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other (7). The subcontinent‘s history---- from the late eighteenth century in particular--- reflects this reality in the writings of the period.
One of the most significant representations of transculturation in the subcontinent at this period is in the nineteenth century journals of Fanny Parkes. First published in London in 1850, as the Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque,
During Four and Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenana the original edition ran to over eight hundred pages. A selection from the journals with an introduction by William Dalrymple, was published recently in 2002, with the title---Begums, Rahim 47
Thugs and Englishmen.
Dalrymple refers to her as ―a free spirit and an independent mind in an age of imperial conformity‖ (x). As the wife of a minor civil servant, Fanny Parkes stayed in India for twenty four years between 1822 and 1846 As the journals reveal, she had an inquiring mind and was clearly fascinated with the traditions and customs of the Indians. She herself, as one gathers from her account, had no problem in assimilating into the ways of the natives and from arriving in the subcontinent as a colonial memsahib, was gradually
Indianized to the extent of becoming a fluent Persian and Urdu speaker.
During her stay in India she forged a close relationship with William Linnaeus
Gardener, and her interaction with him and his family forms a significant part of the cultural representation in her narrative. An American by birth, Gardener had been educated in
Europe before setting off for India to make his fortune. During the remainder of his life which was spent in the subcontinent, he fought for many years as a mercenary under several Indian rulers and eventually, declaring his allegiance to the British Crown, formed his own regiment, Gardener‘s Horse. Gardener had inherited his father‘s peerage and married a beautiful Mughal princess of Cambay with whom he raised a large multiracial family.
Parkes‘s account of her visit to the Khasganj estate of William Gardener provides a fascinating glimpse into a cross-cultural world. She comments on his going native but her tone is not censorious: ―Colonel Gardener has, of course, adopted many of the opinions and ideas of the people with whom he has passed so great a portion of his time, and in his mode of living he may be termed half an Asiatic‖(211); For this reason she feels ―his autobiography would be a work of the highest value, affording a picture of Indian manners and Indian policy with which few besides himself have ever had an opportunity of becoming so intimately acquainted‖(211). Alongwith the spontaneity in expressing her curiosity and Rahim 48 delight in the company of the women of the zenana, her descriptions are full of close observations about the cultural difference reflected in the manners and ways of her Indian hosts. As a guest at the estate and indigo plantation of Gardener‘s son, comments on many aspects of domestic life inside the household. According to her the lady of the house--
[Mulka Begum] walks very gracefully and is as straight as an arrow. In
Europe how rarely ---how very rarely does a woman walk gracefully! Bound
up in stays, the body is as stiff as a lobster in its shell; that snake-like
undulating movement---the poetry of motion ---is lost, destroyed by the
stiffness of the waist and hip, which impedes the free movement of the limbs.
A lady in European attire gives me the idea of a German manikin; an Asiatic,
in her flowing drapery, recalls the statues of antiquity.(194)
She observes that because of the large number of servants, the Begum does not have too many duties to attend to –―eating opium and sleeping, appear to occupy much of her time. Sometimes her slaves will bring the small, silver cauldrons and cooking pots (degchas and handis) to her and, guided by her instructions, will place some highly-esteemed dish over charcoal in a little moveable fireplace, called an angethi‖ (195). Parkes‘s eye for minute detail is noticeable in her descriptions of the wedding ceremony of William Gardener‘s granddaughter. In an interesting observation she reports ―the presents were displayed on the ground before the bride, who was sitting on a charpai, wrapped in an Indian shawl, hiding her face and sobbing violently; I thought she was really in distress, but found this violent sorrow was only a part of the ceremony‖ (219).The account also includes interspersed detail related to the elaborate wedding ceremonies, and religious rituals such as the Mohurrum, the observance of the month of Ramzan and the Idd. Parkes repeatedly acknowledges the difference in her cultural perceptions and those of her Indian hosts. Accordingly she observes: the old begum said to Colonel Gardner, Rahim 49
―They are curious creatures, these English ladies; I cannot understand them or
their ways-their ways are so odd! And yet the begum must have seen so many
European ladies, I wonder she had not become more reconciled to our odd
ways.
The conduct that shocked them was our dining with men not our relations, and
that too with uncovered faces. A lady going out on horseback is monstrous.
They could not comprehend my galloping about on that great English horse
just where I pleased, with one or two gentlemen and the coachman as my
attendants. My not being afraid to sleep in the dark, without having half a
dozen slave girls snoring around me, surprised them. (238)
Through these comments the reader learns about the cultural codes that marked the difference between Parkes, the English lady, and the Indian women in the zenana. The custom for Mughal noble women to observe purdah, and be waited upon by slave girls, even when they were inside their bed-chambers, is reported through a self-referential mode so that it is in contrast to Parkes‘s subjective position, her own independent ways, that the native women are perceived and their opinions regarding notions of propriety evoke her response.
The spirit of the age is also reflected in Parkes‘ opinion regarding the superstitious beliefs of the Indians. As an Englishwoman who travels extensively in the subcontinent and especially because she is befriended by Gardener, she has many opportunities to record intimate details regarding cultural norms relating to women. She writes
Science has not yet entered the confines of the zenana; nature and superstition
reign supreme; nevertheless, native women suffer less on the birth of a child
that the women of Europe. The first nourishment given an infant medicinally
is composed of umaltass (cassia fistuala) sugar, aniseed, water, and russote, Rahim 50
from a colt just born! (239)
Parkes‘s journals contain many insights into the dynamics of the relationship between the women in the harem. She mentions overhearing Colonel Gardener saying-
―Nothing can exceed the quarrels that go on in a zenana, or the complaints the begums make against each other; a common complaint is, such an one has been practising witchcraft against me‖(239). She also informs her readers that--Sons are of inestimable value; the birth of a daughter is almost a calamity; but even the mother blest with a son is not likely to remain long without a rival in the heart of her husband, since ninety-nine out of a hundred take new wives: besides the concubines given by the mother before marriage! (239)
Parkes‘s journals also give the reader a strong sense of the growing divide between the
British and the natives. She invites criticism from her peers for her overdeveloped sympathies with the natives. One notes an interesting contrast to Fanny Parkes in the profile of Emily Eden---the sister of the then Governor–General, Lord Auckland--- drawn by
Humphrey Trevelyan in his book entitled The India We Left. A part of the book recalls his great uncle Charles Trevelyan‘s time in the subcontinent in the 1830s, the period when
Parkes was also living there.
Miss Eden, a very superior person who never settled down in India and always
longed for her English home, soon decided that she was not very fond of
Englishmen out of their own country, and found Anglo-Indian society
decidedly limited. The women read no new books, took not the slightest
interest in home politics and reduced every topic to the purely local. Female
intellect, she wrote, did not flourish in India.(31)
The denigration of Indian society ―was strongly influencd by the evangelical movement, vigorous in reform and less tolerant of Indian customs (14).
Parkes was thus one of the last few admirers and enthusiasts of the Indian way of life. Rahim 51
Suchitra Sarma makes a postcolonial reading of Parkes‘s journals. According to her as a collector of precious artefacts and curios of India, Parkes is proud of her collection of Hindu idols which when she returns home, in her opinion, is not even matched by the British
Museum. Sarma is of the view that Fanny Parke‘s writing represents, ― the quintessential coloniser‘s attitude, swinging between the masks and roles of friend and master, an empathiser and possessor, and finally a proud collector of memorabilia, the penchant of the
European in India‖ (60).
According to Nigel Leask such ―picturesque‖ accounts reveal ―the ‗vulnerability‘ rather than the self-sufficiency of European travellers, in relation to the lands and people in which they travelled and the instability rather than authority of their published narratives in the eyes of metropolitan readerships‖(16).
The emphasis shifted from descriptions of the picturesque and exotic to a pattern of precise and scientific information. The spirit of the age, reflected in the cartographic projects and the laying of roads and railways, also impacted on the formal structure of travel writing.
The accounts of Victorian travellers increasingly included illustrations, sketches, maps and at a later date, photographs.
As Edward Said argues
We must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso
implicated, entwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things
beside the ‗truth‘, which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to
methodologically is to view representations (or misrepresentations—the
distinction is at best only a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of
play defined […] not by some inherent subject matter alone, but by some
common history, tradition, universe of discourse. (272-3)
Said emphasizes the historical particularity of representations. The historical and the Rahim 52 discursive context are both important in generating meaning in the practice of representation.
Many travel writers in the twentieth century have used railway contexts to represent the subcontinent. The historical context is important here. By the year 1900, with nearly
24,000 route miles the subcontinent could boast Asia‘s longest and the worlds fourth longest railways system. The culture of standardized travel in the subcontinent provides a convenient and safe passage to Western travellers and travel writers. Their representation extends to the material aspects such as the architecture of railway stations, to the crowded and chaotic urban space around the stations and the interior of railway carriages.
Paul Theroux in Ghost Train To The Eastern Star employs a panoramic gaze to represent
India from a distance as the train moves through the landscape.
Hours passed but the landscape of plains and ploughed fields did not change.
A familiar melancholy descended on me, the effect of a long hot afternoon on
a train rolling through a landscape of spare trees and stricken fields. Near a
halt in the middle of nowhere, a man was squatting on his haunches at a level
crossing on a country road, and two men on bikes and an old red bus waited
for the train to pass by. As the train continued across the great abdomen of
India, I thought that if you didn‘t see this - the immensity, the destitution, the
emptiness, the ageless solitude - you would know nothing of India. (212).
The image of the train moving through a vastness and emptiness is expressed through a biological metaphor. The land spreads out like an immense distended belly. There is a sense of a distanced sensibility which is evoked through the image of an ―ageless solitude.‖.It serves as an iconographic representation of landscape and also brings in the human dimension with people waiting for the train to pass by.
As opposed to Theroux‘s representation, V.S. Naipaul image of
To step out of the third-class air-conditioned coach on to the smooth hot Rahim 53
platform was to feel one‘s shirt instantly heated, to lose interest, to wonder
with a dying flicker of intellectual curiosity why anyone in India bothered,
why anyone had bothered with India. On that platform, oven-dry, competitive
activity was yet maintained. The porters, blazing in red tunics and red turbans,
hustled about screeching for custom. The successful staggered beneath metal
trunks sprayed with fine dust after the journey from Bombay, one trunk, two
trunks, three trunks. The fans spun frenziedly above us. The beggars whined.
(Naipaul 11-12)
Dervla Murphy in her book, Full Tilt: From Dublin to Delhi with a Bicycle, describes her train journey from Rawalpindi to Lahore. The scenic construction is around her fellow passengers inside the train carriage and the anecdotal narration is in the first person voice.
they pressed me to have some of the fly-blown sweetmeats which were also
hawked at each stop, and when I persisted in refusing they looked quite hurt,
and one of them went off and bought me a roast chicken, to my great
embarrassment. I tried to explain that I wasn‘t being upstage and ‗mem-
sahibish‘ about their sort of food, which I normally consume ad lib., and that it
was merely a question of my insides not being as democratic as my principles.
But no one spoke English very well so the intricacies of the situation escaped
them and they simply nodded and smiled and told me that the chicken was
very good and sat happily watching me unhappily eating what they wouldn‘t
dream of affording for themselves. (224)
The incident is full of humour and gives insights into cultural norms related to
Pakistani hospitality.
William Dalrymple begins his account with a vivid description of the early - morning scene at the railway station. ―It is barely dawn, and the sky is as pink as Turkish delight. Yet Rahim 54 already, at 5.45 a.m., Lahore Central Station is buzzing like a kicked hive‖ (AK 337). The dramatic use of similes and the combination of visual and auditory imagery conveys the chaotic rush of people amidst the noise of the passengers, coolies and station vendors as they try to out-shout each other. The station building itself reflects Anglo-
European features of civic architectural grandeur.
William Glover in his comprehensive study—Making Lahore Modern-Constructing
And Imagining A Colonial City(2007) elaborates that the station was built shortly after the rebellion of 1857, during a time when securing British safety against a future ―native‖ uprising was foremost in the colonial rulers‘ mind, Accordingly ―it looked like a fortified medieval castle, complete with turrets and crenellated towers, battered flanking walls, and loopholes for directing rifle and cannon fire against an attack‖ (23). Dalrymple represents the station building as ―strange and hybrid with features of different architectural styles----
British, Italian, German -- only the chaos is authentically Pakistani‖ (AK 337).
The scene outside is a crowded one as Dalrymple pushes his way ―through the surge of jammed rickshaws and tottering red-jacketed coolies, through the sleeping villagers splayed out on the concrete, past the tap with the men doing their ablutions, over the bridge, down the stairs and on to the platform (Dalrymple, AK 337).The use of conjunctions ―through‖ ―past‖ and ―over‖ suggests movement over the foot bridge and down the stairs to the platform. The comparison of the platform to ―a hundred Picadilly Circuses at rush hour‖ suggests frenetic activity. Porters stagger towards the first-class carriages under a mountain of smart packing cases and trunks. Further down the platform, near third class, solitary peasant women sit stranded amid seas of more ungainly luggage: cages and boxes, ambiguous parcels done up with rope, sacks with lumpy projections – bits of porcelain, the arm of a chair, the leg of a chicken. Vendors trawl the platform selling trays of brightly coloured sweetmeats, hot tea in red clay cups, or the latest film magazine. (AK 337) Rahim 55
By 1863 some three million tons of rails, sleepers and locomotives had been shipped to India from Britain, in around three and a half thousand ships. Engineers had looped tracks over the steepest mountains in the world, sunk foundations hundreds of feet into the sea. It was an epic undertaking, even by the standards of an age inured to industrial heroics.
Dalrymple emphasizes that railway travel in the subcontinent has an important function in removing religious or caste barriers. Travelling in a railway carriage ―a Maulvi who spent his days contemplating the glorious Koran might find himself sitting next to an
Untouchable who skinned dead cows‖ (AK 338). In the yoking of incongruent images that suggest age old barriers between the two large religious communities, the Hindus and the
Muslims, Dalrymple manages to convey a strong effect of comic irony
According to Dalrymple ―just as India has always seduced and transformed its conquerors, so in the same way it slowly took over and indigenized the railways. Soon the stations were inhabited by whole villages of people washing, sleeping and cooking in the ticket halls, arriving days early for a train and building encampments on the platforms‖(AK
341).In Dalrymple‘s representation there is an image of a hastily improvised large subcontinental dwelling with people seemingly comfortable enough to do their basic chores without the need for privacy. The resilience to adapt to the most strange and unfamiliar conditions and turn them round to one‘s own advantage is suggested in a bantering tone.
Paul Theroux describes a similar scene at the Jaipur Junction station: ―Even in the dark hours of the morning there were chatterers and drinkers under the glaring lights, family groups huddled over pots of food, some people sleeping in heaps, stretched out like mummies, or like corpses in body bags‖ (186).
The railways were the ultimate symbol of all the Raj prided itself on being: pioneering and up-to-date, intrepid and impartial; on the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution. Even today harrumphing Home Counties colonels will point first and foremost to the railways as a Rahim 56 symbol of everything they like to think the British ‗gave‘ to India.
Another significant focus in the work of many contemporary travel writers is their representation of the changing city-scape in the larger cities of the subcontinent. Due to the imperatives of global capitalism there is an urgency to transform the city so that it is more international, more cosmopolitan
The changing streetscape of Bangalore with the onslaught of corporate culture is the subject of Dalrymple‘s essay entitled ―Finger-Lickin‘ Bad: Bangalore and the Fast-Food
Invaders‖. In parodying the slogan of the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food restaurant,
Dalrymple comments on the onslaught of multinational companies as a result of economic liberalization since the late eighties. From being a sedate, cosmopolitan city with its tree lined avenues and colonial clubs, Bangalore had recently reinvented itself as ‗India‘s Silicon
Valley‘, South Asia‘s flagship. Town for software and high technology. Western banks, software companies and a growing number of fast food chains had transformed the streetscape. The old colonial bungalows had been replaced by towering office blocks.
The siren call of Kentucky Dippers, Zinger burgers and chicken tikka pizzas has proved irrestistible. Returned India expats form long queues outside the Pizza Hut, as Dalrymple comments
Once inside you find yourself surrounded by baseball hat-wearing computer
nerds speaking in uniquely Bangalorean Indo-American accents.
‗Actually, Meera, this ain‘t nothing at all compared to Pizza Hut we are
visiting in Santa Barbara. You can‘t get real pepperami here. And there are no
fries…‘
‗Tarun, have you seen Mission:Impossible? Really cool movie, yaar?‘
‗Yaar. Actually not bad. But Tom Cruise: what a schmuck! I am thinking Brad
Pitt is much better.‘ Rahim 57
‗Hey, Naveen, have you heard? Sunil has a preview of Windows 98.‘
‗Wow! But I though Sunil was an Apple-freak.‘ (AK 163-164)
The ‗hyper-development‘ had provoked a series of violent protests from the locals.
Bombay, in the Sixties and Seventies, had a utopian air about it: it was the only city in
India in which everyone was potentially upwardly mobile. We who were born at the beginning of the Sixties, and whose fathers belonged to that corporate class, whose activities constituted the commercial life of this sea-front town, Amit Chaudhuri refers to himself as the ‗comic book‘ generation grew up with
Tintin, Archie and Jughead, Richie Rich, with war films like Where Eagles
Dare and Westerns like McKenna‘s Gold, with Coke and Gold Spot and later
with rock music. The comic-book idyll of Fifties America, of California, with
palm-trees, swimming-pools, sunny promenades, sodas and juke-boxes,
persisted in that Bombay. (347)
There is a reflective comment here when he remarks, ―half the life of a human being, they say, is made up of dreams; living in Bombay then, one would have known that half the life of a colonial or post-colonial is made up of dreams of the West‖(Chaudhri 347).
In the Eighties, Bombay began to change. Increased growth accompanied
continued deprivation. The number of homeless people, living in makeshift
‗bastis‘ or shanties, multiplied; at the same time, property prices rival ed those
of Tokyo. Young film-stars, usually the sons of older ‗veterans‘, kept guns in
their houses; there were Mercedes Benzes on the roads and ‗bastis‘ along the
sides, some of them selling ‗smack‘. The aura of the colonial city had
disappeared from Bombay, replaced by the feverishness and electric radiance
and wealth and destitution of a Latin American town, the contradictions of a
Third World city. Seventeen-year-olds drove Marutis – a new lightweight car Rahim 58
made with Japanese collaboration, symbolizing the buoyancy and lift of
upward mobility and money – that had been given to them by their fathers;
often they had no license; often they ran over and killed or crippled people
sleeping on pavements. My old friends – the comic book generation – either
got into drugs or into business management (a degree in business management
was a symbol of prestige for this generation, just as a degree in science was for
the previous one) or they left for the real America which they had always
dreamt about. (Chaudhri 348)
In his book Ghost Train To The Eastern Star, Paul Theroux describes ―the howling but deaf and discontinuous mob‖(146) in the streets and lanes of Amritsar.
These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts – tongas and gharries - and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools – spoke-shaves, chisels, cobbling awls, soldering irons, treadle-powered sewing machines; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign, Amritsar Improvement Trust…(146)
The aural, olfactory and visual landscapes of the city come together in the stinging dust, smelly traffic and fresh dung and howling mob. The variously odd and assorted means of traffic are itemized in a list that seems to be endless. The ―culture‖ of the crowd is vividly conveyed through the piling up of images.
Geoffery Moorhouse‘s description of the Old City of Lahore also evokes a sense of sound and smell as the commotion of a palpable mass of humanity moving together is conveyed. Rahim 59
Whichever gateway was chosen for entrance, the alleyways soon merged indistinguishably into a confused medley of colour, activity, commotion and tantalizing or repugnant smell. All were palpitating with human beings and animals, yet no one seemed to touch anyone else. Men labouring under heavy loads, hurrying to be done with their burdens, shouted incessantly to those in their path, who dutifully edged out of the way.(138)
Moorhouse describes his feelings after wandering through the Old City many times while in Lahore. According to him he ―never came out again without exhilaration at such a pattern of vitality arranged in such an ageless way (138).‖ He compares it to a London scene.
It occurred to me that if the Great Fire of London had never happened, and if
demolition and planning had never been introduced, a walk from Bishopsgate
to old Billingsgate would have been much like a stroll from the Hazuri Bagh
to the Mori Gate. Apart from its electricity, its running water, and its
confounded traffic in two-stroke engines, the Old City of Lahore was as
unchanged as that. (138)
Anarkali went under the name of bazaar, but it was a peculiar hybrid of
tradition and modernity, with half its shops behind plate glass windows, but
with garbage swept out of these premises and left in the gutter, to be
negotiated carefully by a congestion of auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, motor-
scooters, cars and pedestrians (Moorhouse 132).
The particular anxiety of influence experienced by the traveller is not so much
dictated by place as by how much and what has been said about the place. The
difficulty for the literary traveller is in finding a new language within the
already existing tradition of writing about a particular place or country that
is felt to be adequate to their experience of the place and that commands
attention.(Cronin 39) Rahim 60
In this context representational conventions have changed. The subcontinent and its cultural identity has been read and interpreted through innovative modes in contemporary travel writing.
Rahim 61
CHAPTER THREE
The Historical Mode
In representing the diverse cultural aspects of the subcontinent, Dalrymple‘s engagement with the historical is pervasive. This is reflected in the structure of his many layered polyphonic narrative in which the historical past intersects with the present in a range of different contexts. According to the German philosopher Hegel,
―the term History unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes ……not less what has happened than the narration of what has happened‖ (60). Accordingly the historian selects and interprets facts and then constructs a narrative which extends beyond the literal context of historical facticity. Hayden White uses the term ‗narrativized‘ for such a construction and emphasizes that it has the form of a story. He describes the difference between a historical discourse that ‗openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it, and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story‘(qtd. in Keene 121). As a travel writer, Dalrymple employs this narrativity to construct a setting and evoke characters and events from different time periods emphasising the distinctive historical and cultural context which defines them.
Unlike situated ethnography which is technically constructed around a ‗strategically chosen locale,‘ representation of the larger order of things is done through historical narration interconnecting fluid spatial and temporal zones. Following this narrative mode, Dalrymple‘s journey through time does not follow a linear chronology.
Displaying a strong feel for historical adventure and a spontaneous curiosity ‗to know more,‘ about particular cultural practices which intrigue him because they are rooted in a past tradition, Dalrymple constantly connects the present with the past. The narrative shifts among varying time lines, from the distant past, to a more recent cultural history Rahim 62 and frequently connects to the social and cultural milieu in present times.
This structure is well illustrated with an example from his second travel book, City of Djinns. The narrative in Chapter Six of the book is divided into nine sections of varying length. The narrative begins in the present with an account of the lavish party to which Dalrymple and his wife are invited to mark the New Year. It makes a critical comment on the ― nascent New Delhi chattering class‖(CD 153) and the gap between the rich elite who are partying and the poor. The second section constructs the setting of the
Mughal empire during the late seventeenth century. The reader journeys into the past with the help of historical detail related to the political career of the nobleman Safdarjung, who rose to become the powerful Nawab of Avadh against the backdrop of the declining authority of the Emperor Mohammad Shah; this part connects to Dalrymple‘s lengthy description of the architectural features of Safdarjung‘s ―onion- domed‖ tomb in old
Delhi(158). The third section is a graphic ethnographic description of a traditional partridge fight that Dalrymple goes to see with two Delhi residents and partridge enthusiasts--- his erstwhile taxi-driver, Balvinder Singh and his father Punjab Singh. In the fourth section of the narrative there is a detailed review of Dargah Quli Khan‘s eighteenth century account Muraqqa‘-e-Dehli. Dalrymple includes intertextual references to highlight the representation of Delhi as ―a sophisticated city full of glamour and intrigue‖(CD 165). The alternation of the first and third person narrative marks a change in perspective and voice. There is therefore a variation in the flow of the narrative which characterizes the sequence of narrative passages, dialogue, comment and description, and which Stanzel terms as ―narrative rhythm” (qtd. in Fludernik 96).
In peeling the historical onion, Dalrymple draws extensively on his academic training as a historian and archaeologist. This is evident in his erudite style marked by information gleaned from research into library records, hitherto unexplored archives Rahim 63 and intertextual references to travel accounts from previous times as well as from those by contemporary writers. According to Dorrit Cohn, unlike fiction which employs a story level and a discourse level, nonfiction has an additional level, that of reference to an area of events or documents that can be cited about happenings in the past (qtd. in Keene 122).
Dalrymple‘s travel narrative therefore, is shaped by bringing together documentary evidence from different historical sources. Rare manuscripts, photographs, miniatures and books, are drawn upon extensively. Above all information gathered from interacting with people is frequently cited and adds depth to the narrative structure. Dalrymple‘s personal experiences such as visits to historical monuments, descriptions of their architecture and iconography, participation in religious and cultural events and encounters with people whom he seeks out as especially representative of a cultural milieu are contextualized mainly in a historical framework. In addition the routes that Dalrymple follows, strategic locations on the way, characters and events are given specificity through the paratextual apparatus such as maps with route lines, timelines and wonderfully expressive illustrations by the artist
Olivia Fraser. There are illustrative motifs which also serve as a functional stylistic device to mark the breaks that divide the narrative into different sections. This is done according to the transitions in the narrative voice or to indicate the shift in focus on various characters, events or cultural traditions from different time periods.
Dalrymple‘s interest in tracing the historical frequently extends to individual lives.
Personal histories and biographical portraits of a wide range of people therefore are included both through third person narration as well as in the first person articulation of the characters‘ individual experiences This feature is significant in lending prominence to the polyphony in the narrative because there is a mingling of voices and a constant interplay between the author, narrator and the characters. Rahim 64
A dominant characteristic of Dalrymple‘s historical consciousness is the intertextual density that marks his work. Allusions, quotations, discrete passages or episodes create a frame of reference in which the reader can place the text and mark the difference between the material that is contained within this frame, and also the way it links to the primary narrative and makes it especially meaningful in a polyphonic context.
The interconnectedness with previous writing from various genres and other styles, apart from introducing literary history into the narrative, connects the author /narrator to different voices, especially to those of other travellers, through their experiences and their stories. According to Urbain, ‗at the origin of any journey there is a story, or another journey, or yet another story, in brief, there is a mediator of desire, a model to be translated that informs one‘s vision, governs one‘s action and feeds one‘s discourse‘
(qtd. in Borm 2). There is therefore a cultural echoing as the travel writer turns to the narrative voices of his literary precursors.
The title of Dalrymple‘s very first book, In Xanadu: A Quest , signifies a journey into the historical past. It has resonances of both the literary world—
Coleridge‘s Kubla Khan, as well as those that connect to an ancient, many splendoured, historical site. In retracing the medieval journey of Marco Polo, the
Venetian traveller and merchant, Dalrymple undertakes, what according to Peter
Hulme, several travellers and travel writers are keen to do, to trace and follow the footsteps of earlier travellers, ―more often the routes are being retraced in order to mark the historical gap between the two moments and perhaps throw light on the earlier work (98)‖. There is therefore a double sphere of reference; the physical journey and the road followed, and also the retracing of a literary route.
Dalrymple introduces his 12,000 miles journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu as a sequel to the retracing of a previous historical journey he had undertaken ―from Rahim 65
Edinburgh to Jerusalem, following the route of the First Crusade‖ (IX 11). The quest becomes a symbolic pilgrimage to a site that conjures up a romantic image of fabled lands and heroic adventure. Dalrymple includes biographical detail about Marco Polo, and the historical and political context of his medieval journey. The contemporaneous account of his own journey is presented through a scenic construction that combines archival research, description of the landscape and anecdotal narrative interspersed with frequent intertextual references. Historical and cultural commentary is also included, such as the detail about the Armenian Mongol alliance which led to opportunities for trade between Chinese, Persian and Italian merchants. This provides the context for introducing into the narrative, recorded historical facts about the Polos‘ expedition.
Juxtaposed with this is the narration of Dalrymple‘s own first- hand experiences of cities and towns located en route, a few examples being Ayas, Sultaniya, Tabriz,
Taftan and Lahore. The account therefore is characterized by a polyphonic representation.
Divided into eight chapters, the narrative space is effectively used to express his personal views about Polo‘s account and also comment on several other travel texts which highlight ethnographic and historical information from previous eras. The interpolations and digressions in the structure of the narrative apart from historicizing the journey also serve to contextualise the subjective focus on cultural aspects that engage Dalrymple‘s attention such as architecture which emerges as a dominant representational theme in Dalrymple‘s travel writing and is developed further in his later work.
Commenting on the reputation of Marco Polo as a heroic adventurer, Dalrymple refers to his glamorous cultural image as a ―romantic gallant‖(IX 67) . Through intertextual references he draws attention to the manner in which this historical image has been reinforced through literature, and appropriated into the domain of popular culture for Rahim 66 commercial gain. According to him,
Polo has been extravagantly praised over the years. Tim Severin has called
him a ‗genius‘, Eileen Power thought it was ‗impossible to exaggerate the
extent of his accomplishments‘ and that his ‗curiosity was insatiable‘;
Elizabeth Longford believed he possessed ‗enthusiasm and a photographic
memory‘. Hotels have been named after him, designer jeans shops, Chinese
restaurants, and Eastern-style Soho strip joints. His book (‗the greatest travel
book ever written‘, according to John Masefield) has been turned into a strip
cartoon, a one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival, even a million-dollar
television drama, broadcast across Europe and Asia—(IX 66)
The catalogue of various intertexts, especially the citations of literary hyperbole emphasise the legendary Polo mystique. The references to the many commercial enterprises undertaken in his name and related to contemporary culture and the media across the globe, reiterates its symbolic reach across historical time. Dalrymple then offers a critique of The Travels: which comes as an anti-climax for the reader. In his view
-- the book is surprisingly dull. Polo did not set out to write an account of his
travels, despite the name by which it has always been known, nor did he write
a description of a diplomatic expedition originally launched to try to save the
Crusader Kingdom. It is not even a general account of the lands he passed
through. He says nothing about the sights he saw (he does not even mention
the Great Wall of China), and includes very little about Asian social mores
(which might have made really interesting reading). Instead he wrote a dry,
factual guide to commerce in the East (IX 66-67).
The repeated use of negatives in the excerpt underscores what Dalrymple regards as a lack in the book--- ethnographic description and social commentary. His parenthetical Rahim 67 comment on Polo‘s writing also serves to undercut the varied cultural response to a travel account that has acquired iconic status, over time, in the public imagination.
However paradoxically, in his own attempt in retracing the route, as recorded by Polo and constructing his very first travel narrative around it, Dalrymple acknowledges the significance of Polo‘s historic journey.
Dramatising the contrast between The Travels and other travel accounts from the past, Dalrymple expresses his admiration for the celebrated seventeenth century travelogue of the Englishman Tom Coryat, whom he refers to as ―one of his travel writing heroes‖(IX 184). What interests Dalrymple in his account is his ‗mix of humour and accurate detail‘ in representing the court of the Moghul Emperor Jehangir.
―On his ―exoticke wanderings‖ Coryat picked up Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi, and it was his skills as a linguist that enabled him to include the spicy details of bazaar gossip that enliven his picture of Mogul India‖ (IX 185). When Dalrymple visits Lahore--- some three hundred years after his eccentric forebear had travelled there on foot--- he is reminded of Coryat‘s representation of Lahore in its Golden Age ―as one of the largest cities of the whole universe for it containeth at least XVI miles in compasse and exceedeth even Constantinople in greatnesse‖ (IX 184). The intertextual reference here marks a transition in the narrative and emphasizes a link with the historical past. It also connects to Dalrymple‘s personal itinerary while travelling the same route. He acknowledges that when he breaks his journey in Lahore, his own interest in seeing the tomb of Jehangir derives partly from Coryat‘s description of Nur Mahal (Nurjehan),
Jehangir‘s consort, who had it built in memory of the departed emperor. Dalrymple also quotes from the writing of Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Moghul court to convey the great authority the empress wielded, ―all justice or care of any thing or publique affayrs either sleeps or depends on her who is more inaccessible than any Godesse or Rahim 68 mystery of heathen impiety‖ (IX 186). As a present day visitor, Dalrymple‘s account of his visit to the tomb reveals his keen eye for architectural detail. He notes the simplicity of its form, apparent both in the design and the building material
in shape it is a low plain rectangle arcaded on all sides, centred on an
unpretentious ivan gateway and flanked by four minarets. It is built of brown
stone inlaid with white marble. There is no tile work, no fussy detail, no
extravagance. Only the cenotaph itself is at all elaborate, inlaid with semi-
precious stones and covered with kufic designs listing the Ninety-Nine
Names of God. (IX 186)
The elaborate description related to the decorative features of the tomb indicates Dalrymple‘s scholarly interest in Islamic architecture, especially that of the
Moghul period. This is further emphasized when adopting a referential mode, he compares it to ‗its European contemporary Baroque‘ in its representation of variations of a familiar theme, but as he observes, the Mughal architecture of Lahore is toned down and therefore less extravagant; combined with the distinctive feature of the landscaped garden settings, it appears more sedate and accessible. In an earlier travel account To The
Frontier (1984), Geoffery Moorhouse displays a similar interest in the architectural detail of Jehangir‘s tomb. Accordingly while describing the marble sarcophagus, he writes:
The ninety nine names of God, inlaid blackly against the white stone, were
delightful because of their sweeping curves as well as uplifting for their
association with the numinous. There was also an intricate inlay of semi-
precious stones in floral patterns, which would become even more extensive in
the Taj Mahal. And there was a surrounding latticework of marble,
encouraging gentle breezes to stroke the pilgrim as he paid his respects to the
dead.(147) Rahim 69
The representation takes note of the intricacies of Mughal calligraphy and the recurrent floral motif which would be used in a more elaborate fashion three years later in the decorative features of the Taj Mahal. It also marks the traveller as a pilgrim at the tomb.
Another striking use of intertexual functionality is in Dalrymple‘s narration of one of the most traumatic historic events to mark colonial rule in India. The 1857 uprising and the massacres that followed the recapture of Delhi by the British‘s portrayed through a polyphonic narrative space in which different texts and voices are brought together.
The early nineteenth century travel account of Fanny Parkes is referred to frequently by Dalrymple for its documentation of a particularly interesting phase in subcontinental cultural history. Accordingly, in his Introduction to the 2002 edition of
Parkes‘ travel journals, he praises her writing by drawing upon the considered observation of one of his peers, the British travel writer, Colin Thubron, in whose opinion, a good travel book ―catches the moment on the wing, and stops it in time‖
(xxiii). Dalrymple is of the view that the significance of Parkes‘ travel account is in the historical record that it offers of the syncretic culture of Lucknow and Delhi and the cultural crossover between the British and the Indians during the eighteenth century.
This acknowledgement also serves to highlight a dominant representational dimension in Dalrymple‘s own work, namely, the transculturation in the ‗contact zone‘(Pratt 7) of the subcontinent in colonial times. According to Pratt, transculturation worked from the colonies to the metropolis and shaped ‗its domestic society‘ culture and history.
Elaborating this she states , ―A ‗contact‘ perspective treats the relations among colonizers and colonised, or travelers and ‗travelees‘ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices often within radically asymmetrical relations of power‖ (7). Rahim 70
I discovered that I was myself the product of a similar interracial liaison from this period, and that I thus had Indian blood in my veins. No one in my family seemed to know about this, though it should not have been a surprise: we had all heard the stories of how our beautiful, dark-eyed Calcutta-born great-great- grandmother Sophia Pattle, with whom Burne-Jones had fallen in love, used to speak Hindustani with her sisters and was painted by Wyatts with a rakhi-a
Hindu sacred thread-tied around her wrist. But it was only when I poked around in the archives that I discovered she was descended from a Hindu
Bengali woman from Chandernagore who converted to Catholicism and married a French officer in Pondicherry in the 1780s‖. (WM xlvii-xlviii)
It also became increasingly clear to Dalrymple that the relationship between
India and Britain was a symbiotic one. Just as individual Britons in India could learn to appreciate and wish to emulate different aspects of Indian culture, and choose to take on Indian manners and languages, so many Indians at this period began to travel to Britain, intermarrying with the locals there and picking up Western ways.
The Mughal travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journeys in Asia, Africa and Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain, one of whom had completed the cultural transformation so perfectly that he ‗was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India‘. He also met the extra-ordinary Dean Mahomet, a Muslim landowner from Patna who had followed his British patron to Ireland. There he soon eloped with, and later married, Jane Daly, from a leading Anglo-Irish family. In 1794 he Rahim 71
confirmed his unique- and clearly surprising prominent-place in Cork society
by publishing his Travels, the first book ever published by an Indian writing in
English, to which half of Ireland‘s gentry became subscribers. In 1807 Dean
Mahomet moved to London where he opened the country‘s first Indian-owned
curry restaurant, Dean Mahomet‘s Hindostanee Coffee House.
(WM xlvii-xlviii)
Inspite of the divergences in cultural authority and in the beliefs and customs of the colonial rulers and their subjects, there was a gradual shift towards an interdependence and assimilation, that resulted very often in the forging of a new cultural identity. Transculturation is thematized by Dalrymple as a historical process that resulted in an enriching intermixing of cultures in the subcontinent during a singular phase in colonial history. It therefore finds a dominant focus in his narrative through several historical representations of ‗white Mughals‘--- an epithet that
Dalrymple used to great effect as the title of his meticulously researched Raj romance published in 2002. The term characterizes those East India Company servants who came to the subcontinent in the period of the eighteenth century as young fortune hunters, administrators and mercenaries and who in time assimilated completely with the cultural surroundings of the natives.
This ‗crossing over‘ is traced by Dalrymple within a historical frame of reference. He dates it to the first European presence in India, that of the Portuguese who settled in the subcontinent after the conquest of Goa in 1510. Citing historical sources he points out that the Portuguese commander Alfonso de Albuquerque had encouraged his men to marry the Muslim women--- whose husbands they had massacred earlier -- and to convert them to Christianity. However as historical evidence reveals, the crude attempt at imposing ―unadulterated Portuguese culture‖(WM 11) on the Indians, proved to be Rahim 72 unsuccessful in the long term. Dalrymple ascribes this to a process of gradual historical change. Accordingly he points out ―over the course of the next fifty years, the women, the environment and the sheer distance of Goa from Europe all worked on the new arrivals‖(WM 11) till they were completely absorbed into the ways of the natives.
Dalrymple includes intertextual references from travel accounts of the period which document that by 1560, the Portuguese had adopted an ostentatious Indian lifestyle; the grandees of Goa would be dressed in silks in the manner of the natives and would be accompanied by vast retinues of slaves and servants. Members of the aristocracy kept harems and even the Christian women wore Indian clothes inside the house and lived as if in purdah, wearing the veil, or transported in ―modestly covered palanquins‖(WM 12) if they ventured outdoors.
Like many other Britons after him, William Fraser, a Scotch Highlander from
Inverness who arrived in Delhi in 1805 had become ‗completely hypnotized by the great capital‘(CD 104). Accordingly describes him as a scholar, a metaphysician and a philosopher.
Dalrymple quotes from a letter written by the French botanist Victor Jacquemont, in
1831, which reports that Fraser is ―half –asiatick in his habits …his mode of life has made him more familiar, perhaps, than any other European with the customs and ideas of the native inhabitants. He has, I think, a real and profound understanding of their inner life, such is possessed by few others. Hindustani and Persian are like his two own mother tongue…‖
(TLM 65).In another letter he mentions that Fraser had ‗six or seven legitimate wives‘ who all lived together. His children were without number but were all ―Hindus and Muslims according to the religion and caste of their mamas‖(CD 107). Dalrymple describes the picture of William‘s chief wife from the Fraser Album. The contextual framing is conveyed in terms of a graphically presented visual image as he describes the portrait: Rahim 73
It shows a tall and exquisite Indian woman, dressed in a slight close-fitting
bodice and a long pleated Rajasthani skirt. Her torso is swathed in a jamevar
shawl, her hair is worn loose, and her arms are steeled with torcs and tribal
bracelets. Her slippers have up-curled toes. Beside her stands a single boy,
aged perhaps six years old. Although he is dressed in Mughal court pyjamas,
there is a distinctly European look to his features. The inscription, in Persian,
reads simply: ‗Amiban, a Jat woman of Rania, the chosen one of Fraser Sahib,
whose delicate beauty was beyond compare‘(CD 107).
In the detailed description relating to the physiognomy of the Indian woman, her attire and jewellery and the reference to the European likeness in the boy‘s face,
Dalrymple conveys the distinctive historical setting in which racial opposites, the
‗Mughal‘ and the ‗European,‘ co-exist in mutual dependence and cultural harmony. The inscription in Persian emphasizes Fraser‘s intimate relationship with his ‗chosen‘ Indian wife and functions as a dramatic statement on his transculturated status.
One of the most intriguing portraits is that of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British
Resident at the Deccani court in Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805. Dalrymple quotes at length from the account by Mountstuart Elphinstone, which records the extent to which
Kirkpatrick had adopted native ways
Major Kirkpatrick is a good-looking man … but he wears [Indian]
moustachios; his hair is cropped short, and his fingers are dyed with
henna, although in most other respects he is like an Englishman … [At
the durbar of the Nizam] he goes in great state. He has several elephants, and a
state palankeen, led horses, flags, long poles and tassels, &c., and is attended
by two companies of infantry and a troop of cavalry… Major Kirkpatrick
behaves like a native, but with great propriety. (CD Rahim 74
According to Dalrymple the cultural crossover was a reality in several parts of the subcontinent. When the British annexed large territories of the kingdom of Avadh in 1764, many Europeans adopted the customs of eighteenth century Nawabi Lucknow (AK 35). He cites the example of Major General Claude Martin who ―kept a harem which included his favourite wife Boulone as well as her three sisters‖ (AK 35). He mentions an interesting detail in that this sexual curiosity worked the other way as well, as revealed in the fact that two British memsahib were part of the royal Avadhi harem. The Nawab even had a mosque built in the name of a Miss Walters, which survives in Lucknow.
The characterization of the first British Resident at the Mughal court, Sir David
Ochterlony who had ‗gone native‘ is preceded by Dalrymple‘s narration of his visit to the old British Residency building, located in, what was now an impoverished part of Old
Delhi. He finds the ochre coloured mansion, immediately recognizable with its ‗colonnade of Ionic pillars,‘(CD 110) in a ruinous state. While exploring the decrepit building, he is greatly intrigued by the discovery that ― behind the classical façade lay the earlier frontage of a Mughal pavilion: a double row of blind arches leading up to a central portal. The entire building was erected on the foundations of a much earlier mansion‖(CD 111). He realizes that the British during the colonial period had, instead of knocking it down and building anew, ‗merely erected a façade over a Mughal substructure‘(CD 111). The fusion of different cultural histories into a hybrid form, reminds Dalrymple of the British
Resident himself who had ‗gone native‘. Accordingly he comments, ―It was just like
Ochterlony: in public establishing the British presence; but inside, in private, living the life of a Nawab‖(CD 111).
Dalrymple‘s representation of a transculturated reality is illustrated in the telling analogy he draws with the use of the architectural metaphor. The reference to the British authorising the erection of a building over the foundations of an earlier Rahim 75 structure conveys the image of the palimpsest, the complex layering of historical and cultural inscriptions; in this context those of the colonial British superimposed on
Mughal India, each one quite distinctive, yet merging to produce a richly textured canvas. The representation of copresence is dramatized further through a visual parallel, as Dalrymple makes an intertextual reference to a famous miniature that shows
Ochterlony leisurely enjoying an evening‘s performance by nautch girls at the Residency.
―He is dressed in full Indian costume, and reclines on a carpet, leaning back against a spread of pillows and bolsters. To one side stands a servant with a fly-whisk; on the other stands Ochterlony‘s elaborate glass hubble-bubble‖ (CD 111).
The objectified description reinforces the cultural crossover manifest in the seemingly comfortable adoption of an indigenous courtly lifestyle. Dalrymple heightens the contrast between Ochterlony‘s acquired Indianised identity and his cultural origins in distant Scotland. The image is constructed through the description of the sartorial detail of the family portraits in the picture- rail, showing his Scottish ancestors –
‗kilted and plumed colonels from Highland regiments, grimacing ladies in stiff white taffeta dresses as they seem to peer down disapprovingly at the group of nautch girls swirling immodestly below them. Ochterlony, however, looks delighted.‘ The juxtaposition of the two graphically presented contrasting visual images within a single frame, serves to highlight aspects of cultural difference and assimilation as a complex historical reality that both the colonial rulers and their subjects had come to terms with. The representation concludes with a strong authorial comment on the transculturation during this specific chapter of colonial history. Dalrymple terms it as ― perhaps the most attractive interlude in the whole long story of the British in India‖.
His great interest in this remarkable period of Anglo- Mughal cultural fusion eventually led Dalrymple to unexplored primary sources in the East India Company Rahim 76 archives in Britain, India and Pakistan. With the assistance of Urdu and Persian scholars, he carried out extensive historical research for his book on the fall of the Mughal dynasty, The Last Mughal, published in 2006. The central question that the book addresses, as Dalrymple points out, is ―how and why the relatively easy relationship of Indian and
Briton, so evident during the time of Fraser gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj‖(TLM 9). As the research revealed, the Uprising of 1857 ―was the result of that change, not its cause‖ (TLM 9). It also confirmed the fact that by the late
1830‘s there was a marked decline in the numbers of the Indianized Company officials who had married or cohabited with native women. Dalrymple refers to the wills and inventories written by Company officials which show that it was at this time that the number of Indian wives or bibis being mentioned in them previously begins to decline, and by the middle of the century they had all but disappeared.
It was also noted that by this time, those amongst the British who identified with the local culture were subjected to increasing ridicule for imitating the natives in their forms of dress and lifestyle by wearing turbans and allowing their whiskers to grow.
Dalrymple cites an editorial of 1856 in the Delhi Gazette which reflects this attitude:
Instances have been known of Englishmen coming out to India early in
life and becoming in the course of time so thoroughly Indianized, so
identified with the natives ( usually with the Mohammedan natives) in
habits and feelings as to lose all relish for European society- - - - -It is now
clear that the present practical influence of such a class, a class fast dying
out, can only be to retard the progress of knowledge in India, to abet
the native in his adherence to his ancient ways, to keep him tenacious to his
old ideas of Oriental conservatism and hostile to all innovation- - - (TLM
73-74) Rahim 77
This reflects the increasing denigration of Indian culture as a result of change in attitudes.
Dalrymple cites this to reinforce his contention that it was mainly two factors that brought about this change. First the political ascendancy of the British in the nineteenth century ―led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance‖(TLM 9) and which steadily increased, resulting ultimately in the racial prejudice that was rampant during the period of the Raj. The East India Company had become well entrenched in the subcontinent after their defeat of the French. They had also succeeded in subduing their
Indian rivals and had extended their administrative control over the change in the balance of power between is of the view The second was the change brought about by Evangelical
Christianity.
The mode of historical narration that Dalrymple employs in City of Djinns brings to mind T.S. Eliot‘s comment about Rudyard Kipling‘s historic sensibility. In his critique of Kipling‘s poetry, Eliot remarks, ―the historical imagination may give us an awful awareness of the extent of time or it may give us a dizzy sense of the nearness of the past. It may do both‖ (32). Dalrymple displays a similar consciousness as his intricately structured narrative moves through varying timelines blending the present with the past, highlighting different historical periods, traditions and events which imprint the city of Delhi with its distinctive ‗ancient-modern‘ character. The many layers of cultural and social history are delved into with the strong commitment of an historian and ethnographer who has put in much effort in terms of background research, yet is eager to plunge into the experience of recording what he observes first hand. Describing his very first visit to the subcontinent, Dalrymple confesses to feelings of great surprise at finding a social and cultural ambience in postcolonial India, which belies his personal expectations of a more marked Rahim 78 historical impact of the colonial legacy in terms of cultural influence. Accordingly he writes:
I knew that India had been influenced by England since the Elizabethan
period, and that the country had been forcibly shackled to Britain, first in
the form of the East India Company, then the British Crown, for nearly
two hundred years. Moreover, in the mid-1980s, Britain was in the grip of a
Raj revival. The British public wallowed in a nostalgic vision of the Raj as
some sort of extended colonial soap opera- Upstairs, Downstairs writ large
over the plains of Asia. The Jewel in the Crown was being shown on
television, and the correspondence columns of The Times were full of
complaints from old India hands about the alleged inaccuracies in
Attenborough‘s Gandhi. Academic presses were churning out books on the
buildings of the Empire while the Booker shortlist could be counted on to
include at least two books whose plot revolved around the Raj: The Siege
of Krishnapur, Heat and Dust, Staying On and Midnight‟s Children had
all been winners in recent years (CD 71)
The passage is quoted at length to highlight Dalrymple‘s use of the historical mode in constructing a polyphonic narrative. The representation works through an amalgam of historical and cultural location in the host of allusions spanning a time period from the sixteenth century to post- Independence India. Ancient history is evoked in the specific mention of the Elizabethan period and the Roman Empire. The imperial presence in India finds recall in the references to the ‗East India Company‘ the ‗British Crown‘ and the ‗Raj‘; the historical detail marks the arrival of the
British in the subcontinent during the seventeeth century, the long period of imperial entrenchment and the era of high nineteenth century colonialism before the Rahim 79 final departure. Markers of cultural stereotyping related to the subcontinent are listed in the form of specific examples drawn upon from a spate of cultural offerings in popular British literature, the media, and the cinema from the decade of the eighties. These intertexts serve to connect forcefully to the historical legacy of
British colonial rule in the subcontinent, as they also do, in the words of Salman
Rushdie, to- ―the huge, undiminished appetite of white Britons for television series, films, plays and books all filled with the nostalgia for the Great Pink Age‖ (130).
In Dalrymple‘s narration, colonial history and postimperial nostalgia as expressed in the sentimental wallowing of British cultural representations, is dramatized through the listing of literary and cultural memorabilia sentimentally evoking the period of the Raj, such as Jhabwala‘s novels The Jewel in the Crown and Heat and
Dust and Attenborough‘s award winning film Gandhi. It serves to echo Fredric
Jameson‘s contention about postmodern cultural imaginings. These, in his view, are often divorced from the real, for as he argues, ―cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject-----we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach‖ (167). Emphasising the obsessively nostalgic interconnectedness of his countrymen with their former colony through such cultural stereotyping, Dalrymple acknowledges that these were but ‗fond imaginings.‘ His own assumptions about the Indians manifesting similar sentimental associations with
‗things Imperial British‘ were equally misconceived, as he discovers, when he travels to India forty years after independence. He is ‗intrigued‘ by the fact that contemporary
Indians had recovered to a great degree from the colonial hangover, even though it was manifest in the fact that ―people spoke English, played cricket and voted in
Westminister-style elections‖(CD 71), but he expresses his surprise at the fact that ―the Rahim 80
British Empire was referred to in much the same way as I referred to the Roman
Empire…… as far as the modern Delhi-wallah was concerned, the Empire was ancient history, an age impossibly remote from our own‖(CD 71).
Dalrymple‘s representation of the cultural ambience of Delhi, both past and present, is frequently worked through his representation of its monuments from different historical periods. The architecture is read and interpreted as an intertext which gives voice to the city‘s historic character. He admits that it is mainly this aspect of the
Indian capital that makes it his favourite city and also continues to intrigue him. As he writes
… of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even
begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains.
Crumbling tomb towers, old mosques or ancient colleges intrude in the most
unlikely places, appearing suddenly on roundabouts or in municipal
gardens…New Delhi is not new at all; instead it is a groaning necropolis,
with enough ruins to keep any historian busy through several
incarnations(TLM 8).
On one of his several explorations of the city to trace remnants of colonial history, Coronation Park-- the site of the three Delhi Durbars, symbolising the peak of imperial pageantry in the subcontinent-- is located by Dalrymple and his taxi driver
Balvinder Singh, in a ‗flooded wilderness‘. The now isolated and decaying statue of King
George V, is described as an ‗Indian Ozymandias,‘ an image which could be mistaken
―for a displaced Egyptian Pharoah or a lost Roman Emperor‖(CD 72). The statue, removed after Independence in 1947 from its original place of prominence on the
Kingsway (now Rajpath) , ‗stands forgotten and unloved, an unwanted reminder of a period few Indians look back to with any nostalgia‘(CD 72). Rahim 81
Dalrymple‘s intertextual references to Shelley‘s Ozymandias and the image of anachronistic symbols of fallen grandeur in the mention of pharaohs and Roman emperors is reinforced with the use of adjectives ‗ lost‘ and ‗displaced‘, and invokes a remote history that is largely forgotten. The dramatic contrast between the public perceptions from his own social and cultural environment in Britain, and of those prevailing in postcolonial India are brought out sharply in the self-ironizing tone of the narrative. Writing in a similar vein, Trevor Fishlock describes his visit to the historic site in its crumbling state of present day neglect. According to him: ―The field of vanities where the King and the princes postured survives like the temple of an extinct cult, reclaimed by the relentless jungle. The King-Emperor presides. His nine-foot marble statue looks out over tamarind trees and the rusty gates of a park, over tangles of bushes and unkempt grass‖(152).The illusion of imperial permanence
Holland and Huggan are of the view that travel writing, like travel itself, is
―generated by nostalgia…It is nonetheless a contradictory even paradoxical process, veering from illusion to strenuous exercise of memory, from cultural self congratulation to self-critique, from blatant acquisition to property disinvestiture‖ (151).
Amongst innumerable locations that dot the landscape of the subcontinent and which unfailingly evoke nostalgic sentiment in many a British travel writer, are the hill stations and dak bungalows from colonial times. These feature prominently in their nostalgic representations of an enduring cultural legacy of the imperial past. Jan Morris confesses to this in her travel account entitled ‗Hill Station: Darjeeling, 1970‘. As she writes, ―the most dogmatic progressive will not deny to little Darjeeling a tug of nostalgia. It is harmless. It is only a fragrance of earlier times, a Victorian bouquet still lingering up here along the ridge‖(7). The use of metaphorical language to construct the
Rahim 82 image of a lingering fragrance serves to sentimentalize the sensuous evocation of the past of her grandparent‘s generation. Morris narrates how once, while walking through the ―small military cantonment, complete with parade ground, garrison church and shops for the soldiery‖(8), she is suddenly caught by surprise to hear the strains of a hauntingly familiar melody from the parade ground behind her. Overcome by emotion, she stops to listen as:
With a slow and melancholy introductory wail, the Gurkha pipe band broke
into the sad, sad music of a Highland lament. I stopped dead in my dusty
tracks, and the tears came to my eyes: for what generations of my own people,
I thought, had stirred to that music in their exiles long ago, and how strange
and sweet and lonely it sounded in these hills of the Indian frontier! (8)
For the music to evoke such intense feelings suggests a strong recall of past history, represented here by Morris, in the romanticized image of her colonial kinsmen living in, as she terms it, a state of ‗exile‘ far from their native land. The military aesthetic of the period of the Raj is strongly conveyed through the reference to the
Gurkha pipe band and the ambience of the military cantonment.
Dalrymple‘s representation of his visit to Simla filters the varied aspects of the nostalgic process. In the journey to the hills with his wife Olivia, to escape the summer heat of Delhi , there is a retracing of the footsteps of his colonial forebears. In her engaging account of her travels to the subcontinent—Full Tilt Dervla Murphy writing in a different vein makes a scathing reference to Simla as
one of India‘s ghost-haunts—a monument to the Victorian penchant for
ugliness on a grand scale----here until 1947, the British lived during the hot
season in comfortably cushioned on the knowledge that they were
indispensable to India, yet remaining as remote from the fundamental realities Rahim 83
of Indian life as Simla is from the sweat and dust of the plains. (15)
This comment reinforces the continuities and the discontinuities of the imperial enterprise in the subcontinent. The hill station underlines the continuing impact of a way of life imposed by the colonial rulers which even today reminds us of the distancing they chose to effect. Dramatizing his first glimpse of Simla from the train window, Dalrymple writes:
As evening drew in, we turned a bend and caught a first glimpse of Simla‘s
bungalows and country houses rising up from among the deodars of the ridge.
Crowning the top of Summer Hills stood Viceroy‘s Lodge, a familiar
silhouette of Edwardian towers and pinnacles, a Scotch Baronial stronghold
looking strangely at home only a couple of hundred miles from Tibet.
Through an open window I felt the first drops of rain blowing into the
carriage. The sky darkened and the hillsides grew grey; a wave of
nostalgia crept up on me: this was not the torrential tropical rain of the
Indian plains, but the familiar, hesitant, half-hearted drizzle of home(CD 315).
In the excerpt, quoted at length here, the scenic evocation fuses images of the natural landscape with those of a well defined constructed colonial setting, replete with all the architectural markers of British imperial presence, in the reference to Edwardian towers and the Scotch Baronial Viceroy‘s Lodge. The setting is given further specificity through the contrast built up between the torrential rain of the Indian plains and the characteristic English weather with its grey skies and intermittent drizzle .
Dalrymple is overwhelmed by ―a wave of nostalgia‖(CD 315) and is reminded of home. However the memories are overtaken by a feeling of déjà vu. This is evoked in the intertextual reference to Kipling‘s writing in which Dalrymple recalls a romanticized echo of the cultural strains of colonial rule in the subcontinent. He refers to the representation of Simla as a frequent literary setting of ‗illicit romance‘ in Rahim 84 the collection of Kipling‘s short stories entitled Plain Tales From The Hills in which there is a predictable plot which repeats itself---
After the sweltering boredom of the plains, the young officer goes up to Simla, where, bowled over by the sudden glut of young English beauties, he falls in love with a
Mrs. Hauksbee or a Mrs. Reiver: ―He rode with her and walked with her, and picnicked with her, and tiffined at Peliti‘s with her, till people raised their eyebrows and said
―Shocking!‖(CD 315).
The fictional quote brings Kipling‘s voice and the colonial context into the narrative.
It also represents the colonial hill station as a cultural site which was carefully constructed by the British to create a home away from home. The English memsahib was by now a central romantic interest in the lives of the colonial administrators. As suggested by Dane
Kennedy, the picturesque locales of the hill stations in the subcontinent facilitated cultural distancing. The hills, far away from the natives, provided a comfortable retreat to the colonial administrators to recreate for themselves their own little world amidst surroundings and leisured activities they were familiar with(qtd. in Sarma 51) Alex von
Tunzelman in her book Indian Summer refers to the elaborate preparation involved in the transportation of the entire official and domestic ―paraphernalia of the Raj‖(188).
Hundreds of coolies were employed to carry articles such as
dispatch boxes, carefully packed crockery, musical instruments, trunks full of
theatrical costumes for amateur dramatics at the Gaiety Theatre, crates of
tea and dried provisions, faithful spaniels in travelling- boxes, rolled up rugs,
aspidistras, card tables, favourite armchairs, baskets of linen, and tons upon
tons of files were borne on the shoulders of one long caravan of miserable,
sweating Indian peasants‖(188).
The listing of an assortment of items to provide a semblance of the comforts the Rahim 85
British wanted around them is undercut by the irony in the image of the ― miserable, sweating Indian peasants‖ (188) .
Dalrymple represents the cultural presence of the colonial rulers by referring to the Victorians and their penchant for replicating an elaborate British cultural setting in what was their official summer retreat in the subcontinent. He acknowledges the fact that Simla had represented a different cultural reality in the imperial context; however as he observes, it still casts a long historical shadow. This is evident to him in the familiar trappings, that he sees in Simla and which even today reinforce the legacy of the colonial past. He elaborates this through an objectified description: ―There is no mistaking the shadow of the departed English. It lies everywhere: in the shooting sticks, riding whips in the shop windows; in the net-curtained bungalows named ‗Pine Breezes‘ and ‗Fair View‘; in the crumbles and custards of the boarding-houses‖ (CD 315).
Self-consciously aware of his own sentimental response to the cultural imprint of imperial rule, Dalrymple reminds himself and his reader that the ambience of the hill station was all ‗counterfeit‘. It represented an elaborately constructed but illusory cultural setting, similar to the fictional world invoked through the allusion to
Kipling‘s writing. He therefore employs a dismissive tone in his critique of Simla as
‗an idealized, picture-postcard memory of England, all teashops, village churches and cottage-gardens the romanticized creation of addled exiles driven half-mad by the
Delhi heat‘(CD 315). In Dalrymple‘s representation there is a construction of another
―romanticized‖ representation that sought to re-create and carry colonial culture to diverse locations in the subcontinent.
Intertextual references emphasize the nostalgia associated with loss and displacement, in Dalrymple‘s characterisation of individuals whose lives have been irrevocably changed by historical circumstance. In the context of the Partition of the Rahim 86 subcontinent in 1947, there is a poignant example in the portrait he draws of
Ahmed Ali, the celebrated writer. His novel Twilight in Delhi seeks to portray through a vividly poignant representation, ―the decay of a whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living, values now dead‖ ( Ali x). Regarded as a masterpiece of historical fiction by literary critics, it is acknowledged by Dalrymple as an ―irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi‖(CD 58).
As part of his efforts to find out more about Delhi‘s cultural history, Dalrymple travels to Pakistan, to meet the distinguished chronicler, who now resided in Karachi.
During his stay, Dalrymple is introduced to a few ‗Delhi exiles,‘ those who in 1947 were forced to leave the city, which had been home to them and their forefathers.
As he listens to their voices and their haunting reminiscences of a past they still cherished, Dalrymple is an acute and sympathetic observer. He is reminded of the plight of the displaced Palestinians and draws an emotive parallel as he reports on their conversation: ―Each one treasured his childhood memories like a title-deed. Each one knew by heart the stories of the catastrophe, the massacres and the exodus; the forty-year-old tales of exile flowed from everyone‘s lips like new gossip. Each one talked about the old city as if it remained unchanged since the day they had departed‖ (CD 61).The nostalgic evocation of loss and remembered pleasure by each person is heightened with this reference to a particularly violent and painful history and a narrative of exile which has a deep resonance in both individual and collective memory. The deeply etched images of the city in their minds‘ eye seem to defy historical reality.
Dalrymple‘s exaggerated description of an anglicised Ahmad Ali reinforces the sense of physical and cultural uprootedness as a transformative experience for thousands in the subcontinent during the upheaval of the Partition. It also conveys the cultural stereotyping that orders one‘s expectations of a person or place, and is Rahim 87 sharply drawn to show that Ali is at a far remove from the Delhi-wallah steeped in
‗traditional culture‘, whom Dalrymple had been expecting to meet.
He wore severe black-rimmed glasses above which sprouted a pair of thin grey
eyebrows. He slurred his consonants and had the slightly limp wrist and
effete manner of one who modelled himself on a Bloomsbury original. His
hair was the colour of wood-ash. For a man once seen as a champion of
Delhi‘s culture, a bulwark of eastern civilization against the seepage of
western influence, Ahmed Ali now cut an unexpectedly English figure: with
his clipped accent and tweed jacket with old leather elbow-patches he
could have passed off successfully as a club land character from a Noel
Coward play.(CD 62)
The detail related to Ali‘s appearance, his mannerism, speech and attire has shades of caricature. It serves to highlight what Dalrymple regards as shockingly incongruous in the person of the writer famed for his representation of the refined high culture of Delhi. The parallelism effected through the use of the antonyms
‗eastern‘ and ‗western‘ effectively builds up what is generally perceived as an irreconcilable opposition between two cultures. This is dramatically off-set by the image of the transculturated subcontinental writer, embodying in his appearance the quintessentially English literary world of Bloomsbury and that of a stock character from popular British theatre.
Ahmad Ali‘s voice is included in the narrative as that of an angry man who
―spluttered and spat like a well-warmed frying pan‖(CD 62), Dalrymple asks him why he had chosen to live in Karachi Responding with bitterness, Ali says that it was not by choice. He narrates how he had been employed as a university professor in Nanking,
China, during the Partition; he had been disallowed, by the newly formed Indian Rahim 88
Government from returning home to Delhi, because of his Muslim identity. As Trinh T.
Minh-ha argues, ―home for the exile and the migrant can hardly be more than a transitional or circumstantial place, since the ‗original‘ home cannot be recaptured, nor can its presence/absence be entirely banished in the ‗remade‘ home‖ (15). Expressing his outrage at his forced exile in Pakistan, Ali bemoans the fact that his changed status had also led to the cancellation of a prestigious cultural identity. His work as a literary artiste had been ‗weeded out‘. Copies of Twilight in Delhi had been officially proscribed because the book, according to official sources had described a culture that was now ironically branded as ‗foreign and subversive‘.
Dalrymple concludes the memorable encounter with a poetic representation that in its nostalgic flow captures sensuous images of a rich cultural milieu associated with the
Twilight, one of the most significant periods in the cultural history of the subcontinent. In the listing of a host of cultural symbols, and the references to actual persons and place names, evoking the ambience of the old city of Delhi, there is a strong polyphonic recall
We talked for an hour about the Delhi of their childhood and youth. We talked
of the eunuchs and the sufis and the pigeons and the poets; of the monsoon
picnics in Mehrauli and the djinn who fell in love with Ahmed Ali‘s aunt. We
talked of the sweetmeat shops which stayed open until three in the morning,
the sorcerers who could cast spells over a whole mohallah, the possessed
woman who used to run vertically up the zenana walls, and the miraculous
cures effected by Hakim Ajmal Khan. (CD 64)
The repetition of the phrase ‗we talked,‘ emphasises a sharing of experience.
The polyphony is marked through the mingling of voices of interlocutor- listener- narrator , and those of the characters who as raconteurs vividly bring to life a historic Rahim 89 cultural landscape. Dalrymple‘s representation effectively conveys the heightened state of nostalgic sentiment that seems to engulf the old men, for example in his choice of the maritime metaphor to describe their perspective-- ―they swam together through great oceans of nostalgia before finally coming ashore on a strand of melancholy‖(CD
64). The use of figurative language in describing their sorrowful narration also connects with Ahmed Ali‘s elegiac narrative in Twilight in Delhi, in its representation of historical events that culminate in the tragic dispersal of a unique culture.
Life goes on with a heartless continuity, trampling ideals and worlds under its
ruthless feet, always in search of the new, destroying, building and
demolishing once again, with the meaningless petulance of a child who
builds a house of sand only to raze it to the ground---(156)
Ali‘s representation of a world that is dying away is conveyed forcefully through the poetic analogy of a ‗house of sand‘ as he offers a bleak comment on the transient nature of reality. Ironically in his own lifetime he becomes witness to a traumatic cultural displacement similar to the one he had portrayed in his fictional work.
Dalrymple points this out in an authorial comment, about Twilight in Delhi, which was published just seven years before the events of 1947. According to him, ―the book‘s gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmad Ali could ever have imagined‖(CD 58).
Amongst other historical accounts that inform his own study and representation of
Mughal culture in City of Djinns, Dalrymple draws extensively on Francois Bernier‘s Travels in the Moghul Empire and Niccolao Manucci‘s Moghul India. In Chapter Seven he makes an intertextual reference to the two seventeenth century travel accounts. In his view ―no sharper or livelier pictures of Mughal Delhi with all its scandal, dramas and intrigues, have come down to us‖ (CD 191). Dalrymple gives a brief biographical sketch of each of the two Rahim 90 travellers before commenting on their writing. Bernier is introduced to the reader as the aristocratic and urbane French doctor who arrived in India during the reign of the Shah Jehan in 1658, and soon became famous as the physician to the royal family and the Mughal nobility. Through his travel accounts he comes across as ―one of the first apologists for
Mughal culture against the growing arrogance of its European visitors‖ (CD 192). Dalrymple interpolates passages from Bernier‘s account to illustrate how in his highly developed sensibility of the ―gourmand and aesthete‖(CD 191), he was a typical Frenchman and represented the educated man of the early Englightenment. As an illustative example he includes the following observation by Bernier: ―I have sometimes been astonished to hear the contemptuous manner in which Europeans in the Indies speak of [Mughal architecture]‖(CD 192), Dalrymple connects this to the Frenchman‘s opinion of the Delhi
Jama Masjid:
I grant that this building is not constructed according to those rules of
architecture which we seem to think ought to be implicitly followed; yet I can
see no fault that offends taste. I am satisfied that even in Paris a church
erected after the model of this temple would be admired, were it only for its
singular style of architecture, and its extraordinary appearance. (CD 192)
Dalrymple points out that in addition to the descriptive detail of the architecture and the courtly and ceremonial lifestyle of the Mughal royalty, there is what he terms as ‗reams of bazaar gossip‘(CD 191) in Bernier‘s travelogue, which in his view both informs and entertains the reader.
Niccolao Manucci is introduced as Bernier‘s younger Italian contemporary. The son of a Venetian trader, he ran away from home at the age of fourteen and journeyed to India to seek employment in the Mughal army. As an artilleryman, he fought in the civil war between
Dara Shikoh and his younger brother, prince Aurangzeb and is finally besieged in a fort. As Rahim 91 such his travelogue records from his own first hand experience, the bitter rivalries between the members of the royal family. Dalrymple quotes from Manucci‘s account----―Although
Aurangzeb was held to be bold and valiant, he was capable of great dissimulation and hypocrisy…‖(CD 197). He then expresses his views on the travel accounts in the following comment:
With their two very different viewpoints----one the angst-struck French
intellectual, the other the ex-con and hard-nosed Venetian man of action---
Bernier and Manucci colour the gilded outlines provided by the Mughals‘ own
court chronicles and their miniature paintings. The picture that thus emerges of
the tensions and jealousies in the Imperial family has a Shakespearean feel to
it--- The characters in the drama---some good, but flawed and naïve, others
utterly evil and ruthless---are classic Renaissance types. (CD 195)
As he emphasizes, the narrative voice of the two travellers reflects their individual backgrounds and inclinations. Dalrymple also acknowledges the significance of the travel accounts in providing details that flesh out the one- dimensional portrait that one gets from the official court records and miniatures of the Mughal period. The intertextual reference draws on a literary metaphor---Shakespearean tragedy--- to evoke a history of ambition, intrigue, coarseness and revenge under the veneer of the cultural spendour of the Mughal court, in two important representations of the period.
A recurrent thematic focus which marks the historical mode in Dalrymple‘s narrative is the representation of a cultural splendour that has faded away as a consequence of historical change. The theme is worked through a narrative frame in which a specific city or locale associated with a distinctive cultural ambience is contextualised in a past historical era and then contrasted with its present state which is shown in a state of decline. Rahim 92
Just as Partition resulted in prosperity and growth for the New Delhi, it led to impoverishment and stagnation for the old. The fabulous city which hypnotized the world travellers, the home of the great poets Mir, Zauq and Ghalib; the city of nautch girls and courtesans; the seat of the Emperor, the Shadow of God, the Refuge of the World, became a ghetto, a poor relation embarrassingly tacked on to the metropolis to its south.
Dalrymple bemoans the fact that since 1947, the Old City has survived only by becoming one enormous storehouse for North India‘s wholesale goods; one by one the old palaces and mansions have been converted into godowns (warehouses) and stores. It has become more remarkable for its junk markets and car parts bazaars than for any fraying beauty or last lingering hints of sophistication. ―The crafts and skills developed over the centuries for the tastes of the old Urdu-speaking Delhi elite either adjusted to the less sophisticated Punjabi market, or simply died out,‖(CD 50) for example the Muslim shoemakers from the old Cobbler‘s Bazaar near the Ajmeri gate had fled to Karachi during the Partition , now it had become a hardware market.
For Dalrymple the greatest disappointment in Delhi was Chandni Chowk. As he says
―in the poems and travelogues from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Moonlight
Bazaar has been presented as a kind of Oriental Faubourg St. Honore, renowned for its wide avenues, its elegant caravanserais and its fabulous Mughal gardens‖(CD 54). The use of adjectives ‗wide‘, ‗elegant‘ and ‗fabulous‘ suggest a perfect symmetry
Having read descriptions of this great boulevard, once the finest in all Islam,
as you sit on your rickshaw and head on into the labyrinth, you still half-
expect to find its shops full of jasper and sardonyx for the Mughal builders,
mother-of-pearl inlay for the pietra dura craftsmen. You expect to see strings
of Bactrian camels from Kashgar and logs of cinnamon from Madagascar,
merchants from Ferghana, and Khemer girl concubines from beyond the Rahim 93
Irrawady; perhaps even a rare breed of turkey from the New World or a zebra
to fill the Imperial menagerie and amuse the Emperor. (CD 54)
The excerpt quoted above offers a dramatized representation of the famous bazaar.
Dalrymple invokes the historical by building upon the romanticized image of Chandni
Chowk presented in the travelogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mention of place names of exotic locations bring to mind, distant lands of Asia and
Africa and trade routes associated with an ancient geography. In the reference to
‗concubines‘ and exotic goods such as spices, pearls, jasper and sardonyx and the rare species of animals that were transported to the famous bazaar from different places, over land and sea, Dalrymple conjures an image of the fabled splendour of the Mughal empire. The atmosphere of the same bazaar, as it might have been in the nineteenth century is also presented vividly in Dalrymple‘s book, The Last Mughal where he describes the
Delhi tradesmen with their wares displayed on the pavements: ―the ear cleaner with his pick and probe, the tooth cleaner with his bundles of neem twigs, the astrologer with his cards and his parrots, the quack with his lizards and bottles of murky aphrodisiac oils, the kabutarwallah with his fan tails and fancy doves‖(96). The jewellers, cloth merchants and spice merchants
Dalrymple‘s description of Chandni Chowk as it is today presents a sad picture of neglect and decay and conveys the extent to which the place has changed This is evident from the following excerpt:
as you sit stranded in a traffic jam, half-choked by rickshaw fumes and the
ammonia-stink of the municipal urinals, you see around you a sad vista of
collapsing shop fronts and broken balustrades, tatty warehouses roofed with
corrugated iron and patched with rusting duckboards. The canal which ran Rahim 94
down the centre of the bazaar has been filled in; the trees have been uprooted.
All is tarnished, fraying at the edges.(CD 54)
The polluted and congested atmosphere of the once grand bazaar is emphasized with the use of olfactory imagery. The choice of describing words for example ‗sad‘,
‗collapsing‘, ‗broken‘, ‗tatty‘ , ‗rusting‘, ‗tarnished‘, ‗fraying‘ effectively convey the dilapidated condition of the shop fronts.
The description then shifts to the images of a typical crowded subcontinental bazaar On the pavement, a Brahminy cow illicitly munches vegetables from the sack of a vendor; a Muslim ear-cleaner squats outside the Sis Ganj gurdwara and peers down the orifices of a Sikh nihang (CD 54).
The juxtaposition of images of the ‗Brahminy cow‘, the ‗Muslim ear-cleaner‘ and the ‗Sikh nihang suggest that Dalrymple represents the traditional bazaar as a site which like other public places in the subcontinent such as shrines, railway carriages, stations and parks brings diverse people together. Despite caste and religious differences, which are otherwise often intensely divisive, the close proximity of human and animal in a congested and crowded space Through a snatch of oral speech, Dalrymple conveys the sounds of broken English as vendors try to sell him their wares ---
A man grabs your arm and stage-whispers: ‗Sahib, you want carpets, hashish
smack brown sugar change money blue film sexy ladies no problem!‘
Another vendor waves some cheap plastic trinkets in your face ‗Hello, my
dear,‘ he says. ‗You want?‘
His brother joins the scrum, his arms full of posters: ‗What you want? I have
everything! Guru Gobind Singh, Alpine meadow scene, Arnold
Schwartzneger, two little kittens, Saddam Hussein, Lord Shiva, Charlie
Chaplin …(CD 54) Rahim 95
This excerpt indicates that Dalrymple is both a sharp observer and a keen listener as he reports. His sharp ear catches the idiom of fragmented Indian English.
Dalrymple accomplishes this through a narrative structure which is divided into different interlinked segments. This allows for an expanded narrative space in which he as the author/narrator can focus on cultural aspects and include other points of view articulated through the voices of different characters. Usually the first person narration is through the voices of old residents who are located by Dalrymple and prompted by him, they recreate the cultural past through their reminiscences. Frequently the
‗vestiges and fragments‘ of a past are contrasted with the present which is always represented in a state of neglect and decline.
When Dalrymple visits Lucknow in 1998, he locates one such resident in the person of Mushtaq whom he introduces as ‗one of the last remnants of old Lucknow: a poet, teacher, writer‘ and who as such knows the city intimately. Through the first person narrative voice,
Dalrymple constructs a representation which emphasizes that ―Lucknow‘s period of greatness lay long in the past‖ (AK 27). In the introductory paragraph Dalrymple traces the city‘s cultural history from the seventeenth century. Accordingly he uses the past tense to emphasise the grandeur of a bygone era in the following description
Lucknow, the capital of the Kingdom of Avadh, was indisputably the largest,
most prosperous and most civilized pre-colonial city in India. Its spectacular
skyline- with its domes and towers and gilded cupolas, its palaces and pleasure
gardens, ceremonial avenues and wide maidans- reminded travellers of
Constantinople, Paris of even Venice. The city‘s courtly Urdu diction and
baroque codes of etiquette were renowned as the most subtle and refined in the
subcontinent; its dancers admired as the most accomplished; its cuisine
famous as the most flamboyantly elaborate (AK 26). Rahim 96
The description with its use of hyperbole marks the material prosperity and rich cultural milieu of Lucknow which came to be acknowledged as the most refined city in the subcontinent. Dalrymple‘s use of specific vocabulary such as ‗domes‘, ‗towers‘, ‗cupolas‘,
‗palaces‘ and ‗maidans‘ suggest a distinctive architecture and spatial layout that was second to none as noted by travellers who compared it to the most civilized cities of Europe.
Now almost two centuries later Dalrymple stands on the roof with Mushtaq, in the old quarters of the city and looks down on what he describes as ‗still one of the greatest skylines in the Islamic world‘(AK 26) However as he observes, the signs of decay were unmistakable. The gardens, mosques and the havelis have all fallen into a ruinous state.
The narrative is structured so that it shifts between the present and the historical past. This structure is imaginatively sustained through a stylistic technique which is most prominent in the third segment. The cultural legacy of Lucknow is represented through the dialogue between Dalrymple and Mushtaq as they walk together through the old quarter of the city. In the role of cultural historian, Dalrymple asks probing questions about eighteenth century Lucknow, during the peak of its cultural glory. Mushtaq explains that during this period ―under the Nawabs, Lucknow experienced a renaissance that represented the last great flowering of Indo-Islamic genius‖ (AK 29). He elaborates that the Nawabs were great patrons of the arts and had taken care to assemble around them poets, writers, artisans, craftsmen and master builders. The last nawab Wajid Ali Shah himself, he points out was an accomplished poet and dancer.
As they wander through the old chowk, Mushtaq emphasizes that ―the culture of
Lucknow was not just limited to the elite‖(AK 38). When Dalrymple asks him what it was that had distinguished the courtesans from prostitutes. Mushtaq replies ―in many ways the courtesans or tawwaif as they were known were the guardians of the culture‖ (38). He elaborates further: Rahim 97
Apart from anything else, they preserved the traditions of Indian classical
music for centuries… they were the incarnation of good manners. The young
men would be sent to them to learn how to behave and deport themselves: how
to roll or accept a paan, how to say thank you, how to salaam, how to stand up,
how to leave a room-as well as the facts of life. (AK 38)
In his view the most significant aspect of this cultural grooming was that the tawwaif --- themselves accomplished singers and poets ---would tutor young men to speak perfect Urdu. As he explains to Dalrymple ―You see, in Lucknow language was not just a tool of communication: it was a projection of the culture-very florid and subtle. But now the language has changed. Compared to Urdu, Punjabi is a very coarse language: when you listen to two Punjabis talking it sounds as if they are fighting‖ (AK 39).Mir Moazzam laments the dying out of the entire culture of poetic mehfils and mushairas when music, dance and poetry were considered to be an integral part of a refined existence.
The historical mode is evident in Dalrymple‘s representation of the different forms of architecture in Lucknow. He identifies these with specific periods of Lucknow‘s history. One of the buildings that he describes in great detail is the Imambara complex constructed by
Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula for Shi‘ite religious discourse in 1784; one of the largest vaulted halls in the world,
the Imambara is a vast and thoroughly monumental building: long, echoing
arcades of cusped arches rise to great gilded onion-domes and rippling lines of
pepperpot semi-domes; at the corners soaring minarets culminate in solid,
well-designed chattris. The whole composition surrounded by the Great
Mosque and the Rumi Darwaza exudes a bold, reckless and extravagant self-
confidence. Lucknow was consciously aiming to surpass the glories of late
Moghul-Delhi, and the Great Imambara shows it could do so with dashing Rahim 98
panache. (AK 33)
The description details the architectural vocabulary of the Imambara manifest in a bold, exuberant style, that in turn reflects the richness and flamboyance of Lakhnavi culture of the period. Dalrymple‘s use of florid language for example, –―echoing arcades‖,
―cusped arches‖, ―gilded onion domes‖, ―soaring minarets‖ (AK 33) well designed chattris conveys the strong visual impact that historic monuments such as the Imambara can have in terms of artistic expression and cultural history.
A substantial part of the narrative is devoted to descriptions that draw a sharp contrast between the refined civilization of the past and the shabby, impoverished and melancholic atmosphere of the streets of present day Lucknow. There is sharp criticism in Dalrymple‘s comment that it seems impossible to believe that the historical monuments date from less than two thousand years ago. ―They rear out of the surrounding anarchy like monuments from some lost civilization‖ (AK 33). He paints a graphic picture of the neglect and squalor that he sees around him on the streets
Waves of squabbling cycle-rickshaw drivers pass down the potholed roads,
bumping in and out of the puddles. Rubbish lies uncollected by the roadside,
with dogs competing with rats to snuffle in the piles of garbage. Beside them,
lines of desperate street-vendors squat on dirty rush-mats, displaying their
tawdry collections of cheap plastic keyrings and fake Rolex watches. (AK 33)
In Dalrymple‘s account of his visit to Hyderabad Deccan, in 1998, there is another representation of cultural history from the days of the Raj articulated through nostalgic memory. The first person narration is presented mainly through the voice of Mir
Moazam Husain, a scion of the once all powerful and wealthy Paigah nobility who had been witness to and asks him to recount Described by Dalrymple, as ―a sprightly and intelligent eighty-four-year-old‖(AK 192), he talks elegiacally about the past, but unlike Rahim 99
Ahmad Ali, without any bitterness. He tells Dalrymple that his grandfather Nawab Fakrool
Mulk had been the Deputy Prime Minister in the Nizam‘s government. Other than his official duties he had a passion for building, and had planned and supervised the building of a series of palaces in the state. Mir Moazam had grown up in one such palace in which as he informs
Dalrymple there had been ―a staff of 927 including three doctors. There was even a small regiment of women, eight or ten of whom were of African extraction to guard the main gate of the zenana‖ (AK 192).This detail included in the introductory paragraph sets the tone for a narrative that shapes into a fascinating expose of Deccani culture, of which as Mir
Moazam laments, only ‗vestiges and fragments‘ now remain.
Dalrymple constructs the polyphonic account so that there are parallel narrations that provide different perspectives on a cultural past. The second section introduces another point of view through which the past is evoked. Dalrymple is reminded of Iris Portal, an old friend of Dalrymple‘s grandmother whose husband had been part of the colonial bureaucracy in the
Deccan in the early decades of the twentieth century. Portal‘s tales of the period, as
Dalrymple recalls, in an authorial comment had ‗a fairly tale quality‘. They conjured the picture of Hyderabad ―as a sort of fantastical Indian Ruritania, where an unreconstructed feudal aristocracy preserved extravagantly rococo rules of etiquette‖(AK 197).
The Nizam, according to the old woman, was reputed to be the richest man in the world with a fabulous treasure of gold and precious stones; he had a retinue of eleven thousand servants: thirty eight dusted the chandelier----- he had three official wives, forty two concubines and nearly twenty children. ―It was like living in France on the eve of the
Revolution‖ (AK 197). There was a great divide between the wealthy aristocracy and the common people who lived in dire poverty. Dalrymple remembers ―you couldn‘t help feeling that the whole great baroque structure could come crashing down at any minute‖ (AK 198).
Dalrymple‘s largely authorial third-person narrative, in this section, includes historical Rahim 100 research relating to the period. Recorded facts relating to the Nizam‘s fortune are presented through enumerative detail. The reader is informed through a reference to contemporary archives that
the Nizam was estimated to have 100 million pounds in gold and silver bullion
and 400 million pounds in jewels. He was the owner of the Golconda diamond
mines, the source of the legendary Kohinoor and the Great Mughal Diamond
which weighed 787 carats. He ruled over a territory the size of Italy measuring
82,700 square miles of the Deccan plateau, and commanded a personal army.
(AK 198)
Dalrymple brings in a modern day example, for the present day reader, when he emphasizes that ―the state‘s income and expenditure had exceeded those of twenty member states of the United Nations‖(AK:198).
Through the technique of cataloguing, Dalrymple represents the material wealth and opulence of the Deccani principality in its ―period of glorious sunset‖ (AK 199). The Nizam himself is described as a greatly eccentric individual. His shabby personal appearance belied the magnificence of his court. Dalrymple quotes one British Resident of the period who thought the Nizam resembled ―a snuffly clerk, too old to be sacked‖ (AK 198). He wore, ―a dirty old Fez, a grubby pair of pyjamas, and an ancient sherwani‖ (AK 198).The oddities that Dalrymple highlights make the reader pause and so help in modulating the pace of the narrative by evoking an image that contrasts with to the
Dalrymple provides historical detail to contextualize the varied aspects of Deccani culture which combined to make it a distinctive centre of learning and the arts in the subcontinent. According to him ―after the fall of Lucknow to the British in 1856, Hyderabad remained the last redoubt of Indo-Islamic culture and the flagship of Deccani civilization, with its long heritage of compostite Qu‘tb Shahi, Vijayanagaran, Moghul, Kakatiyan, Central Rahim 101
Asian and Iranian influences‖(AK 199). In the reference to the varied cultural strands that
The Osmania university had spearheaded the effort to promote education in the region and was the first to teach in an indigenous Indian language, ―it was the most important area for the production of Urdu literature in the subcontinent, and the people of Hyderabad had evolved their own distinctive--and often very sophisticated-- manners, habits, language, music, literature, food and dress‖ (AK 199).
It is through the first person narration of Mir Moazam that Dalrymple includes a historical perspective relating to the violent end of the ―period of glorious sunset‖(AK 212) in Hyderabad. As the British prepared to leave India in 1947, there were signs of the old order gradually fading away and finally declining into a state of chaos. He talks nostalgically of the grandeur of the city in former times when the Nizam would host the Viceroy on his visits. Dalrymple paints a vivid scene:
Outside there would be gorgeously caparisoned elephants and over a hundred
polo ponies. There were palanquins and teams of palanquin bearers, four-in-
hand coaches, and by 1934 nearly fifty cars, mainly Rolls-Royces and
Daimlers. I remember the polo matches and the times we used to stand over
there and try to shoot coins thrown in the air. Then there were the tennis
matches and the trips to the Malakpet races and the shikar trips into the jungle.
He adds resignedly ‗It all seems very long ago now‘.(AK 213)
Dalrymple‘s prompting voice intrudes with a query ―So what of the future?‖ I asked. ‗What do you think will survive of the old culture of Hyderabad?‘(AK 214)
Mir Moazam responds with philosophical resignation ‗Very little‘ he said.
‗You can‘t keep out change. One must try to move with the times.‘ Deccani
culture, as he reiterates was the product of a very particular mixture of peoples
and influences. It was based on religious tolerance, courtesy, hospitality, love Rahim 102
of the arts and a first-rate civil service which made no distinction between
creeds or caste or class (AK 214).
He bemoans the fact that much of the old elite had migrated to Pakistan, and a flood of new immigrants had arrived from Pakistan.
Dalrymple‘s account of his visit to Goa in 1993, highlights a location in the subcontinent that is considered unique in terms of cultural ambience. The narrative is divided into two parts; the first section consists of a detailed account relating to the arrival of the
Portuguese conquistadors and the establishment of a trading empire from where they could control the maritime routes to the East.
The ‗four and a half centuries of intermingling and intermarriage‘ had resulted in a complex hybrid mixture of the two races and cultures: ―a European template adapted to the climate and social mores of India, or, from the opposite perspective‘ an Indian environment tinct with European institutions, Indo-Portuguese architecture and an amalgam of increasingly Indianised European cultural importations‖(WM 13).
As a result most Goans still consider their state a place apart: a cultured
Mediterranean island, quite distinct from the rest of India. As they quickly let
you know, they eat bread, not chappatis; drink in tavernas, not tea-shops;
many of them are Roman Catholic, not Hindu; and their musicians play guitars
and sing fados. None of them, they assure you, can stand the sound of sitars or
shehnai. (AK 232-33)
Dalrymple‘s use of reported speech and the third-person narrative voice conveys an emphatic tone as he highlights the geographical distance and the cultural and religious differences between the two communities. This is reinforced through the use of anti-thesis and a sprinkling of specific vocabulary that can be identified with Portuguese and Hindi speakers. Rahim 103
Dalrymple locates a local resident who seemed to epitomize the old traditions of Portuguese culture both in her appearance and her lifestyle. Donna Georgina
Figueiredo lived in an eighteenth century colonial mansion and informs him about the history of Goa. Dalrymple walks about the place:
the haphazard, narrow cobbled lanes of Fontainhas, for example, the oldest
quarter of Panjim. Fontainhas looks like a small chunk of Portugal washed up
on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Old spinsters in flowery dresses sit on their
verandahs reading the evening papers, chatting to each other in Portuguese …
violinists practice Villa-Lobos at open windows; caged birds sit chirping on
ornate art nouveau balconies looking out over small red-tiled piazzas. As you
watch, old men in pressed linen trousers and Homburg hats spill out of the
tavernas, walking-sticks in hand, and make their way unsteadily across the
cobbles… A Mediterranean douceur hangs palpably, almost visibly, over the
streets. (AK 233)
As has been illustrated through the textual analysis the use of the historical mode enables Dalrymple to shape the narrative in a dynamic way. He modulates the pace of the narrative by dividing it into segments of description, narration, and dialogue. The segments vary in length and are marked by section breaks in the form of illustrated motifs which as paratextual clues are aesthetically pleasing and also serve to guide the reader who is prepared for the shift in scene or location. Sometime the breaks indicate a change in point of view so that there are alternations between first- person and third- person narration and a polyphonic effect is created with different perspectives.
The order of represented time in Dalrymple‘s historical narration is not chronological; the shift between past and present is negotiated through the stylistic device of a loop back and a flash forward into the present so that the link with the past is Rahim 104 emphasized. The scenic construction and the characterisation is also in keeping with this emphasis. Very often there is a juxtaposition of scenes in which the past is evoked through images of a cultural splendour and contrasted with the neglect and squalor of the present.
This is particularly so in the representations of architectural descriptions of ancient monuments or of historical locales such as bazaars or the central chowks and the skylines of ancient cities.
Dalrymple‘s use of the historical mode draws on intertextuality as a significant formal device. The literary voices from the past, especially in previous travel accounts related to the subcontinent, provide an interesting parallel to his own cultural representation. Alongwith the perspectives of Marco Polo, Ibne Batuta, Bernier and
Manucci there are intertextual references to the writing of Babur, Dargah Quli Khan,
Ghalib, Kipling and Ahmad Ali and several others. Each of these references is placed strategically in the narrative so that it evokes a particular historical context and a specific point of view.
Dalrymple‘s historical consciousness is also reflected in his thematic focus and choice of subject-matter. In much of his representation, he tries to find the British connection in the cultural history of the subcontinent. Rahim 105
CHAPTER FOUR
The Ethnographic Mode
As outlined in the introductory chapter Dalrymple‘s repertoire as a travel writer is in clusive and expansive. This is largely because of the polyphonic ethnographic focus in his narrative.
In the late- eighties Clifford Geertz in his book Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author, argued that understanding an anthropologist‘s ethnographic writing is like understanding a fictional body of work by Melville or Mark Twain. The meaning of a text is found in the author‘s voice, and the anthropological material contained therein must be interpreted in that light (qtd. in Rosman and Rubel 17).
According to James Clifford ‗polyvocality was restrained and orchestrated in traditional ethnographies by giving to one voice a pervasive authorial function and to others the role of sources, ―informants‖ to be quoted or paraphrased (15). He asserts that this authority has been questioned in polyphonic ethnographic texts in which many different voices are heard and their expression given equal weight thus recasting the ― informants‖ as co-authors.
Dalrymple frequently draws on strategies of ethnographic research. Through the observer/ participant interaction his travel accounts include a record of encounters sometimes in the shape of detailed interviews with individuals who are part of a distinctive cultural ambience. who provide insights into historical, social and cultural contexts while they articulate their experiences or share their personal stories. This also creates the context for a more intensive enquiry into belief systems and cultural practices that Dalrymple is curious about and chooses to elaborate upon in greater detail. For his themes and narrative structure he draws on his travels in various locales so that there is a representational framework through which he keeps shifting the Rahim 106 focus, from the physical setting to ethnographic description Personal anecdotes relating to his interaction with fellow travellers on the road also form part of the first-person and third-person narration. On other occasions he seeks out locals such as knowledgeable residents of a particular city with whom he strikes an easy conversation, sometimes listening attentively to their point of view on other occasions asking probing questions and eliciting a response which serves as a point of information related to historical and sociocultural aspects.
There are also representations of encounters, sometimes in the shape of detailed interviews with individuals who are part of a distinctive cultural ambience or with those who articulate their individual observation and experience.
Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller ―needs to
train his eye in the way an ethnographer does…to remain relevant and
stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated
knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions,
history, economy, and politics.(n.p.)
A vividly polyphonic representation finds expression in the story The Red Fairy from Dalrymple‘s most recent travel book Nine Lives published in 2009. The possibility of moving beyond identity and its dissolution into a state which transcends conventional boundaries of social and cultural reality, is a theme that is explored through the documentation of Lal Peri‘s life as a political and cultural exile who finds sanctuary in the shrine of the Sufi mystic Laal Shahbaz Qalander; The narrative, structured in seven parts, interweaves different story strands through historical narration; a personal history of physical and cultural displacement is linked to events that mark violent transitions in the recent political history of the subcontinent. This is paralleled by a graphic representation of shrine culture which Rahim 107 reflects the historical traditions of Sufi- inclined religious beliefs of a vast majority of people in the subcontinent.
In a recent comprehensive ethnographic study entitled At the Shrine of the Red
Sufi-- Five Days and Nights on Pilgrimage in Pakistan , Jurgen Wasim Fremgen describes his experience inside the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalander as an entrance into an ―archaic, magical and yet palpably physical world‖ (3). He interprets the local expressions of the
Sufi mystical tradition as the gentle face of Islam ―marked by trust, tolerance and a feeling of togetherness; of trances and a Dionysian spirituality--- a joyful counter-culture in contrast to that of a rather cheerless appearing orthodox Muslims (Fremgen 3). He also links the vast network of Sufis and dervishes and numerous pilgrimages to holy shrines, to the extremely mobile culture and the general communicativeness of the Pakistani people. As he observes ―whether farmer or businessman, mullah or Sufi, they are ‗on the road,‘ doing business, maintaining contacts and forging friendships. Pilgrimages to holy shrines seem to be an intrinsic feature in some sections of this mobile culture‖
(Fremgen 5). This view is corroborated by Dalrymple as he recalls a past visit to the Urs of the eighteenth century Sufi mystic, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. He recalls that the courtyards of the tomb had resonated with the sound of devotional music and drumming as the pilgrims, both women and men, danced together in a state of religious ecstasy. The atmosphere was filled with the thick with incense and
Dalrymple travels to the town of Sehwan situated in the rural heartland of Sindh, the southern most province of Pakistan; more specifically a three hour journey from
Sukkur, one of the oldest cities on the banks of the river Indus. In the first section of the narrative, Dalrymple draws on the historical past. He introduces Sindh as ―a centre of Muslim- Hindu syncretism, with every kind of strange cult part- Hindu, part-
Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes‖(NL 113). He traces the tradition of religious Rahim 108 heterodoxy in the region and ascribes this partly to the geographical position of Sindh as a bridge between Hindu India and the Islamic Middle East (NL 113).
In her book Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia takes a similar view when she elaborates that for centuries the river Indus has been ―a place where people, ideas and religions meet and mingle‖ (97). Referring to the fusion of disparate religious and cultural traditions in Sindh she writes: ―seemingly irreconcilable ideas merge by the simple osmotic process of being in close contact with each other. Many of the proselytizing saints who arrived in Sindh from Iran or the Middle East gave their mission a boost by putting down roots in ancient Hindu places of worship, or even by allowing themselves to be identified with Hindu gods‖(97). According to her Sehwan is ‗the site of an important
Shiva centre.The name Sehwanistan, as it was known until recently derives from Sivistan, city of Shiva, and the modern faqirs still dress like Shaivite yogis, in torn clothes with matted hair‖ (97).
The shrine is represented by Dalrymple as a revered site of pilgrimage for people of both faiths. He emphasizes the primacy of the Sufi belief that ―divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart and the quest for fana ------total immersion in the absolute------liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence‖(NL 113). Dalrymple also highlights the significance of the spiritual and cultural legacy of the Sufi saints through the teachings of Sufi poetry and song. According to him, the ―high philosophical subtleties‖ (NL 113) of the mystics found a way into the hearts of ordinary people mainly because they were expressed in the Sindhi, Punjabi and Hindi vernacular and so were easily comprehensible to the simple village folk. The natural imagery in the poetry is drawn from ―simple rural symbols taken from dusty roads and running water, desert thirst, the dried up thorn bush and the blessings of Rahim 109 rain,‖(NL 114) and evokes the harsh desert landscape. He illustrates this by quoting a verse from the Sur Jo Risalo, the monumental Sindhi verse collection of Shah Abdul
Latif, in which the saint refers to his wanderings in the desert, in the company of a group of Hindu sadhus and Nath Yogis.
These ascetics have conquered their desires/
In their wilderness they found the destination
For which they searched so long
On the path of truth,
They found it lay within (NL 115)
The background historical detail serves to concretize the setting of the shrine as well as reinforce the significance of the annual urs, or assembly to commemorate the saint, that draws people from all over the subcontinent to Sehwan.
Lal Peri is introduced by Dalrymple as a Qalander, ― the sort of deeply eccentric ascetic that both the Eastern Christians and Sufis have traditionally celebrated as Holy Fools‖(NL 121). Her traumatic past as a ‗triple refugee‘ is represented in the context of the turbulent political events in the region during the last four decades.
Consequently the story records how she is
first as a Muslim driven out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu Muslim
riots in the 1960‘s; then as a Bihari driven out of East Pakistan at the creation
of Bangladesh in 1971;and finally as a single woman taking refuge in the
shrines of Sindh while struggling to live the life of a Sufi in the male
dominated and increasingly Talibanised society of Pakistan. (NL 121)
Dalrymple traces the chronology of religious conflict and political upheaval with the mention of specific dates. Both the temporal and the spatial contexts are forcefully marked in the historical reference to the repeated and forced crossing of Rahim 110 borders that impacts so grievously on Lal Peri‘s life. This detail also reinforces her continuous suffering when she is subjected to repeated victimization on account of her religious and ethnic identity, as the political conflict exacerbates amongst the neighbouring nation states. To make matters worse, as a single woman she has to face the challenges of an oppressive ideology that has made inroads into a previously tolerant and more open culture. Her painful displacement also marks her initiation into the ways of the Sufi; spirituality for her becomes an antidote to personal suffering
She danced with great force and a manic energy, jumping and leaping in
the air------eventually after nearly half an hour of building, the drumming
reached its climax and Lal Peri did a final pirouette before dropping to the
ground as the pounding rhythm ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
(NL 119)
The dhammal is renowned for its ability to heal and in Sindh as elsewhere in Sufi
Islam –it is widely believed that a disease that appears to be physical, but which actually has its roots in an affliction of the spirit can be cured by the power of Sufi music and drumming.
In his account of his visit to the dargah of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moin-ud-Din
Chishti, in City of Djinns, Dalrymple describes a similar scene. He describes a dervish in a state of wajd or trance who like Lal Peri and many other devotees at Sufi shrines across the subcontinent dance in a state of rapture.
The dervish began bowing from the waist like a Chinese courtier; only then did he begin to turn. As the music rose to its climax and the crowd clapped, encouraging him on, he turned faster and faster, his skirts flying out, spinning round and around on a single axis screaming loudly: ―Ha! Ha! Ha!‖ Finally he fell down and curled into an embryonic ball
(310-311).
Rahim 111
The hope is that by sending the women into a trance, their sadness and anxiety will be calmed and, ultimately cured (NL 119).
In many of the travel essays from The Age of Kali, we are introduced to ethnographic writing that can be termed as cultural criticism. Dalrymple chooses to focus on socio-cultural themes that reflect the injustice, violence and class and caste divisions in the subcontinent.
―The eye of faith can often see much that is hidden from the vision of the non- believer‖ (AK 49). As a poetic beginning to the essay entitled--The City of Widows,
Dalrymple uses this opening sentence to great effect as he describes his visit to Vrindavan,
Uttar Pradesh in 1997. The introductory paragraph builds up the contrast in perspectives through a repeated use of antithesis. To the ‗non-believer‘ it is just a dusty, ―rundown north
Indian bazaar town‖ but to the ‗pious pilgrim‘ it is ―the dwelling of Krishna, and thus----an earthly paradise fragrant with the scent of tamarind and arjuna trees‖ (AK 49). The setting is further concretized by Dalrymple as he describes Vrindavan as ―temple town with its crumbling palaces and swarming ashrams, its open sewers and its stalls selling brightly coloured lithographs of the God Child‖ (AK 49) where hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees converge for an annual pilgrimage. The description which occupies the first three paragraphs is in keeping with the representation of Vrindavan as one of the holiest religious sites in India and therefore believed to be an auspicious place to spend one‘s final days in prayer and fasting before passing on to the next world. The reader does not anticipate
Dalrymple‘s poignant description of the widows which as he points out constitute the largest group amongst the pilgrims. However as he emphasizes their presence is immediately felt as one arrives in Vrindavan, ―bent-backed and white-saried, with their shaven heads and outstretched begging-bowls; on their foreheads they wear the tuning-fork-shaped ash-smear that marks them out as disciples of Krishna‖ (AK 50). Rahim 112
Dalrymple comments on the cultural practice in traditional Hindu society whereby a widow becomes a virtual outcast in the community as soon as her husband dies. ―She is forbidden to wear colours or jewellery or eat meat. She is forbidden to remarry (at least if she is of reasonably high caste; low-caste and Untouchable women can do what they want) and she is forbidden to own property‖ (AK 50). In the traditional rural communities a widow is
―still expected to shave her head and live like an ascetic, sleeping on the ground, living only to fast and pray for her departed spouse‖ (AK 50). Dalrymple‘s third person authorial narration here includes reflects sympathy for the oppressive conditions of several thousand of widows who spend their days in Vrindavan chanting mantras, meditating or begging. All they earn for their chanting is a cupful of rice and two rupees. When they fall ill and cannot chant they have to go hungry. As an observer he notices that ―they have no privacies, no luxuries, no holidays. They simply pray until they keel over and die. There are eight thousand of them at present in the town, and every year their number increases‖(AK 51). To corroborate his own. ― ‗If I were to sit under a tree,‘ said Kamala Ghosh, a local women‘s rights activist, ‗and tell you the sadness of the widows of Vrindavan, the leaves of that tree would fall like trees‘
‖(AK 51).
There is a change of narrative voice in the second section. Dalrymple in the role of ethnographer listens attentively as Kanaklata, one of the middle- aged widows tells him her tale of woe. She had been widowed at the age of seventeen. After the death of her husband her land had been usurped by the village strongmen and she had been forced to work as a maid in Calcutta.
I wasn‘t used to working as a servant, and every day I cried. I asked Govinda
[Krishna], ―What have I done to deserve this?‖ How can I describe to anyone
how great my pain was? After three years Krishna appeared to me in a dream Rahim 113
and said that I should come here. That was 1955. I‘ve been here forty years
now ‘.(AK 51)
Kanaklatha‘s day in Vrindavan, as she tells Dalrymple, began at four thirty every morning. Spending an hour in prayer, she would go to perform ablution at the river ghats.
From six until ten she chanted the mantras at the ashram and then she would go to beg in the bazaars. She shared mean lodgings with her ninety five year old mother. The narrative is structured so that Dalrymple‘s dialogue with the widow prompts a request from her that he should accompany her to see her image of Krishna. The description here again draws a contrast between ‗the brightly lit temples‘ and shrines and the interior of the house which is a
‗cramped, dark, airless room‘. Here lay Kanaklatha‘s bed-ridden mother. Dalrymple describes the old woman as ―shaven-headed and smeared with ash like her daughter, but she was toothless and shrunken, lying curled up like an embryo on a thin cotton sheet‖ (AK 53).
The mother‘s voice is also heard in the narrative when she says ―It is all fate. When we were young we never imagined this would be our end…….Only Govinda knows our pain and misery……..no one else could understand‖ (AK 53).
Kanaklatha tells Dalrymple ―after living though so much pain and misery, I wonder whether sati would not have been the better option‖ (AK 53).
Through the first person narrative voice, Dalrymple includes the perspective of the widows themselves. It reinforces Dalrymple‘s representation of the widows as one of the most destitute and exploited segments of society. Another point of view that highlights this reality is introduced into the narrative as the voice of Kanaklatha‘s landlord, a Brahmin priest named Pundit Shukla. Through his views, Dalrymple comments on the corruption underlying the ostensibly charitable impulse of the wealthy Delhi businessmen to set up widows‘ ashrams in Vrindavan. As he informs Dalrymple, it was done primarily to launder their black money; against their donations the business magnets would ―receive receipts Rahim 114 stating they had given much larger amounts which would be written off against tax. So the widows were just a means to a financial end‖ (AK 55).
Dalrymple reports on the donors, in their thousands, whose names were inscribed on marble plaques put up on the walls, floors and ceilings of the ashram he visits. The plaques promised that for the sum of Rs. 2000 ―the widows would sing bhajans for the donors for the next seven generations‖ (AK 55). According to Dalrymple, a large number of donors were
British Hindus so that ―next to plaques recording donations from Agra, Varansai and Calcutta were a number from rather less exotic centres of Hindu culture such as Southall, Northolt and Leicester‖ (AK 55). Here he refers to the large and very wealthy diasporic community from the subcontinent in the United Kingdom.
Dalrymple describes the appalling conditions as his eye takes in the two vast halls of the ashram. He estimates that there are more than a thousand widows congregated there.
Most of them were in their fifties and sixties but there were several who were
much older leaning against the walls or prostrate on the ground. The windows
were shuttered, two naked bulbs provided the only light in the centre of the
room, leaving the edge in a deep, Dickensian darkness. The whole
establishment stank of urine and dirty linen‖ (AK 57).
The close atmosphere inside the hall is marked by the alliterative force of the phrase
‗deep, Dickensian darkness‘. The image also reinforces the perennial gloom in the widows‘ lives as a consequence of their demeaned status and the fact that they literally exist in a marginalised state on the edge of society. Dalrymple suggests that because their individuality is totally negated, they seem to live vicariously through Krishna, the god who is central to their existence as the chanting of his name is a raison d‘etre. He remarks on the foul smelling and unhygienic conditions inside the hall where the widows spend most of their day. They are made to work in four hour shifts, supervised by the ashram managers Rahim 115 who walk up and down with a stick ensuring that no one falls out of line. As Kanaklatha tells
Dalrymple—―we try to remember what we are chanting…but mostly we carry on so that we can eat. When we fall ill and cannot chant, the ashram doesn‘t help: we just go hungry‖(AK
52).
In this section of the narrative Dalrymple employs both visual and auditory imagery.
The cries of the older women are compared to ―high pitched shrieks of wounded birds,‖ ―the clashing cymbals‖, ―ringing of bells‖ and the cantor‘s chant of ―Hare Ram, Hare Krishna,
Hare Ram, Hare Krishna‖(AK 57), answered by two thousand women singing as one, conveys a cacophony that is disturbing. As the evening shadows fall, the end of the widows‘ shift is marked by a pair of Brahmin priests who enter the hall and begin to perform the arti. Dalrymple describes the seemingly choreographed ritual closely.
Taking a burning charcoal splint, they revolved the flame in front of the idol
of Krishna which stood at the centre of the room. As they did so the widows
let out an unearthly ululation: an eerie, high-pitched wailing noise. Bringing
their hands together in the gesture of supplication, they all bowed before the
idols as the priests closed the temple doors for the night. Then slowly the
women began to file outside. (AK 58)
The description marks the worship of Krishna as the central activity in the widows daily routine. Dalrymple remarks on the unnerving display of religious frenzy which is expressed in the shrill wailing of the women as they bow before Krishna and as their chanting reaches a crescendo.
Dalrymple‘s use of the ethnographic mode is well illustrated in his polyphonic representation of the tradition of eunuchry in the subcontinent. His detailed focus on the eunuchs is framed as part of the narrative in Chapter Six of City of Djinns. Dalrymple links it to the seventh section in the Chapter,in which he makes an intertextual reference to Rahim 116
Muraqqa-e-Delhi by Dargah Quli Khan. The book is regarded as an important account of the cultural history of the city during a specific period of the eighteenth century. As a Muslim nobleman from the Deccan, Quli Khan visited the city and stayed there for a period of four years from 1737 to 1741. According to Dalrymple, despite the fact that during this time
Delhi was subjected to a bloody massacre by the invading army of the Persian ruler, Nadir
Shah, the book represents it as a vibrant and ―bawdy city of joy, a place remarkable for its dancers and courtesans, its lively celebrations and orgiastic festivals‖ (CD 168). Dalrymple connects this promiscuous spirit of a past era to the bawdiness associated with [hijras] eunuchs in the subcontinent. The social and cultural context of their complex history and their current status in society is represented through various points of view.
The account itself begins with Dalrymple‘s first- person narration of his efforts to locate members of the eunuch community so that he interact with them personally and find out more about their lives. Having found out where they live, Dalrymple describes his arrival just before dawn at Turkman Gate situated in Old Delhi. Climbing up to the parapet of the gate he adopts the manner of a seasoned detective and lies in wait as the city begins to stir to life.
The image of a city waking up for the day is evoked in the phrases related to descriptive detail for example ―the sweepers raking the dirt‖, the call of the muezzin ―from the minaret of a nearby mosque‖ and the chai wallahs lighting ―their stoves to boil the first tea saucepan of the day‖ (CD 169). Dalrymple‘s wait extends to an hour and then finally just as the sun is rising he catches a glimpse of the sight which according to him, he had come to see. As the ―solitary bicycle rikshaw jolted out of the labyrinth of the Old City‖ (CD 169) he spots three figures of the eunuchs inside it. He describes them vividly:
They were clad in brightly coloured silks and muslins, flowing saris edged in
glittering gold brocade. They were heavily made up, with painted cheeks and Rahim 117
scarlet lipstick; each of their noses was pierced with a single diamond stud.
They were dressed for the nautch, dressed as a woman, yet they were not
women. Even at a distance of twenty yards I could see that their physiognomy
was very different from the delicate features of Indian girls. Their faces were
too strong, their arms were too thick, their shoulders were wrong. They
smoked. Physically, they resembled painted men, yet they were not men---the
figures in the rikshaw were all eunuchs (CD 169).
The elaborate description of their gaudy attire, heavy make up and jewellery which is associated with nautch girls is undercut by the use of irony. Dalrymple writes-- [they were]
―dressed as women, yet they were not women‖ (CD 169). The irony is reinforced in the last sentence of the excerpt when Dalrymple emphasizes that in their physiognomy they
―resembled painted men, yet they were not men‖ (CD 169). The repetition of two negative sentences- not women and not men reveals the ‗half-truths‘ of the eunuchs physical and social reality.
There is a break in the narrative as Dalrymple draws on a wider historical frame of reference and traces the position of eunuchs in ancient times. Accordingly he elaborates their status in both the Western and the Islamic context. (CD 172) In the Anglo-Saxon world they were popular as slaves, and as ‗passive sexual playthings‘ in the degenerate days of the later
Roman Empire; in the Muslim world their impotence made them perfect as servants and harem guards. They were also trusted with positions of high office such as those of governors, courtiers and generals. The great mosque in Mecca was guarded by eunuchs. ―In the subcontinent during the Mughal period they were prominent as officials and as singers, dancers and conjurors as reported by Dargah Quli Khan- who mentions that Taqi an eunuch was close to the Emperor and had access to his Majesty‘s private apartments‖ (CD 172). Rahim 118
Dalrymple explains that in the Hindu tradition, Hijras (eunuchs) were considered to be even lower than Untouchables and castration was seen as a degrading punishment‖ (CD
171). As such to be a eunuch was considered a curse- ―no one was allowed to accept alms from them, no one was allowed to eat food cooked by them and they were not allowed to be part of any sacrifice‖ (CD 171). Inspite of the disparate traditions of the Hindus and
Muslims, Dalrymple is intrigued by the fact that eunuchs seem to have died out everywhere except in India and Pakistan where they are estimated to be well over a million.
Modern Indian eunuchs dress as women and arrive uninvited at weddings and
birth celebrations. They dance and sing and make bawdy jokes. From the poor
they extract money in payment for the good luck and fecundity that their
blessings are supposed to impart. From the rich they take larger sums by
threatening to strip naked unless paid to leave; terrified middle-class party-
givers will give them anything as long as they go quickly. They are volatile,
vulgar and can sometimes be violent. (CD 170)
The representation highlights the paradoxical aspects of the eunuchs‘ social status.
Their blessing is considered to be especially auspicious at the most important of celebrations yet they can be exceedingly coarse and are also a source of embarrassment. Dalrymple uses alliterative language to stress shades of behaviour---volatile, vulgar, violent—which the eunuchs are identified with.
Dalrymple‘s curiosity about the eunuchs leads him to make several attempts to talk to them. He is rebuffed each time. Either they slam the door in his face or answer with
―graphic expletives‖(CD 170). He realizes that as a community, the eunuchs are very secretive and so are not inclined to divulge any information about themselves. Finally, when
Dalrymple has all but given up, he chances upon Zakir, a local jeweller who had been observing his futile attempts to make contact with them. As a resident of the locality Zakir Rahim 119 had known all the local eunuchs since childhood and as a jeweler he still served them as clients. He volunteers to help Dalrymple and the following morning they make their way through the narrow gullies of the Old City to the old Mughal haveli where the eunuchs live.
At this point in the narrative, Dalrymple shifts his ethnographic focus to another setting, the neighbourhood and more specifically the house where the eunuchs live. This allows him to represent them as informants who are in their own familiar environment and who interact with him on their own terms. A polyphonic effect is also created with the introduction into the narrative of the voices and perspectives of the eunuchs themselves.
Dalrymple locates a significant part of the narrative in the physical setting of the eunuchs‘ home. Zakir and Dalrymple are led inside by a young eunuch into ―a small courtyard. Under a wooden veranda lay a spread of carpets and divans. Sprawled over them were two more eunuchs‖(CD 174) They were putting on makeup and combing their hair.
Dalrymple notices two ―effeminate-looking‖ men sitting nearby and a baby lying in a cradle(CD 174). He reports that the group greet Zakir warmly but frown at him. The dialogue is constructed as follows:
‗Who‘s the gora [white]?‘ asked one.
‗This is my friend Mr William,‘ said Zakir. He‘s a writer.‘
‗Why have you brought him here?‘
‗He would like to meet you all.‘
‗You know we can‘t talk to any outsiders,‘ replied the hijra, ‗unless Chaman
Guruji gives us permission.‘
‗And she won‘t,‘ said the other hijra, pouting defiantly at me. ‗She doesn‘t
like goras.‘
‗Where is Chaman?‘ asked Zakir.
‗Upstairs. She‘s sick.‘ (CD 174) Rahim 120
Climbing up the rickety wooden stairs they go up to the guru‘s room. Inside, as
Dalrymple describes it, is a world which is in sharp contrast to the interior of the old Mughal haveli they were introduced to downstairs:
We were confronted by a pink boudoir that could have been the dressing room
of a 1950s Hollywood film star. Mirror-glass tiles covered the end walls and
the ceiling; pink plastic carnations peeped out of brass vases; cut-out pictures
of actors and actresses were pasted into a frieze over a glass bookcase filled
with Hindi videos. The pink chintz curtains matched the pink chintz
bedspread; underneath it, prostrate yet fully dressed in a woman‘s blouse and
man‘s dhoti, sprawled the figure of Chaman, the guru of the household.
Chaman‘s fingernails were brightly painted and her hair was long and
straggly; she had huge sagging breasts. Yet her face with its heavy jowls,
hangover eyes and early-morning stubble was entirely that of a man. As we
entered the bloated face nodded us a silent greeting. (CD 174)
The vivid description of the gaudily decorated room is conveyed through the use of colour imagery highlighting the girlishly pink interior of the ‗boudoir.‘ Dalrymple‘s use of the analogy of a 1950‘s film star‘s dressing room conveys a distinctively feminine and flashy lifestyle. Chaman guru‘s attire – ―woman‘s blouse‖ and ―man‘s dhoti‖ (CD 174) directs attention to the almost grotesque incongruity reflected in the eunuch‘s personal appearance.
Dalrymple represents this through the use of descriptive detail associated with a woman--- the ―painted fingernails‖ and the ―huge sagging breasts‖ (CD 174). This is off-set by the very masculine ―early-morning stubble‖ and ―bloated face‖ (CD 174); the description -neither completely female, nor completely male, stamps her identity as a eunuch.
Dalrymple constructs the scene so that the old guru is the central character and her point of view is highlighted. In his role of observer and listener, he notices that the eunuch Rahim 121 seems to be in pain as she complains about her various ailments to Zakir. She laments the fact that perhaps, because she is now old and dying, her little chelas (disciples) are leaving her and remarks sadly, ―I had seven, now only three are left to look after their old mother.
Remember Maya? She went off last month and married a boy from Pakistan. Promised she would come and see me, but you know what these little chelas are like…‖(CD 174).
Dalrymple‘s reporting of the dialogue with the eunuchs is significant in conveying information about their individual reality and their mode of life in the community and their social status. The guru finally seems to notice Dalrymple and asks about him
‗Who‘s your gora, Zakir?‘
‗This is my friend, Mr William.‘
I smiled. Chaman frowned.
‗Is he your boyfriend?‘
‗No,‘ said Zakir. ‗He‘s married. To a girl.‘
Chaman wrinkled up her nose in disgust.
‗He has brought you a present, Chamanji,‘ continued Zakir. (CD 176)
Dalrymple takes out a silver ta‟wiz which Zakir had advised him to gift to the guru.
Her fat hand snatched it from him:
‗Who gave you this?‘ asked Chaman.
‗Pir Hassan Naqshbandi,‘ I said.
‗Naqshbandi, eh?‘
Chaman bit the corner of the ta‟wiz. This seemed to satisfy her as to its
authenticity.
‗It will make you well again,‘ I said hopefully.
‗Nothing will make me well again.‘ The old eunuch fixed me with a sharp eye.
‗Are you American? From the land of Hollywood?‘ Rahim 122
‗No. I‘m British‘.
‗From London?‘
‗From Scotland.‘
‗You know Sean Connery? I read in a magazine that he was from Scotland.‘
‗You‘re right. He is.‘
‗In the old times we hijras used to be like your zero zero seven. We were
called khawaja saras, not hijras. We used to live in the king‘s house. In those
days we never danced. Our job was to listen and tell things to the king. We
were just like your Sean Connery‘(CD 176).
The cultural significance of each utterance- Dalrymple‘s as the ethnographer and those of his individual subjects is represented by Dalrymple in the dialogue, from the point of view of both a shifting individual and social perspective.
Dalrymple‘s silver Sufi charm and the reference to Sean Connery and zero zero seven, mark a ―breakthrough with Chaman‖ (CD 177). For the next two months Dalrymple is a regular visitor to the eunuch household in his attempt to learn more about their ways.
Arriving early before they leave on their rounds- ‗to go on tolly‘ as they put it-he interacts with them, their choices and get ready for their daily routine.
In this section of the narrative Dalrymple employs first person narration so that the individual stories of the three chelas- are heard through their own voices. As Dalrymple remarks about them- ―Razia, Panna and Vimla were all very different- in their backgrounds, their characters and their looks‖ (CD 177).
Each of the three eunuchs is prompted by Dalrymple to narrate why and how they become hijras and how they came from other places to live in Delhi with Chaman Guru. All these stories are different and extraordinary and add to the polyphony in the narrative as
Dalrymple makes them tell their own stories through the first- person narrative voice. This is Rahim 123 similar to the formal technique used more extensively by Dalrymple in Nine Lives, his travel book written sixteen years after City of Djinns.
After getting to know them well and studying them closely Dalrymple is in a position to record that the eunuchs live within a highly structured system. Each household of eunuchs is constrained to follow the orders of the guru who is considered the head of the family. She initiates the chelas into the ways of the gurus and guides them within the household and also outside. ―Each household has a well defined parish where its members are allowed to operate. Violations ---poaching in another household‘s area--- is referred to a special council of eunuchs from all over India and Pakistan which meets once a year‖(CD
181). Dalrymple also finds out that each eunuch household relies on a ―network of informers—sweepers, dhobis, midwives---who report back the imminent births and marriages in their districts‖(CD 181). As a well structured system it runs smoothly. Dalrymple ends with an authorial comment which is critical in tone.
I was always struck by the eunuchs‘ lack of bitterness. Through no fault of
their own, through deformity or genetic accident, they found themselves
marginalized by Indian society, turned into something half-way between a
talisman and an object of ridicule. Yet in their own terms they seem fairly
content with their lives, and they do not rail against the fate that has left them
with this role.(183)
‗The Singer of Epics‘ a story from Dalrymple‘s most recent travel book Nine
Lives published in 2009, provides a polyphonic representation of the life and art of
Mohan Bhopa, ―a bard and village shaman‖ (NL 79) from a nomadic tribe in the desert of
Rajasthan in northern India. Dalrymple employs the ethnographic mode to contextualize both the cultural setting and his own study of the oral tradition as it is practiced The story which effectively combines cultural history, literary history and personal history is Rahim 124 divided into different inter-related segments. A large part of the narrative is rhetorically constructed on intertextual references to the scholarly research on the representational and performative aspects of the oral tradition across cultures. The intertexuality is most prominent in the third section of the narrative. Dalrymple draws on the work of Milman Parry, a Harvard classicist from the 1930‘s. He had contended that
Homer‘s epics, regarded as the definitive texts in the European literary tradition, must have derived from the original oral poetic form popularized by story tellers in ancient times. Parry‘s research had led him to Europe, to what was then Yugoslavia, where it seemed the oral tradition was still flourishing. By the time he returned to
America in 1935, he had successfully completed the recordings of 12,500 heroic poems, songs and epics. This effort had generated a new approach to the understanding of the Greek classics. However as Dalrymple‘s own enquiry reveals, the strong oral tradition in the Balkans had shown a steady decline over the past decades and had all but lapsed as a ―living institution,‖ (NL 90) its end hastened by the civil war that devastated the region in the 1990‘s.
The intertextual narrative is expanded by Dalrymple to include historical detail relating to the literary sources of the oral tradition in the subcontinent. This is most famously represented in the two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. According to the historian Romila Thapar in A History of India 1, the Mahabharata as it survives today, with various interpolations, is the longest single poem in the world. ―Originally it may have been the description of a local feud, but it caught the imagination of the bards and in its final form we find all the tribes and peoples of the subcontinent participating in the battle‖ (32).
Dalrymple refers to the Mahabharata, as ―India‘s equivalent of the Iliad the Odyssey and the Bible all rolled into one‖ (NL 88). As he reiterates, ―the story of the Mahabharata is still the common property of every Hindu in the subcontinent, from the highly educated Rahim 125
Brahmin scientist down to the untouchable roadside shoe-black‖(CD 321). He makes the point that though it is the most famous of the Indian epics even today, historical research confirms that it is only one of several, that form part of the cultural archive of the subcontinent. He locates the popularity of the great Muslim epic, the Dastan-i Amir
Hamza , during the Mughal period in the highly developed art of the dastan-goee – storytelling performances which over long periods of time, were embellished by a host of Indian myths and legend. In its fullest form, the tale grew to contain an astounding number of stories which would take several weeks of all night story-telling to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was finally published in 1917, filled no fewer than forty six volumes, averaging a thousand pages each. Accordingly, the narrative and its presentation saw a constant improvisation
The factual underpinning of the narrative was covered in layers of subplots
and a cast of dragons, giants and sorcerers. At fairs and festivals, on the steps
of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or in the Qissa Khawani, the Storyteller‘s
Street in Peshawar, the professional storytellers or dastan—gos, would
perform night-long recitations from memory.(NL 91)
Dalrymple emphasizes the fantastical aspects of the dastan, which made it more dramatic and the spirited response the recitation drew from eager audiences across the subcontinent. Both as a popular art form for the masses and as a more exclusive cultural performance for the sophisticated and erudite nobility, it became an integral part of the cultural milieu. There was official patronage extended by the Mughal elite.
Many amongst them, including the famed Urdu poet, Ghalib— would commission private performances of the epic for receptive audiences.
Within the intertextual frame of the narrative, Dalrymple refers to the ancient literary tradition of European epics such as the Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Rahim 126
Song of Roland which, in his view, now retained academic interest only and as such were confined to the domain of literature classes. The central question which intrigues
Dalrymple is how the oral epics in Rajasthan had survived over the centuries through the performances of storytellers who were simple, illiterate villagers---- at best shepherds or cowherds. How was it that they could recite the thousands of (slokas) stanzas, of the great epics from memory and keep their audiences in thrall for many hours? The question is addressed through meticulous ethnographic research into the indigenous art form of the bhopas, the epic singers of Rajasthan .
In an analepsis, in the second section of the story, Dalrymple brings in autobiographical detail; his previous visit to the area twenty years ago had been inspired by the example of his literary hero, the travel writer, Bruce Chatwin, who had
―written his wonderful study of restlessness, The Songlines” (NL 85) in a remote desert fortress in the province. Following his example, Dalrymple had travelled to the Thar desert to live in a fort outside Jodhpur to work on his new book. As a guest at Rohet
Garh the ancestral home of a thakur -- a Rajasthani landowner-- he is introduced to the cultural traditions of a conservative feudal society that had surprisingly defied the onslaught of modernity. In a strong authorial comment, Dalrymple ascribes this to the historical ‗absence of any form of colonial British intrusion‘ under the Raj. Large territories--- the state of Rajasthan amongst them---- had been autonomously controlled by India‘s princely rulers. Whereas this, in his view, meant the perpetuation of some primitive customs such as ritual widow burning, or suttee,-- occasional instances of which were cited in the state--- there were other aspects that testified to the continuation of an undiluted and richly varied indigenous cultural tradition.
Accordingly in this rural and feudal setting, Dalrymple discovers a distinctive cultural ambience, ―castes of nomadic musicians, miniaturists and muralists, jugglers and Rahim 127 acrobats, bards and mime artists were still practicing their skills----- every prominent family of the land- holding Rajput caste inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians and praise singers, who celebrated the family‘s lineage and deeds‖(NL 87).
It is here that he had first come across the bhopas and the tradition of oral performance. The narration of the encounter which had taken place twenty years ago, serves to contextualize the central characters as part of an unbroken cultural tradition. in the area. Dalrymple introduces Mohan bhopa and his wife as two of the last hereditary singers of a six hundred years old Rajasthani medieval poem The Epic of
Pabuji, the eponymous tale of the principal deity of the desert. He refers to an article he had written on Mohan for the New Yorker in 2004, soon after he had first seen him perform, and mentions his subsequent efforts to promote him at literary festivals and conferences. Now he travels to Mohan‘s native village of Pabusar to attend a performance of the epic. There is graphic ethnographic description, highlighting the different aspects of the storytelling , such as in the detail of the visual imagery on ―the phad , a long narrative painting made on a strip of cloth, which serves as both an illustration of the highlights of the story and a portable temple‖ (NL 79) As elaborated by Dalrymple, the performance goes beyond entertainment to become a sacred ritual invoking Pabuji as a living deity and asking for his protection against ill fortune. He uses the analogy of a ―Shekhawati fresco transferred to textile: a great vibrant, chaotic seventeen-foot-long panorama of medieval Rajasthan‖ (NL 83) to describe the profusion of images of creatural life and the numerous men, women and gods who feature as characters in the story. ―The phad has a teeming energy that seems somehow to tap into the larger- than- life power of the epic‘s mythology to produce wonderfully bold and powerful narrative images‖ (NL 83). Rahim 128
In his representation, Dalrymple emphasizes that the performance itself offers a rich repertoire of scenic devices such as dance, drumming and singing to the accompaniment of music on the ravanhatta –a stringed instrument played by the bhopa himself. Sitting on a durree amongst the rustic audience, he notes the contrast between the strong participatory spirit of the villagers and the more restrained response of the urban middle class audience. ―Because of their familiarity with the text, many joined in the singing. They joked and laughed spontaneously and frequently recited the final line of each stanza. Sometimes a Rs.10 note would be offered to Mohan usually accompanied with a request for a song or bhajan‖ (NL 106).
In keeping with an important theme of the book--- the challenges that confront age old religious practice and cultural tradition in the face of modernity--- the narrative also highlights the changes that performers of the epic have had to incorporate, keeping in view the expectations of their twenty first century audience. In this regard
Dalrymple refers to the work of the Cambridge academic John D. Smith. His doctoral research, in the 1970‘s, had been on the bhopas of Pabuji and their ancient art form.
Returning to Rajasthan twenty years later to make a documentary on the subject, Smith had realized that the reach of modern technology was seriously endangering the centuries old tradition of epic performance in the area. The broadcasting of mainstream Sanskrit epics on cable television and the glut of DVD‘s in the market had begun, in his view, to have a ‗standardizing effect on Hindu mythology‘. This would inevitably ―weaken local variants such as the Pabuji story‖(NL 107). He had also noted that a few bhopas had persisted with the performance ―in a bastardised form‖ (NL 107) adapting it to the demands of ‗exotic‘ entertainment in the hotels of Rajasthan and the larger cities such as in Delhi and Bombay. Rahim 129
Dalrymple highlights the instability of cultural trends by bringing in an example from recent cultural history. He refers to the serialized version of the Mahabharata telecast on the national Indian channel Doordarshan, in the early 1990‘s, which had recorded an estimated viewership of 600 million people. Such was the impact of the televised version that the busy lives of hundreds of people across the subcontinent would come to a halt as audiences in villages and cities settled in front of the television wherever it was available. ―In Rajasthan people responded by offering arti and burning incense sticks in front of their television sets just as they did to the bhopa‟s phad, the portable temple of the phad giving way to the temporary shrine of the telly‖
(NL 107).
This authorial comment, punctuated with the use of the colloquial form in ‗telly‘, reinforces the cultural adaptation to an ‗ invented tradition‘, the cultural appropriation of a sacred text and a revered art form by an ubiquitous technology that had worked swiftly to transform social and cultural norms. The changed perceptions of the modern audience had to be taken into consideration by the performers. Dalrymple asks Mohan what could the bhopas do to save their audiences? Mohan responds by acknowledging that they had adapted their repertoire in keeping with current trends ----
―‗for the younger generation I try to put in the occasional joke when people are getting sleepy. Nothing Bollywoodish or vulgar, just enough to grab attention in between scenes‖(NL
108).
‗Benazir Bhutto: Mills and Boons in Karachi‘ Dalrymple‘s 1994 profile is provocatively titled to set the tone for a dramatized representation of one of the most famous and controversial politicians in the recent history of the subcontinent. Divided into seven sections the polyphonic form of the narrative is an interesting mix of political biography, journalistic reportage and ethnographic description. The authorial tenor varies from the Rahim 130 mocking, to the scathing to the analytical as Dalrymple‘s encounter with Benazir is constructed partly through the dialogic frame of an interview. In addition to her own speech, he also draws on the voices of other members of the Bhutto clan, ----her mother, her younger brother and her sister in law. The juxtapositions of different articulations through these ‗sources‘ serves to emphasize the contradictions in her personality against the backdrop of a complex political culture.
As is the case with much of Dalrymple‘s narrative structure, the introductory paragraphs of the essay are expository and focus on the physical setting of the locale. The opening particularly is a dramatic one as he describes Islamabad: ―Pakistan‘s regimented concrete capital, home to Benazir Bhutto and ten thousand of her bureacrats-- is to Pakistan what EuroDisney is to France: it is in the country but not of it‖ (AK 346). The disconnect between the capital city and the rest of the country is conveyed through the image of
American pop culture transplanted in an alien European environment. Dalrymple employs third person narration as he reports on his drive through the image of the deserted avenues of the city in the early hours of the morning. This serves to show up by contrast what he describes as – ―The grey megalomaniac mass of the President‘s Palace…. and the fortified compound of the Prime Minister‘s Residence‖ (AK 346). He also comments on the ubiquitous policemen on guard; armed with assault rifles they reinforce the atmosphere of heightened security around the official section of the city where he is summoned for the interview with Benazir Bhutto.
Dalrymple begins the second section with a graphic description of the architectural features and the interior of Benazir Bhutto‘s official residence. The narrative also includes biographical detail and traces her political career in the context of Pakistan‘s political history from the decades of the seventies and the eighties. He also analyses Western perceptions of
Benazir Bhutto. After what he describes as the ―grey architectural brutalism‖ (AK 347) of the Rahim 131 cityscape, the Prime Minister‘s residence comes as a surprise for Dalrymple as he is escorted there by a pompous official
a giddy pseudo-Mexican ranch-house with white walls and a red-tile roof.
There was nothing remotely Pakistani or Islamic or Asian about the building,
which, was ‗PM‘s own design‘. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two
or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have
looked quite at home on the railings around Hyde Park hung below garishly
gilded cornices; potted ferns sprouted from kitsch neo-Egyptian bowls. The
place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly
flamboyant Latin American industrialist; but in fact it could have been
anywhere. Had you seen it on one of those TV game-shows where you are
shown a particular house and then have to guess who lives in it, you might
have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone; except, perhaps, to the Prime
Minister of an impoverished Islamic republic. (AK 347)
Dalrymple‘s representation here is overblown satirically, to the extent of being a caricature. It is constructed through a piling up of images that evoke a strange hybrid of borrowings from various cultures. The place names bring together different global locations and disparate architectural and decorative features to emphasize an ill designed and garishly ornate mansion which appears totally incongruous in the capital city of the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan. It connects with Dalrymple‘s earlier example of Disneyland bringing
American culture to France in a transplanted form. The description is also significantly placed as a preamble for the more intensive focus on Benazir Bhutto‘s personal life, her academic career and her entry into mainstream politics after her father‘s death. Dalrymple again emphasizes that there was little evidence that Benazir‘s roots were in early education was in a convent school run by Irish nuns. Later she was sent abroad for higher studies where Rahim 132 she earned degrees from Harvard and Oxford. It is chiefly because of her having spent a long period in the West that the media in England and America seem to idolize her as someone whom they can identify with- ‗she is one of us‘. To top off these assets her image is enhanced because of her other assets ‗she‘s good looking, she‘s photogenic, she‘s brave, she‘s a democrat and she‘s a woman‘. Here Dalrymple makes a subtle comment on the powerful role the media has traditionally exercised in projecting a particular image, one that would appeal to Western sensibilities, which in a politician‘s case would work to their advantage. He draws attention to the fact that though Benazir is fluent in English, her language skills in Urdu and her mother tongue Sindhi are rudimentary.
She speaks like a conscientious foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically,
muddling her plurals and singulars, her genders and tenses. Her Sindhi, which
for generations has been the mother tongue of her family, is even worse: apart
from a few imperatives and a handful of greetings and platitudes, she is
completely at sea. Her opponents complain, not unfairly, that she is more
British than Pakistani, more Western than Eastern. (AK 348)
In an authorial comment Dalrymple adds his voice to those of her detractors who are critical of her Westernized manner. Dalrymple also draws on historical facts to contextualize
Benazir‘s political career, beginning with her struggle against the military dictatorship of
General Zia-ul-Haq after his coup d‘état against her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and had been responsible for his hanging. There is a brief tracing of her father‘s negative role in the civil war between West and East Pakistan which subsequently led to the creation of
Bangladesh. Benazir Bhutto‘s husband Asif Ali Zardari is also presented in a negative light as a one time playboy who was tagged with the label ‗Mr. 10 Per Cent‘ because of his reputation for using his wife‘s name to extort money and for amassing wealth through illegal means. Rahim 133
Dalrymple‘s representation is markedly individualized in the third section. He focuses on Benazir‘s appearance and her manner as she approaches the garden where the interview is to take place is described as ―deliberately measured and regal‖ (AK 350), a far cry from her frenzied campaigning which is ―all hectoring and raucous motorcades‖ (AK:350). He adds detail relating to her appearance face is heavily made up and her signature ‗white gauze dupatta‘ tops a hairdo which Dalrymple describes as ―a sort of baroque beehive‖ (AK 351).
At this point Dalrymple constructs the narrative through dialogue so that the actual interview is reported in detail. Dalrymple alternates the third person authorial narrative with the question/answer mode. His very first question to Bhutto is whether she regarded herself as an Anglophile after having studied at Oxford.
‗So you enjoyed your time at Oxford?‘
‗I suppose in retrospect it was a happy time, because it was free from
responsibility and so it had an air of innocence about it…‘
‗Innoc…?‘
‗…It was free from all the Machiavellian twists that life can take, free of
deception. I think at university one doesn‘t have the deception or the betrayal
which comes about in every career…‘
‗You think…?‘
‗…Moreover for me it was a time of security because my father was alive, and
he was the anchor in my life. I felt that there was no problem that would be too
great for him to solve so I was not worried ever, or too anxious, because I
always felt I always had my father to fall back on‘
From the beginning of the interview it was clear that trying to halt Benazir in
mid-flow…(AK 351-352) Rahim 134
―Those who know her say that there have always been these two quite distinct Benazir
Bhuttos. The emotional socialite from the wealthy background is generally the Benazir remembered by her Oxford friends: a glitzy, good-looking Asian babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstadd,…‖(AK 354).
―This Benazir-known to her friends as ‗Bibi‘ or ‗Pinky‘- adores royal biographies and slushy romances (in her old Karachi bedroom I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills&Boons‖ (AK
354).
In his travel essay written in 1990, entitled ‗Caste Wars, Jodhpur—Rajasthan‘,
Dalrymple focuses on the rigidity of the caste system which is central to Hindu philosophy and as such regulates ―every detail of life in the traditional Indian village‖(AK 115) where eighty percent of the Indian population still lives. His visit to a small medical field centre near Jodhpur in the heart of the Rajasthani desert is also represented as an important learning experience for him. The centre had been destroyed in a recent arson attack because it offered medical services to the Harijans-- the Untouchables in the area. The locals belonging to the upper castes had resented this. Dalrymple uses dialogue to convey the situation on the ground as Dr.Tyagi, the field doctor who had also been beaten up by the attackers, shows him the wreckage of the medical equipment and the stock of medicines. He asks the doctor, ― ‗But I thought Untouchability was outlawed at independence.‘ ―Technically it was‖, replied Tyagi but do you know the saying “Dilli door ast”? The laws they pass in the Lok
Sabha [Indian Paliament] make little difference in these villages. Out here it will take much more than a change in the law to alleviate the lot of the Dalits—the oppressed castes‖ (AK
112).
Through this exchange Dalrymple makes a strong critical comment on the deeply entrenched social and cultural traditions that stem from orthodox Hindu belief in the caste system. The rigid social sanctions which are dictated by the religious culture in the rural Rahim 135 areas of the subcontinent are not affected by constitutional and legal reform. Dalrymple as ethnographer, also adopts a self-reflexive position in the narrative. He describes the people in the ambience of the desert village:
women carrying water, yellow saris billowing in the desert wind, and
tribesmen with muttonchop whiskers and mountainous turbans---it seems to
the foreign eye as if they are growing almost organically out of the dust, and
that what you are seeing is something good, and natural and
harmonious…But the foreign eye is easily misled, and it cannot read the
visual language of the villages.(AK 113)
For Dalrymple it is a strikingly picturesque sight. He becomes aware of his inability as a foreigner to perceive and interpret the indigenous cultural codes that are integral to community life in the village when Dr. Tyagi points out the overt signs of the ―caste apartheid‖(AK II4) which are stamped on the Indian landscape. As he tells Dalrymple,
―The stone village with the pukka houses belongs to Rajputs. The huts belong to the
Harijans. They are not allowed to live together, and if a Harijan wishes to come past the
Rajput houses he must remove his shoes‖(AK 114). Dr.Tyagi also tells him that the Harijans cannot draw water from the only well in the village; they have to wait for a person from the higher caste to come and give it to them. They cannot share the same utensils, nor can they sit together on the same charpoy or durree (AK 114). Caste was also signified through colour.
Among the men, the Brahmins were identified by their saffron turbans, the other men wore white. Dalrymple learns that even ―the way you trained your moustache, upward, downwards, or across---and the knot with which you tied your dhoti defined you even more closely, and could show even your subcaste‖ (AK 114). Blue was the colour of the upper caste women and was worn with heavy ear and nose rings. Yellow and mustard was worn by Rahim 136 the middle caste women. The Harijan women wore darker colours The Brahmin houses were painted blue and stood out from the rest of the dwellings.
The ethnographic description is constructed from the information that Dalrymple is provided by Dr.Tyagi. Through the device of using the authentic voice of a local informant
Dalrymple conveys the contrast between his own perceptions as an outsider and those of a person who comes from within the local culture. The imagery is effectively used to convey colour as a signifier of difference and discrimination. It also serves to dramatize the setting of the desert landscape; the bright colours are distinctive and stand out against the uniform backdrop of the sand dunes
The main emphasis in the next narrative segment of the essay is on the way social and political change is resisted by the upper castes in Indian society Dalrymple highlights the protests and self-immolations that marked the violent reaction to the Government‘s announcement that half the jobs in the government would be reserved for the lower castes.
He includes the voices and the perspectives of the students from the Brahmin and the
Kshatriya upper caste communities who vent their anger against the decision (AK 120). In a postscript to the essay Dalrymple adds an authorial comment when he observes that despite changes in official policy, in most parts of rural India ―the caste system remains firmly entrenched… the Dalits assertion of political power have both brought about a new awareness of caste‖(AK 121).
In keeping with his dialogic approach as ethnographer, Dalrymple highlights the growing culture of violence and corruption in Indian politics in his essay entitled ‗The Age of
Kali. Patna, 1997.‘ Another strand in the polyphonic narrative relates to the marked social hierarchy that divides Indian society on the basis of the caste system. The narrative is structured so that in the six interconnected sections Dalrymple interweaves different Rahim 137 perspectives with regard to the subject of ―violence, corruption and endemic caste-warfare‖
(AK 3) that have come to dominate most aspects of life in the northern Indian state of Bihar.
In order to contextualize the issues in a socio-cultural framework, Dalrymple, for much of the introductory segment, draws on news briefs and reports from the Indian media, for instance he refers to a brief news item from the Indian Express about a revenge massacre in which two hundred armed Untouchables had killed forty-two upper caste men in a Bihari village. Another newspaper story, Dalrymple alludes to, narrates the high handedness of a local Member of Parliament who had ordered his henchmen to beat up a retired government official aboard a train. The old man had merely protested at being forced to vacate his seat for the MP and his security guards when they had boarded the railway carriage. At the next station the old man had been dragged out of the carriage, beaten some more and left bleeding on the platform. Dalrymple refers to the tragic incident as a casual occurence ―a tale of everyday life on the Bihar railways‖ (AK 3).
A few sentences later he comments on yet another horrific story- he terms it ―a tale of life in the Bihar civil service‖(AK 4) These authorial observations are laden with irony and convey the complete institutional breakdown and the violent atmosphere that is endemic in the area. The chilling details relate to the brutal murder in October 1994 of a newly appointed District Magistrate in Gopalganj, a remote district in Bihar. The ―energetic and idealistic‖ (AK 4) young officer named G. Krishnaik had not been deterred by the fact that his predecessors had been eliminated by a bomb planted in his office. Dalrymple refers to a clip he had seen of Krishnaih‘s interview on Doordarshan, the Indian state television network, in which the young officer had ―announced a series of measures-----to control crime, generate employment and uplift the Untouchables of Gopalganj‖ (AK 4). Tragically, only two months later, the young man met a violent end at the hands of a local MP Anand
Singh, a man who had a criminal record with nearly ―seventy charges against him ranging Rahim 138 from murder and criminal conspiracy to kidnapping and the possession of unlicensed arms‖
(AK 5). Though Anand Mohan Singh was sent to jail for ordering a crowd to lynch and murder a civil servant, he nevertheless contested the 1996 general election and succeeded in retaining his seat.
Dalrymple‘s technique of drawing on authentic media sources and factual detail to document a grim social reality makes for an effective exposition. The reader is given background information and is prepared for a more intensive inquiry as Dalrymple travels to
Bihar to get a first hand account of the situation. In Patna, the capital city of the province, he hires a car and heads for the village of Barra, the specific location where the massacre had taken place. The road is described by Dalrymple as being the worst he had ever travelled on during his many years in India. As he points out in a chilling description:
--although it was one of the principal highways of Bihar, potholes the size of
bomb craters pitted its surface. On either side, the rusting skeletons of dead
trucks lined the route like a succession of momenti mori. As we drove, I had
the feeling that I was leaving the twentieth century far behind. First the
electricity pylons came to a halt. Then cars and trucks disappeared from the
road; even the rusting skeletons vanished. In the villages, wells began to
replace such modern luxuries as hand-pumps. We passed the odd pony trap,
and four men carrying a palanquin. The men flagged us down and warned us
about highwaymen. They told us to be off the roads by dark. (AK 6)
In the graphic description Dalrymple invokes both the spatial and the temporal aspects of the bleak journey. He highlights the desolation of the route as the rutted highway seems to offer little, except the ominous threat of impending death. Dalrymple‘s use of figurative language is particularly striking as he presents the chilling image of the ‗rusting skeletons of dead trucks‘ which are compared to ‗memento mori‟ (objects intended to Rahim 139 remind one of the inevitability of death). The simile is aptly used, keeping in view the context of the cycle senseless violence and carnage which seems to cast a blight on the surroundings. He admits to a surreal feeling of travelling backwards in time, far out into a remote and ancient landscape, as all modern trappings such as electricity, vehicular traffic and hand pumps seem to have vanished en route. The mention of the ‗ pony trap‘ and the
‗palanquin‘ conveys a strong sense of journeying into a primitive and bygone era. The pronounced warning of the passers-by about highwaymen reinforces the sense of a lurking danger.
In describing the visit to the village itself, Dalrymple introduces first- person narration through the voice of Ashok, one of the two male survivors of the massacre who takes on the role of informer. He accompanies Dalrymple to the scene of the carnage and shows him the houses which the widows of the murdered men and he had constructed with the money they had been paid as compensation by the government.
Dalrymple is unnerved to see the architecture of the houses as is revealed by the following description:
They were miniature castles: tall and square, with no windows except for thin
arrow-slits on the third storey. Unwittingly, they were almost exact miniature
copies of the Peel Towers erected across the Scottish borders in the sixteenth
century, when central authority had completely broken down. There could be
no better illustration of Bihar‘s regression into the Dark Ages. (AK 8)
Here Dalrymple draws on an historical reference from his native Scotland to invoke an anarchical period dating back to the sixteenth century. Ashok informs him that the houses had been designed to protect themselves against attack. They still felt vulnerable because the
Bihar Government was headed by Laloo Prasad Yadav, a lower caste politician who would do nothing to stop the violence. Ashok speaks bitterly as he tells Dalrymple---―we are left at Rahim 140 the mercy of God. This is the Kali Yug,[ the age of Kali], the epoch of disintegration. The lower castes are rising up. Everything is falling apart‖ (AK 8).
The Chief Minister of India‘s most corrupt and backward state becoming the custodian of the crumbling Nehruvian of a secular, democratic India (AK 13).Dalrymple describes Laloo as ―a small, broad-shouldered, thick-set man; his prematurely grey hair was cut in a boyish early-Beatles mop‖(AK 13). He had reserved the whole of the first row of seats for himself; his aides, MPs and bodyguards filled up the next seven tiers. They were all big, slightly sinister-looking men. All, including Laloo himself, were dressed in white homespun cotton pyjamas, once the symbol of Mahatma Gandhi‘s identification with the poor, but now (when synthetic fibres are far cheaper) the unmistakable insignia of political power (AK 13).
The representation of the Chief Minister is through the first person narrative voice.
‗My father was a small farmer,‘ he began, scratching his balls with the
unembarrassed thoroughness of a true yokel. ‗He looked after the cows and
buffaloes belonging to the upper caste; he also had three acres of his own land.
He was illiterate, wore a dhoti and never possessed a pair of shoes in his life.
My mother sold curds and milk. She was also illiterate. We lived in a mud-
thatch cottage with no windows or doors; it was open to the dog, the cat and
the jackal.We lived in a mud thatch cottage with no windows or doors…
I was one of seven. I had five brothers and one sister. There was never enough
money. (AK 15)
This representation is constructed so that it locates Laloo in a world which is the opposite of the Anglicised, rich, jet-set world of Benazir Bhutto or Rajeev Gandhi.It emphasizes Dalrymple‘s main focus in the essay on the increasing political power that the lower caste, ill-educated villagers such as Laloo wield in Indian politics. Their ambitions to Rahim 141 displace an age old social and cultural framework with another world view is revealed through the dialogue:
But how can you hope to destroy a system that has been around for three and a half thousand years? I asked. ‗Isn‘t caste the social foundation of Hinduism?‘ (AK 15)
―It is an evil system,‖ said Laloo simply. It must go.‖
Dalrymple gives factual detail to highlight Laloo‘s corruption and nepotism, the patronage networks that are an integral part of politics in the subcontinent.The scale of the corruption is presented in statistical detail
The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation gradually closed in on Laloo
during the spring of 1997, as the full scale of the amount embezzled by his
administration in the ‗Fodder Scam‘ became clear: around a thousand crore
rupees, or 180 million pounds- a large sum anywhere, but a truly colossal
figure by Bihari standards. (AK 24)
Finally in May 1997 Laloo was arrested, but as Dalrymple highlights, ―he pulled off a putsch of characteristic audacity: he resigned as Chief Minister of Bihar, only to hand over the reigns of government to his illiterate wife, Rabri Devi. (AK 24)
‗On the Frontier‘ is the title which Dalrymple gives to his travel piece that highlights the Kalashinkov culture and drug culture in the North- West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
The title also brings to mind the British writer Geoffrey Moorhouse‘s travel book To the
Frontier published in 1984.
The opening paragraph dramatizes the main focus in the essay---
Violence is to the North-West Frontier what religion is to the Vatican. It is a
raison d‟etre, a way of life, an obsession, a philosophy. Bandoliers hang over
the people‘s shoulders, grenades are tucked in to their pockets. Status symbols Rahim 142
here are not Mercedes or Saville Row suits; in Peshawar you know you‘ve
arrived when you can drive to work in a captured Russian T-72 tank. (AK 313)
Dalrymple draws on a powerful symbolic association in the image of the Vatican, and its identification with Catholicism, to emphasize that in the case of the North- West
Frontier in Pakistan, it is a place which is synonymous with violence. He locates this in the widespread custom amongst the people in the region to own and use all manner of weaponry.
Moreover as he reiterates, it is a custom which is integral to Pathan tribal culture and flaunted as a mark of social status and a sign of power and invincibility, just as flashy cars and custom designed suits are associated with a wealthy lifestyle in the West.
The narrative employs an expository tone as Dalrymple dwells at length on the physical setting. In his view, the ―harshness of the landscape…hard, barren, dry country, drained of colour, warmth and softness,‖(AK 313) is to a great extent responsible for stamping the Pathans with a coldness and hardness which is reflected not only in their proud demeanour but also in their intransigent attitude. He also ascribes it to their unique history, the fact that the Pathans have resisted all attempts at being conquered or ruled – ―they have seen off centuries of invaders – Persians, Arabs, Turks, Mughals, Sikhs, British,
Russians – and they retain the mixture of arrogance and suspicion that this history has produced in their character‖ (AK 314).
Many other travel writers have been intrigued by the Pathans. Geoffery Moorhouse in his account of his visit to the North West Frontier writes at length about the distinctive tribal culture that he comes across in Peshawar and beyond in the tribal belt which borders
Afghanistan. He elaborates on the Pakhtoonwali – the rigid code which governs the life of the
Pathans (222.) There are four elements in the code that binds the people of the region in a strong tribal allegiance and determines their interaction with outsiders. The first is the jirga a tribal council of elders. This carries legal sanction to regulate other aspects. The size of the Rahim 143 jirga depends on the size of the tribe, and as Moorhouse explains, the rulings of the jirga
―are based on a mixture of Islamic law and Pathan custom. Only a foolish hothead will defy decisions made by his tribal jirga, in which case he will be ostracized, fined or in extremity have his property burned down‖ (222).
The second element of Pakhtoonwali is termed as ‗melmastia‘ and it means hospitality. This aspect is of great significance generally in the Islamic world but more specifically in the culture of the Pathans and extends beyond accommodating a guest, serving him food and drink, to ―offering him your protection against anything that may threaten him; dying in his defense if need be‖(Moorhouse 223). Another element that is adhered to is
‗nanawatee‘ which requires that the hostility between individuals or tribes must cease and they must make peace with each other. It involves ‗supplication‘ by the defeated, invariably with the Koran in his hands… the victor in his turn, is obliged to be magnanimous when faced with such humility (Moorhouse 223).
The most powerful element in Pakhtoonwali and what Moorhouse regards as the most
―alien to the outsider‘s experience of human behaviour in modern times is ‗badal‟(223). He explains it as- ―revenge, either personal or communal and it is pursued regardless of any other consideration, and with no thought for the time needed to accomplish it, which has occasionally taken more than a generation. An old proverb has it that ‗The Pathan who took revenge after a hundred years, said he took it too quickly‖(223).
Moorhouse‘s detailed ethnographic description explains the stringencies of moral and social behavior that have to be strictly adhered to in Pathan culture. This reality is reinforced by the journalist, Trevor Fishlock who spent many years in the frontier as a correspondent for the Times. In his travel book, Cobra Road he writes: ―The Pathans … for their defiance of any form of government have been called truly free, but their existence is hardly free of Rahim 144 regulation and social sanction. They live by Pakhtoonwali, ―the way of the Pathan‖, a code unwritten but bred in the bone; and adherence to it is their defining stripe‖ (17).
The strict conformity with a distinct tribal law and custom means that the people of the Frontier- especially those who reside in the border areas between Pakistan and
Afghanistan- do not come under the control of the Pakistani government or its writ of law.
This constitutional provision, as Dalrymple points out, is a legacy of colonial rule. ―The
British were quite happy to let the Pathans act as a buffer zone on the edge of the empire‖(AK
314). The same arrangement is in place even today. There is an official ban on the entry of foreigners into the tribal belt because the Pakistani government cannot ensure their safety; however as Dalrymple finds out, with a little effort and care one could manage to quietly arrange being smuggled across the border.
In the second section of the narrative Dalrymple describes his visit to the shops in the
Arms bazaar of Darra Adam Khel. As the proprietor and shop assistant of ‗Khyber Military
Supplies, (Pvt) Ltd.‘ serve him green tea in ‗delicate porcelain bowls‘.(AK 315) Dalrymple takes in the strange interior of the shop and the assorted variety of armaments on display.
His description of the scene is a graphic one:
Lines of high explosive warheads sit in glass cupboards facing onto the street
as innocently as jars of humbugs in an English village store. The stacked
mortar shelves and the anti-tank ammunition are available over the counter for
cash, as if they were tins of Heinz baked beans. Nearby the belts of machine-
gun bullets are hung up like strings of onions. Outside, left lying around in the
streets like so much discarded gardening equipment, can be found heavy
machine-guns, rocket-launchers and field-guns. There is a fantastic, almost
surreal feel to the place: here we go round the Arms bazaar, half a pound of
tuppenny shells, five greened gasmasks sitting on a wall. (AK 314-315) Rahim 145
The scenic construction relates to a visual image which for Dalrymple-- and a western reader-- provides a familiar frame of reference, that of a small corner shop in a country village, where basic commodities are sold. The bizzare incongruity of the situation that he finds himself in as he surveys the wares offered for sale, is sharply represented in the contrast built up through the figurative language, in this instance with the use of similes. In the reference to items such as ‗humbugs‘, ‗tins of baked beans‘ and
‗onions‘ compared with‗mortar shells and ―field-guns‖ and ―rocket launchers‖ (AK 314-
315). Dalrymple expresses his reaction to the surreal quality of this first-hand experience. In stylistic terms there is an innovative use of language as he incorporates snatches of nursery rhymes in the description to evoke a sense of the fantastical.
The perspectives of the shopkeeper and his assistant are introduced into the narrative as they tell Dalrymple that their sale of Kalashnikovs had declined since the Afghan war had ended. However business wasn‘t too bad as the tribesmen still wanted to buy guns.
Dalrymple lets the reader hear the voices of the two men as they express their views
Mohammad Rafiq nodded in agreement. ‗Our people are liking too much these
arms. In the tribal areas you do not need permit, not even for tank.‘
‗Take middle-rank man‘, said Abdul Qadir philosophically. ‗He does not have
the comforts of life. But he has gun and pistol and rifle, maybe two: one Lee
Enfield for traditions-sake, one Kalashnikov for killing people.‘
‗If he is big man- a malik- he may have rocket-launcher and anti-aircraft gun.
Too many gun. Is good business.‘
‗And they actually use these guns?‘ I asked.
‗Often they are using.‘(AK 315) Rahim 146
The dialogue provides an insight into a culture where the easy accessibility to the deadliest of weapons and their use is customary and impacts on the physical and moral worlds of the people in a strong way. Tradition and modernity in this instance are cited in terms of the difference between the classic British made Lee Enfield and the more functional
Russian manufactured Kalashnikov.
Dalrymple narrates his brief encounter in Peshawar with Khan Abdul Wali Khan, a seasoned politician and landlord of the North West Frontier Province. As he sits sipping green tea with the frail old man in his summer house, with the sound of birdsong and running water and surrounded with colourful flowers, the Darra arms bazaar seems to be part of a distant world. This segment of narrative ends with Wali Khan‘s response as Dalrymple tells him about what he had seen earlier on his visit to the Darra market-
‗Yes‘, he said. ‗There are now more than one million Kalashnikovs in this
province alone. It has got completely out of control.
He shook his head sadly.
‗I feel,‘ he said, ‗as if I‘m living on an ammunition dump‘ (AK 316).
The comment in the first-person voice of an old and respected Pathan and Frontier resident is placed strategically by Dalrymple at the end of the second narrative segment and suggests a dramatized indictment of the culture of guns and violence which was exacerbated with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan during the decade of the eighties. The outbreak of war had led to over a million Afghan refugees spilling across the porous border into
Pakistani cities, especially into Peshawar and other border areas of the Frontier. It had also brought a flood of illegal arms and ammunition which were in great demand by the increasing number of armed militias and mujahideen. Soon the term ‗Kalashnikov culture‘ Rahim 147 was gun-running had become one of the two most profitable businesses in the areas. The other and much more lucrative trade was the smuggling of narcotics.
Dalrymple devotes the next section of the essay to the ―ever-expanding drug culture‖(AK 319) and its social and cultural impact on the frontier. The narrative is constructed around the ethnographic description of two interconnected locales. The first is the
Qissa Khawani bazaar in Peshawar and the other is the town of Landi Kotal situated at the top of the Khyber. Dalrymple refers to it as ―the nerve centre of the opium trade and home to many of Pakistan‘s biggest drug barons‖ (AK 319). Wandering through the bazaar in
Peshawar, Dalrymple reveals a sharp eye as he describes the haphazard assortment of goods on sale:
Along with the rugs and sheepskin coats, the karakul caps and the Chitrali
cloaks, the pavements of Peshawar appear to be the end of the line for many of
the knitted woollies and discarded trousers proudly donated by tens of
thousands of Home Counties grannies to Save the Children or Oxfam. Ten
yards further down the street plastic mirrors, broken toy tanks and red
waterpistols all appear to have fallen off the back of a lorry en route from
Taiwan. The fraudulent Rolexes, brass idols, cassettes of wailing music and
garish calendars have been smuggled across the border from India. (AK 31)
The description conveys a strong sense of Dalrymple moving across the bazaar surveying the haphazard display of goods on the pavements. The piling up of images of sundry items adds to this effect. The detail also highlights the contrast with the previous description of his trip to the Arms market. Most of the second hand clothes and other wares are part of the innocuous ―small-scale junk business,‖ (AK 317) but as Dalrymple emphasizes there is a parallel illegal trade in narcotics in the same bazaar. Though officially banned, the drugs bring in big money to the traffickers. He cites reports from the US Drug Enforcement Rahim 148
Agency which trace 50% of the processed heroin which is smuggled to America and Britain to ―illicit processing laboratories dotted around the Khyber Pass‖ (AK 318). He learns that most of the poppy crop is cultivated in Afghanistan and then transported over the border to
Peshawar to be turned into white powder. It is then taken by road to Karachi and from there shipped to the vast market in the West. According to Dalrymple, the Pakistani customs officials are actively involved in encouraging the smuggling because- ―payoffs from the drug mafias are so lucrative that highly skilled graduates compete to bribe their way into the customs service‖ (AK 319). Many politicians and the rich elite of the Frontier and the
Pakistani civil and military establishment are complicit in the drug trade because of the huge profits to be made.
Dalrymple in the role of ethnographer talks to different people as he gathers information related to the drug mafia in the Frontier. He hires a taxi, an old Morris Traveller and an armed guard to take him to Landi Kotal. There is a dramatized description of the drive up the mountains. As the vehicle ―snagged into the narrow mouth of the Khyber Pass,‖
(AK 320) on its ascent into the barren hills, they pass the ‗marble-faced enclosure surrounded by high-tension electrified wire‘ and guarded by Kalashnikovs wielding men. His bodyguard informs him that the place belonged to Zakir Afridi one of the biggest drug smugglers in the
Frontier. Dalrymple builds up the atmosphere of suspense and danger with more detail relating to the abandoned and decrepit Landi Kotal railway station. He discovers that it had been closed since 1985 because the tribesmen—mostly those who were drug smugglers-- had fired at it with Stinger missiles. Dalrymple describes it as ―the sort of place where
Kipling‘s short stories came to an end, the true-blue Victorian hero lying disemboweled on a
Frontier pass, and the vultures hovering nearby‖ (AK 321). He quotes from one of Kipling‘s poems
Rahim 149
When you‘re wounded and left on Afghanistan‘s plains,
An‘ the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest rolls on your rifle an‘ blow out your brains,
An‘ go to your Gawd like a soldier. (AK 321)
The intertextual reference to Kipling‘s chilling poem with the brutal image of surrendering to a violent death in a cruel and hostile environment serves to heighten the grim menace of the surroundings.
Dalrymple concludes the narration on a dramatic note. He descirbes Landi Kotal as
―awash with narcotics‖ (AK 322). Roadside shops and vendors were peddling hashish and opium openly as ―casually displayed as cigarettes and betel nut‖ (AK 322).
The US tried to bribe us to stop growing the poppy,‘ one vendor told me. He
tore a little lump of opium off a block, nonchalantly rolled it in to a ball and
popped it in his mouth. ‗They promised us irrigation and improved roads if we
destroyed our crops. We let them spend their money, then used the wells to
grow better poppy. (AK 322)
The narrative technique that Dalrymple employs in the essay combines several points of view as Dalrymple engages in dialogue with diverse individuals. There is political commentary related to the Afghan war and the military intervention of the United States and also the articulation of monetary interest by both locals in the Frontier and other Pakistanis.
There is also ethnographic description related to the Pathan way of life. The social commentary relates to the lure of easy money for those involved in arms and narcotics smuggling. The polyphony works to heighten the drama of the situation in a picturesque setting.
Most of Dalrymple‘s travel writing which employs the ethnographic mode carries a central theme or contextualizes a cultural practice or event in a specific locale and Rahim 150 setting. However there are parallel strands of narrative that carry the theme forward with a shift in the point of view. The variation from first-person to third-person variation modulates the pace. The ethnographic subjects are located in different settings. This adds depth to the characterization and the overall representation.
Rahim 151
Conclusion
The ethnohistorical focus in Dalrymple‘s travel narrative is central to his polyphonic representation of the subcontinent. The study therefore has attempted to describe and examine historical narration and ethnographic writing as the dominant discursive modes that shape Dalrymple‘s textual representation of specific cultural aspects related to the subcontinent. Although the two modes may seem disparate, in that, the one emphasizes the interpretive and the other the situational, Dalrymple‘s travel texts frequently bring these together in parallel narrative strands. The cultural representation is polyphonic due to the thematic content, the structure of the narrative and the stylistic devices he employs in expanding the narrative space within the text.
Within the historical framework this is achieved mainly by drawing on the journeys and the written accounts of previous travellers. In two instances, Dalrymple quite literally follows in the footsteps of ancient travellers. His first travel book In Xanadu records his 1986 journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu re-tracing the medieval journey of
Marco Polo. In From the Holy Mountain he travels, across the Middle East in 1994, following the route taken by John Moschos, the sixth-century monk, in what was then the eastern Byzantium empire. Both these travel texts in the introductory pages create in the reader a strong expectation of historical adventure as Dalrymple takes to the road marking a route travelled upon by specific travellers many hundreds of years ago.
These journeys are historical explorations as much as they are vivid representations of places and people identified with a late twentieth century cultural landscape.
In the specific context of the cultural representation of the subcontinent Dalrymple‘s travel writing can be read as an historical archive. The reader can hear different voices and points of view from the past through Dalrymple‘s stylistic technique of drawing on Rahim 152 historical research and intertextual references. The voices of various characters are used through their nostalgic recall to create a world that has now faded away. This serves to expand the narrative space so that there is a mingling of voices to create a polyphonic effect.
Dalrymple does not privilege British colonialism as the most significant cultural experience of the past. However the consciousness that his forebears were part of the imperial enterprise in the subcontinent finds repeated expression. The narratives of the transculturated
―white Mughals‖, the history of the Twilight years and the period of colonial rule and
Partition-- which altered both the geography and history of the vast majority of people in the region-- are some of the historical aspects that he represents vividly. The architectural vocabulary of a particular locale is also highlighted in the narrative and becomes a major focus in the representation.
Dalrymple‘s interest in the social, cultural, political world of the subcontinent finds expression through the ethnographic mode. The contradictions of a complex sociocultural and political context, the people and their history and religion are explored and represented with a sharp sensitivity at many different levels. The textual analysis has attempted to show that the narrative is structured in segments so that it is expository, interpretive and dialogic in turn. The representation is worked through a continually changing point of view, the plot is carried forward in the dialogue which Dalrymple sometimes leads as the interlocutor and participant, sometimes he distances himself as the attentive listener and observer. Dalrymple locates the narrative in a physical setting which he builds up with an accumulation of detail so that it evokes different emotional associations in the readers mind. The vivid detail related to the appearance, actions and responses of the characters is included so that they are individualized and the reader is led beyond a generalized, oversimplified judgement about their motives and interests. Rahim 153
As Gadamer says, ―What the work ‗says‘ to us will in turn depend on the kind of questions which we are able to address to it from our own vantage point in history‖ (qtd. in
Eagleton 61). Eagleton emphasizes that ―as the work passes from one cultural context to another, new meanings may be culled‖.
It would be unfair to impose a monologic view on such a complex and amorphous sphere of human endeavour such as culture (and therefore on its representation) or to force closure on the representational dimensions of a genre which too has evolved over time. In an article written for the Guardian, Dalrymple quotes Colin
Thubron. ―Its no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people‘s existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute.‖
There is a change in the conventions of cultural representation in a complex global world and in addressing the challenge, Dalrymple immerses the reader within the human condition through the articulation of personal history. His most recent travel text Nine Lives marks a shift in narrative and takes the genre forward with a new mode of ethnographic writing.
Rahim 154
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