COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS NO. 2.3 JUL ‘13
QUARTERLY OF TRAVELOGY ISSN 2278-9650
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 who inhabits a place”7. Dalrymple is a whiteskinned 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
6 “Home truths on abroad”, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 19th Sep, 2009. 7 ‘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.
Modern Directions in Travel Writing| UPASANA DUTTA | PG. 64 FIRST PUBLISHED IN WWW.coldnoon.com