Upasana Dutta Jul13

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 | Upasana Dutta | p. 69

First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Print ISSN 2278-9650 | Online ISSN 2278-9650)
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 ten-
volume 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

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 cross-
fertilize 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 first-
person 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 travel-
writing norms established earlier which ‘tended to highlight the narrator: his

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, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4399487>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).

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, <10.1353/jnt.2008.0014>accessed on 3rd November, 2011.

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, <http://mysite.du.edu/~bkiteley/ghoshtalk.html> accessed on 31st Oct,
2011.
5
“Home Truths on Abroad”, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 19th Sep,
2009.
6
“Home truths on abroad”, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 19th Sep, 2009.

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
2011.

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
2011.

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-or-
less 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.

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”.
<http://mysite.du.edu/~bkiteley/ghoshtalk.html> 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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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING

Jul ‘13, No. 2.3 | www.coldnoon.com

Modern Directions in Travel Writing:

Dutta, Upasana. “Modern Directions in Travel Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique

"Modern Directions in Travel Writing: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 69

Modern Directions in Travel Writing:

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 70

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 71

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 72

unbridgeable divides that a different religion or language might pose; in fact,

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 73

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 74

who inhabits a place”7. Dalrymple is a white-skinned firang living in India and

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 75

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 76

With television channels, magazines and websites dedicated solely to

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 77

Chambers, Claire. “Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an

Modern Directions in Travel Writing | Upasana Dutta | p. 78

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