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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com
Modern Directions in Travel Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by Upasana Dutta
Dutta, Upasana. “Modern Directions in Travel Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 2.3 (2013): 69-78. Web.
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Modern Directions in Travel Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by Upasana Dutta
Travel writing has been around for a long time, early examples ranging as far back as the second century A.D., when Pausanius undertook his ambitious tenvolume Description of Greece, combining a first-hand observation of Greece’s topography with an insightful study of its culture and politics. It is a genre that has engaged the interest of readers across time and cultures, as the surviving accounts of Nasir Khusraw, Marco Polo, Ibn-e-Batuta, Petrarch and Richard Hakluyt, to name a few, testify. What could be the reasons that led to the birth of travel writing? One can never be sure exactly what shapes the ebb and flow of literature; it is something that is always finely responsive to contemporary interests. It might be assumed that explorers ventured out of their homelands with various motives, as pioneers of their own civilization seeking to spread their faith, as traders and merchants looking for lands full of promises of riches, or, a little more uncommonly in the early ages, simply for pleasure. Their wonder at discovering these new lands and these strange cultures, in a world where oceans and mountains were still fairly staggering obstacles, translated into travelogues. There were always a corresponding number of individuals who wished for or required this information about things hitherto unknown, and thus, possibly, travel writing came into being. It seems, then, to be a genre that was moulded by a number of forces other than the obvious creative impulse of wanting to share new impressions and observations–the knowledge of these newly-discovered territories must have served to benefit scholars and rulers alike. However, in the past few centuries, the crux of travel literature – the nature of travel itself – has changed radically. With ease of transportation, the world has become a smaller place, to take resort to a cliché, and traveling no longer remains the terrain of almost exclusively the politically and financially powerful. When every peak and every crag has been photographed
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and documented with exact dimensions, travel writing can no longer remain concerned with a fascination with the ‘exotic’. I shall attempt to study how contemporary travel literature is a particularly fluid genre, blending elements of history, anthropology, journalism and sometimes employing fictional devices in an essentially non-fictional category with particular attention to Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Dalrymple, in his article “Home Truths on Abroad” has managed to sum up the present status of travel writing quite succinctly, noticing the waning of the travel writing boom, a far cry from the excitement of about two decades ago when he published his first book In Xanadu, the time of the greats of the like of Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. He is one of the first to recognize that the trend of chronicling “rambling accounts of every conceivable rail, road or river journey between Kamchatka and Tasmania” has lost its efficacy as an interesting narrative mode, but he is quick to assert his belief that travel literature has not reached a dead-end by any means, as he believes that “wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It’s possible to crossfertilize the genre with other literary forms – biography, or anthropological writing – or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin’s footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.” Nine Lives is a work where he seems to have given this desire form, having come up with a book that is difficult to classify into any watertight compartment. The book presents firstperson accounts of Dalrymple meeting nine individuals following different religious paths in India. In some cases, the faiths these individuals practice are quite marginalized socially and politically and thus come under various kinds of threat. He manages to negotiate the tricky balance of keeping his persona, his opinions and his judgment in the background and positing the stories firmly in the focus of attention without them sounding flat and indifferent. This, in fact, is a more difficult task than it sounds. Dalrymple, being a historian and having worked as a journalist and broadcaster in India itself, is well aware of the different forces that have grafted the lives of these individuals to their present state. He has consciously tried to move away from the travelwriting norms established earlier which ‘tended to highlight the narrator: his
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adventures were the subject; the people he met were often reduced to objects in the background.’ As he himself admits, ‘I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories centre stage.’ While Nine Lives experiments with the structural presentation of the typical travel book, it more-or-less tries to remain factual and deviates from the truth only to the extent of changing the names and blurring the details about a few characters according to their own requests. In an Antique Land, however, is an even more experimental work where Ghosh does “muddy the boundaries” of fact and fiction itself, while the narrative dissolves the boundaries of different nations and continents. It presents two parallel narratives, one revolving around Ghosh’s stays in the villages of the Nile Delta while doing field work for his doctoral thesis and a later revisiting of the same places in order to meet the community of his friends; and the other an imaginative reconstruction of the travels of a twelfth-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, with the knowledge Ghosh gleaned from the documents of the Cairo Geniza, an ancient archive. To all appearances, In an Antique Land is “a factual account of two crossings widely separated in time”1, but the narrative which serves as an intelligent and imaginative ethnographic study also “straddles the generic borderlines between fact, fiction, autobiography, history, anthropology, and travel book.”2 An attempt to present the two strands which are separated by such wide swathes of time might have resulted in a book that is not cohesive enough, but the reader notices that as the book progresses, the two increasingly shade each other, each informing the other, and Ghosh’s alternating of the narratives come about naturally enough. Throughout Ghosh’s oeuvre there is a tendency to find connections between apparently vastly diverse subjects – nations, cultures, individuals, families find unprecedented connections tying them together in spite of being separated by time and space – ‘shadow lines’ all. He does not attempt to deny the often 1
“Where Fact Crosses Fiction: In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh Review”, Ramachandra Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 11 (Mar. 13, 1993), p. 451, JStor, accessed on 31st October, 2011. 2
“Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land”, Claire Chambers, Postcolonial Text, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2006).
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unbridgeable divides that a different religion or language might pose; in fact, he often speaks about the desperation and the uncomfortable hilarity of the situations in which he was often “trapped by language” (62) in Egypt, unable to explain himself in terms that would be true to his identity, and recognizable to his friends in Egypt simply because: “The language of the interrogator dictates the nature and potential of the response”3, and these conversations were often centered by religious and philosophical debates. He felt like an alien, often cornered, but he does at the same time forge lasting friendships with people of the very same land, relationships that flourish in spite of these differences. It is this fluidity of human emotions and relations that forms a thread of continuity with the narrative of Ben Yiju. He was a Jewish trader from Tunisia who in the early 12th century settled on the Malabar Coast. Yiju married a Nair lady from Malabar, Ashu, and acquired and then befriended a low caste slave, Bomma. Yiju and Bomma seem to have maintained a very different dynamic from the master-slave relationship as one knows it, Bomma having lived as a friend and trusted lieutenant of Yiju’s. Ashu herself seems to have been another slave of Ben Yiju, who was manumitted. It is Bomma that piques Ghosh’s interest when he first stumbles upon a letter mentioning him. According to his own words, “…the reference comes to us from a moment in time when the only people whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual existences, are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers and the priests – the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time” (17). The presence of the subaltern figure with a similar experience of dislocation gives him “a right to be there, a sense of entitlement” (19). He notices time and again in the course of the novel how the relationships between men and women in the twelfth century were not as tainted by the cultural and political barriers as they are now, when communication is so much the easier. On one occasion when Ghosh had gone to the tomb of Abu-Hasira, a Muslim holy man, he is roughly interrogated by a guard who cannot comprehend what business he could have there when he professes a different religion and automatically assumes the
3
‘Caught Straddling a Border: A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land’, Eric D. Smith, Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 37, No. 3, (2007),pp. 447-472, Project Muse, accessed on 3rd November, 2011.
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worst. The author struggles to explain his simple motive of having wanted to visit the tomb, when it strikes him suddenly that “there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story–the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jew, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago” (339). This partitioning of worlds, geographical and literary, is what both In an Antique Land and Nine Lives strain against. The very relationship in which Ghosh and Dalrymple stand with their subject, while different from each other, are both significantly tied to the change that Dalrymple envisions for travel writing. Scholars have long looked at travel writing, in European hands, as “the second line of imperialism”4. Travelers sent back imaginary descriptions of the decayed East which delighted readers with their assurance of the superiority of the West. Dalrymple is well aware of this line of criticism and he counters it with the fact that writing about travel stretches as far back as ‘the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wanderings of Abraham in the Old Testament, and the journeyings of the Pandava brothers in The Mahabharata’5 , and this appropriation of the genre by colonial forces is a fairly recent phenomenon compared to that. Ghosh, as Dalrymple points out, is an ideal example of someone who is ushering in the change—being one of “the “funny foreigners” who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers…writing some of the best travel pieces themselves.”6 But more than Dalrymple’s logic, it is Dalrymple’s way of work that goes farther towards convincing the reader that though the “act of domination” agenda of travel writing might have been a truth, it certainly is not an all-encompassing one. It can be said about either Dalrymple or Ghosh that “He is not a consumer of landscapes but someone
4
“Trapped by Language: On Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land”, Brian Kiteley, accessed on 31st Oct, 2011. 5
“Home Truths on Abroad”, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 19th Sep,
6
“Home truths on abroad”, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 19th Sep, 2009.
2009.
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who inhabits a place”7. Dalrymple is a white-skinned firang living in India and Ghosh is more often referred to as “doktor al-Hindi” in Egypt than by his first name—their ‘foreign’-ness is an inseparable part of their narrator-identity in both the books. But both the books are marked by a rare honesty and empathy which makes them impossible to be reduced to narratives of interested exoticisation. Nine Lives, quite obviously, is a book that captures the extraordinarily diverse and rich spiritual and religious life of the subcontinent. One should notice, then, that this very diversity makes parts of Nine Lives absolutely astounding. There are ways of life which a reader might have only heard of or had a vague idea of which the book upholds with great insight and clarity. It is always filtered through the eyes of someone who is actively practicing the faith and thus one who can offer a real, ordinary perspective, the particular faith being the most natural way of life in the world for him or her. A young Jain nun who leads her life following extreme austerity and has decided to take sallekhana, a ritual fast to the death which Jain monks regard as the best route to Nirvana; a Tantric priestess who lives in a cremation ground; a Buddhist monk who joined the Tibetan resistance to protect his faith and now lives trying to atone for the violence he once committed—these are stories that would be have the tang of novelty to most of the inhabitants of India themselves. If one were to follow the line of argument of travel literature being a veiled tool of domination, there would have been a lot of scope for deliberate imaginative reconstruction which suited that purpose. Nine Lives, however, is more a book about the people, rather than the places, rooted in an intimate knowledge of a foreign culture that Dalrymple has evidently striven for. He actually manages to respond to even the most unconventional of practices with such openness that the depiction is always mellowed by an unexpected familiarity, seeming to say that at the end of the day, however bizarre a faith might seem, it is driven by the search for the same things that every other man seeks—love, peace and knowledge. One of the primary concerns of discussions about travel writing has been the judgment of its merit by the degree of its adherence to facts. Bruce
7
‘Trapped by Language: On Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land’, Brian Kiteley, accessed on 31st Oct, 2011.
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Chatwin, for example, had been repeatedly criticized when his books included fictionalized anecdotes; the real counterparts of a few of the characters recognized themselves and disliked what they saw as the distortions of themselves and their culture. In an Antique Land is a complex text when it comes to this fact-versus-fiction divide, for Ghosh’s interactions seem honest and vulnerable and his anecdotes never seem to reduce characters to generalizations which suit a particular agenda. It is not that Ghosh does not have an agenda, but it is certainly true that this agenda is personal and historiographical. He tries to respond with truth to the strange situations that his standing as a baffling creature in a predominantly Islamic set-up throws at him, and it is successful because he is able to find a manner of continuity, a same-ness in these settings which are set far apart by both space and time. One suspects that a good deal of conjecture must still have gone into the historical narrative. A portion of the narrative is taken up by trying to trace the origin and life of a slave, a presence in the fringes of his society in his own time, after a gap of about eight centuries. In this case, of course, one cannot always rely solely on factual evidence and must try and inch his way forward on the basis of tentative conclusions. The fictionalization therefore is prompted by the very structure of the novel, and this makes it difficult to condemn the traces of deviation from fact that one might detect. In an Antique Land is much more than a straightforward narrative of Ghosh’s travels and keeps moving between genres in order to better accommodate the ways of telling to the requirements of what is being told: “By breaking down barriers between genres, Ghosh is not simply attacking the boundaries, or trying to destroy the power structures inherent in genre boundaries. He is seeking a more honest and accurate way of telling. Books ought to create their own structure out of the material they are made of.”8Ghosh thus comes up with a generically indefinable book: a historical study that incorporates lengthy introspection, an anthropological book that moves fluidly through continents and centuries and a travelogue that does not have a target audience of readers at home.
8
“Trapped by Language: On Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land”, Brian Kiteley, accessed on 31st Oct, 2011.
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With television channels, magazines and websites dedicated solely to travel, the place of travel writing in literature and its relevance might seem to be increasingly unstable; indeed, some might even consider it to be a more-orless outdated genre. I would like to contend, however, that travel writing is not only a genre still full of potential, but one that is irreplaceable. Once considered a more-or-less exclusively non-fiction category, travel literature is slowly but steadily turning into an area which produces books rich in research, insight and imagination. The literary aspect of it is stronger than ever. With its practitioners having been freed from the necessity of chronicling the surface details of a place, they can delve into the intricacies of the life of a certain culture—almost like painting, which could concern itself with trying to capture the essence of things rather than only a faithful surface depiction of the subject, after the advent of photography. No other form of non-fiction, neither journalism nor the internet, allow for the space and depth of thought required to dwell with that kind of liberty on the kind of diversity that exists in the world underneath the apparent homogeneity incurred by globalization. Travel literature has claimed this unique space for itself by adapting itself to the changing times and the changing needs of readers, the kind of adaptability that is best exemplified in the work of writers like Dalrymple and Ghosh.
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References Chambers, Claire. “Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land”. Postcolonial Text, 2.3, 2006. Dalrymple, William. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Great Britain: Bloomsbury, 2009.
––––. “Home Truths on Abroad”. The Guardian. Published April 12, 2009. Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993. Guha, Ramachandra. “Where Fact Crosses Fiction: In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh: Review”. Economic and Political Weekly 28.11: 451. Kiteley, Brian. “Trapped by Language: On Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land”. Accessed on 31st Oct, 2011. Smith, Eric D. “Caught Straddling a Border: A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land”. Journal of Narrative Theory 37.3, 2007: 447-472.
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