Travelling into H istory: The Travel Writing and N arrative

H istory of William D alrymple

By

Rebecca Dorgelo
BA (H ons) Tas
M A Tas

Submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Tasmania
July 2011
ii
D eclaration of Originality

The thesis contains no material w hich has been accepted for a degree or
diploma by the University or any other institution, except by w ay of
background information and duly acknow ledged in the thesis, and to
the best of my know ledge and belief no material previously published
or w ritten by another person except w here due acknow ledgement is
made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material
that infringes copyright.

Signed, Rebecca Dorgelo. 18 July 2011

Authority of Access

The thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in
accordance w ith the Copyright Act 1968.

Signed, Rebecca Dorgelo. 18 July 2011

iii
iv
Abstract: “Travelling into H istory: The Travel Writing and N arrative

H istory of William D alrymple”

Doctor of Philosophy.

William Dalrymple is a popular, bestselling author, initially known for

his travel w riting and subsequently for his popular narrative histories.

H e is also a prolific journalist and review er. H is major publications

include: In Xanadu: A Quest (1990), City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993),

From the Holy M ountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997), The

Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters (1998), White M ughals: Love &

Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002), The Last M ughal: The Fall of a

Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (2006), and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in

M odern India (2009). In each of these w orks, Dalrymple focuses on his

interactions w ith India and the M iddle East.

This thesis examines Dalrymple’s travel w riting and histories

from a postcolonial perspective in order to map the relationship

betw een travel and history w riting, especially in colonial and

postcolonial contexts. Travel w riting is a textual representation of

cultural interactions, even (or especially) if w hat eventuates is more a

reflection of the “ home” country than the traveller’s destination. In a

similar w ay, the strategies by w hich w e negotiate, choose and fashion

historical narratives construct our place in the present.

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 Dalrymple’s texts repeatedly consider the British Raj and its

legacies. The thesis analyses the w ays in w hich Indians, Britons, and the

relationships betw een them are represented. It argues that the British

Empire is represented through a sentimental and nostalgic lens,

resulting in an overwhelmingly positive portrayal. This thesis is also

interested in the w ays in w hich Dalrymple’s texts construct their

authority. This narrative authority is achieved principally through an

emphasis on the first-person, autobiographical experiences of the

narrator, blended in varying degrees w ith an invocation of the

importance of history (w hich is expressed through the narrator’s

relationship w ith primary source material). Dalrymple then uses the

cultural capital that this authority provides to argue for the value of his

version of travel and history w riting over other (particularly theoretical,

postcolonial) approaches.

In addition to his myriad print publications, Dalrymple has also

w ritten and performed in radio and television documentaries, and

recently complemented his public speaking appearances (to promote

Nine Lives) w ith a travelling stage show featuring Indian song, dance

and religious practices. Dalrymple’s influence extends beyond that of

simple author, to that of an expert, celebrity figure w ho operates across

media platforms to reach his audiences. This thesis undertakes a close

reading of each of Dalrymple’s monographs, as w ell as the w ays in

w hich they are positioned in the public sphere, both by their author and

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by review ers and critics. This reading enables an analysis of the

arguments made about the past and present relationship betw een India

and Britain w ithin and outside the texts.

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Acknowledgements:

M y first thanks go to A ssociate Professor A nna Johnston and Professor

Ralph Crane for their inspiration, feedback and supervisory talents. I

appreciate their enthusiasm, collegiality and pragmatism. The rest of

the staff and postgraduate students in the School of English, Journalism

and European Languages have all been encouraging and supportive

and have provided a stimulating environment in w hich to w ork.

Thanks to the Centre for Colonialism and its A ftermath for my

employment over the three years, w hich has provided, as w ell as useful

income, equally valuable experience, opportunities and connections.

Writing a PhD on travel w riting and narrative history, and

arguing for their serious consideration as cultural objects w ith

important influences has the potential side-effect of losing one’s sense

of humour. In recognition of this tendency, I thank the very many good

sorts (too many to name) that I’m lucky enough to have around me.

Particular mention is due to: N athan, Erenie, Rolf, A nica, Ruth and

Letitia for their patience, generosity, friendship, and many laughs that

helped to preserve my light heartedness throughout this degree.

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ix
Contents:

I ntroduction 1

Chapter One
I n Xanadu: A Quest 22

Chapter Two
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi 64

Chapter Three
From the Holy M ountain: A Journey in the Shadow of
Byzantium 102

Chapter Four
White M ughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century
I ndia 138

Chapter Five
The Last M ughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 189

Conclusion
The Age of Kali: I ndian Travels and Encounters and
Nine Lives: A Search for the Sacred in M odern I ndia 233

Works Cited 273

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Introduction:

In the lead-up to the 2011 Jaipur Literature Festival Hartosh Singh Bal caused

a stir in the Indian magazine Open. Singh Bal highlighted the influence of

British taste on the Indian literary scene, using the figure of William

Dalrymple, co-director of the Festival, as the prime example. How, Singh Bal

asks, has a young, white, amusing travel writer become one of the chief

arbiters of literary taste in India? Singh Bal’s “The Literary Raj” is one of few

public critiques of Dalrymple, and it is accompanied by a large colour cartoon

of the author dressed in the style of a Mughal ruler. Dalrymple responded in

the same week with a strongly worded letter to the editor. He defends the

multi-faceted nature of the Festival, and calls Singh Bal’s treatment of him,

including the caricature, “racist” (“Blatantly Racist”).

Perhaps this expose of Dalrymple’s status works against his carefully

maintained self-positioning as equally part of, and divided between, India and

Britain. His objection to his characterisation as a white Mughal is curious,

given that this is a representational strategy that Dalrymple often employs

himself. Dalrymple’s letter is published alongside a corresponding reply by

Singh Bal, which is chiefly devoted to combating the charge of racism. He

clarifies his earlier arguments, reiterating that the central point of his

examination of Dalrymple’s presence high in India’s literary strata is that it

“says something about the Indian literary scene” (“Does Dalrymple Know”).

The presence of such conversations about cultural authority in the public

1
sphere is encouraging, for they echo similar in this scholarly examination of

Dalrymple’s work.

This thesis examines the writing of William Dalrymple. Each of his five

monographs is discussed in a separate chapter, while his prolific journalistic

output (encompassing reviews, interviews and articles) is considered in the

conclusion. Despite its focus on a single author the thesis is not a biographical

narrative about Dalrymple and his works. Instead, it is a serious critical

engagement with a kind of text that is traditionally less-well represented in

literary studies: popular, middlebrow non-fiction. Dalrymple’s popularity and

engagement with colonial history and discourse, as well as the way his work

spans multiple genres, make his texts particularly interesting examples of the

ways in which popular non-fiction functions rhetorically in the public sphere.

Dalrymple is a prolific, well-known (at least to a certain section of the reading

public) and best-selling author. This is a study of his output, an examination of

a successful negotiation with the literary marketplace, and an analysis of the

representational strategies that enable or contribute to that success.

Dalrymple’s oeuvre is interesting because of the ways in which all of its

components function together. His shift between genres, modes and media is

complex and continuing. The move from travel writing to narrative history, for

example, is not simply chronological: Dalrymple participates in the two genres

simultaneously, as they run parallel to and intersect with each other in complex

ways. The sum of Dalrymple’s body of work is significantly greater than its

parts. Considered separately, Dalrymple’s travel writing, narrative histories and

essay collections may appear of little consequence for a critical study: there

2
have undoubtedly been more interesting travel narratives, more gripping

narrative histories and more in-depth essays on India published. When taken

together, Dalrymple’s output enables a study that engages with crucial

questions of power, representation and cultural capital in the public sphere.

Such questions drive this project forward.

Overall, I am interested in the ways in which Dalrymple’s texts operate

in relation to imperialism and its legacies. Lydia Wevers emphasises the

colonial discourse that informs travel writing, and its fruitfulness as an area of

study. She highlights “The many fronts on which travel writing facilitates an

intersection between a distant culture and a present enterprise, and the ways in

which those intersections illustrate pressure points, assumptions and attitudes”

(2). This project examines the assumptions, attitudes and arguments advanced

by Dalrymple’s texts and the relationship of these rhetorical strategies with

colonial and postcolonial discourses. I take inspiration from Peter Hulme’s

description of his Colonial Encounters project, which states that it deals

“persistently, perhaps obsessively, with narrative structures, tropes, phrases,

even single words, in the belief that these can be revealed as sites of political

struggle” (xiv).

There has been very little scholarly engagement with Dalrymple’s work,

although a multitude of reviews, features and interviews follow each of his

publications. The sole academic article to date that deals with Dalrymple’s

travel writing is by Antara Datta. Her article was published in the special issue

of the Yearly Review, Texts Travelling Text. “Dalrymple in the Eye of the

History Storm” is an overwhelmingly laudatory assessment of City of Djinns

3
and The Age of Kali and what they represent as contributions to the field of

travel literature. Datta’s enthusiasm for Dalrymple’s travel writing is evident in

her characterisation of author and text as self-aware, redemptive forces for

equality: “[Dalrymple] is aware of the colonial baggage that the [travel] genre

carries, and he redeems, apart from history, the genre too, which has been

doomed to academic pigeonholing since Said. Through his writing and

references, Dalrymple exposes cultural hierarchies that are more equitable”

(145). Datta argues that Dalrymple “use[s] the travel form to address some of

the most crucial debates of our times” (135), particularly in relation to history

in a “politically recuperative” project (136). Datta’s is certainly the most

positive of the scholarly engagements with Dalrymple’s travel writing.

In a much more restrained piece, Tim Youngs conducted an in-depth

interview with Dalrymple that was published in Studies in Travel Writing in

2005. Youngs converses with Dalrymple about all of his monographs

published at the time of the interview, with an emphasis on his methods and

writing practice. Through a familiarity with the details of the works and a keen

questioning style, Youngs’ interview forms an important engagement with

Dalrymple and his texts.

The few articles that have closely examined Dalrymple’s texts have

focused more often on his narrative histories than his travel writing. Gyan

Prakash’s 2007 response to The Last Mughal was published in The Nation. In

this article, Prakash is chiefly concerned with Dalrymple’s overarching

arguments for the recognition / reevaluation of the East India Company’s

involvement in India as a symbiotic, hybridised relationship, as opposed to one

4
of domination and appropriation. He counts Dalrymple among those he calls

“revisionist” historians who “counsel us … to lower the anti-imperial

temperature and write old-fashioned narrative history” (25). He stridently

opposes Dalrymple’s arguments for hybridity and sentimental reciprocity,

stating:

to retail the eighteenth century as a time when Europeans and non-

Europeans overcame racial and religious boundaries is to fly in the face

of historical evidence. To see the crossing of imperial borders in the lives

of “White Mughals” is to misrepresent both the nature of interracial

liaisons and imperial conquest. (30)

Prakash’s argument appears within the specific parameters of a debate around

conflicting historical approaches. For this project, it provides part of the

broader context for Dalrymple’s narrative histories, and the ways in which they

are received in the popular press and by other historians.

Joy Wang’s “Sentimentalizing Empire: Interracial Romance in Philip

Meadows Taylor’s Seeta” is principally concerned with Meadows Taylor’s

novel, but Wang begins her analysis with an examination of Dalrymple’s White

Mughals. Wang’s literary study draws parallels between the two texts’ central

inter-racial relationships, and the work that these relationships perform, stating

that “White Mughals is both a work of sentimental romance and of revisionist

history” (113). She describes Dalrymple’s “myopic optimism” and his

“political evasion” (114) before moving on to the central focus of her

argument.

5
 This thesis takes a step towards addressing the lack of scholarly attention

that Dalrymple has received, and engages closely with each of his books.

While each chapter focuses on an individual text, the thesis as a whole seeks to

highlight the importance and fruitfulness of a critical examination of

middlebrow literature. Of chief interest is the ways in which each of

Dalrymple’s texts constructs their authority, and the arguments that drive them.

The uncomplicated reading of non-fiction texts by the vast majority of

reviewers and commentators (and therefore, presumably, the wider reading

public), makes a critical examination of Dalrymple’s writing all the more

crucial.

Dalrymple’s representations are examined in the context of pertinent

scholarship on travel writing, historiography and postcolonial theory. Although

it moves chronologically through Dalrymple’s monographs, this analysis does

not privilege an overarching teleology of growth and progress. Instead, the

structure provides a platform for analysing the various ways in which

Dalrymple represents himself and his texts. Broadly speaking, Dalrymple’s

books can be divided into three distinct areas: travel writing, narrative history

and collections of his journalism. With the exception of its treatment of his

journalism, the structure of the thesis resists the urge to group Dalrymple’s

texts by genre, instead allowing for a greater consideration of writing that

occupies various points on a shifting continuum between travel and history. I

emphasise the ways in which Dalrymple’s works both fit within and challenge

the boundaries between travel writing and narrative history. Each text provides

an opportunity to analyse different issues and is approached from varying

6
theoretical standpoints. This examination takes each of Dalrymple’s texts as an

example of different rhetorical strategies, but it emphasises the extent to which

all of Dalrymple’s publications work toward the same representational ends.

The first chapter examines Dalrymple’s travel book In Xanadu: A Quest,

published in 1990 to critical and popular acclaim. Of all Dalrymple’s texts, In

Xanadu conforms most obviously to the generic narrative conventions of travel

writing, and provides both an ideal starting point for examining Dalrymple’s

writing and an opportunity to survey the travel theory employed throughout

this analysis. Hulme’s careful formulation of the colonial discourses expressed

through the travel genre informs this chapter, and indeed the project as a

whole. In Xanadu chronicles Dalrymple’s journey in the footsteps of Marco

Polo, accompanied by fellow-students Laura and Louisa in their long vacation

from university. Of particular interest are the ways in which Dalrymple

represents his first-person protagonist, William. Patrick Holland and Graham

Huggan identify the widespread trope of the English gentleman traveller; In

Xanadu continues this lineage. Also evident is the extent to which William’s

characterisation in this text is modelled upon that of earlier British travellers

such as Eric Newby, Robert Byron and, almost inevitably, Bruce Chatwin

(given Chatwin’s own debts to these previous travel writers). The

characterisation of In Xanadu’s protagonist differs from these antecedents,

however, by being constantly accompanied by a female companion. The

contrast in representation between William and Laura or William and Louisa

provides the chief means of defining the character of the protagonist, as well as

inserting a gendered power dynamic into the centre of the text.

7
 The journey in the footsteps of Marco Polo is a fast-paced chronicle of

William’s observations on the countries and people encountered, and the

discomforts and hardships he and his companions face in the act of travel.

Wevers’ analysis of nineteenth-century New Zealand travel writing highlights

travellers’ awareness of class and social hierarchy. The juxtaposition that In

Xanadu makes between Britain and the East, and between William, Laura and

Louisa and the locals with whom they interact, advances a sense of nostalgic

imperialism, and of racial and class superiority.

Chapter two deals with Dalrymple’s second travel book City of Djinns: A

Year in Delhi (1993), which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award

and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. As suggested

by the title, this is a city-based rather than a journey-based travel text. The

impressions and stories that Dalrymple conveys about Delhi and his

experiences there regularly move into the realm of history. In particular, the

work is concerned with the historical (and continuing) relationship between

Britain and India. The ways in which this relationship is represented vary

throughout City of Djinns, but a positive, sentimental view of the British

imperial endeavour remains constant. The many avenues that City of Djinns

takes to advance this conservative representation of India and its past are

examined throughout the chapter. Chief among these is a strong Orientalising

tendency, especially evident in the text’s preoccupation with gendered and

sexualised descriptions of Mughal courts, dancing girls, decadence and

courtesans. City of Djinns uses descriptions of the different forms of Delhi’s

8
architecture to emphasise particular aspects of the city’s populations, past and

present, with a focus on Mughal and British colonial structures.

William spends his time in Delhi accompanied by one of a variety of

companions: his wife, Olivia, or various locals such as Persian scholar Dr

Jaffery or taxi driver Balvinder Singh. Essentially, this text is about settling in

and exploring a city—anecdotes about William and Olivia’s living

arrangements, their landlady, and her family are common. In contrast to the

nostalgic imperial adventure mode of In Xanadu, this is a story of William as a

belated settler colonist.

The third chapter focuses on From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the

Shadow of Byzantium (1997), which moves away from the stationary,

historically inflected narrative of City of Djinns to a more traditional,

movement-oriented travel text. From the Holy Mountain chronicles William’s

journey through the Middle East, following in the wake of sixth century

Eastern Christian monks John Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist. From the

Holy Mountain is positioned as a more serious travel text than In Xanadu, with

its aim being to investigate the fate of the communities of Eastern Christians

since the time of the Byzantine Empire. I am interested in the ways in which

the central character is constructed, and, in turn, how this influences the text’s

narrative authority. This book emphasises William’s Catholic background and

includes elements of a journey of spiritual development, in contrast to the

intellectual, British gentleman traveller invoked for In Xanadu. From the Holy

Mountain uses several different authorising modes, moving between them

depending on the particular narrative situation: affective, involved and

9
autobiographical; detached, observing and journalistic; or scholarly, historical

authority.

In contrast to City of Djinns, this religious travel narrative is influenced

to a large extent by journalistic, rather than historical, conventions. This results

in an emphasis on William’s exchanges with the Eastern Christians that he

encounters, presented as reported speech. From the Holy Mountain exhibits a

tension between the modes of serious investigative journalism and entertaining

travel writing, further highlighting the complexity of Dalrymple’s movement

within and between different generic forms.

Chapter four is concerned with Dalrymple’s first narrative history, White

Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002). White

Mughals won the 2003 Wolfson History Prize (for histories aimed at a general

readership) and the Scottish Book of the Year prize. This text is centred around

a love story between James Kirkpatrick, the British East India Company’s

Resident in Hyderabad from 1797 to 1805, and the young, elite Muslim woman

Khair un-Nissa. In telling this story, White Mughals puts forward a particular

view of the broader British / Indian relationship at this time. Rather than

addressing the veracity of Dalrymple’s historical narrative, this chapter

examines the ways in which the text represents Britain, India and their imperial

relationship, as well as the individual historical figures. There is much

metonymic slippage between the representation of Kirkpatrick and Khair un-

Nissa’s involvement and that of Britain and India.

Expressions of power and representations of gender are crucial to this

book, given the text’s cross-cultural romantic preoccupation. Betty Joseph’s

10
and Jenny Sharpe’s (separate) insistence on the importance of reading against

the grain, and reading documents for their omissions as well as their contents

undergird this chapter’s interrogation of White Mughals. Their emphasis on the

partial and contingent presence of women in imperial narratives (and the uses

to which they are put) gives focus to the examination of the ways in which

Dalrymple utilises constructions of gender and sexuality.

The formal ways that this text is constructed also come under scrutiny,

using Hayden White’s arguments about the ways in which every historical

narrative is a product of choice, emphasis and interpretation. I also examine

smaller structural details such as the text’s chosen system of referencing,

paying particular attention to the ways in which it functions to further the

narrative and to confirm Dalrymple’s authority as a historian. Central to this

chapter is the argument that White Mughals retains an autobiographical, first-

person narrative that forms the backbone of the narrative: that of William’s

journey, as a historian, through the archives, with the sources used

simultaneously to further the romantic history, and as discoveries and

developments in the narrative of William’s research. Viewed in this light, the

strength of the links between Dalrymple’s travel and narrative history texts are

apparent.

Chapter five focuses on Dalrymple’s second work of narrative history,

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (2006). In this book,

Dalrymple develops his arguments for the value of narrative history, and for

The Last Mughal as an important historical text, alongside a concomitant

dismissal of academic approaches to historical scholarship. I analyse the ways

11
in which Dalrymple positions himself and his text in the wider historiographic

field, and the authorising strategies that they undertake. Of Dalrymple’s

oeuvre, this text is one that engages most explicitly with the violence and

militarism of the British imperial presence in India, through its treatment of the

Mutiny of 1857. This chapter follows the rhetorical strategies that enable a

simultaneous engagement with imperial violence and an overwhelmingly

positive representation of the British in India.

The Last Mughal makes much of the archival sources that it utilises as a

central basis for its authority. Such a move is necessitated by the text’s vocal

opposition to academic history and (particularly postcolonial) theory. In

recognition of this textual focus, my analysis highlights the ways in which

Dalrymple uses certain sources to further his representation of a particular

vision of imperial history in India. It is naturally also informed by Edward

Said’s Orientalism, chiefly through an analysis of the ways in which

Dalrymple uses Orientalism and Said as a metonym for postcolonial

scholarship as a whole. Tony Ballantyne’s reminder that colonial archives

constitute, rather than simply record, imperialism assists in an analysis of

works such as Dalrymple’s that valorise primary source material.

I conclude my examination of Dalrymple’s output by focusing on two

collections of his journalism: The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters

(1998) and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009). These

collections are separated out from the otherwise-chronological approach of this

project because they function as an overview of two decades of Dalrymple’s

writing. These texts also act as reminders of the complex, overlapping nature

12
of Dalrymple’s oeuvre, which sees his journalism existing alongside and

informing his monograph publications and their reception. Likewise, his

monographs give authority to, and intersect with, his journalistic publications.

Further, the conclusion provides an opportunity to closely examine the

ways in which Dalrymple functions outside of the text, in the public sphere,

and his modes of self-fashioning. Dalrymple’s continually growing celebrity

and expert status provides another example of the extent to which his oeuvre

operates beyond the boundaries of individual texts. Dalrymple is a gatekeeper

figure, not just in the field of literature (as Singh Bal notes in reference to the

Jaipur Literature Festival), but also in the areas of Indian history, Indian

religions, the Middle East and Islam. The combination of his cultural capital

and the vision of empire that Dalrymple puts forward has implications for

popular conceptions of Britain’s and India’s imperial past. This thesis seeks to

highlight and analyse these representational processes in order to challenge the

nostalgic, Orientalist notions that they perpetuate.

Dalrymple’s presence in the public sphere functions as an extension of

his central, first-person characterisation in each of his monographs. Terry

Caesar highlights travel writing’s complexities, “commitment to

individualism” and its similarities to “autobiography or memoir, just as its

claim to knowledge discloses its roots in the essay or treatise” (143). There are

up to three Dalrymple figures involved in each text: the central,

autobiographical character, the narrator, and finally the author / public figure.

To avoid confusion, throughout the thesis I refer to the texts’ author and

13
narrator as “Dalrymple,” and the iterations of the autobiographical character as

“William.”

Dalrymple’s writing is classified as non-fiction, which, even in literary

studies, can result in different critical approaches. For the general reader, non-

fiction connotes truth. The rhetorical advantage and authenticity gained from

the generalised categorisation of Dalrymple’s writing as non-fiction is

significant. One example is the authority that can be acquired through

classificatory modes as simple as the ubiquitous “non-fiction / travel” category

on the back cover of City of Djinns. Such classifications influence bookstores’

decisions about placement, and inform potential readers’ choices and

expectations. Pam Morris remarks in regard to realist novels that they collude

with “functional reason to produce philistine readerly narratives. These give

comfort to the reader’s moral and cultural expectations of what life should be

like rather than challenging the existing conceptual and socio-political status

quo” (37). Whatever is represented, the text’s realist form functions to

reinforce a sense of truth and necessity. Morris’ charge can be extended to

apply to non-fiction works such as Dalrymple’s, whose realist narrative

structure functions in a conservative manner. David Carter characterises

middlebrow literature by its “distance from low commercial media, at one end,

and from the new academy (rather than ‘high culture’) at the other” (198).

Locating Dalrymple and his works in the area of middlebrow literature

provides a theoretical context which assists in analysing how his texts operate.

Carter has much to say about the self-improving impulse of the

middlebrow (198). The generic expectation that non-fiction is

14
unproblematically truthful works with this self-educatory drive and ascribes

greater value to non-fiction genres. Reading fiction and reading non-fiction can

be seen to “improve” the reader in different capacities. Non-fiction is more

easily aligned with the principles of self-education, with fiction being more

generally (and ephemerally) represented as imparting skills in aesthetic /

artistic appreciation and therefore facilitating improvements in judgement, taste

and social status. Dalrymple’s monographs serve as particularly resonant

examples of this non-fiction middlebrow market, and analysis of these texts

casts some light on the ways in which this area of literature and reading

practice function.

The study of travel and travel writing always requires an engagement

with the links between travel, privilege and imperialism: “to talk about travel is

to enter into a terrain redolent with markers of imperialism” (Gilbert and

Johnston 1). This connection is readily apparent in Dalrymple’s works.

Dalrymple’s evident interest in and (precisely calibrated) engagement with the

imperial history of his destinations further highlights the centrality of the

representation of imperialism to an analysis of his oeuvre.

Central to a postcolonial reading of Dalrymple’s travel and history

writing is the extent to which his texts can be read as belated echoes or

iterations of prior colonial relationships and representations. Essentially,

Dalrymple’s texts portray a privileged, British protagonist who travels to and

writes about India (and occasionally other destinations). Not only does an

anachronistically characterised William repeat the traditional colonial journey

from imperial metropole to colonial outpost, but Dalrymple compounds this

15
connection by making British India (rather than India itself) his chief subject.

This double connection with Britain’s imperial presence in India means that the

ways in which the British-Indian relationship is represented is all the more

significant.

This project highlights the importance of the ways in which Dalrymple’s

texts use sex and gender, particularly as a way of structuring their

representations of the relationship between India and Britain. India is

consistently feminised and sexualised, with regular features of this rhetorical

strategy being a focus on harems, dancing girls and courtesans. The ways in

which Dalrymple’s texts represent Britain are more complex and flexible than

their treatment of India. On occasion, the British are also feminised (through a

focus on the figure of the memsahib), which works toward a sympathetic

representation of the Raj through an emphasis on its vulnerability and frailty.

The most overt gendered and sexualised representations in Dalrymple’s early

monographs are their uses of the figure of rape. In his later works this shifts to

a narrative of romantic love in what Hulme calls “the ideal of cultural harmony

through romance” (141). Dalrymple also embodies this affective connection

between the two countries in his self-fashioning as a sentimental India

enthusiast. In an interview with Sanjay Austa, he portrays himself as in the grip

of his harmless, yet consuming, obsession: “Some people fancy stamps, some

railways, some pigeons ... Well, I fancy India” (“Indian Historians”). Such

declarations of interest, as well as advancing attractive possibilities for cross-

cultural interaction, also allow for more negative representations of the

16
country. In the introduction to The Age of Kali, Dalrymple asserts his feeling

for the nation, stating that the text is a “work of love” (xiii).

Dalrymple’s performance as knowingly nostalgic, born-a-century-too-

late, with a level of self-deprecation sufficient to engender his readers’

sympathy, is a conscious move towards reviving the acceptability of the

imperial-style traveller / scholarly Orientalist figure. For Debbie Lisle, this

nostalgic link is common: “travel writers maintain their relevance in a

globalised world by mimicking their colonial forebears” (3). Lisle states that

the nostalgia that permeates contemporary travel writing is attractive to readers

because it “provides a sanctuary from contemporary ‘politically correct’

attitudes about race, gender, sexuality and class” (19). The continuing

popularity of Dalrymple’s works shows a widespread receptiveness to this

nostalgic, sentimental version of an imperial British past. As Scott McCracken

succinctly posits, “narratives read by large numbers of people are indicative of

widespread hopes and fears” (2). Dalrymple shifts between a glorification of

British mobility and travel and (specific forms of) Indian civilisation in each

text, but the effect remains static: to rehabilitate the history of the British

empire for a predominantly Western audience.

The anachronistic, belated portrayal of Dalrymple as a digestible

representative of a quintessential British imperial traveller normalises and

makes acceptable discourses of Orientalism. This restorative project is also

advanced through an approach to imperial history and historiography that

privileges narratives of mutual respect and exchange while neglecting those of

violence and appropriation. The critique of Dalrymple’s texts is not based on

17
any kind of argument about their veracity (or otherwise) in relation to an

outside, absolute historical truth. Rather, I borrow Kay Schaffer’s phrase to

describe its approach as one that “assumes that there is no guarantee of

knowledge beyond the textual representations of the event” (3). Sharpe’s

description of Allegories of Empire as “a reading of the narratives that go into

contemporary remakings of the past” (14) is also one that resonates here. It is

the ways in which these texts construct particular travel and historical

narratives that is of interest.

Dalrymple’s texts represent British imperialism in varying ways. Often,

the works’ representational strategies construct a relationship between an

imperial past and a multicultural present, arguing for an imperialism

distinguished by tolerance and hybridity. In his classic but still useful work The

Whig Interpretation of History (1931), H. Butterfield chronicles the pitfalls of

turning history into an untheorised narrative of progress and emphasising

similarities between past and present situations (34). He also notes the

tendency to classify historical figures in relation to modernity: “historical

personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered

progress and the men who tried to hinder it” (11). I examine Dalrymple’s

choices in this kind of classification and what implications they have for his

representation of postcolonial British / Indian relations.

In the end, what concerns this thesis is power. Dalrymple’s influence and

authority grow in relation to the number of books that he publishes (and sells),

and also in concert with the ways that he positions and promotes his extra-

textual authorial persona. Dalrymple, in his particular middlebrow field, has

18
become both celebrity and expert, each with their respective resonances of

popularity and dedication to knowledge. Graham Huggan notes in reference to

Dalrymple that “often travel writers are favoured by the media, not only as

reviewers of ‘Indian’ (and other ‘Third World’) material, but also as expert

commentators on ‘Indian’ (and other ‘Third World’) societies and cultures”

(275). In a circular way, Dalrymple’s celebrity and expert status give greater

weight to the arguments and representations he makes within and about his

texts (which are, themselves, about power and relations between coloniser and

colonised). Joe Moran describes literary celebrities as containing “elements of

the idea of the charismatic, uniquely inspired creative artist [but that they] …

also gain legitimacy from the notion of celebrity as supported by broad

popularity and success in the marketplace” (7). Moran’s argument is made in

relation to celebrity fiction authors, and thus emphasises the creative prowess

of the writer. In the case of Dalrymple’s non-fiction, this “creative” inspiration

can be replaced by an appropriate gesture towards his first-hand experience,

which informs his ability to discover or choose the story to be told.

James Clifford analyses the cachet of experience in the field in the

context of ethnography. As part of a larger critique of the problematic, under-

theorised, nature of authority in ethnography, Clifford pointedly states:

“Experiential authority is based on a ‘feel’ for the foreign context, a kind of

accumulated savvy and a sense of the style of a people or place” (35). The

authority that experience confers is described by Clifford as persuasively

egalitarian: “Experience evokes a participatory presence, a sensitive contact

with the world to be understood, a rapport with its people, a concreteness of

19
perception. It also suggests a cumulative, deepening knowledge” (37). Further,

and crucially, experience shores up its own authority through its inherently

opaque and individualistic nature: “Like ‘intuition,’ it is something that one

does or does not have, and its evocation often smacks of mystification”

(Clifford 35). It is this sense of experiential authority on which Dalrymple’s

celebrity status draws.

Dalrymple’s fame strengthens his authority as a regular reviewer and

commentator. As well as his presence within his texts, Dalrymple performs a

version of this persona in his interactions with the public sphere; through his

public appearances, wardrobe and the arguments he makes, Dalrymple seeks to

collapse the distance between author, narrator, central character and public

persona. Pierre Bourdieu describes what he calls “bodily hexis,” as “One’s

relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it [expressed in] in

the space and time one feels entitled to take from others, more precisely, in the

space one claims with one’s body in physical space” (474). Dalrymple uses his

bodily hexis and celebrity status to add to the authority of his texts. Wevers

aptly describes travel books as “expressions of the effectiveness of print in

putting the world on show and delineating a geography of power” (2). This

project maps these geographies of power, observing the connections between

text and author, subject and authority, and audience and status.

Nicholas Thomas recognises the ways in which the cultural and

governmental elements of colonialism are intertwined (while simultaneously

resisting a conception of colonialism as an overwhelming monolith). The

success of Dalrymple’s writing, which retails a sentimental, nostalgic

20
representation of the British empire, indicates a level of public receptiveness to

such a portrayal. Whether this stems from a conservative desire for a return to

imperialism, or a globalised, multicultural welcoming of cross-cultural

interactions is unclear. Through its close examination of Dalrymple’s travel

and history texts, this study gestures towards a broader consideration of the

rhetorical work that popular travel and narrative history performs.

21
Chapter One: In Xanadu: A Quest

Introduction:

The title of William Dalrymple’s first book, In Xanadu: A Quest, immediately

mobilises specific literary and adventure tropes. First published in 1990, the

work provides a fast-paced, humorous jaunt though the Middle East and into

China following in the footsteps of Marco Polo. The popular and acclaimed

work won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts

Council Spring Book Award for 1990, and was a bestseller. For Mary Baine

Campbell, “‘travel writing’ provokes certain kinds of essentially literary

questions and formulations. Most interesting … are works of literary criticism

that find themselves directly facing issues of power, knowledge, and identity as

a consequence of the very nature of the formal matters raised” (263). Despite

the positioning of In Xanadu as a light, entertaining student excursion, this

chapter takes up Campbell’s challenge to analyse the text’s expressions of

dynamics of power, knowledge and identity. Dalrymple represents himself

throughout this book as a young, highly-educated, upper-class, British

protagonist, nostalgically referring back to previous generations of British

travellers and empire. The work is continually concerned with the strategic

construction and maintenance of this central character.

The text leaves an overall impression of a celebration of unreconstructed

Orientalism, advanced by the representation of the protagonist as a privileged,

nineteenth-century-style amateur intellectual, in combination with the

narrator’s pronouncements about the places and people visited in the course of

22
In Xanadu. For Edward Said, “Orientalism is premised on exteriority, that is,

on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak,

describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West” (20-21).

In Xanadu is a nostalgic tribute to past European travel to and writing about the

Orient, and a central component of the protagonist’s characterisation is this

unspoken relationship with Orientalism. This chapter examines the text’s

relationships with past travellers, from Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin, and

imperial contexts. Lydia Wevers reminds us that

travel writing involved the author in what Mary Louise Pratt described as

the “anti-conquest”: writing which represented travellers, explorers and

naturalists as innocent investigators, motivated by their pursuit of

knowledge, whose journeys happened to occur at the historical moment

of European dispossession and appropriation. (3)

Although texts such as Dalrymple’s are very different to the imperial ones to

which Pratt and Wevers refer, it is fruitful to examine the connections between

the eras, rather than rule strict delineations between them. In fact, Dalrymple’s

narrative encourages such connections, with its explicit characterisation of

William as a naïve undergraduate investigator, albeit one fascinated by, rather

than actively participating in, the imperial moment.

Wevers also reiterates the necessarily classed nature of travel and travel

writing, which she sees as concealed by the genre’s focus on the individual

protagonist:

The personal dimensions of travel writing, the celebration of the traveller

and the journey which gives travel writing its narrative flavour, disguises

23
 the way in which it is also the expression of a social group characterised

by both a cultural conviction that the experience and observations of

European people should be recorded, and an economic and physical

capacity to undertake long and often difficult journeys. In other words,

the focus on the heroic, personalised aspects of travel conceals the fact

that it is a class activity, enabled by financial status and cultural

knowledge. (6)

Similarly, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan note that “the freedom of

travel writers is not the freedom of all: it is the privilege of mobility that allows

them to travel, and to write” (4). It is worth emphasising that the privilege of

mobility is one that comes with class, cultural and economic capital.

The chief manner in which an Orientalist flavour is imparted to In

Xanadu is through the characterisation of William. Unlike the protagonists of

many travel texts, Dalrymple does not travel alone. He is accompanied at all

stages of his journey, first by Laura and then by Louisa. Although Dalrymple

dominates the text, these two characters are central and are appropriately

recognised in the acknowledgements: “it must be obvious to anyone who reads

this book that I owe an enormous debt to two people without whom the whole

enterprise could never have got off the ground. I dedicate this book with love

and apologies to Laura and Louisa” (np). Louisa was Dalrymple’s girlfriend

with whom he planned the trip, who, despite breaking it off with him for

Edward before the journey begins, agrees to travel half of the route with him.

Laura, on the other hand, is a casual acquaintance whom Dalrymple knows by

reputation. He describes their initial encounter:

24
 Reeling from the blow [of Louisa’s rejection], I went off to a dinner party

where I poured out my heart to the stranger who was sitting on my left.

The recipient was called Laura. … Laura was as impulsive as she was

formidable. At the end of supper she announced that she would take

Louisa’s place. .... Over the next two weeks Laura swept me around

London as she slashed at red tape, assaulted passport officials, and

humbled the bureaucracy of the Asian embassies. (12)

This passage, set prior to the commencement of the journey, in combination

with the acknowledgements’ statement that the presence of these two women

enabled the project to “get off the ground,” sets up the central dynamic

between these characters from the text’s opening. The women are active, while

William is carried along with them, whether it be represented through his

acceptance of Louisa’s “new man” (12) as a “fait accompli” (11-12), or being

“swept … around London” with Laura (12). William’s passivity accentuates

his innocence and naïveté. He is almost a fellow-traveller in his own story—

present to record events (such as Laura “assault[ing] passport officials”) but

distanced from the action.

Through an overarching concern with authenticity, credibility and truth

(variously bolstered by the text’s journalistic and historiographic leanings),

Dalrymple the author and William the character are brought ever closer

together as the book progresses. Through this manoeuvre, Dalrymple stresses

the straightforwardly autobiographical, rather than the inventive, possibilities

of the travel genre. In conversation with Tim Youngs, Dalrymple firmly states:

“I never consciously created a persona around the ‘I’. The ‘I’, I suppose, is the

25
me of that particular moment, and how I see things at that particular moment”

(40). Dalrymple’s denial of the use of fictional elements in the construction of

the iterations of the character of William glosses any changes in the ways in

which William is represented (within individual texts, or, particularly, across

Dalrymple’s body of work) as accurate reflections of Dalrymple’s intellectual

and emotional development. Such a disingenuous approach necessarily

privileges the centrality of the authorial figure, and relies upon the (inherently

personal) authority of autobiography for its legitimacy.

Paul Smethurst positions narrative authority in travel writing as “the

figurative re-enactment of (or the prelude to) assuming actual authority of

peoples and places travelled to and written about” (4). He emphasises the

importance of analysing the “strategies by which narrative (and actual)

authority are sought, assumed, applied, and questioned in the context of both

imperial and post-colonial travel narratives” (4). In the case of In Xanadu, the

central strategies for the construction of narrative authority are the appeal to

autobiographical authenticity and the association of William with a phalanx of

past, canonical travellers. The characterisation of the protagonist is central to

both of these authorizing strategies.

By utilising the opening phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla

Khan or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” for the title of his first travel book,

Dalrymple achieves a collection of effects. The reference works to position the

text in a particularly British, romantic, poetic (and vaguely Orientalist) manner,

at the same time as investing it with the authority of Coleridge’s canonical

status. Balanced by the subtitle, A Quest, which suggests more concrete,

26
practical elements, In Xanadu harnesses the association with the poem’s

mythical qualities in order to effect a sense of the exotic. This association is

strengthened, and overlaid with a lacquer of Romantic values of the importance

of poetry, when William and Louisa solemnly recite the poem in unison upon

reaching their destination (300). The comment by their local escort at this

recitation, humorously translated as “English people, very, very bonkers”

(300), affirms their stubborn dedication to an intellectual, romantic ideal. The

text’s title immediately alters the object of the journey for the travellers:

instead of journeying to (Chinese) Shang-tu—a name mentioned only once

throughout the text (285)—they seek the (British) literary destination named by

Coleridge.

Beginning in Cyprus, the text traces William’s journey from there to

Jerusalem, through Iran, Pakistan, India and across China to the destination

“Xanadu,” following as far as possible the route taken by Marco Polo.

Dalrymple chronicles his impressions of the places he visits and the people he

meets, and provides comic narration of his travels, rich in dialogue and

dramatisation of his experiences and the characters with whom he interacts.

For the most part the work is arranged chronologically, echoing the trajectory

of the central journey. The text’s opening chapter makes much of the

legendary, familiar nature of Polo’s travels. The chapter begins in Jerusalem,

with a conversation between William and a Franciscan monk, from whom he

collects the holy oil to take on his journey. It then moves through a brief

narrative history of the Polos and the historical context in which they travelled,

to an anecdote introducing the reader to William’s first encounter with the

27
figure of Marco Polo. This structure enables the text to start in the middle of

the action, with an informal impression of the central character. The reader is

then informed (or reminded) of the wider context, and then given details to

introduce the protagonist.

Peter Hulme succinctly characterises the particular variant of travel

writing to which In Xanadu belongs as “in the wake” of earlier travellers (“In

the Wake” 18). Hulme observes that “The writing of these journeys inevitably

reflects their secondary nature—they are dependent on what some earlier and

almost by definition, more famous predecessor has undertaken” (18). This

structure provides many benefits to the travel writer, including a ready-made

route, structure and an indication of the work’s subject. Hulme sees the chief

value of the text that follows a known route or traveller in its “asymptotical

relationship to the ‘original,’ the story of the first journey which is usually

glimpsed beneath the contemporary text, often held physically in the hand of

the travel writer, sometimes quoted, sometimes not” (18-19). For Debbie Lisle,

these kinds of journeys inevitably foreground the relationship between the

historic and contemporary narratives, giving “the past-to-present framing of the

narrative even greater significance. By providing historically informed

discussions of the famous figure and his / her original visit, the following

author simply explains how a destination has, or has not, changed since that

time” (223). In Xanadu is a text that constructs itself as being authentic and

originary, despite the fact that as a journey “in the wake” it is necessarily

neither of these things.

In an effort to attain a greater level of authority, Dalrymple provides a

28
lengthy explanation of the reasons that make his journey the first legitimate re-

tracing of Polo’s travels:

Many had, like us, set off in his tracks but no one had ever managed to

complete the journey. … But in the spring of 1986 the opening of the

Karakoram Highway, the mountain road which links Pakistan with

China, made it possible for the first time, perhaps since the thirteenth

century, to plan an overland route between Jerusalem and Xanadu and to

attempt to carry a phial of Holy Oil from one to the other. The war in

Afghanistan prevented the whole of Polo’s journey being followed but in

principle it was now possible to follow almost all of it, and to complete

the journey. (11)

Dalrymple begins by emphasising the authenticity of his journey and the text

that forms its record, claiming the somewhat curious position of being the

first—not to make the journey, but to follow Polo properly (although this claim

itself is immediately qualified as following Polo’s route “in principle,”

whatever that might be taken to mean, and with the exception of Afghanistan).

Dalrymple glibly creates a narrative which brushes aside the historical details

in order to situate his journey as significant—to justify the work’s existence as

both scholarly and historical rather than just an entertaining tale. However, the

lack of attention to the historical details (much European travel occurred in

Afghanistan in the nineteenth century) serves ultimately to undermine the

claims that Dalrymple makes for In Xanadu’s historical value. As a journey

that is intrinsically belated, it might seem that a concern with authentic,

originary status is somewhat redundant. However, Dalrymple’s justification of

29
the journey in this way shows a need for the work to be positioned as both

relevant to the contemporary political situation and as contributing to

knowledge.

Despite the work’s desire for authenticity, the protagonist is positioned as

naïve. From the text’s beginning, William is figured as the novice traveller,

especially in relation to his travelling companions. This is evident in even the

most crucial aspects of the journey. It is Louisa, not William, who initiates the

planning of the trip and the choice of the route: “It was my then girlfriend

Louisa who spotted the small article in the New York Herald Tribune which

announced the opening of the [Karakoram] highway and together we decided

to mount an expedition to follow in the Venetian’s footsteps” (11). In a text

that makes so much of the authenticity of its central narrative device (the route

taken), a lack of a similar preoccupation with the authority of the protagonist is

significant. More important to the text than the foregrounding of an

authoritative authorial presence (as can be found in Dalrymple’s later works),

is the sustained representation of the work’s central figure in a specific mode.

The chief way in which In Xanadu represents its protagonist (and

therefore the crucial manner of representation for the text itself) is directly

related to the class and mobility of this particular traveller. William is

represented as a bumbling, ineffectual, upper-class traveller, which forms a

vehicle for much of the text’s humour. This representational strategy fits

remarkably well with the trope of the anachronistic (English) gentleman

traveller identified by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan as “a means of

reinstalling a mythicized imperial past” (xi). They describe

30
 the capacity for self-deprecation that most marks the gentleman’s

progress: an indication not only that he doesn’t take himself too

seriously, but that we shouldn’t take him too seriously either. … The

foppishness of some of these writers, who tend to make light of their

misadventures, provides a useful alibi for their cultural gaffes and, at

times, their arrogance. (6)

William’s constant shortcomings in the practical matters of travel, highlighted

through his juxtaposition with his more efficient companions, enable

Dalrymple to introduce his (often negative) opinions to the reader. At the same

time, these are characterised as somehow harmless, or less important, due to

William’s foppish eccentricity.

William is introduced through an entertaining autobiographical vignette

describing his schoolboy fascination with Polo:

At my primary school we knew all about Marco Polo. He wore a turban,

a stripy robe a bit like a dressing gown and he rode a camel with only one

hump. The Ladybird book which had this picture on the cover was the

most heavily thumbed book on the school bookshelf. One day, my

friends and I put some biscuits in a handkerchief, tied the handkerchief to

a stick and set off to China. It was an exhausting walk as there were no

camels in Scotland, and by tea time we had eaten all our biscuits. There

was also the problem that we were not absolutely sure where China was.

It was beyond England, of that we were certain, but then we were not

absolutely sure where England was either. Nonetheless we strode off

manfully towards Haddington were there was a shop. We could ask

31
 there, we said. But when it began to get dark we turned around and went

home for supper. After consultation we decided to put the plan on the

shelf for a while. China could wait. (10-11)

This piece of amusing memoir constructs the cuteness, and the somewhat

ineffectual nature of the younger William, as well as emphasising the

continuing youthfulness of the protagonist, linking his present quest with his

childlike curiosity. However, the schoolboy William is represented as a

particular type of child: not a muscular, capable, Boy Scout type, but instead

constructed as rather keen and slightly bewildered. Here again Dalrymple is

participating in what Holland and Huggan term “the cult of gentlemanliness in

contemporary Anglophone travel writing” (6), characterised by the expression

(and, to a certain extent, parody) of the “anachronistic ideals of (English)

gentlemanliness ... [that are] likely to attest to the traveler’s honesty and

courage, his sense of fair play” (6). The text represents the protagonist as an

enthusiastic, though amusingly flawed figure.

It is telling that this anecdote concludes with the postponement of

William’s childhood plan, positioning the present trip as the fulfilment of a

long-held childhood dream. The influence of Bruce Chatwin on Dalrymple’s

writing can be seen in the device of using a childhood object / obsession to

kick-start a travel story, recalling the role of the mylodon skin in Chatwin’s In

Patagonia (a text whose title bears a clear intertextual relationship to

Dalrymple’s). While In Xanadu devotes a reasonable amount of words to

chronicling the conception and planning of the expedition, there is no similar

narrative of the conception of the journey’s chief production—the text itself.

32
Other, less material outcomes are gestured towards (such as the nebulous

concept of the general enrichment of knowledge), and Dalrymple does identify

himself as a travel writer on occasion. Such moments serve as a reminder that

the underlying motivation for the journey is its product, the travel book,

although this is generally elided through the text. The relationship between the

journey and the text is reinforced when Dalrymple refers to his writing process:

“I got out the logbook and began scribbling. But it was cold and getting colder,

and after a couple of pages I gave up and went out into the dusk to explore the

town’s Seljuk remains” (89). Such passing references to the text’s construction

invariably focus on the immediacy of the act of writing to the journey, rather

than the removed, subsequent editing and rewriting processes.

More oblique references to the writing process, and the status of the

journey as a subject to be written about, are visible in Dalrymple’s relationship

with Polo’s text (rather than the mythologised figure of Polo himself). In

contrast to his idolisation of Polo as an early example of an intrepid European

encountering Persia and Asia, Polo’s text is actively criticised by Dalrymple:

the book [Polo’s Travels] 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 intended 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 he includes very little about Asian social mores (which might have

made really interesting reading). (66-67)

33
His catalogue of complaints about Polo’s text highlights what Dalrymple sees

as important in a travel narrative. It seems that, for Dalrymple, what is most

interesting is an anthropologically or ethnographically influenced comparison

of cultural behaviours (or, to use his morally-inflected term, “social mores”).

The ways in which cultural comparisons are used throughout In Xanadu offer

some insight into what a less “dull” travel text might look like. In contrast to

many travel writers following in the wake of earlier (famous) travellers,

Dalrymple does not revere or fetishise the original text. That William and his

companions would subject themselves to serial discomforts and hardships for

the sake of a book that they do not like seems rather remarkable. Of course,

though, Marco Polo is more than just his Travels. Polo’s fame, instant name-

recognition status (for a Western audience) and position as one of Europe’s

first contacts with Asia makes him a celebrity traveller for Dalrymple to

follow, regardless of whether his text is “interesting” by William’s standards.

Assuming that Dalrymple follows his own advice about writing an interesting

travel account, In Xanadu can be seen as an improved version of Polo’s

Travels—the same route, with more entertaining observations.

In actuality, instead of a focus on the cultural practices of the people

whose lands they visit, the backbone of In Xanadu is the narration of the daily

trials of William and his companions. In a central set-piece of characterisation

that reinforces the protagonist’s indolent gentlemanly image, Dalrymple

narrates William’s and Laura’s ascent of the old citadel in Sis:

We made slow progress or, rather, I made slow progress while Laura shot

ahead and I limped up after her. Although it was mid-afternoon, it was

34
 still hot, and my shirt was saturated. Occasionally I would collapse on a

ledge, my head resounding to the military band thumping away in my

temples, and douse myself with the tepid chlorinated water from the

water bottle. Laura seemed impervious to the heat, the exertion, or the

imminent danger of dehydration or heart failure. At first she was

impatient with me (“Oh get on with it!” “You should lose weight.”

“When was the last time you took any exercise?”) but by about halfway

up she seemed to come to terms with the fact that she was not travelling

with an athlete and began to tempt me up with gentle, clucking

pensioner-talk (“Come on now, only a little bit further.” “Just think,

nearly there!” and “Oh well done; one last effort now”) (72-73)

The humorous way in which this passage is put together works to endear

Dalrymple to the sympathetic reader, as someone unafraid to send himself up

or to reveal his weaknesses. However, as becomes evident in the text, it is only

particular kinds of attributes (and chiefly his physical state or stamina) that are

open to this treatment. William’s intellectual powers, for example, are never

brought into question. Dalrymple’s characterisation of William as a modern

embodiment of the enthusiastic amateur gentleman traveller mobilises an

interconnected series of related discourses. Harking back nostalgically to a

particular incarnation of British imperialism, such a representational choice

necessarily implies an acceptance of British superiority. Inevitably, the aspects

of imperialism recalled in this belated, nostalgic fashion are those that are

daring, heroic and masculine. This image remains, despite William’s distinctly

un-athletic characterisation. The conflation of William’s, Laura’s and Louisa’s

35
attributes reinforces this image of resourceful British travellers, with even the

(upper-class) women contributing to the model. The anachronistic

characterisation of William and his companions sets the tone for the work and

necessitates its own group of conventions of appropriate travelling behaviour,

influenced by class.

Locating In Xanadu

In Xanadu is a text that is positioned by Dalrymple in a variety of ways. The

majority of these are linked to, and revolve around, the ways in which the

figure of Dalrymple is represented. The representational conflation of author /

narrator / protagonist and the text in which they are manifest (or that they

produce) enables the use of the level of authenticity claimed by autobiography,

while simultaneously retaining the light-hearted, tall-story inflections common

to travel writing. Such a move effectively allows the text to claim both

“serious” (read truthful) and jocular (“not to be taken seriously”) status, as the

narrative occasion requires. There are two main sites in which the text effects

its self-positioning: within the book itself, and outside the text, in the

surrounding publicity. The extra-textual positioning chiefly occurs in

juxtaposition with Dalrymple’s later monographs. Therefore it is not merely

about the positioning of In Xanadu, but also about its place in the larger body

of Dalrymple’s works. This is achieved through a narrative of the development

of Dalrymple’s authorial persona, and his characterisation as protagonist. Here,

the conflation of author and text is evident and strategic.

36
 When explicitly comparing his first book with his later offerings,

particularly when faced with criticism of some of the views expressed in the

early work, Dalrymple represents In Xanadu as a naïve work by a young

author: “it is a very early book, written at the age of 22. Writing a book aged

22, if it works, is a very exciting thing, but you then have to live with that book

for the rest of your life—reminding you what an obnoxious creep you were in

your early 20s!” (Interview with Tim Youngs 40). Dalrymple emphasises his

intellectual development since that time: “It is a book that I have more or less

completely disowned!” (Interview with Tim Youngs 40). He goes on to defend

the work, however, appealing to its humour and popularity: “The fact is that it

has got the best jokes and is a much funnier book than the others. I think I have

got progressively more politically correct and dull as I get middle aged. But in

readings In Xanadu will get a louder laugh than anything” (Interview with Tim

Youngs 40).

The ways in which William is represented throughout the text influence

the positioning of the work. Instead of this resulting in an extended focus on

William, his characterisation is effected by juxtaposing him with a variety of

other travellers. At no point during the work does William travel alone, despite

the established mystique of the traveller as the essentially solitary,

individualistic nomad (epitomised by the self-representation of figures such as

Chatwin). Louisa and Laura are the characters most commonly used as contrast

to the protagonist, as well as a selection of other, incidental figures introduced

for the development of particular facets of William’s representation as

required. There exists a power dynamic between William and Laura (with

37
whom he shares the first half of his journey) and Louisa (his companion for the

conclusion of his travels). Here In Xanadu utilises a figure common to much

travel writing, that of the traveller’s sidekick. The sidekick, or foil, is present in

a wide range of travel books including Michael De Cervantes Saavedra’s Don

Quixote (1605 and 1615), Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days

(1872) and the more recent Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O’Hanlon

(first published 1984), and works as a balance to the main character.

Passepartout’s skepticism, enthusiasm and passion form a counterweight to

Phileas Fogg’s excessive rationality in Around the World in Eighty Days.

Sancho’s rustic common sense attempts to ground his deluded and dangerous

master in Don Quixote. And in Into the Heart of Borneo, poetic dreamer James

makes bearable O’Hanlon’s macho amateur naturalist musings.

Implicit in the figures of hero and sidekick is an unequal distribution of

status. In the context of travel writing the journey is owned by the author’s

character, regardless of the centrality of the sidekick to the success of the

journey and the narrative. This status gap is often further compounded by the

sidekick being a servant or employee of the hero. In Xanadu’s sidekicks

function in much the same way as the above examples—as an organised, bossy

balance to William’s general uselessness, and a dippy girlishness to highlight

his intellectual prowess and (occasional) resourcefulness. That William’s

sidekicks are both female positions a gendered disparity of power at the text’s

centre. As demonstrated by Don Quixote and Into the Heart of Borneo, the

often greater wisdom of the sidekick does little to bridge this gap. It is as if

their devotion to (or patience with) the eccentric and foolish hero cements their

38
place in the hierarchy.

Between them, Louisa and Laura provide the means by which Dalrymple

can be characterised in wildly divergent ways, depending on the situation: as

hen-pecked, childlike, superior, chivalrous, caring, cavalier and so on. It is

difficult to overstate the extent to which William’s characterisation is reliant on

this narrative strategy. His experience of diarrhoea and food poisoning—a

reasonably private affliction—is conducted through comparison with Laura,

who “spent the morning exploring while I trotted up and down the corridor”

(125). Dalrymple then emphasises William’s frailness and hypochondriac

tendencies: “Languishing in bed I felt empty and weak and ill and sorry for

myself. I wondered if I had a temperature. Perhaps I had dysentery. Perhaps I

had caught one of those worms that you hear about in medical jokes. Some

could grow thirty feet long, others made you go blind” (125). Again, this is

contrasted with Laura’s command of the situation, as she immediately instructs

him on his best course of action: “‘You mustn’t eat anything this morning,’ she

said. ‘This afternoon you may have a small bowl of yoghurt. The bacteria in it

will help fight whatever is in your stomach. On no account take any antibiotics.

They will only weaken your resistance in the future and we can’t have the

expedition delayed any more than it is already.’” (125). Laura is represented as

both physically and emotionally stronger than William, dispensing practical

advice where he wallows in self-pity and worry. In a sense William is

portrayed as childlike (and Laura as fulfilling an appropriately female

mothering role), but this scene also adds to his image as a gentleman

traveller—he is indolent, and need not come up with his own solutions, instead

39
relying on others for their assistance. The fact that William isn’t evidently

sexually involved with either Laura or Louisa during their travels is in line with

his gentlemanly characterisation throughout In Xanadu. The gentleman

traveller is necessarily unattached, represented as the youthful, free traveller

who journeys for the sake of travel, amusement and (occasional) self-

improvement, reminiscent of the elite traveller of the grand tour.

Perhaps one of the more telling instances of William’s representation in

relation to Laura is found when they are contemplating what is constructed as

the most dangerous section of their journey—their entrance into Iran. The

conversation consists entirely of stereotypically British understatements:

[Laura] “Well, what do you think?”

[William] “What do you mean ‘what do I think?’”

[Laura] “You know exactly what I mean.”

[William] “What do you think?”

Laura considered. “Well I think it would be a shame if we got killed.”

[William] “So do I.”

[Laura] “And I don’t much fancy being flogged.”

[William] “Not my idea of a good time either.”

[Laura] “But I couldn’t face anyone at home if we wimped out now.”

[William] “So we go?” (114)

What is most memorable here is the overall sense of British pluck and a gung-

ho attitude reminiscent of much juvenile adventure fiction. This passage allows

William the kudos (and cavalier dashingness) of wanting to preserve his

reputation at home in the face of danger, while simultaneously advancing his

40
characterisation as the novice traveller, by allowing Laura to make all of the

decisions, without William having to venture an opinion.

The shift of William’s travelling companion from Laura to Louisa

similarly provides an opportunity for William’s characterisation to both

continue and change, according to the requirements of the narrative. This shift

is emphasised when Louisa asks: “‘Willy, I know I’m awfully stupid, but don’t

Pakistani hotels normally have beds in them?’ ‘Yes, of course they do,’ I

replied, rather enjoying the role of Experienced Traveller that I had assumed

since Laura left. Then I looked in the room. It was, as Louisa had indicated,

quite bedless” (191-92). Here, if anything, William’s amateur nature is

strengthened through the send-up of his keenness to appear knowledgeable and

experienced. As Louisa and William’s journey together progresses, further

changes in William’s representation become apparent:

When, at breakfast the next morning, I mooted the idea of crossing the

river into Gujar territory and climbing Pir Sar, Louisa was less than

enthusiastic. She had found Pakistan hard going and said she was feeling

tired and frail. She did not feel quite up to climbing mountains. “Don’t

come then,” I said eventually. “Anyway the Gujars developed a taste for

memsahibs during the Raj. You wouldn’t be safe.” “What about you?”

“No one will rape me.” “No. That’s true.” (204-05)

For Jenny Sharpe, “rape is not a consistent and stable signifier but one that

surfaces at strategic moments” (2). The moment at which it appears in In

Xanadu is an instance of heightened representation of William’s manliness.

Dalrymple advances no evidence or examples of the putative programme of

41
imperial sexual violence that he attributes to the Gujar population. Despite this,

he represents their investment in the rape of memsahibs as significant: the

phrase “developed a taste for” implies a regular habit and appreciation, as

opposed to isolated incidents. All Gujars, from the Raj to the present, are

represented as automatically inculcated with this “taste.” This representational

strategy is embedded in with ideas about racial traits and types and spurious

genetic theories that might transmit this “taste” to successive generations.

Louisa and William’s agreement that he need not fear rape can be read in

a number of ways. In contrast to the majority of the text, William is

represented here as physically strong: ready to climb mountains and able to

defend himself from attack, unlike the frail Louisa. In what might be presumed

to be an attempt at humour, William’s lack of physical attractiveness is seen to

work in his favour, sparing him from the Gujars’ advances. Further, related,

representational possibilities include an assumption that the Gujars’ proclivity

for sexual violence is limited to heterosexual rape, and that, by virtue of not

being a “memsahib,” William is therefore safe.

This transportation of Raj-era tropes and narratives about the rape of

white women into the present provides an opportunity for William to utilise a

(belated) image of empire for self-improvement purposes. John Tosh describes

the ways in which masculinity and empire function together: “the empire in

turn answered to profoundly felt masculine needs. The empire needed men; but

men also needed the empire, as a resource, as a refuge and as an object of

desire” (199). Here, Dalrymple’s desire for the empire is seen in his embrace of

the subject-position of plucky Briton encountering imperial foes.

42
 As well as this subtle use of the Laura and Louisa characters to influence

the portrayal of William, another, more obvious, representational strategy is

simultaneously open to Dalrymple. Chatwin’s 1987 text The Songlines, which

chronicles his theories about humanity and nomadism through a narrative of

his travels through central Australia, is an example. The text features

conversations between Bruce and Arkady, an Australian of Russian descent

with knowledge of Aboriginal cultural practices. Salman Rushdie highlights

the extent to which conversation and characterisation in Chatwin’s The

Songlines is constructed to serve the purposes of the text: “Later, after the book

is published, Bruce tells someone that ‘of course’ I am Arkady. …[I don’t]

recognize a single line of our conversation in The Songlines. The truth is, ‘of

course’, that Bruce is Arkady as well as the character he calls Bruce. He is both

sides of the dialogue” (Imaginary Homelands 233). Similarly, the realist, non-

fiction mode of In Xanadu does not foreclose Dalrymple’s complete

representational control.

Two useful examples of incidental meetings that form crucial

components of Dalrymple’s self-representation are both found in William’s

experiences in Turkey. His encounters—with a Turkish transvestite at the

Tarsus bus station; and with a group of German cyclists that Dalrymple finds

“doing press-ups outside my room” (83) at the Hotel Seljuk—both serve as

opportunities to define the protagonist. The Germans are seen as overly

physical (at the expense of their mental capacity), boorish types who are

embarked on a pointless journey, the embodiment of a binary division between

bodily and scholarly pursuits: “They tell me they have bicycled here from

43
Tiero del Fuego: ‘Ze Andes ver ze best bit’” (83). The Germans’ almost-

aggressive enthusiasm for exercise forms a sharp contrast with Dalrymple’s

distress mere sentences before: “5.30 a.m. Sivas bus station. Cold. Exhausted.

Penniless. 6.00 a.m. ... Discover that my plastic shampoo bottle has broken.

There is Head and Shoulders all over my wash bag, my clothes and, horror of

horrors, my books” (83). The juxtaposition between the athletic and the

intellectual recalls the Cartesian dualism between body and mind, and aids in

the construction of a particularly British masculinity in contrast to the German

type that so irritates William. Further, different, demarcation of William’s

gentlemanly masculinity is evident in his anxious depiction of the transvestite

as un-manly, freakish and disturbing. Dalrymple narrates in diary form:

10.30 p.m. Set off two hours late, only to stop [half an hour later] at the

bus station in Tarsus, the home of St Paul. Enough to give anyone

wanderlust: loud Turkish music and some sort of mewing Turkish

transvestite. He / she / it tells me Tarsus is “very romantic place”. It wore

thick mascara, pink lipstick and held a small yellow handbag. (82)

The overdetermined emphasis on the transvestite’s feminine attributes, and the

telling use of animalistic descriptors, highlights the complexity of Dalrymple’s

self-construction in a specific form of anachronistic, British masculinity. The

contrast between William’s efforts at bodily improvement (his wash bag and

Head and Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo) and those of the transvestite (the

yellow handbag and pink lipstick) are firmly separated. The message appears

to be that there are appropriate levels of self-fashioning which should be

adhered to. For Holland and Huggan, such instances of “homosexual panic”

44
function to draw “the line in the sand,” where “the traveler reclaims cultural

norms by detaching himself from a homosexually compromising situation”

(133). His emphatic non-identification with the cross-dressing figure works

alongside the less histrionic disavowal of a particularly athletic instantiation of

masculinity as embodied by the German cyclists.

The formal attributes as well as the content of this section of In Xanadu

invite analysis. This is the only section of the text that adopts an abbreviated

journal style. Other textual devices utilised which produce a similar effect

include a reliance on dialogue, and dramatised descriptions of scenes through

the use of stage directions, both of which are particularly reminiscent of Robert

Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. Indeed, when Dalrymple mentions Oxiana in the

text, he refers to one of Byron’s “playlets” (In Xanadu 125). But, though they

provide a similar feeling of immediacy, the journal style provides the most

reliable guarantee of veracity, crucial for travel writing. As Hulme reminds us,

travellers “depend for their authority, in some measure, on that touchstone of

travel writing, the conveyed sense of ‘being there’” (“In the Wake” 19).

Dalrymple explains: “It was a night of unmitigated horror probably best

conveyed through the entries I made at the time in the logbook” (81). A diary

is an internal narrative, involving only the author. Therefore, the diary has the

potential to house thoughts and opinions that might not be appropriate for

public expression. The same is true for William’s “logbook” for In Xanadu—

reference is made to his keeping it throughout the text, however the material is

significantly reworked prior to publication. This sole instance in which the

logbook “survives,” then, might claim this private nature as mitigation for its

45
overwhelmingly negative outlook, as its representation as only being intended

for William’s eyes endures.

Another facet of William’s characterisation throughout In Xanadu, which

in turn reflects on Dalrymple’s self-positioning, is found in the ways in which

he is aligned with earlier, famous travel writers. Chatwin, celebrity traveller

extraordinaire, is a central model for Dalrymple who repeatedly expresses his

admiration: “Bruce Chatwin is one of the great prose stylists of the late

twentieth century” (Interview with Tim Youngs 39). He even narrates his own

pilgrimage to significant sites in Chatwin’s career: “I started the manuscript [of

City of Djinns] at the desk where Bruce Chatwin wrote The Songlines” (City of

Djinns 1). In such instances, Dalrymple appears to be doubly “in the wake” of

earlier travellers: as Holland and Huggan note, “[the invocation of

gentlemanliness] is both a throwback to another era and an ironic recognition

that this era, and the values for which it stands, are now long gone. Self-

parody, in this context, demonstrates the awareness of belatedness” (6). While

Dalrymple constructs himself in the trope of the anachronistic gentleman

traveller, it is without the level of irony or self-reflexivity that Holland and

Huggan characterise as usual in such instances, nor the camp performance of

Chatwin. Instead, Dalrymple performs this characterisation as if it is still

possible (and unproblematic) to be a nineteenth-century gentleman traveller in

the 1980s, making imperially-inflected forms and conventions of travel and

cultural encounter accessible, amusing and everyday, erasing intervening

progress and changes in power relations. As well as constructing himself in the

tradition of the gentleman traveller, Dalrymple also simultaneously positions

46
himself in the tradition of those such as Chatwin who themselves took on this

role. In this sense, then, Dalrymple’s characterisation of William clearly

reflects the self-conscious, upper-class and very British lineage to which In

Xanadu subscribes.

Holland and Huggan suggest that: “It is an axiom of recent travel writing

that writers offer tribute to their predecessors, homage often paid in adulatory

terms. Contemporary travel writers thus consciously place themselves in a

tradition—a tradition as much literary as historically based” (7). So in addition

to the figure (and textual traces) of Marco Polo being visible through (or

behind) Dalrymple’s writing, the pale shades of intervening travellers are also

visible. Another of these travellers, and “The person who influenced me more

than anyone else—In Xanadu is basically a pastiche of his work—is Robert

Byron .... he wrote one unbelievable masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana (1937)”

(Interview with Tim Youngs 39). In Xanadu shows explicit traces of this

influence. In conjunction with Hulme’s resonant image of the traveller “in the

wake” conducting their journey with the text of their famous predecessor in

hand, Dalrymple positions William as travelling with a suitcase full of

canonical travel books. Polo is present (and regularly quoted), but it is Byron to

whom William appears most attached: “I turned to Robert Byron. The Road to

Oxiana had done more than anything to lure me to Persia in the first place, and

was always favourite reading in times of depression” (125).

In Abroad (1980), his study of British inter-war travel writing, Paul

Fussell describes Robert Byron as “monomaniacal and doubtlessly slightly

mad, carrying in him, as Anthony Powell remembers, ‘something of the

47
genuine 19th century Englishman—a type even in those days all but

extinguished in unmitigated form—the eccentricity, curiosity, ill temper,

determination to stop at absolutely nothing.’” (77). Fussell also writes an

introduction to an edition of The Road to Oxiana (1982), in which he ascribes

great, transformative powers to Byron and his text: “one can learn to see by

reading Byron” (xii). In light of this, the genealogy of travel writers engaged in

nostalgic, belated iterations of a past ideal is highlighted. Chatwin’s admiration

for Byron is evident in his introduction to the 1981 edition of The Road to

Oxiana, in which Chatwin describes Byron’s work as a “sacred text” (xi). He

notes of his journeys to Central Asia: “Sometimes, we met travellers more

high-minded than ourselves who were following the tracks of Alexander or

Marco Polo: for us, it was far more fun to follow Robert Byron. I still have

notebooks to prove how slavishly I aped both his itinerary and—as if that were

possible—his style” (xiii). The model for In Xanadu was the nineteenth-

century English gentleman, a figure that had resonances for Byron and

Chatwin (among many others) before Dalrymple. Where Dalrymple differs

from these travelling antecedents in his approach to this model is in his resolute

lack of ironic or camp sensibilities. A healthy embrace of irony is so endemic

in the travel genre, particularly in texts such as Byron’s and Chatwin’s that rely

heavily on the conceit of the belated traveller. So much so that in texts where

this level of knowing, ironic performance is lacking (like Dalrymple’s works)

the lack often goes unnoticed, as the reader projects the expected ironic

sensibility into the travel text.

Instances in which Dalrymple invokes this tradition to which he claims

48
membership can be seen more or less clearly throughout In Xanadu, and are

evident in general statements such as:

No wonder the Arabs have endeared themselves to generations of

European travellers. The conversation was slow, formal and courteous,

so much so that it seemed somehow archaic, fabulous, as if we were

eighteenth-century gentlemen on a grand tour, rather than grimy

undergraduates on a long-vac jaunt. We reclined, and followed the

example of the brothers. Some snoozed. Some played backgammon.

Everyone belched. But before long Nizar went and fetched a new radio

cassette recorder from his bedroom and my eighteenth-century fantasy

evaporated. (40)

This passage is the site of a number of discrete, though connected, textual

manoeuvres. Most obvious is the manner in which William sets himself up as

the latest in a long line of “European travellers,” gently historicising his place

as belated, at the same time as highlighting the authority of the tradition in

which he is participating. Here, Dalrymple foregrounds the particular era of

British traveller to which he is connected. Rather than rehearsing the full extent

of the trope of the modern European encountering the ancient Other, or

advancing links to Polo, he positions himself as a throwback to the idle touring

gentleman. John Tosh states of gentlemanliness that it “had a distinctly

ambivalent relationship with [the work ethic]” (93). Dalrymple’s embrace of

Orientalised indolence highlights his gentlemanly status.

There is no room for differentiation within this passage, either for the

Europeans (who are all presumed to be attracted to the same qualities of

49
Arabia), or for the Arabs, as represented by Nizar al-Omar’s family (who are

characterised as essentially and timelessly hospitable). The relation of such

characterisation to In Xanadu’s overall tendency to orientalising fantasy is seen

in Dalrymple’s eager appreciation of situations which conform to these types

of representation: “In the doorway stood the hotelier. He was holding a

breakfast tray. A few minutes later he returned with a bucket of piping-hot

water. He bowed as magnificently as an Abyssinian slave from The Arabian

Nights and withdrew. This was more like it” (84). This is an example of what

Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston describe as “traces of the imperial endeavour

haunt[ing] the very vocabulary, grammar, form, and subjectivities available to

the Western traveller” (13). In this case, Dalrymple actively embraces this

imperial influence on the characterisation of the narrator.

In keeping with William’s self-fashioning as a gentleman, and the work’s

emphasis on his status as a Cambridge scholar, Dalrymple advances his

theories on the provenance of particular techniques of castle-building,

concluding that

it was wonderful to have the freedom to speculate. In Europe detailed

research has dropped a weighty academic veil between the amateur

antiquarian and his ruins. He must tread carefully for he treads on

someone’s PhD. In contrast, the state of Cilician archaeology is only as

advanced as its English equivalent was at the time of John Aubrey and

William Stukely, and the traveller can still write books of dilettante

observations like Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum [1724], without fear

of being contradicted. He is on virgin territory. (74)

50
Here, William is characterised as a typical Orientalist—the dilettante, amateur

enthusiast reaching out into the relatively-unstudied realms of foreign

antiquities where there is still space to define and explain ancient mysteries for

a home audience. Problematically, William’s intellectual freedom as amateur

antiquarian appears to be based upon the relegation of all contemporary

Turkish scholarship to a distant past, clearing a path for a British scholarly

“deflowering.” Such sentiments are elided when Dalrymple later claims that:

“In Xanadu is a lark. It’s a student journey. It’s a very light, young man’s

book” (Interview with Tim Youngs 38). Rather, In Xanadu posits arguments

about imperial history and cross-cultural power relations while simultaneously

being a “lark.”

Dalrymple and his travelling companions have high levels of social and

economic capital, as evidenced by their time spent and connections made with

people in high places—as when Dalrymple describes the luxury and service on

offer at his friend’s “palatial” residence in Lahore—despite the text’s frequent

protestations that their journey is on a budget. In Israel, William describes his

encounter with Hamoudi: “he offered us a room for a pittance and we accepted:

I had only £600 to see me through to Peking, twelve thousand miles away. This

was not going to be a deluxe holiday, whatever else it might promise” (20).

Countering statements such as this are the text’s frequent reference to drinks,

hotels and activities that do not appear to fit such a budget. Indeed, rather then

conveying the experience of shoestring travel, underlying the text is a sense of

privilege that continues to reveal itself. Adding to the text’s elasticity on

money matters, there is also some confusion around the amount that Dalrymple

51
has at his disposal: Trinity College is stated as donating £700 in the

Acknowledgements.

Anglocentrism and Cultural Comparisons

The tone is set for much of William’s interactions with those that he meets on

his travels at the opening of In Xanadu. Dalrymple effectively positions the

reader and the traveller together, in opposition to the various locals

encountered. In this instance, William performs his superiority through the use

of dramatic irony, with himself and the reader knowing more than the

Franciscan monk, Brother Fabian, from whom William obtains the oil from the

Holy Sepulchre that he takes to Xanadu in imitation of Polo. Fabian ignorantly

asks “who’s this Italian you were looking for?’” and wishes William “Good

luck finding your friend” (6). These responses are encouraged by William’s

combination of brevity and suggestion, and Fabian’s lack of knowledge is

represented as entertaining. This manoeuvre concomitantly places William and

the reader in a knowledgeable subject position.

Another example of such characterisation is seen in subsequent

explanations of the purpose of their journey:

As we tried to edge our way towards the gangplank, a Lebanese

merchant began quizzing us on our journey: “Good sir, why are you

coming to Syria?” “We are following Marco Polo.” He considered this as

he walked forward. “This Marco Poodle—he is Englishman?” “No,” said

Laura, stepping over the epileptic. “Italian.” “Oh.” Then: “When was Mr

Poodle coming to Syria?” “Many years ago.” “He is still alive?” “No.”

52
 “Then why do you follow him?” (30)

Although this exchange works to place the merchant as the subject of ridicule,

the question that he ends with is never fully resolved through In Xanadu. Here,

the gap appears to add to the general ridiculousness of the merchant, implying

that the reason is so obvious as to be above explanation. Throughout the text a

variety of answers implied include reference to the inherently peripatetic nature

of the travel writer, a quest for knowledge for its own sake (although precisely

what this journey is contributing to human knowledge is similarly unclear) and

a valorised imperialist tendency to explore or travel “because it is there” or

because one can.

Central to the characterisation of William is his positioning as an

intellectual. Constant reference is made to study undertaken, books carried, and

to the fact that Dalrymple and his companions are travelling during their long

university vacation. A good British schooling is seen to equip the travellers for

survival and success in foreign lands, as Dalrymple narrates William’s and

Laura’s attempt at boarding a bus in the crowded station of Latakia: “We got

aboard on our third attempt. Ten school years of cold scrum practice in wet,

February North Yorkshire were finally put to good use; we charged forward

like a pair of prop forwards, swinging our rucksacks, mercilessly knocking

everyone flying; only the Bedouin got in before us” (33). Even better than this

schooling, however, is the fact that Dalrymple is not simply a student, but a

student at Cambridge University’s Trinity College.

William has many conversations with people from the various countries

through which he passes about university, most involving some comparison

53
between Oxford and Cambridge and their local counterparts, or reference to the

fame and centrality of Oxbridge. These instances are expressions of an overt

Anglo-centrism. They are not the only points at which such sentiments are

expressed, however they form a discrete, contained subject for analysis.

William reports on an exchange he has with Rajep, a local of Sis who houses

the travellers for the night:

He studied law at the Bosphorus University in Istanbul—and had a T-

shirt to prove it. He was appalled to learn that we both studied history.

“In Turkey history has no value,” he said as he walked us to his home.

“The only serious subjects are engineering, medicine, law and

economics.” He was, however, reasonably impressed that we were from

Oxford and Cambridge: “I have heard people say that they are quite good

universities.” (77-78)

The contrast advanced here comes down to one of differences in levels of

cultural and economic capital. William and Laura have sufficient that they can

study history and travel for pleasure, while Rajep studies law and stays in

Turkey with his family. University studies, of all of the possible aspects of

William’s character that could be used to illustrate this difference in status, is

chosen to advance this point.

One of the more dramatic examples of the power and usefulness of a

Cambridge education is evident in William’s experience of being interrogated

by an Iranian police officer, who suggests that he might be a spy. The reader is

given an insight into William’s over-wrought consciousness: “Stop thinking

like this. It won’t help. Think of something else. Think of sex. Not in Iran. Think

54
of your family. You might never see them again. Stop this. You’re upsetting

yourself. Laura will come and rescue you” (141). In desperation to prove that

he is a student, not a spy, William hands the police officer his university library

card:

“What is this?” he said. He looked at the card. Then he looked up. “You

are at Cambridge?” “Yes.” “Cambridge University?” “Cambridge

University.” His expression changed. “Oh, Agah,” he said. “By the great

Ali! This is the most famous university in the world.” He examined the

card. “Ah, my heart! Look at this card. Expiry date June eighty-seven.

Borrowing October eighty-six. Five vols. Oh, Agah. For me these are

magic words.” “For me too.” “Agah. I am your servant.” I sat up. “Do

you mean that?” “Agah. You are a scholar. I am at your service.” He did

mean it. (142)

Tellingly, on the rare occasion that Laura does not come to William’s rescue,

Cambridge does. The mere mention of the famous university is capable of

transforming antagonists into assistants: “All afternoon, [the police officer]

Reza drove us around the monuments of Savah” (142).

A sense of cultural superiority is evident in the many comparisons

between Oxbridge and other educational institutions encountered. William then

uses the authority of his superior education and proceeds to make a succession

of quick, generalised and, to a great extent, harsh judgements about most of the

places visited. Dalrymple’s treatment of Latakia forms an example: “The

food—if you can find it—is the worst in the Middle East, the people the least

friendly” (33). To compound the imperialist overtones already making

55
themselves felt, such generalisations inevitably include recourse to simplistic

and problematic arguments about national types. Dalrymple notes of Latakia’s

population: “They mix Arab deviousness with colonial French arrogance, and

add to this a surliness which is uniquely their own” (33). Stereotypes are

rehearsed with abandon, with the locals being othered further through

relegation to the stone age: “We reached the town in a Neolithic late-evening

gloom. Dogubayazit was full of sinister, swarthy Turks. A few had sliteyed

[sic] Mongol features. They wore ragged waistcoats and stared deadpan from

open doorways” (112). When a particular national type is insufficient for

fullness of description, then a racial / cultural comparison (which invokes a

hierarchical vision of cultures and races) is utilised to aid the depiction:

Never have I seen a train less likely to raise the spirits. It could not have

been further from an Indian carriage. There, for all the discomfort, the

seats are packed with people busily unrolling bedding, setting up

primuses, cooking supper and generally making themselves at home.

Walking into an Indian train is like walking into an Indian village.

Entering a Turkish train is like finding oneself in a solitary confinement

cell. (108-09)

These hierarchical nuances of racial comparison become more overt when

Dalrymple actively (rather than just implicitly) compares the places and people

he encounters with Britain and the British:

They were bareheaded and far removed from the noble Afghan of travel

books. They did not talk of gardening or Persian poetry; instead they

questioned us closely about the West: “Is Inglistan better than Pakistan?”

56
 “In some ways.” “Pakistan is a country of dogs.” I painted a very

romanticized picture of Cambridge, and they promised to come and visit

me. “Is it far to drive?” “Very far.” I thought how they would look

driving down King’s Parade in their truck; we could take them punting.

(213)

As well as highlighting the absurdity of the notion of mutual travel, or travel

from the “periphery” to the “centre,” and comparing Afghan and British,

Dalrymple also measures his Pakistani fellow-travellers against previous travel

writers’ representations, thus simultaneously marking his place in the tradition.

This is despite the fact that their Afghan hosts are more capable travellers than

William and Louisa—they had hired the truck “in Peshawar, and were driving

it to the Chinese border” (212) when the British pair hitch a ride.

The imperialist power invoked by William and his companions manifests

most strongly in its icons and symbols. These are carried reverently and

described in great and loving detail by Dalrymple:

Before we left Britain Laura wrote to enlist the aid of the Permanent

Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. I have the reply in front of me. It

is written on a piece of thick, heavily embossed paper with a lion and a

unicorn at the top right-hand corner. From it, it would appear that the

Permanent Under-Secretary is a personal friend of Laura’s. It also

appears that the embassy in Peking has been instructed to contact the

Chinese Foreign Ministry to arrange an express permit, and that the

embassy in Islamabad is waiting to help us with the Pakistani Civil

Service. Of all the wonders I have seen Laura work in the past few

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 weeks, this must be the most spectacular. I have one other letter in front

of me. This I organized (although acting on Laura’s instructions). This

second letter is written on paper so thick it almost approaches parchment

and bears the crest of Trinity College, Cambridge. If it is to be believed

any obstacle to our expedition could well prove a major blow to the study

of the Orient as we know it. (181-82)

This is the most overt acknowledgement of the extent to which In Xanadu’s

central character is a contemporary version of the traditional Orientalist figure.

For Said, this means: “A nineteenth-century Orientalist was either a scholar (a

Sinologist, an Islamicist, an Indo-Europeanist) or a gifted enthusiast (Hugo in

Les Orientales, Goethe in the Westöstlicher Diwan), or both (Richard Burton,

Edward Lane, Friedrich Schlegel)” (51). In William’s case, he attempts a blend

of scholar and enthusiast. He also echoes the experiences of Robert Byron and

his companion in The Road to Oxiana, who also use the authority of their

education to advance their “expedition”: “‘You want visas for Samarcand?’

said M. Bouriachenko. ‘Of course you do. I will telegraph to Moscow at once

to say that two Oxford professors of Islamic culture’—(God forgive us, we

both left Oxford without degrees)—‘have arrived here and are waiting for

permission to cross the Amu Darya’” (Oxiana 343). The purpose of William’s

“expedition” (no longer a “journey,” or even the titular “quest”) is the very

broadly defined “study of the Orient,” underwritten in both epistolary and

financial form by the scholarly authority of Cambridge.

Reminiscent of nineteenth-century letters of introduction, these missives

reinforce William’s role as a modern embodiment of the anachronistic

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gentleman traveller. The letters are issued, and carried in addition to the usual

array of travel documents, for the purpose of overcoming local objections or

resistance to their travel. This draws attention to the particularly imperially-

inflected mode of travel (and travel writing) in which Dalrymple is engaged.

As well as highlighting the apparent willingness of the British to band together

to assist their kin abroad, the passage again privileges Laura’s organisational

skills and connections over William’s, as he is careful to point out that his

actions were only undertaken at her instigation.

Dalrymple, after reproducing the entire letter from Trinity in the body of

the text, expresses his admiration and gratitude to Simon Keynes, author of the

letter, through highlighting the extent to which his recommendation is

knowingly farcical: “And this [letter, extolling the academic rigour of

Dalrymple’s ‘expedition’], God bless his soul, from a man who had received

five essays from me in an academic year, and they on the Anglo-Saxons”

(182). There is a collegial sense of the educated British working together to get

one over the “natives.” Distinguished professors and colleges seem to

obligingly give funds and bend the truth to assist Dalrymple. The implication

here appears to be that any foreign power that objects to or restricts

Dalrymple’s endeavour is somehow misguided. This then sanctions the use of

bluff and trickery in an attempt to circumvent any obstacles.

In Xanadu is a text that is inextricably linked to the representation of its

author, both within and outside its textual boundaries. Dalrymple’s

construction of William as a travel writer throughout the work is pure self-

fashioning, as during the journey undertaken for In Xanadu he is not yet a

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travel writer at all. His self-identification, then, is both bold and strategic and

forms a significant part of his characterisation. As if to test the wisdom that

discourse creates its object, Dalrymple represents William as a travel writer

throughout In Xanadu (although in specific terms, emphasising the creative,

intellectual motivations for travel and travel writing):

“Where are you from?” asked the mullah. “What is your job?” “I am

from Scotland and I am a travel writer,” I replied. “What is Scotland?”

asked the mullah. “It’s a bit like Inglistan.” … “What is ‘travel writer’?”

In Turkish, travel writing sounds like a very sinister occupation. “It’s a

man who travels for his living,” I said. “Like a bus driver?” “Yes, like a

bus driver.” (151-52)

Later, in an interview with Aviva Tuffield on a publicity tour for White

Mughals (2002), Dalrymple is more forthcoming about the pecuniary details:

I mention his precocious authorial success and he admits that having

secured a “whopping, for an undergraduate, book advance” for In

Xanadu, he went around “boasting to all my friends and made myself

thoroughly unpopular” at college. After spending a year living off the

kudos of his publishing contract, he then actually had to write the book.

(3)

The method of production and the choice of writing style are also highlighted

by Dalrymple in this interview:

“I used this wonderful staccato Chatwin pastiche which I thought was a

thing of complete genius and was going to change the face of travel

writing—tiny sentences, very artistic”. Dalrymple sent this draft of the

60
 first chapter off to his editor and soon after found a message on his

answer machine: “Willy … these are notes that you’ve sent me? I hope

they’re notes because if you think this is what you’re handing in, we

might have to talk about getting that advance back.” (Tuffield 3)

The image of a keen young writer naïvely embracing and failing to master

Chatwin’s writing style functions to both recognise and deny the earlier

traveller’s influence. In sending up his desire to imitate Chatwin’s prose, he

glosses over the continuing impact of Chatwin on his work and on his authorial

persona. Heather Henderson highlights the relationship between contemporary

and past travel writers: “Travel writing is in fact a double-pronged quest for

domination, not only of actual experience (foreign lands and foreigners) but

also of literary experience (prior travel texts and their authors)” (245).

Dalrymple’s narratorial persona is tightly-constructed and contingent, owing

intertextual debts to and taking inspiration from multiple sources, including

Chatwin. This is a point worth remembering in the face of Dalrymple’s claims

for autobiographical simplicity, facticity and authenticity.

Another manner in which Dalrymple constructs his authorial persona is

through the photographs inserted in the centre of the text. In the first instance,

the collection of black and white photographs that accompany In Xanadu

confirms the presence of the author in the landscape, adding to the non-

fictional positioning of the text. The style of photographs included functions to

emphasise the pseudo-ethnographic nature of the text, with a proliferation of

portrait-style images of various exotic, bearded, weather-beaten men (many

given titles by Dalrymple such as “Mad Mullah” or “Rasputin”) or enthusiastic

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groups of children outnumbering all other subjects, including images of

architectural features. Such inserts are reminiscent of canonical travel works

such as Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), which also

feature black and white studies of the exotic locals. A notable difference is in

the proliferation of portraits of the protagonist in Newby’s text. These signify

different narratives and opportunities for characterisation, in their portrayal of

the author: whether wild and bearded atop a mountain, or smartly dressed

alongside his bearer.

By contrast, the only image of Dalrymple included in the text cements

his association with Cambridge university, with its caption reading: “Looking

smug afterwards, Neville’s Court, Trinity College, Cambridge.” This picture

implicitly positions Dalrymple as the photographer for the rest of the images,

reinforcing his representation as author and explaining his absence from the

frame. The only visual representation of Dalrymple in the text situates him at

Cambridge, and points to the centrality of his affiliation with this institution to

his characterisation.

Overall, it is easy to forget that In Xanadu is set in 1986. The text’s tone,

content and characterisation of its protagonist all work together to advance a

feeling of nostalgia for past modes and attitudes of travel. In Xanadu is another

in a long line of iterations of the figure of the British gentleman traveller,

without any of the self-recognition or parody that often goes with such a

representational choice in contemporary writing. The result is a travel text

which rehearses Orientalist modes and ideas, without reservation or comment.

Dalrymple’s next work, City of Djinns, has at its centre a quite different

62
narrator. The text itself largely leaves aside the overt racial / cultural / national

comparisons of In Xanadu in a work that is less a generic travel text and more

an extended consideration of one city: Delhi.

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Chapter Two: City of Djinns

William Dalrymple’s second monograph was published three years after In

Xanadu, and tells the story of his sojourn in Delhi with his wife Olivia. The

text’s subtitle A Year in Delhi advances an easy equivalence between the

monograph and a year in the author’s life. Yet the narrative structure of City of

Djinns is more complex than its title indicates, and it uses the “best bits” of

Dalrymple’s experiences over four years to create a “notional year” spent in

the capital (Interview with Tim Youngs 42). The text’s relationship with

history is deployed through a series of stories about various characters

encountered by William, who are in turn linked to historical figures and events.

In this way, the work introduces stories about the Mughals, the British,

Partition and Independence through William’s personal connections.

Dalrymple claims: “All the different ages of man were represented in the

people of the city. Different millennia co-existed side by side” (9). This

passage works to portray India as occupying a different temporal environment

to Britain. Johannes Fabian’s directive about anthropology—“We must ask

what it is that anthropologists try to catch with their manifold and muddled

uses of Time” (25)—is equally applicable to travel writing here. William’s

ease at negotiating both the physical and temporal spaces of the capital make

him an ideal guide to its past and present.

William’s movements into Delhi’s past are described in tandem with his

explorations of the city:

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 The further Dr Jaffery and I went into the vortex of vaulted passageways,

the less and less sign there was of the twentieth century, with all its noise

and cars and autorickshaws, then of the nineteenth and eighteenth

centuries with their blank-faced late Mughal town houses. By the time

we ducked under a narrow arch and emerged into the daylight of the

central enclosure, we were back in the Middle Ages; the legacy of the

Tughluk period was lying all around us. (277)

Note the absolute nature of the language used to describe the protagonist’s

temporal travels: it does not merely “seem as if” they are in the Middle Ages,

the words chosen are the decisive “we were back.” Claude Lévi-Strauss

famously describes his awareness of his own belatedness as a traveller:

“insidiously, illusion began to lay its snares. I wished I had lived in the days of

real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle

that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt” (43). Dalrymple’s

representation of his engagement with history as well as travel functions to

minimise this sense of arriving too late.

The character of William operates in a similar way to the protagonist of

In Xanadu in that he is a repetition of an earlier British model. However,

instead of an earnest version of past ironic travellers, the archetype that

William emulates in City of Djinns is that of the British colonist. Stationary

settler rather than travelling Orientalist is the imperial model chosen for this

geographically-bounded narrative. An excerpt from City of Djinns features in

the Lonely Planet publication A House Somewhere (George and Sattin, 2002),

alongside stories that are more about migration and settling than visiting and

65
moving on by Peter Mayle, Jan Morris and many others. It is ironic that Lonely

Planet, with its absolute brand identification with travel, would choose City of

Djinns to excerpt. This shows the strength of the association between

Dalrymple and travel, and the success of his authorial performance and self-

fashioning. Given this significant shift in subject, a change in the

characterisation of the protagonist is unsurprising. The William of City of

Djinns is equipped with the personality traits necessary to be a valuable and

effective settler colonist—he is practical, capable, vigorous and dependable.

He is also married, and this domestic dynamic is an important contrast to the

unattached individualist at the centre of In Xanadu.

One of the central aspects of Dalrymple’s work is its interaction with the

British imperial presence in India. City of Djinns is the tale of an elite Briton’s

travel to and residence in Delhi, which makes it available for reading as an

echo or repetition of early colonial encounters. Therefore, the ways in which

William is represented throughout the text personalises the empire. Both In

Xanadu and City of Djinns effect a positive portrayal of British imperialism,

although they employ what appear to be opposite strategies. The disorganised

intellectual traveller of In Xanadu shows the empire as an absent-minded,

harmless elite construction. In contrast, City of Djinns’ protagonist represents

the empire as much more stable, responsible, organised, rational, adventurous,

domestic, (generally) respectful and long-suffering. Through the construction

of the central character, the British colonial presence in India is represented as

well-balanced.

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 In another clear break from his self-representation throughout In Xanadu,

City of Djinns sees the protagonist portrayed as fit and active, as William’s first

conversation with regular comic relief character Balvinder Singh, a Delhi taxi

driver, demonstrates:

“How do you know I’m a Britisher?” “Because,” said Mr Singh, “you are

not sporting.” “Actually I am quite sporting,” I replied. “I go for a run

every day, swim in the summer...” “No Britisher is sporting,” said Mr

Singh, undaunted. “Lots of my countrymen are very keen on sport,” I

retorted. “No, no,” said Mr Singh. “You are not catching me.” “We are

still a force to be reckoned with in the fifteen hundred metres, and

sometimes our cricket team...” “No, no,” said Mr Singh. “Still you are

not catching me. You Britishers are not sporting.” He twirled the waxed

curlicues of his moustache. “All men should be sporting a moustache,

because all ladies are liking too much.” (19)

This passage, with its poking fun at Indian English, sets up a hierarchy of

levels of English language usage, placing William at the top. Although the

change in characterisation of William’s physical prowess might appear

inconsequential, it facilitates a representation of the British as capable,

practical, vigorous colonisers. From the effete gentlemanly protagonist of In

Xanadu emerges the manly William at the centre of City of Djinns. Note that

here the humour of the passage rests on Singh’s unclear English phrasing. Also

amusing is Singh’s presumption that he knows what it is that “all ladies” are

“liking.” While it is expected in the travel genre that a Western traveller will

67
make sweeping assumptions about the country visited, a similar universalising

by an Indian character is presented as an object of humour.

Throughout City of Djinns, William is represented as a contemporary

iteration of nostalgically-portrayed British colonisers. This characterisation, in

concert with a number of arguments throughout the text, is an opportunity to

represent Britain’s imperial relationship with India in a personable, friendly

manner. This re-enactment of British / Indian colonial history overlays a

complex and conflict-ridden past with an easy narrative of progress, civility

and cultural exchange. While such elements form part of the history of the

British annexation of India, contemporary texts that exclusively take such a

line form a nostalgic, limited representation. These portrayals have the

potential to perform their own kind of colonisation, settling in popular

(Western) consciousness and impacting on perceptions of imperialism and

cross-cultural relations past and present.

The scope of City of Djinns is necessarily dictated by its subject matter:

where In Xanadu’s journey structure provides ample opportunities for amusing

vignettes and cultural comparisons, City of Djinns’ geographical location gives

Dalrymple the space for a brief, anecdotal treatment of Indian history. Instead

of an in-depth consideration of Delhi as a travel destination, or a concentrated

study of its history, Dalrymple opts for an approach that uses elements of both.

This hybrid model enables a selective, piecemeal approach. This assists in the

maintenance of a sense of the positive contributions of the British to India.

Despite the work’s historical focus, City of Djinns is still careful to remain

identifiable as a travel book. The text achieves this identification through

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specific gestures towards typical travel tales, such as William’s encounters

with Indian bureaucracy and “great glistening cocoons of red tape” (20),

regardless of the grounded nature of the narrative.

One of the instances in which change is evident between City of Djinns

and In Xanadu is in Dalrymple’s treatment of transvestites and eunuchs.

Instead of the disgust and panic evident in In Xanadu, City of Djinns offers a

more considered portrayal. Tim Youngs comments on this shift in his interview

with Dalrymple, highlighting the difference between the “very sensitive and

detailed interviews with the eunuchs and the transvestites in City of Djinns”

and the earlier “comments on a transvestite whom you referred to as ‘he / she

(it)’” (41). The section of City of Djinns in which William spends time with

some of Delhi’s eunuchs, or “hijras,” still works to define the protagonist’s

masculinity, although in a different manner to that of In Xanadu. An important

qualifier to this is the fact that City of Djinns is the story of William’s time in

Delhi with his wife, Olivia, as opposed to his unattached characterisation in his

earlier narrative. This aspect of William’s identity is explicitly mentioned when

he first meets Chaman, the head of a hijra “household” (176), in an exchange

with William’s Indian companion, Zakir, who introduces him to Chaman. The

text uses recorded speech to convey the conversation: “‘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” (176). The

protagonist’s exchange with Chaman is always polite, but is represented in

such a way as to convey to the reader the extent to which William is holding

back from agreement with or admiration of Chaman.

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 In an effort to identify with William, Chaman uses the figure of Sean

Connery (a fellow Scot) as common ground, stating, “In the old times we hijras

used to be like your zero zero seven. …Our job was to listen and tell things to

the king. We were just like your Sean Connery” (176). Dalrymple conveys his

thoughts to the reader: “Somehow I couldn’t imagine Chaman and her

household taking on Goldfinger or seducing Ursula Andress, but I let this pass”

(176). He consistently refuses to be drawn. Chaman shows William a glamour

picture of herself at twenty-five and asks: “‘I was beautiful, no?’ ‘Unique,’ I

said” (177). The effect of William’s contact with the hijras is to characterise

the protagonist as an ethnographer in the field, penetrating hidden areas of

Delhi society in order to bring (slightly titillating) information to his readers.

The difficulty of this assignment is emphasised by Dalrymple in the beginning

of this section, with the statement:

despite their frequent appearances in public, very little is actually known

about the Indian eunuchs. They are fiercely secretive and of their own

choice inhabit a dim world of ambiguity and half-truths. They trust no

one, and hate being questioned about their lives; if they are pressed, at

best they will slam their doors in your face. (170)

As well as this, the presence of secretive eunuchs and brightly-painted dancers

furthers the image of a timeless India, in which exists these traditional figures

that “you can still find … in the dark gullies of the Old City—if you know

where to look” (169).

In a rare section of the work in which William leaves Delhi, Dalrymple

chronicles his and Olivia’s journey to Simla for the summer:

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 by the mid-nineteenth century the British seemed to have agreed that,

even with the aid of the Thermantidote, Delhi was best avoided in high

summer. From then on, the majority of the British inhabitants of the city

therefore decamped to Simla in April, and stayed there for the duration of

the hot weather. Late that summer, as the plains of North India were

transformed into one vast shimmering heat haze, Olivia and I bowed to

tradition and followed the ghosts of the memsahibs—and much of the

modern Delhi middle class—up into the cool of the old Imperial summer

capital. Rejecting the plane, we did what Delhi-wallahs have done now

for a century: we took the Himalayan Queen as far as Kalka then

changed on to the narrow-gauge miniature railway which winds its way

up the steep slopes to Simla. (314)

It is significant that this journey is literally in the footsteps of the imperial

British, reinforcing William’s Delhi sojourn as an iteration or echo of the

British / Indian colonial encounter. By “rejecting the plane” in favour of rail,

William and Olivia actively extend their connections to the nineteenth-century

colonial past. Dalrymple’s emphasis on the female elements of the Raj

highlights the complex ways in which he represents the imperial British. The

particular representation advanced here, is that of the fragile, ghostly

memsahib. Of course such a representation of British women in India is

limited—Dalrymple makes much of the vigour and engagement of Fanny

Parkes in his introduction to a 2002 edition of her Wanderings of a Pilgrim in

Search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty Years in the East; with

Revelations on Life in the Zenana (1850), retitled Begums, Thugs and White

71
Mughals. Like any travel in the wake of, this section, in which William and

Olivia literally act out the part of the British imperial population, forms a

tribute to those who made the journey beforehand.

City of Djinns’ investment in the conventions of the travel genre, as well

as Dalrymple’s reputation as an entertaining travel writer with the success of In

Xanadu, influences its classification as a straightforward travel text. When

considering the positioning of City of Djinns within Dalrymple’s oeuvre, it

becomes evident that different aspects of City of Djinns are emphasised for

different reasons. This is particularly obvious in retrospect, when Dalrymple

compares it with his later history works. In this context, City of Djinns is

positioned in the same way as In Xanadu—as the product or reflection of the

psyche of a younger, more naïve, author yet to reach his intellectual peak

(which is later figured as the properly mature writing of history). In an

interview with Tehmina Ahmed in 2003, Dalrymple works to heighten the

scholarly credibility of White Mughals by emphasising its break from the style

of his earlier works:

City of Djinns and Xanadu were books written by a very young man. I

was 22 when I wrote Xanadu and 28 when I wrote City of Djinns. They

have all the pitfalls and the plus points of young men’s books. They are

also different forms. Xanadu is a travelogue and City of Djinns a personal

memoir. This [White Mughals] is an attempt to write a solid piece of

history, it’s not at all personal. (Interview with Tehmina Ahmed)

This manoeuvre is of particular interest as it signals a sliding scale of

youthfulness that is applied retrospectively whenever required. In a 2005

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interview with Tim Youngs, Dalrymple positions City of Djinns as the

“mature” text against which the youthful In Xanadu is situated: “In Xanadu

was half-written when I was still at university at the height of the Thatcherite

’80s and City of Djinns was written after 4 years of living in India. It obviously

has a very different set of influences. You grow up a lot in that time” (41).

In direct opposition to his earlier statements linking City of Djinns and In

Xanadu together as irreverent, “young” works, here City of Djinns takes on

greater historical value. Another move towards seeing City of Djinns as a

“mature” text is found in the introduction to The Last Mughal where there is a

retrospective portrayal of City of Djinns as a straight history book, represented

as forming part of the lineage of Dalrymple’s passion for history, and acting to

bolster the impression of an extensive corpus of work:

It was this intriguing and unexpected period which dominated the book

that I wrote about Delhi fifteen years ago, entitled City of Djinns, and

which later ignited the tinder that led to my last book, White Mughals,

about the many British who embraced Indian culture at the end of the

eighteenth century. The Last Mughal is therefore my third book inspired

by the capital. (The Last Mughal 9)

The key to this statement is the emphasis on the time that Dalrymple has spent

with his subject—the “fifteen years” of implied knowledge, familiarity and

research which functions to increase his narrative authority. Here Dalrymple

has an interest in mythologising his oeuvre. Such representation also functions

to sell Dalrymple’s back catalogue. There are, of course, similarities between

City of Djinns and Dalrymple’s later, historical, works, but these are eclipsed

73
by their myriad differences. One example is in each text’s approach to citation.

City of Djinns does not exhibit the concern with an appearance of academic

rigour found in Dalrymple’s historical works. Footnotes are absent, and direct

quotations are very few—those that are present are bereft of any system of

referencing. The text is less about the findings or outcomes of the protagonist’s

activities than it is about chronicling the experience of William undertaking the

research or talking to the people (as opposed to the particularities of what they

say).

Although City of Djinns is manifestly non-academic, a glossary of

unfamiliar words and an index is appended. This somewhat overdetermined

emphasis on Indian word usage, combined with the conversations that William

records with a wide cross-section of the Delhi population, advances the

impression that Dalrymple has a high level of fluency in a variety of Indian

languages, and also works to exoticise the text. However, on the rare occasion

that Dalrymple’s proficiency is mentioned directly, it appears that the opposite

is true. William’s contact for all things Mughal, Dr Jaffery, asks him “‘Would

you not like to learn classical Persian?’ ‘I would love to,’ I answered. ‘But at

the moment I’m having enough difficulty trying to master Hindustani’” (187).

The characterisation of William as a belated settler-colonist is advanced

consistently throughout the text. Here it can be found in William’s echoing of

the term “Hindustani,” the mixture of Urdu and Hindi used by the Raj. Later in

the work, William’s lack of fluency in Hindi also becomes apparent, although

accompanied by the emphasis that this is common in non-Indians:

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 Mr Lal’s English was even less fluent than my Hindi, so we chatted,

ungrammatically, in his tongue. Thanks to our twice-weekly lessons,

Olivia and I had now become confident enough in Hindi for the practice

of it to become enjoyable rather than tiresome—if only because people

were so surprised to hear any non-Indian speak even the most stumbling

version of it. (209)

This admission of William’s less-then-fluent grasp of Hindi is immediately

deflected by the follow-up assertion of his and Olivia’s greater commitment to

communication than other Westerners. Given these passages, it can be assumed

that either the majority of William’s interaction occurs in English, or that

significant use of an interpreter is required for William to carry out the detailed

conversations that make up much of City of Djinns. Both possibilities go

unmentioned in the text, as both would undermine (in different ways)

Dalrymple’s authority. These potentialities either open up similar

conversational possibilities to other travellers (if English is the language of

choice then Dalrymple’s role as interpreter of India for the Western reader

diminishes) or counter the representation of Dalrymple as sole driver of the

interactions that comprise the narrative.

It seems that, in the service of the travel genre’s glorification of and

reliance on the author / narrator persona, the possibility of the presence of an

interpreter is elided. This is the case for Dalrymple’s later travel book From the

Holy Mountain: “You don’t openly acknowledge in the book, for example, an

interpreter if you’re talking through somebody” (Interview with Tim Youngs

59). In part this lack of acknowledgement is a convention of the print media,

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which, in comparison to the usual radio and television treatment of interpreters

and those being interpreted (beginning with the voice of the foreign language

speaker and then giving way to the voice of the interpreter), does not

automatically foreground their presence. However, it is a convention that

functions to highlight the figure of the author and emphasise his individualistic

investigative communication talents.

In contrast to the lack of attention paid to the specifics of William’s

language skills, City of Djinns frequently highlights the peculiarities and

hilarities of Indian English usage. Despite careful framing as the natural

evolution of a language, Dalrymple’s use of this material is overwhelmingly in

the service of humour at the expense of the local characters. Instances such as

this recall the jocular style of In Xanadu’s interaction with local populations. It

is telling that there are no similar situations narrated in which William’s

meaning is amusingly misconstrued (or in which he makes a gaffe) in

conversation. One of the more extended examples of Dalrymple’s delight in

the oddities of Indian English is his gleeful engagement with the Times of

India:

The news is inevitably depressing stuff (“400 Killed in Tamil Train

Crash”, “150 Garrotted by Assam Separatists” and so on), yet somehow

the jaunty Times of India prose always manages to raise the tone from

one of grim tragedy. There may have been a train crash, but at least the

Chief Minister has air-dashed to the scene. Ten convented (convent-

educated) girls may have been gang-raped in the Punjab, but thousands

of students have staged a bandh (strike) and a dharna (protest) against

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 such eve-teasing (much nicer than the bland Americanese “sexual

harassment”). And so what if the protesters were then lathi (truncheon)

charged by police jawans (constables)? In the Times of India such

miscreants are always charge-sheeted in the end. (73)

This passage pokes fun at the unfamiliar ways in which the Times of India (in

implicit comparison with its British namesake) uses particular words or forms

of words. Further, through his careful choice of examples of language comedy,

India is portrayed as full of danger and disaster (especially for women),

emphasising Dalrymple’s status as intrepid traveller. That Dalrymple’s

favourite of the “amusing” words chosen is “eve-teasing” points toward the

gendered orientalising tropes which City of Djinns utilises. The collapsing of

gang rape and “eve-teasing” without regard to context is problematic. It is

unclear whether the Times also conflates the two or if this is Dalrymple’s glib

language. As found in In Xanadu, the figure of rape is utilised to strengthen

William’s representation as manly and as a matter for humour.

Another manly British character at the centre of City of Djinns is also

called William. Apart from the protagonist, the British man who receives the

most detailed attention is William Fraser, who was appointed in 1805 as

Assistant to the British Resident in Delhi (98). The importance of Fraser to

City of Djinns can be seen in the text’s narrative economy—twenty-six pages

of the work are devoted to a chronicle of Fraser’s career in India. Dalrymple

emphasises Fraser’s lack of interest and involvement in the British community

in Delhi, and his sporting and military prowess (alongside his various

eccentricities). His active nature and distance from British “bores” is illustrated

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in the course of an anecdote about an Anglo-Indian dinner party: “William

[Fraser] was not among the diners. Not only did he prefer to be on the move

with his troops in the wilds of Harayana or fighting the Gurkhas in the hills

above Gangotri, he also found ... the bores of the European community

intolerable” (114). One of the ways in which Dalrymple’s text positively

portrays the British administrators of India is by emphasising the eccentric

figures who enthusiastically embraced aspects of the Mughal culture with

which they interacted, in contrast to the provincial European “bores” (a

forerunner of Dalrymple’s later arguments in White Mughals and The Last

Mughal). Fraser is shown as a representative of an accepting, pluralistic, hybrid

culture which was overthrown in the decades prior to the Indian Mutiny of

1857 by “The cold and exact set of mind which could reduce the human

casualties of a bloody war to the level of bowling averages [which] was a

world away from the attitudes of [Sir David] Ochterlony and William Fraser”

(150).

It is revealing that there is no mention of the events of the Mutiny itself

within City of Djinns. A possible, generous, explanation for such an omission

might be a presumption by Dalrymple that both the British and Indian

readership would have sufficient prior knowledge of the events of the Mutiny

for a recapitulation to be unnecessary. Another, less generous, reason may be

the desire not to have to take up a particular historiographical position, and risk

causing offence to readers either in the United Kingdom or in India. Either

way, the absence is remarkable given Dalrymple’s focus on the British

response to the Uprising. It seems that any concerted focus on the Mutiny

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(which was the largest anti-colonial revolt in the history of the British Empire)

significantly undermines the representation of the British presence in India as

built up through the construction of the characters of Fraser and William. City

of Djinns’ lacunae in regard to the Mutiny works in combination with other

narrative devices to provide a strategically limited picture of the British East

India Company and the British in India more generally.

One aspect of the text that works in this way is its portrayal of the British

military forces in India. The examples chosen present the overwhelmingly

unified picture of charismatic British or “half-caste” leaders commanding

undying loyalty and respect from their (native) troops: “While he [Fraser]

slept, his bodyguard of Indian tribals would unroll their mattresses and sleep

around his couch” (99). Despite the British shunning James Skinner due to his

mixed heritage, Dalrymple still recruits him as an example of a charismatic

British leader. Skinner’s soldiers wore physical proof of their affiliation,

Dalrymple writes: “When James Skinner raised his cavalry regiment he had the

Skinner clan emblem—the bloody hand—tattooed on the bellies of his Hindu

recruits” (128). The crowning example of Indian respect for the British military

presence (curiously taken from the height of the Mutiny) is Dalrymple’s

description of Brigadier General John Nicholson. Nicholson served as an army

officer for the East India Company from 1840 to 1857, in Afghanistan, and the

Punjab, and is known for his “ferocious hatred of the mutineers and the civilian

population of Delhi” (Vetch). Dalrymple glosses Nicholson as: “the ‘Lion of

the Punjab’, who was killed in the storming of Delhi in 1857 but who was still

worshipped long afterwards as a hero by the British and as a god by a Punjabi

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sect called the Nikalsini” (115). This apotheosis of the British military leader

takes the representation of “native” admiration for British military leaders in

India to new heights, and capitalises on tropes of Indian superstition, credulity

and British superiority. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography:

The truth seems to be that in 1848 a mendicant holy man, impressed by

Nicholson’s ruthless, and often cruel, use of power, tried to get in his

good graces by erecting a shrine to him. He succeeded in getting others

who feared the strange officer to join in making offerings both at the

shrine and to Nicholson in person in order to gain favour and to protect

themselves from his wrath. (Vetch)

In light of this explanation, Dalrymple’s phrase “worshipped long afterwards”

may be valid for his British admirers, but seems less applicable to his Indian

devotees.

As evident in his focus on military officials, Dalrymple clearly signposts

the way that he constructs his historical narrative, employing elite, ruling-class

individuals and families as a lens through which to view particular historical

events and eras. An example is found in Dalrymple’s explanation of his focus

on Mughal ruler Safdarjung: “[He] interested me because his life seemed to

encapsulate perfectly the intriguing but cataclysmic half-century that linked the

Mughal high noon at the close of the seventeenth century with the decay and

disintegration of the Twilight fifty years later” (156). As well as linking

Mughal rule to “decay and disintegration,” this passage highlights the

differences in representation between Indian and British historical personages.

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When it comes to British figures such as Fraser, who is used in exactly the

same way, as a representative of a period and style of British / Indian

interaction, their metonymic status is not signalled to the same extent. Perhaps

this is due to the (Western) reader’s greater awareness of the multiplicity and

individuality of British experiences and a concomitant resistance to an overt

simplification. On the other side of the spectrum is the reader’s practice with

treating exotic people and stories as metonyms for their larger culture. Further

enhancing the plural representation of the British, Dalrymple contrasts the

monument to casualties of the Mutiny and William Fraser’s residence:

the Memorial stands only a few feet from the great white house which

William Fraser laboured throughout the early years of the century to

build. One monument with its Mughal borrowings and position

determined by Timur’s camp represents what the Raj might have been.

The Mutiny memorial represents—crudely and distastefully—what it

was. (150)

Here the varied and rich nature of the British experience in India is played out

through the juxtaposition of these two structures, and the potentiality for

different outcomes emphasised in a way that does not occur in relation to

Indian historical figures.

City of Djinns is a text with a complex structure that contains a

sometimes-unstable mixture of travel and history. What holds all of the

elements of this text together is an overwhelming concern with the

amelioration of the reputation of the British in India. The text achieves this

representational rehabilitation through the employment of a number of

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different, though connected, tropes. The most powerful of these effects a vision

of the British in India through the lens of a romanticised rhetoric of cultural

exchange, highlighting individual Britons’ interactions with and contributions

to Mughal courtly culture. Dalrymple shares with the reader his search for

British imperial memories of Delhi during the Raj period: “Before I went to

India I went to Cambridge to see a friend of my grandmother. Between the

1920s and the 1940s, Iris Portal’s youth had been spent in … colonial Delhi …

I wanted to hear what she remembered” (75). The author’s interest in British

India (rather than India itself) even predates his journey to the country.

One of the ways in which Dalrymple negotiates the shifting relationship

between travel and history in City of Djinns is by a repeated narrative

technique of describing his reading or research in a place. For example, his

musings about the contrast between the dilapidated present and the glorious

past of the British Residency building in Delhi are followed by a description of

William’s situated reading: “To aid the imagination, I got out my copies of the

Fraser letters and diaries that I had brought with me” (112). By bringing his

narration of his research into the Indian environment, Dalrymple provides a

compelling illusion of travel, both through the Delhi landscape and into the

past.

After hearing Portal’s stories about the officers, polo and class

hierarchies under the Raj, William states that he knows that he has to end the

interview, but that he has to ask one final question before he departs. The

structure of the conversation leaves no doubt for the reader that this is the

question foremost in William’s mind: “‘In retrospect,’ I said. ‘Do you think

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British rule was justified?’” (80). Portal’s answer is dry and humorous:

“Well, at the time we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as wicked

imperialists,” she said, answering slowly. “Of course not. But you see,

although people of my generation were very keen on Gandhi and Indian

Independence, we were still very careless. We didn’t give much thought

to the question of what on earth we were doing to that country and its

people. That said, I can’t forget the sacrifices made by the ‘wicked’

imperialists over the centuries—the graves, so many very young, the

friends I have had, and what good people many of them were.” (80)

Portal’s reply situates the British as overwhelmingly well-meaning, if careless

and distracted. This, in combination with her references to unnamed British

“sacrifices,” advances the argument that the British were working for the

betterment of India, even if they went about it in a careless way. She concludes

her answer with a more overt reference to the British colonial authority:

“But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A

people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about

for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings,

but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.” Iris

sighed. “And that, of course, is exactly what we did.” (80)

The systematic and strategic representation of figures such as Portal is one of

the mechanisms by which this text constructs an image of the Raj as a

benevolent, positive force. In this formulation, not only did the British “go

away and die in Cheltenham,” but they also built “good buildings” and

introduced “new ideas.” The British are presented as a positive, paternalistic

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force for cultural evolution who made their contribution to the development of

the Indian nation and then peacefully faded away.

Not content with Portal’s reminiscences from her home in the United

Kingdom, Dalrymple seeks out Phyllis and Edith Haxby near Delhi as further

remnants of India’s post-imperial British population. He finds them harmless,

struggling and mentally unwell in their dilapidated cottage outside Delhi,

blaming their declining health and fortunes since 1947 on imaginary

persecutors: “There are prostitutes living all over the place, making life hell for

us. They say we’re English and shouldn’t be here. After seventy-eight years!”

(87). Although simultaneously highlighting the ridiculousness of their

arguments, this passage emphasises the length of time that the sisters have

spent in India, their frailty and the legitimacy of their presence. All of the

British “survivors” of the Raj interviewed by Dalrymple are women. The

feminisation of the imperial experience works (through utilising stereotypical

notions of femininity) to imply the vulnerability of the British presence in

India, and to undermine the traditional narrative of imperial colonisation as

male, militaristic and adventurous. Dalrymple’s representational manoeuvre is

also rather ironic, given the desire evident in many of the mythologies of the

British Empire to blame the increase in numbers of British women under the

Raj for the decline of earlier, more intimate, cultural relationships, which is

present elsewhere in City of Djinns. Ronald Hyam’s Britain’s Imperial

Century, 1815-1914 provides an illustrative example of such misogynist

stereotyping. Hyam states:

The regulation of sexual relations with indigenous peoples was

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 inherently a central feature of the colonial relationship, and it was

fundamental to the construction of racial perceptions and misperceptions.

As race relations became less relaxed in the later nineteenth century, so

missionaries and memsahibs insisted on greater controls. (292)

Links between Dalrymple’s and Hyam’s representation of the British presence

in India can be seen in their demarcation of two distinct periods: one centered

around sexual relationships between British men and Indian women (portrayed

as vital to the relationships between Indian and British men), and the second

regulated by the strictures of missionaries and memsahibs (and detrimental to

the relationships between Indian and British men). Unsatisfied with merely

representing a British India in which, as Gayatri Spivak memorably states,

“White men [are] saving brown women from brown men” (297), Hyam and

Dalrymple see the relationships between the white men and brown women as

instances of utopic, equal, cross-cultural partnerships.

Not only are those who remember their personal imperial experience for

Dalrymple represented as eccentric, but more famous historical figures are also

subject to this trope. Sir Edwin Lutyens, engineer and architect of New Delhi,

is one such figure. On reading Lutyens’ collected letters, Dalrymple muses:

perhaps the overwhelming surprise of the letters is Lutyens’s

extraordinary intolerance and dislike of all things Indian. Even by the

standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the

impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted

malevolence. (84)

Even in the process of calling Lutyens a bigot, Dalrymple mitigates the

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obvious negative connotations of the remark through the use of the qualifiers

“bumbling” and “insular.” Lutyens is not represented as bigoted, so much as

quaint, foolish, harmless and terribly British, in a manner that, implicitly,

Dalrymple appears to understand. Of course, the other implication of such a

representation is that all Britons are bigots, in their own quaint and isolationist

manner.

Dalrymple is interested in architecture, and City of Djinns is full of

detailed descriptions of prominent buildings, particularly those that formed part

of the British presence in India. For Dalrymple, these buildings function in a

similar, though more symbolic, manner to figures like Portal and Lutyens,

physically embodying the British impact on the Indian landscape. This is

especially so in the case of Lutyens, who was responsible for much of the

imperial British architectural presence in New Delhi. Dalrymple is alive to the

symbolic possibilities here, and performs a textual manoeuvre which sees

Lutyens and his buildings becoming metonymically representative of the Raj

as a whole. He devotes lengthy sections within City of Djinns to descriptions of

Luytens’ architecture and his responses to its beautiful, quintessentially

imperial, design (80-83). This architecture, described as taking its form from

both classical and Eastern traditions, buttresses Dalrymple’s representation of

Lutyens’ Delhi as an expression of the beauty of cultural exchange:

East fused with West. Round arches and classical Greek colonnades were

balanced by latticework stone screens and a ripple of helmet-like chattris

[domed Mughal structures, literally ‘umbrellas’]. At the very centre of

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 the complex, the resolution of every perspective in New Delhi, stood

Lutyens’s staggering neo-Buddhist dome. (81)

Dalrymple’s description of Lutyens’ buildings implies the presence of a

particularly romanticised culture that takes the best from each contributing

society, embodied in the blend of colonnades and chattris. This

representational process elides the materialities of colonial rule or of

imbalances in power within this “beautiful” exchange. He praises Lutyens

enthusiastically:

It was superb. In the dusk, as the sun sank behind the great dome of the

Viceroy’s House, the whole vista would turn the colour of attar of roses.

I would realize then, without hesitation, that I was looking at one of the

greatest marriages of architecture and urban planning ever to have left

the drawing board. (82)

Such a sentimental representation becomes complicated when Dalrymple

highlights the authoritarian, imperial aspects of Lutyens’ architecture, and

acknowledges the accompanying distaste that it produces.

William chronicles his realisation that “there was a distant but distinct

echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial

Delhi” (82). This notion is immediately qualified, however, when he highlights

the “very many, very great differences” between Fascist Italy and Nazi

Germany and the British Raj, stating: “Certainly it is far more beautiful than

anything Hitler and Mussolini ever raised: Lutyens, after all, was a far, far

greater architect than Albert Speer” (82). The juxtaposition of the text’s

recognition and denial of the less-than-attractive side to imperial power is

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intriguing. For instance, Dalrymple quotes the inscription on the gateway of the

Baker’s Secretariats, in capital letters, and laments its “patronizing” nature:

“LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE; A PEOPLE MUST

RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY; IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST

BE EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED” (83). However, in

introducing this inscription, he states “For those who like to believe in the

essential benevolence of the British Empire it is a depressing discovery” (83).

Given the ways in which City of Djinns represents the British in India, it seems

that Dalrymple is to be included in this category.

Dalrymple deals with the uncomfortable nature of Lutyens’ legacy in a

number of ways, all of which continue to emphasise its aesthetic qualities. He

defends Lutyens’ New Delhi against Nehru’s claim that “New Delhi is the

visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful

extravagance” (85). For Dalrymple,

[Nehru] was right, of course, but that is only half the story. It is also the

finest architectural artefact created by the British Empire, and preferable

in every way to Nehru’s disastrous commission of a hideous new city by

Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Chandigarh is now an urban disaster, a

monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism; but Imperial

Delhi is now more admired and loved than perhaps ever before. (85)

Here is Dalrymple’s opposition between “new” and “old” India, distilled. The

aggregation of the British with India’s rich cultural past, in contrast with a

soulless modernist present, ascribes further value to the imperial encounter.

The final word on the matter leaves the reader with a positive overall

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impression of the British presence in India: “in its patronizing and authoritarian

after-taste, Lutyens’s New Delhi remains as much a monument to the British

Empire’s failings as to its genius” (85). Alongside its “genius,” the empire is

described as “patronising.” This is a friendlier, more well-meaning, if

condescending, way of representing British rule. If only the empire was less

patronising, the argument seems to run, then its “genius” would be even more

apparent.

Dalrymple also uses descriptions of various buildings to evoke or

represent different periods of Indian history. And although he expresses some

reservations, Dalrymple awards his highest praise to the British Raj society and

its twentieth-century architecture as represented by the work of Lutyens, rather

than Mughal Delhi: “In summer I preferred the less claustrophobic avenues of

Lutyens’s Delhi” (8). Comparing Dalrymple’s numerous considerations of

multiple forms of Delhi architecture, there emerges an interesting dichotomy:

not between purely “British” and “Indian” forms, but, in a more complex

manner, between new (modern and modernist) Indian architecture and town

planning and old (including late British imperial) Indian architecture, with all

praise going to the “elegant” old over the dull, Westernised, new. So, for

example, he writes:

When I first saw Delhi it was still a low-rise colonial capital, dominated

by long avenues of white plaster Lutyens bungalows. … One of my

strongest memories from my first visit was sitting in the garden of one of

the bungalows, a glass to hand, with my legs raised up on a Bombay

Fornicator (one of those wickerwork planter’s chairs with extended arms,

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 essential to every colonial veranda). In front lay a lawn dotted with

croquet hoops; behind, the white bow-front of one of this century’s most

inspired residential designs. Over the rooftops there was not a skyscraper

to be seen. Yet I was not in some leafy suburb, but in the very centre of

New Delhi. Its low-rise townscape was then unique among modern

capitals, a last surviving reminder of the town planning of a more elegant

age. (23)

While indulging in rather obvious colonial nostalgia, channeled though the

medium of furniture and architecture, as well as signalling toward the level of

privilege that he enjoys, Dalrymple highlights the elegance of British rule

through its remnants in the cityscape. His repeated use of the descriptors “low-

rise” and “colonial” compound the representation. In a manner typical of the

majority of travel books and travel guides (such as the highly popular Rough

Guide and Lonely Planet series), he dismisses the highrise metropolis as ugly,

soulless and irrelevant to “real” Indian life and culture: “Modern Delhi is

thought of either as a city of grey bureaucracy, or as the metropolis of hard-

working, nouveau-riche Punjabis” (168). In this context, then, what City of

Djinns values is Delhi’s past over its present. This is a typical Orientalist

preoccupation with a “golden,” “classical” past for India, juxtaposed with a

fallen present. This equation of the country with history and spirituality

effectively forecloses a representation of India as a nation properly equipped

for modern state governance. City of Djinns’ portrayal of a contemporary Delhi

in decline further enshrines the British administration as a sensible, viable

stage in the nation’s history that has regrettably closed.

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 Other, earlier historical figures who work in City of Djinns as

representatives of the British presence in India are Delhi’s earlier British

Residents. Dalrymple represents these men, whom he locates within the

Mughal court in Delhi, as cosmopolitan and eccentric:

the Emperor continued to hold court as he had always done, and at first

the charade of Mughal power was maintained with the express approval

of the British residents. These early residents were a series of

sympathetic and slightly eccentric Scotsmen, whose love and respect for

India was reflected by their adoption of Indian modes of dress and Indian

ways of living. The first, Sir David Ochterlony, set the tone. With his

fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony

was decidedly different from the normal run of starch-shirted, stiff-lipped

burra sahibs. (98)

The words that Dalrymple chooses enable two parallel, but conflicting,

representations to be mobilised at the same time. Reference to the “charade” of

Mughal power, which shows the growing influence of the British, is countered

by the statement that the Mughal ruler had the “express approval” of the

“sympathetic” residents. Dalrymple advances a contrast here, between an

imperialist past characterised by Orientalist men, and the contemporary

remnants of the Raj as fragile women.

The ways in which central imperial buildings such as the British

Residency are represented serve to reinforce Dalrymple’s arguments about the

British imperial relationship with India, which he sees as overwhelmingly

hybrid and fluid, particularly in the late eighteenth century, with many of the

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British living in the style of the Mughal Muslim elite. This is not, of course, an

isolated or an inherently problematic argument. Dalrymple describes his

discovery that the Delhi Residency was built on the ruins of a Mughal

mansion:

Behind the classical façade lay the earlier frontage of a Mughal pavilion:

a double row of blind arches leading up to a central portal. .... [T]hey [the

British] merely erected a classical façade over a Mughal substructure. It

was just like Ochterlony: in public establishing the British presence; but

inside, in private, living the life of a Nawab. (111)

Such statements strategically perform and naturalise Dalrymple’s arguments

about the pluralistic quality of imperial India in a way that elides the inherent

difficulty in interpreting “private” ideas, relationships and thoughts. Both the

British Residency and Ochterlony, the British Resident, are silent figures onto

which particular “private” leanings can easily be projected. Dalrymple’s

narrative style is convincing because it simultaneously presents historical detail

and his own interested interpretation of that detail. But what if we read

differently? What if the classical façade is read as an erasure of prior Mughal

architecture and modalities of power and privilege? Dalrymple’s compellingly

readable style forecloses against other interpretations, and it is this that reveals

how the generic features of travel writing—autobiographic and subjective—

work to mask the partisan histories Dalrymple engages in at this point in his

writing career.

As well as focusing on the ways in which Dalrymple represents the

British in India, it is fruitful to examine his construction of India before the

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arrival of the British, for this in turn impacts on the ways in which the British

are viewed throughout his work. In his description of the tomb of Safdarjung,

Mughal ruler of the late seventeenth century, Dalrymple uses an interpretation

of the architecture to emphasise poetically the decadence and decay of this

period:

Safdarjung’s tomb exudes the flavour of an age not so much decaying

miserably into impoverished anonymity as one whoring and drinking

itself into extinction. The building tells a story of drunken laughter as the

pillars of [the Mughal] empire collapsed in a cloud of dust and masonry;

and afterwards, of dancing in the ruins. (159)

Here again, the straightforward language that Dalrymple uses functions to elide

other representational possibilities; the statement that the building “tells a

story” of debauched, wilful imperial collapse does not leave room for differing

interpretations, or even a questioning of the effectiveness of the buildings’

capacity to relate a narrative. Repeated references to morally dissolute

practices (“whoring,” “drinking,” “dancing in the ruins”) work to emphasise

the unsuitability of the Mughals for responsible government, the inevitability

of their decline and the concomitant rectitude of the British. The language that

Dalrymple employs to detail the structure and ornamentation of the tomb

reiterates this gendered image of corruption, reinforcing Orientalist tropes

about a degenerate, feminised Orient in contrast to an upstanding, masculine

West:

Like some elderly courtesan, the tomb tries to mask its imperfections

beneath thick layers of make-up; its excesses of ornament are worn like

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 over-applied rouge. Even the little mosque to the side of the gatehouse

has a whiff of degeneracy about it: its three domes are flirtatiously

striped like the flared pyjama bottoms of a nautch girl; there is something

fundamentally voluptuous in its buxom curves and poise. (158-59)

Significantly, the Mughal empire is not simply figured as a courtesan, but as an

ageing one, whose efforts to mask her imperfections are comical and

grotesque. The use of the words “voluptuous,” “buxom,” and “degenerate”

together function to give the image of the Mughal empire as an overblown,

spent force. Thus, in Dalrymple’s representation, India was in a heightened

state of decline before the arrival of the British. Rather than a series of geo-

political negotiations, or the gradual decline of former imperial powers, the end

of Mughal dominance is a direct result of feminised Mughal “excess,”

“degeneracy” and wilful self-destruction.

There is something fundamentally attractive about this Orientalist vision,

for William and the imperial British. Dalrymple’s description of Ochterlony’s

character through the interpretation of his miniature portrait is revealing:

He is dressed in full Indian costume, and reclines on a carpet, leaning

back against a spread of pillows and bolsters. .... The picture summed up

the period, to my mind perhaps the most attractive interlude in the whole

long story of the British in India. There is a quality of the naughty

schoolboy about Ochterlony and his contemporaries in Delhi: away from

the disapproving gaze of the Calcutta memsahibs they gather their

harems and smoke their hookahs. (111-12)

This passage contains a number of insights into the way City of Djinns

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functions. First is Dalrymple’s apparently straightforward assertion that the

portrait of Ochterlony sums up the period. This off-the-cuff statement

condenses the textual strategies of the book. The veracity of the statement that

a painting can somehow metonymically represent a whole, infinitely complex,

era collapses on closer examination. This manoeuvre—of taking one story and

elevating it to representative status—is what City of Djinns does with the

narrative of the elite British / Mughal relationship. The statement that this is

the “most attractive” aspect of the colonial situation affirms Dalrymple’s

investment in this argument. What is truly “attractive” about this period is

finally enumerated—namely, Orientalist fantasies of a feminised India:

dancing girls, harems and hookahs. Here Dalrymple indulges in the common

representation of British women as a hindrance to cross-cultural interaction and

harmony in imperial India, coupled with a romanticised portrayal of extent of

the Resident’s interaction with India. For Joy Wang, such instances of

“sentimentality about racial and cultural hybridity... [are] inseparable from a

problematic stance that tends to view the history of British expansionism as a

‘symbiotic’ relationship rather than one of conquest and exploitation” (114).

The elision of the commercial and geographical impetus sustaining the British

East India Company’s presence in India throughout City of Djinns supports this

(strategic) view of the symbiotic nature of the British / Indian relationship.

City of Djinns frequently slips into clichéd Orientalising fantasy,

particularly when Dalrymple chronicles Delhi’s history. This is most obvious

in the form of William’s keen interest in and enthusiastic description of the

sexual aspects of courtly Mughal life:

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 Best of all were the dancers and courtesans—beautiful women like Ad

Begum whose speciality was to appear naked at parties, but so cleverly

painted that no one noticed: “she decorates her legs with beautiful

drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in

place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as found in

the finest cloth of Rum.” (167)

Dalrymple’s description of the British experience in India also focuses on such

titillating notions, with Sir David Ochterlony and his “harem” given much

attention: “Every evening all thirteen of his Indian wives used to process

around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant”

(98). Ochterlony is a figure who continues to hold Dalrymple’s attention

beyond the boundaries of City of Djinns. His later forays into Indian history

also feature the Delhi British Resident and his “harem.” Dalrymple’s nostalgia

for this eroticised vision of a colonial past is evident when William stands

outside the Residency and looks through the windows, trying to imagine its

past glory:

Dusty filing cabinets stand where the nautch girls once danced. Doors

hang loose on their hinges. Everywhere plaster and paint is peeling. So

total is the transformation that it is difficult now ... to people the empty

corridors with the bustling [British East India] Company servants,

glittering Mughal omrahs (noblemen) and celebrated courtesans. (112)

India’s past functions as an exotic, sensual, Orientalist escape from a present

characterised by decline. However the British Company officers still “bustle”

in a busy, important manner.

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 In contrast to such portrayals of Indian society as sensuous and dissolute

prior to the arrival of the colonisers, the British are represented as forces of

improvement and evolution. The benefits of cross-cultural exchange moves in

both directions, as Dalrymple emphasises British cultural influences on, as well

as appropriations of, Indian culture. Significantly, this influence is not

portrayed through any description of the Raj, but rather through representations

of post-independence India. William recalls his 1984 interview with another

remnant of the Raj, Norah Nicholson, who explains: “I’ve been here twenty-

four years and have applied for the land, but they ignore me because I refuse to

give them a bribe. … There is no law and order and still less justice since the

British left” (116). In this formulation, the period of British rule in India

becomes an oasis of order, truth and justice, in opposition to the corruption and

degeneracy evident after independence. Comments by Persian scholar and

Dalrymple’s guide Dr Jaffery reinforce such a view: “‘In this city,’ he said,

‘culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It does not take

much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed’”

(190). It is in this context that even the lightest, most humorous sections of City

of Djinns need to be examined. For example, the amusing, if rather

stereotypical, references to Dalrymple’s ordeals with Indian bureaucracy:

I left Mr Lal’s office at noon. By four-thirty I had queued inside a total of

nine different offices, waiting in each for the magic letter, seal, signature,

counter-signature, demand note, restoration order or receipt which

would, at some stage in the far distant future, lead to me being granted a

telephone. (22)

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This passage’s overtones emphasise the dysfunctional nature of Indian

bureaucracy as an unruly, uncanny child of logical, solid British parents. The

suggestion of Indian bureaucracy’s superstitious, illogical nature is

encapsulated in the designation of each step as “magical.” This representation

functions alongside the other multiple narrative strategies that work together to

provide an overwhelmingly positive representation of the British in India.

The reception of City of Djinns highlights the general acceptance of

nostalgic imperial narratives, with its publication generating a flurry of positive

reviews and publicity. It received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and

Dalrymple won the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year award in

1994. The sole scholarly article concerned with City of Djinns published to

date is by Antara Datta in a special issue of the Yearly Review concerned with

travel. Datta’s contribution is an enthusiastic and generous assessment of City

of Djinns. With a focus on the text’s treatment of history, Datta endows the

work with significant, transformative powers, stating that it “use[s] the travel

form to address some of the most crucial debates of our times” (135), in a

“project [that is] politically recuperative” (136). Datta further argues that the

travel aspects of this important text allow Dalrymple to present a range of

historical perspectives:

what Dalrymple’s history offers is the possibility of heteroglossia within

history writing. The narrator / traveller himself, in the process of

travelling, narrating, reading, conversing, endeavours to participate in the

heteroglossia about which he writes. (140)

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Datta’s enthusiasm about the “possibilities of heteroglossia” is presumably

encouraged by the stories Dalrymple tells about the different characters he

meets in the course of his narrative. However, William’s interactions, which

Datta elevates as inclusive, ultimately serve to reinforce Dalrymple’s central

narrative. Although the “possibilities” of heteroglossia might be gestured

towards, they are hamstrung by the text’s overall argument for the positive

contribution of the British, and its driving first-person narrative. As well as

privileging individual, personal interaction as a part of some kind of universal

humanism, Datta’s argument leaves aside the inherently singular,

individualistic nature of the travel text. Datta attempts to circumvent such

issues by noting the trend of contemporary travel writing to emphasise “the

arbitrariness of individual witnessing” (137). While this may be true for many

travel writers, Dalrymple is not one of them. With his emphasis on the power

of travel and the authenticity of his works, Dalrymple’s representation of the

author is as an embedded source of insight.

Datta enumerates the sources of authority for City of Djinns: “The

legitimacy of the travel-history created is not to be sought only from the

historical archive, but in the ‘recognition’ that comes from a common lived

experience” (140). What she sees as exciting, inclusive possibilities—the

shared “recognition” of commonality—I read more critically as an appeal to

the unverifiable, unrepeatable authority of individual experience.

The praise heightens toward the close of the article, which sees

Dalrymple as the saviour of both the genres of travel writing and history:

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 He is aware of the colonial baggage that the genre carries, and he

redeems, apart from history, the genre too, which has been doomed to

academic pigeonholing since Said. Through his writing and references,

Dalrymple exposes cultural hierarchies that are more equitable. That such

a project is desirable is beyond doubt, but that it is still a romantic and

fringe exercise is difficult to ignore. (145)

While I agree that Dalrymple’s project is a romantic one, it is unclear how a

text that works consistently toward the amelioration of the British imperial

presence in India can be read as a redemptive work free from “colonial

baggage.” The claim that Dalrymple and City of Djinns “exposes” more

“equitable” cultural hierarchies is mysterious, unless Datta is referring to

Dalrymple’s arguments for the British admiration of aspects of Mughal courtly

culture. Such a designation is highly problematic, as it advances as liberal a

fundamentally conservative text. Datta ends with a useful reminder of the

inequalities inherent in travel writing: “The fact that some people more than

others, certain languages more than others, have greater mobility is intrinsic to

any debate on travel writing. That writers like Dalrymple use this privilege to

create a more liberal consensus should not be understated” (146). I do not

dispute Dalrymple’s privilege, however the argument that Datta makes for his

texts’ power to redeem and change is difficult to understand. Instead, City of

Djinns may be viewed as an overwhelmingly paternalistic text which works

toward a distinctly positive reception of the Raj.

Although City of Djinns is undoubtedly a very different kind of travel

book from In Xanadu and his next work, From the Holy Mountain, it is the

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characterisation of the protagonist that provides the link between them; despite

the shifts in William’s representation between these texts, the centrality of his

investigative intellect is clear. In each text, the narrative drive is

overwhelmingly presented as the narrator’s and the central character’s quest

for knowledge. Following from this motivation, then, the link between travel

and archival research becomes clearer as both are figured as forays in

Dalrymple’s search for truth. Perhaps this representational conflation can start

to explain Dalrymple’s later positioning of City of Djinns as an early iteration

of his history writing.

In his next book, Dalrymple moves from the static narrative of City of

Djinns to another journey-based travel text, From the Holy Mountain. Like

City of Djinns, it contains much that is based on conversations between

William and various locals who he encounters. From the Holy Mountain also

shifts geographical location from India to the Middle East. However,

Dalrymple’s engagement with Orientalist tropes continues.

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Chapter Three: From the Holy Mountain

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium is

Dalrymple’s third monograph. First published in 1997, it details his travel

through the former Byzantine empire, visiting Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon,

Israel, Jordan and Egypt. The journey and its narration are structured around

Dalrymple following in the footsteps of two Eastern Christian monks, John

Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist. Dalrymple describes their “epic

30-year journey” (Interview with Lyn Gallacher)

across the entire Eastern Byzantine world. Their aim was to collect the

wisdom of the desert fathers, the sages and the mystics of the Byzantine

East, before their fragile world—already clearly in advanced decay—

finally shattered and disappeared. (Holy Mountain 11-12)

This description of Moschos’ project as one of ethnographic-style collection

and recording signals the ways Dalrymple represents his own journey.

Dalrymple positions From the Holy Mountain as a continuation of and a

companion to Moschos’ travels, as a text that uses the length of history and

hindsight to compare his own impressions of the state of Christianity with

those recorded in Moschos’ The Spiritual Meadow. Dalrymple privileges his

central primary source as an especially valid representation of Byzantium in

the sixth century:

through the pages of The Spiritual Meadow one can come closer to the

ordinary Byzantine than is possible through virtually any other single

source. Although it often seems a fairly bizarre book—an unlikely

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 fricassee of anecdote, piety and strange miracles—as a historical text it

adds up to the most rich and detailed portrait that survives of the

Byzantine Levant immediately before the advent of Islam. (15)

Dalrymple’s claims for The Spiritual Meadow’s status as not merely useful or

interesting, but “the most rich and detailed” surviving record are reiterated

throughout the text. However, when taken alongside the quotations chosen for

inclusion by Dalrymple—chiefly the “bizarre” miracle stories mentioned (15,

34, 53, 136, 183, 264, 390, 413, 437, 438)—the historiographic utility of The

Spiritual Meadow seems less evident. Also crucial to his representation of the

text’s authority is its connection to “ordinary Byzantine” life and people—an

appeal to the grounded “reality” of history from below, despite the cloistered,

monastic (emphatically un-ordinary) nature of its subjects.

Dalrymple’s frequent musings on the thoughts of Moschos, and his

statements regarding features that Moschos might recognise, appear with

uncanny regularity throughout From the Holy Mountain. Though this is

perhaps unsurprising for a journey “in the wake of” earlier travellers, the

tenuous and qualified nature of these passages is striking. In Constantinople,

William notes:

This morning I visited the site of St Polyeuctes, once the greatest church

in the whole Christian Empire; Justinian was said to have built Haghia

Sophia in an attempt to match it. It would have been a familiar

monument to John Moschos; indeed it was probably in a monastery

attached to some great church like this that he lodged when he came to

the city to finish The Spiritual Meadow. (41)

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It seems that the presence of these pieces of pseudo-biographical conjecture

(that the use of the words “would have,” “probably” and “some” signal) are a

product of the paucity of The Spiritual Meadow as source material, despite

Moschos being invoked as the inspiration behind William’s journey. His

continual musings on the state of mind of Moschos appears to spring from a

dearth of this kind of information in The Spiritual Meadow. Rather, the text

consists of a collection of sayings, stories and miracles (12). The structure of

“in the footsteps” travel books invariably highlights close parallels between the

original traveller and the contemporary protagonist. Given the limited amount

of material with which to work, Dalrymple fills the gap with statements such

as:

I thought of Moschos standing on this hillside amid these tombs at the

end of the world, fretting about the heretics and brigands on the road

ahead, checking in his bag to make sure his roll of notes and jottings was

safe, then turning his back on this last crumbling outpost of the Christian

Empire. (454)

Moments such as this recall Heather Henderson’s recognition of the nostalgia

of contemporary travel writing, in which: “The pleasure of imagining scenes

from the past on the spot where they took place is often greater than the

pleasure of witnessing scenes of today” (232). This passage takes this

formulation one step further, as imagining of past scenes is conducted through

the eyes of the past traveller as well as the contemporary protagonist. The

imagined connection between William and Moschos is given greater

importance in these instances than the location in which they are narrated.

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Dalrymple heightens these similarities by constructing his version of Moschos’

identity solely through his Christianity (as opposed to national or racial

“type”). It is religious differences and dilemmas—“heretics”—that William

imagines concern Moschos. Of the description “Eastern Christian,” it is the

“Christian” component that is most useful for Dalrymple here.

Another move that connects East and West within the text, though in

specific, limited ways, is Dalrymple’s persistent choice of old or Westernised

place names instead of their more accurate incarnations—Antioch for Antakya,

for example. This choice in nomenclature privileges Western over local

imaginings of place, as well as firmly tying Eastern cities to aspects of their

past known to a Western audience, rather than expanding that audience’s

knowledge further.

Although constructed around a similar premise to In Xanadu, albeit

following a less famous route, From the Holy Mountain is remarkably different

in a number of ways. The characterisation of the protagonist is significantly

altered from the iterations of William present in both In Xanadu and City of

Djinns. Most notably, the William of From the Holy Mountain travels alone:

his female companions, Laura, Louisa and Olivia, are jettisoned in favour of a

series of monks, guides and taxi drivers, who function in similar—though less

sustained—ways to the women of the earlier texts, acting as sounding boards

and side-kicks.

All vestiges of the bumbling gentlemanly persona of In Xanadu are

abandoned—this William is organised, sure of himself and in control of his

journey. He is also more serious—what little humour there is throughout From

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the Holy Mountain comes at the expense of others, rather than of William. The

self-deprecation that occasionally accompanied earlier versions of his character

is also rejected, and in its stead is a firmly earnest, almost pious demeanour.

From the Holy Mountain is manifestly a serious travel text, with an

appropriately reliable protagonist at its centre. The first sentence of the work’s

acknowledgements reads: “The journey recorded in this book took place over a

single summer and autumn, but incorporates a few episodes from two visits, to

Israel and Egypt, made earlier in the year” (xv). Dalrymple sets out the

parameters of his travels for the reader. Providing this information in this up-

front manner advances a sense of the author’s transparency and truthfulness.

Dalrymple also foregrounds instances in which details have been altered, for a

worthy purpose: “The identity of a great many people has been disguised,

particularly in those sections dealing with Turkey, the Israeli-occupied West

Bank and Egypt. I sincerely hope that no one comes to any harm through what

I have written” (xv). His “sincere hope” that his writing’s potential to cause

harm is not realised works to highlight its crucial nature—impacting on the

safety of real people. Both of these manoeuvres serve as examples of what

Hulme and Youngs see as journalist travel writers’ “deep investment in

maintaining their credibility” (10).

When compared to Dalrymple’s earlier travel works, this monograph

comes across as a self-consciously mature and responsible text. Vestiges of his

earlier travel style remain, however, and occasionally disrupt this earnest

demeanour. The ever-present link between travel and pilgrimage is evident in

From the Holy Mountain. Pilgrimage modifies the notion of travel somewhat,

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introducing a higher purpose to the journey. He is earnest and invests himself

in his work, sharing his concern about the declining numbers of Christians in

Jerusalem with the reader:

All this matters very much. Without the local Christian population, the

most important shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum

pieces, preserved only for the curiosity of tourists. Christianity will no

longer exist in the Holy Land as a living faith; a vast vacuum will exist in

the very heart of Christendom. (317)

Dalrymple is figured as a pious traveller—one who can be trusted. He enables

an affective connection between Western Christian readers and the Eastern

Christian communities he describes. However, he still retains the authority of

the distanced observer, through his identification as Catholic. Perhaps the shift

in designation of the journey as a pilgrimage helps to lessen the tension within

the text between travel and historical and journalistic conventions.

The work moves uneasily between moments of light travel anecdotes and

in-depth investigative journalism and is ultimately not quite successful in either

endeavour. For example, From the Holy Mountain switches, somewhat

jarringly, between the text’s need to entertain and inform the reader. William

the unflinching investigative reporter and William the entertaining traveller do

not always gel. In a laid-back, travel writing style, Dalrymple describes his

time in Damascus and highlights the levels of privilege that he and his friends

enjoy:

After a fortnight of glorious indolence staying with friends in a

diplomatic suburb of Damascus, I was woken this morning by the sound

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 of Bing, their Filipino manservant, blow-drying my now spotlessly clean

rucksack. Slowly the daunting prospect of the day ahead began to take

shape: leaving the soft beds, the cool blue swimming pool and my

hospitable hosts—all for the uncertainties of Lebanon, a country which

for the last two decades has been virtually a synonym for anarchy. (195)

Here Dalrymple uses the richness of his surroundings in Damascus and the

domestic efforts of Bing with the blow-dryer to highlight the contrasting

“anarchy” of Lebanon. What is presented as the central concern of From the

Holy Mountain, however, is the fate of the Christian populations of the East.

Thus, the lighter passages peppered throughout the text (which are reminiscent

of In Xanadu) appear out of place when contrasted with the narrative of

William whose duty it is to listen to and report tragedies. For example,

Dalrymple relates Sarah Daou’s story of her dispossession from her home in

Palestine and her experiences:

One day they used one of those [suction] bombs on the building next to

ours. It was completely destroyed. The four hundred families in the

basement—maybe a thousand people—were all crushed to death. … At

about the same time some other cousins of ours were in a building that

was shelled by phosphorous. They were killed too, but with phosphorous

it is a very slow death. It burns very slowly from your skin down to your

bone. (274)

In relating such horrific detail, William is represented as hardened and stoic.

The journalistic practice in which From the Holy Mountain participates, of

witnessing and reporting foreign atrocities or violence, sets up a dichotomy

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between home (as safe) and abroad (as a place of extremism and violence). The

tone of the narration at these points is reminiscent of international disaster

reporting—concerned, and designed to provoke concern in the home audience,

with an emphasis on the gravity of the situation, although inevitably mediated

by a well-spoken reporter. The tension between the two crucial foundations of

the text, which rarely coexist easily throughout, is evident. This juxtaposition

works to depoliticise Dalrymple’s interventions, with the lighter moments

providing respite from these tragic stories.

This tension is also present in the work’s paratexts: a rough, artistically-

drawn map, similar in style to those found in Dalrymple’s earlier works,

situates the text in the travel genre in a way that a different (plainer, more

geographically accurate) style of map would not. In contrast, From the Holy

Mountain’s preliminary pages also signal the work as a politically inflected,

philanthropic text. Dalrymple’s suggestion to readers that they might like to

donate money to support Palestinian Christians introduces a vision of a pan-

Christian community, and positions From the Holy Mountain as having a role

in fostering global Christian connections. It also functions to construct an ideal

reader: one who is engaged, concerned, with a disposable income, and

motivated by a (untheorised) sense of a global cosmopolitanism. Although

From the Holy Mountain is dedicated to Dalrymple’s parents, it contains this

rather unusual appeal for monetary support:

Anyone who wishes to offer practical support to some of the Christian

communities mentioned in this book might like to get in touch with—or

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 send donations to—Sabeel, a charitable organisation working primarily

with the Palestinian Christians. (xvi)

This statement works in a similar way to a dedication, which, in Gerard

Genette’s terms, implies the support of the dedicatee: “The dedicatee is always

in some way responsible for the work that is dedicated to him and to which he

brings, willy-nilly, a little of his support and therefore participation” (136).

Therefore, then, From the Holy Mountain annexes the support of the

Palestinian Christian community. For Genette, the “zone between text and off-

text,” is

a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the

public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and

achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more

pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author

and his allies). (2)

Dalrymple’s expectation of readers’ philanthropy further supports the text

which it precedes, representing From the Holy Mountain as a particularly

compelling and moving work, providing important insight and inducing

readers not only to sympathise with the situation of distant Christian

communities but to donate money, as well.

The extent to which Dalrymple positions From the Holy Mountain’s

chief subject as religion is variable. The most striking example of this

changeability is found in the text’s two subtitles: the original A Journey in the

Shadow of Byzantium and the later (1998, for the Henry Holt United States

publication) A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East. The

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seemingly minor differences between the two descriptive titles actually

embody a significant representational shift. A Journey in the Shadow of

Byzantium signals an overall interaction with the various cultures, religions and

centres of the former Byzantine empire. The focus of a work subtitled A

Journey among the Christians of the Middle East is, obviously, Christianity.

The inclusive broadness and sense of mystery of the earlier subtitle is lost with

the later narrowing of emphasis. In recognition of the text’s subject matter,

From the Holy Mountain also received exposure in faith-based media outlets

such as the Church Times and ABC Radio National’s The Religion Report.

Dalrymple’s previous travel texts, In Xanadu and City of Djinns, are

concerned with the relation and interpretation of difference for the Western

audience. In contrast, From the Holy Mountain’s focus is on connections and

similarities between Eastern and Western Christian communities. This shift

results in a marked increase in empathetic modes of representation. When

describing the people of Turkey in his first travel book, Dalrymple states:

Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. Their men

are almost all handsome with dark, supple skin and strong features: good

bones, sharp eyes and tall, masculine bodies. But the women share their

menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. Very few are

beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent. Baggy

wraps conceal pneumatic bodies. Here must lie the reason for the Turks’

easy drift out of heterosexuality. (In Xanadu 71)

The contrast between the impression given by such a light, misogynist and

Orientalist description and the William of From the Holy Mountain’s deeper

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interaction with the (Turkish Christian) community is notable: “The priest was

away in Istanbul, but from the doorkeeper I learned that the Christian

community now numbered only two hundred families. In his lifetime, he said,

as many as fifteen thousand Christians had left the town for new lives in Syria,

Brazil, Germany and Australia” (61-62). The subject of each passage signals

William’s level of engagement—in his observations about the aesthetic merits

of the Turks in In Xanadu, William is represented as the disinterested observer,

recording what he sees (and thinks). For From the Holy Mountain, William’s

engagement is represented as heightened: as well as looking and thinking, the

protagonist also communicates with and records the responses of the local

Christian population. The contrast in subject matter also highlights the shift

between the two texts—from a decadent, Orientalist, musing on beauty and

homosexuality to an earnest concern with the decline in the number of Turkish

Christians present in Antioch.

From the Holy Mountain is a text that emphasises its own construction,

as an embedded, literal product of experience and travel. From the beginning

pages of the work, Dalrymple foregrounds the text as both a product and a part

of the journey that it records:

My cell is bare and austere …. It’s now nine o’clock. The time has come

to concentrate my thoughts: to write down, as simply as I can, what has

brought me here, what I have seen, and what I hope to achieve in the next

few months. My reference books are laid out in a line on the floor; the

pads containing my library notes are open. Files full of photocopied

articles lie piled up below the window; my pencils are sharpened and

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 upended in a glass. A matchbox lies ready beside the paraffin storm

lantern: the monastery generator is turned off after compline, and if I am

to write tonight I will have to do so by the light of its yellow flame. (3-4)

Dalrymple’s repeated references to simplicity and austerity function to

emphasise the unembellished, truthful nature of the text. His implements—the

pencils, the paraffin lantern—conjure up the image of the authorial process as a

simple, timeless act unclouded by contemporary pitfalls, fads or distractions.

This foregrounding of the work’s construction continues throughout the text,

most evidently in the continual reference to writing and to his notebooks, and

serves to highlight the corporeal presence of the text and the role of the

protagonist as the author. The reader is reminded of this fact repeatedly,

through numerous asides, such as: “I sat in front of the tomb for twenty

minutes before heading back to my cell. There I opened this diary, lit the

paraffin lamp and wrote into the night” (422).

Dalrymple’s text-in-progress is referred to differently depending on the

project of the moment in From the Holy Mountain. When Dalrymple’s

individual, authorial, travel-writer persona is foremost, William refers to the

text as his “diary.” Such a designation immediately implies notions of

autobiography and self-representation. When he is in investigative journalist

mode, William no longer keeps a diary, but suddenly carries a notebook (the

preserve of important, and potentially dangerous, facts and figures). William

and his driver, Mas’ud, are approaching a village in Turkey when they come

across a barricade: “‘Police?’ I asked. ‘Inshallah, village guards,’ said Mas’ud,

slowing down. ‘Just hope it’s not PKK. You can’t tell at this distance. Either

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way, hide that notebook’” (89). This change in nomenclature is one small way

in which the shift between modes is effected throughout From the Holy

Mountain. The work ends with a particularly striking example of the ways in

which Dalrymple emphasises the physical presence of the text in the narrative:

On the front of my diary was a damp-ring left by a glass of ouzo I drank

on the Holy Mountain. Inside were stains from a glass of tea knocked

over in Istanbul. Some sugar grains from the restaurant in the Baron

Hotel have stuck to the pages on which are scribbled my notes from

Aleppo. (454)

All of these instances work in the service of constructing the text as an object

produced in the environments that it describes—as being as close to the time

and place of events as the traveller himself. The material object of the

notebook is represented as absorbing the experiences, along with the stains, of

travel. The text becomes its own subject, in a somewhat narcissistic fashion.

Dalrymple’s descriptions of the writing process throughout the narrative

are almost invariably set in monasteries. It seems that Dalrymple, through

writing in such environments, sets himself up as performing his own kind of

asceticism and dedicated ritual. Through this austerity William associates

himself with the past and present monastic communities that he describes,

strengthening the “in the wake of” structure of his journey. In a similar

manoeuvre to the one that sees Dalrymple giving Moschos worries about

“heretics” and “brigands,” William also categorises religiosity in these terms.

In a description of the stone carvings of Edessa, William sees them reflecting

the “heresies that circulated so promiscuously in the city between the first and

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seventh centuries A.D.” (69). The designation of interpretations of belief as

“heresy,” as opposed to using more neutral language, reinforces the connection

between the two travellers by highlighting William’s investment in Christian

doctrine.

The religious nature of his narrative and the environments in which it is

written is echoed by the evolution of William’s spiritual practices and beliefs

throughout From the Holy Mountain. Dalrymple presents himself as religious

(in particular, as a Catholic) at strategic intervals throughout From the Holy

Mountain, which work in different ways. Sometimes, somewhat paradoxically,

they serve to distance William from the monastic communities with whom he

interacts:

“I’m a Catholic,” I replied. “My God,” said the monk. “I’m so sorry.” He

shook his head in solicitude. “To be honest with you,” he said, “the

Abbot never gives permission for non-Orthodox to look at our holy

books. Particularly Catholics. …” Christophoros murmured a prayer.

“Please,” he said, “don’t ever tell anyone in the monastery that you’re a

heretic. If the Abbot ever found out, I’d be made to perform a thousand

prostrations.” “I won’t tell a soul.” (10)

William is represented as honest to a fault, revealing his Catholicism even in

situations in which it might be detrimental to his endeavour. This honesty is

strategically contingent, however—the strength of his rapport with

Christophoros is shown in their agreement to keep William’s beliefs quiet from

the Abbot.

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 On other occasions, William’s relationship with his faith works to add a

sense of autobiographical importance to the completion of his journey:

Prompted by the example of the nun, despite having half dropped the

habit, I began to pray there, and the prayers came with surprising ease. I

prayed for the people who had helped me on the journey, the monks who

had showed me the manuscript on Mount Athos, the frightened Syriani of

Mar Gabriel, the Armenians of Aleppo and the Palestinian Christians in

the camp at Mar Elias. And then I did what I suppose I had come to do: I

sought the blessing of John Moschos for the rest of the trip, and

particularly asked for his protection in the badlands of Upper Egypt, the

most dangerous part of the journey. (287)

William’s journey is represented as a vehicle of personal spiritual

improvement, enabling him to regain the habit of prayer. His devotions are

figured here as an expression of gratitude towards those that had assisted in his

travels, and as a sympathetic engagement with the communities of Christians

that he has encountered. At this point in the narrative, William’s request for

Moschos’ “blessing” is employed to emphasise the dangerous territory about to

be entered. His bravery and vulnerability are simultaneously strengthened. At

other moments within From the Holy Mountain, William’s experiences of

monastic life are shown to impact upon his character. He states: “After five

days in the calm and quiet of monastic seclusion, I was horrified by everything

I saw. Cairo suddenly seemed to be a nightmare vision of hell on earth, fly-

blown and filthy, populated entirely by crooks and vulgarians” (423). Here he

puts himself in the position of the monks, whose distance from society is

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continually emphasised. As a part of this identification, Dalrymple constructs

Christian faith and credulity as a positive force that has the potential to bind

East and West together, whereas scepticism and rationality are represented as

divisive:

At the base of a stylite’s pillar one is confronted with the awkward truth

that what has moved past generations can today sometimes be only

tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith, while remaining quite

inexplicable and absurd when seen under the harsh distorting microscope

of sceptical Western rationality. (60)

Here faith and imaginative empathy are recognised as appropriate

historiographical tools, as opposed to a (necessarily Western) rational

approach. This opposition might be read in two ways: as a simple East / West

binary, or, more fruitfully, as a polarisation of gentle faith and harsh logic. The

important caveat to this second reading is that while Westerners are

represented as being capable of making the leap to faith, the corresponding

possibility—of Eastern rationality—is disavowed.

Surprisingly, for a text that Dalrymple describes as having a “detached”

authorial presence—“My style as a travel writer in Holy Mountain is detached

in the sense that I don’t interject myself” (Interview with Tim Youngs 58)—it

contains an overarching narrative of spiritual growth. Although never

represented as pious or ascetic to the extent of Moschos, Dalrymple’s strategic

moments of religious self-identification serve to advance a comparison

between Moschos and himself. Countering the overwhelming piety of the

text’s religious subject matter is William’s continued fascination with an

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Orientalist conception of the East in a particularly feminised, sensual manner.

His description of the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul is an early example:

After the penitential piety of Mount Athos, arriving here is like stepping

into a sensuous Orientalist fantasy by Delacroix, all mock-Iznik tiles and

pseudo-Ottoman marble inlay. A hotel masquerading as a Turkish bath;

you almost expect some voluptuous Turkish odalisque to appear and

disrobe behind the reception desk. (25)

This representational mode continues with Dalrymple’s discussion of the

Empress Theodora. Although entirely irrelevant to the story of Moschos’

travels, reports of the sexual exploits of the Empress are quoted by Dalrymple

at length. A sample excerpt is:

There was not a particle of modesty in the little hussy: she complied with

the most outrageous demands without the slightest hesitation. She would

throw off her clothes and exhibit naked to all and sundry those regions,

both in front and behind, which the rules of decency require to be kept

veiled. (37-38)

The utility of these descriptions derives from the opportunity they present to

show the study of the Orient as full of such accounts of debauchery. Thus,

Dalrymple is characterised as a figure whose interest in the Oriental past is

entirely understandable, as it is quirky, entertaining and full of dissolute

dynastic intrigue. Such titillating interruptions to the religious narrative

manage to endow a story that primarily involves celibate monastic

communities with an Orientalist haze of sexuality.

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 Dalrymple’s fondness for nostalgic, literary-based Orientalist

representations of the East is also evident in his description of Urfa, “a proper

Silk Route bazaar-town, straight out of the Arabian Nights” (65). He

emphasises the confusion of “a warren of covered alleys loud with a Babel of

different tongues,” “surging” with a “crowd of wild, tribal-looking men” (65).

He catalogues the “hawk-eyed, hard-mouthed Kurdish refugees… sallow

Persian pilgrims… weatherbeaten Yürük nomads… stocky Syrian Arabs” (65)

in a manner reminiscent of the easy racial categorisation practiced in In

Xanadu.

Dalrymple cultivates a credulous, religious persona at particular points

throughout From the Holy Mountain. He also, when speaking about the text

with Tim Youngs, emphasises its journalistic qualities, likening aspects of its

production to the practices of professional investigative journalism: “I did with

this book exactly the same as I would do if I was writing for a leading

newspaper and had to submit my words to a fact checker” (59). Instead of

utilising the scholarly authority of the historian, and the accompanying textual

conventions such as footnotes, as he does in later works, here Dalrymple relies

on the conventions of journalism for his authority.

In his comparison of his methods to the production of “leading

newspapers,” Dalrymple argues for the political importance of his text while

again emphasising its veracity. The work’s place in the travel genre means that

Dalrymple expends much energy in order to represent From the Holy Mountain

as a straightforward mix of history and journalism:

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 In terms of reporting accurately what has happened, From the Holy

Mountain is pretty scrupulous. If you are reporting genocides and the

moving of peoples you simply cannot make things up, you cannot put

words into someone’s mouth. You could possibly make up a

conversation or recreate a conversation with someone who is serving you

your dinner, but if it is actually a piece of political reportage with

someone in the refugee camp which is evidence for something important

politically you simply can’t play any games with the truth. (Interview

with Tim Youngs 58-59)

This passage attempts to defend, simultaneously, From the Holy Mountain’s

truth status and the authorial privilege of the travel writer to “play games with

the truth.” The fuzzy nature of the line between fiction and non-fiction in travel

writing is highlighted in Dalrymple’s enumeration of the situations in which it

is acceptable to “make [things] up.”

Dalrymple uses the sales figures for From the Holy Mountain to add to

his arguments for its credibility and importance, as well as separating it from

his previous texts (and further highlighting its serious nature): “Holy Mountain

is the book I am proudest of. It is also by far the most successful internationally

of my travel books” (Interview with Tim Youngs 44). Dalrymple describes the

ways in which he represents himself as protagonist and narrator in From the

Holy Mountain, arguing that the presence of William as character is minimal in

this text. The basic impossibility of a first-person travel book without a central

protagonist is here elided in favour of an emphasis on the journalistic features

of the work, such as interviews:

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 I think this book has got less of me up front than any of my other books:

I just talk to people and let them present themselves, so it’s not political

in the sense of being a first person rant, or indeed an extended comment

piece. My own style increasingly, I think, is letting a person speak for

themselves. If there’s someone I disapprove of I let them hang

themselves with their own rope, and I present sympathetically someone

with whose view I agree. (Interview with Tim Youngs 52)

Such an argument is rather disingenuous, given that regardless of the level of

detachment, From the Holy Mountain remains a first-person travel text, in

diary form. In such a context, any claim for the text as a vehicle for unmediated

representation is naïve at best. The statement that because the text is not an

“extended” “first person rant” that it is “not political” is misleading. In fact, the

more subtle approach that Dalrymple takes, of either “sympathetic” or

“disapprov[ing]” narrative presentation, is potentially more politically effective

than a “comment piece.” Dalrymple concedes that the impact of the author’s

perspective is still present, while simultaneously attempting to downplay its

centrality: “Inevitably you are interjecting yourself in that process: how you

got it, how you frame it, how you present it, but nonetheless one hopes it is

done relatively unobtrusively” (Interview with Tim Youngs 52). Here the self-

reflexivity of the text is shown to be strategically limited—although present in

the extended consideration of the writing process, any treatment of William’s

views and how they are distilled and presented throughout the text is absent.

As with Dalrymple’s previous works, From the Holy Mountain uses

descriptions of architecture (particularly religious architecture and design,

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given the book’s focus) as symbols of the particular culture, period or religious

group in question. Such passages are particularly important in this text, which

chronicles Dalrymple’s impressions of a large array of similar, though not

quite identical, Christian communities. Without overtly resorting to the cruder

racial categorisation present in In Xanadu, Dalrymple describes the Temple of

the Sun in Lebanon:

Like the decor of modern Maronite drawing rooms, the emphasis in the

temple’s decoration seemed to be on opulence rather than good taste: as

you wandered around, you kept thinking: “How much did this cost?” The

temple was a monument to decorative excess: whole gardens of acanthus

tendrils and palmettes voluted over the stonework; imperial lion-masks—

unembarrassed lumps of high classical kitsch—roared out over the great

baroque orgy of the ruins. The columns, each eight feet thick, were taller

than any elsewhere in the classical world; each capital was larger than a

fully-grown man, and covered with enough different leaf forms to fill a

greenhouse at Kew. It was an exuberant, theatrical monument, designed

more for ostentation than religiosity, and it undoubtedly achieved its aim.

(265)

Such descriptions convey William’s judgement on what he portrays as the

Iranian-influenced Ba’albek. The narration of the forms of decoration on the

ruins become rather pointed characterisations of the Maronite community with

phrases like “opulence rather than good taste,” “kitsch,” and the damning

statement that the temple was “designed more for ostentation than religiosity.”

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 In discussion with Youngs, the extent of the strategic construction of the

journey and the narrative and the motives behind them becomes clear:

[TY:] Was Holy Mountain a book that you were going to write anyway,

and Moschos’s book and your following in his footsteps just provided the

structure?

[WD:] Yes, exactly.

[TY:] But in the book you disguise your other concerns somewhat and

highlight the aim of following Moschos?

[WD:] Correct, though again the political aim grew in clarity as the

journey and the book developed. Certainly I think my book proposal

before I did the journey would have highlighted overwhelmingly

Moschos. (55)

The detailed passages in the early sections of From the Holy Mountain which

chronicle William’s decision-making process regarding the journey and its

motivations show the extent of this narrative “disguise.” Dalrymple states:

“Open on the desk is my paperback translation of The Spiritual Meadow of

John Moschos, the unlikely little book which first brought me to this

monastery” (4). Other aspects of the text’s production are later revealed to have

occurred differently than they are presented in the text. There are many,

overdetermined references to William writing by the light of a hurricane

lantern in austere monastic surrounds in the present tense, such as:

The wooden simandron has just begun to call from the church; matins

will begin in ten minutes. Soon it will be dawn. The first glimmer of light

has begun to light up the silhouette of the Holy Mountain. The paraffin in

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 my lamp is exhausted, and so am I. … The simandron is being rung for

the second time. I must shut this book and go down to the church to join

the monks at prayer. (21)

Despite these frequent descriptions of ascetic writing sessions, Dalrymple

professes his gratitude in his acknowledgements for the use of a friends’ house

to write: “I would particularly like to thank Alan and Brigid Waddams, who

not only looked after me in Damascus but also lent me their house in Somerset,

where much of this book was written and edited” (xvi). For a text that spends

so much effort on convincing the reader of its objective journalistic credentials,

such discrepancies are notable.

The gulf between the historical and journalistic endeavours of From the

Holy Mountain and the use of the first-person diary structure is illuminated by

Dalrymple:

I thought of abandoning that [diary form] altogether but it started off,

you’re quite correct, more in diary form and by the end it’s absurd

because I’m referring to huge chunks of secondary and primary texts

which I couldn’t possibly have carried with me! … I was very much

aware that the diary was becoming less and less plausible in all sorts of

ways. (Interview with Tim Youngs 56)

More than just the implausibility of form is evident here. The demands of

narrative and research manifestly override the conceit on which their existence

depends—that of the centrally important, enabling journey. Dalrymple

identifies the (almost inevitable) influence of Robert Byron’s The Road to

Oxiana in his choice of the diary device in From the Holy Mountain: “I started

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off with a view to writing a sort of Byronish diary but in the end it just became

a way of dividing it up” (Interview with Tim Youngs 56-57). Of course, the

diary form, as well as providing a structure for the narrative, also brings a

sense of immediacy and honesty to the text.

As well as using the autobiographical authority inherent in the diary,

Dalrymple seeks out eminent authorities in fields pertinent to the text. Two

prominent examples are Dalrymple’s interactions with Sir Stephen Runciman

and independent journalist Robert Fisk, each of which works, in different

ways, to establish Dalrymple’s position in crucial fields—history and

journalism, respectively.

Of the two, Runciman is more recognisable as a traditional authorising

figure, whose presence gives Dalrymple legitimacy in the arena of narrative

history writing. Dalrymple’s choice of historian also positions him and the text

to the right of the spectrum, and establishes narrative history as the mode to be

followed, rather than a more analytical approach. The utilisation of Runciman

highlights the manner in which From the Holy Mountain’s scholarship and

audience is positioned. As Jonathan Harris notes, although the central

arguments of Runciman’s three-volume A History of the Crusades, published

between 1951 and 1954, have been comprehensively challenged, the works’

popularity endures: they are still in print and seen as “institutional” Crusade

histories. It is this popular, realist approach to history that Dalrymple aligns

himself with through his association with Runciman.

Although Dalrymple uses Runciman as historical inspiration and

validation, the manner in which Runciman is incorporated into From the Holy

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Mountain is entirely in the mode of travel writing. Instead of engaging with

any of Runciman’s scholarly works, either through quotation or analysis,

Dalrymple goes to visit him, has coffee and a chat, and describes the encounter

in great detail:

I first read about John Moschos in Sir Stephen Runciman’s great three-

volume History of the Crusades .... He is well into his nineties: a tall,

thin, frail old man, still very poised and intellectually alert, but now

physically weak. He has heavy-lidded eyes and a slow, gravelly voice,

with a hint of an old fashioned Cambridge drawl. During lunch,

Runciman talked of the Levant as he knew it in his youth. (18)

Dalrymple’s visit to this eminent, upper-class personage serves to give

legitimacy to the historical arguments and parallels advanced throughout From

the Holy Mountain. It also constructs Dalrymple as a privileged figure, who

has sufficient status to warrant a personal audience with a “great” sage such as

Runciman. The choice of this particular historian as patron, when viewed

alongside similar moves in In Xanadu, shows a tendency to invest authority

and wisdom in aged figures. This is necessary to a degree when obtaining

reminiscences of the Raj, as he does in City of Djinns, but adds no appreciable

value to a study of Byzantine Christianity (apart from harnessing “common-

sense” notions regarding age and wisdom, and perhaps balancing out

Dalrymple’s own youthfulness).

Dalrymple’s engagement with Runciman as a historian is limited, and

serves chiefly as a platform from which to espouse his own aims for and

arguments about the journey he is undertaking:

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 Later, over coffee, I broached the subject of John Moschos and his

travels. What had attracted me to The Spiritual Meadow in the first place

was the idea that Moschos and Sophronius were witnessing the first act

in a process whose dénouement was taking place only now: that first

onslaught on the Christian East observed by the two monks was now

being completed by Christianity’s devastating decline in the land of its

birth. The ever-accelerating exodus of the last Christians from the Middle

East today meant that The Spiritual Meadow could be read less as a dead

history book than as the prologue to an unfolding tragedy whose final

chapter is still being written. (19)

The first sentence of this excerpt situates William and Runciman together, but

then immediately moves into William’s lengthy description of his aims.

Although this passage begins as if William and Runciman are in conversation,

there is no recorded response from Runciman regarding the traveller’s plans or

ideas. Instead, the section becomes a place in which Dalrymple airs his

arguments about the function of his text, while the presence of Runciman, and

the lack of any recorded objection to or debate about Dalrymple’s theories

serves to validate the premise of From the Holy Mountain. It is clear that

Dalrymple represents his book as the “final chapter” of Moschos’ narrative of

decline.

As the description of his visit continues, Dalrymple presents the reader

with a story of his inspiration for the journey (and thus for the text itself). His

time in the presence of Runciman is portrayed as the necessary ingredient for

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the crystallisation of his thoughts on the book and the journey which it is to

chronicle:

Driving back home from Runciman, I knew what I wanted to do: spend

six months circling the Levant, following roughly in John Moschos’s

footsteps. Starting in Athos and working my way through to the Coptic

monasteries of Upper Egypt, I wanted to do what no future generation of

travellers would be able to do: to see wherever possible what Moschos

and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under

the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness

what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium. (21)

In a similar fashion to In Xanadu’s claim for originary status as the first

journey to properly retrace Polo’s route, Dalrymple here attempts to lend

gravitas to his endeavour by positioning himself as the last witness (excluding,

presumably, those still-practising Eastern Christians) to what he represents as a

culture in decline. He explicitly, and repeatedly, links his and Moschos’s

journeys together at the close of From the Holy Mountain:

John Moschos saw that plant [Eastern Christianity] begin to wither in the

hot winds of change that scoured the Levant of his day. On my journey in

his footsteps I have seen the very last stalks in the process of being

uprooted. It has been a continuous process, lasting nearly one and a half

millennia. Moschos saw its beginnings. I have seen the beginning of its

end. (453-54)

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As Patrick Brantlinger notes in relation to discourses about savagery and the

dying race theory, such visions of “ebbing twilight” are often the product of a

“sentimental” combination in which “celebration and mourning are fused” (2).

Where Dalrymple uses Runciman to bolster his credentials in history, he

turns to a very different figure in the field of journalism. Fisk, the famous and

influential British foreign correspondent, writes for The Times and The

Independent (since 1989), and has also published numerous books. Dalrymple

also uses Fisk as an authorising figure, though chiefly by association. Fisk,

more so than Runciman, also provides further characterisation opportunities for

William, through the contrast between the representation of the two journalists.

One of several conversations between William and Fisk functions as an

example of the dangers of working as a war correspondent and shows William

as a moderate, self-preserving, everyday character (in contrast to other sections

that emphasise his bravery). Dalrymple quotes Fisk’s enthusiasm for being in

the middle of the action:

“I would do it—no problem. I went to the SLA headquarters in

Marjayoun last month, as a matter of fact. There are Hezbollah all round,

of course. They might take a potshot at you, but they generally don’t

shoot unmarked cars. At least not normally. It’s not as if you’d be

travelling in an Israeli army convoy, ha ha.” “Ha ha.” I shuddered at

Fisk’s idea of an easy assignment and privately made up my mind to

forget interviewing Lahad, and to keep well away from the SLA. (216)

Such a passage works, almost paradoxically, to both highlight Dalrymple’s

standing as a journalist—comparable with the famous Fisk—and to position

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him in contrast to the seasoned war correspondent. Thus, Dalrymple comes out

of the encounter a respected journalist and a figure with whom the reader can

empathise, even though he is not prepared to risk personal safety to ensure

accurate and representative reporting.

In a more subtle manner, Dalrymple highlights his own bravery and

commitment to his project when he talks with his hotel receptionist Merin

about his planned visit to south-east Turkey. Merin “seems to think my plans

are hysterically funny” (49). He dismisses Merin’s sarcastically-phrased

warnings: “Don’t worry, you’ll only get shot if you run into a PKK roadblock,

and only blown up if you drive over a landmine. Otherwise the south-east is

fine. Completely safe. In fact highly recommended” (49). Here Dalrymple and

the reader are constructed as knowing more than Merin, despite his familiarity

with south-eastern Turkey. The presence of the book in the hands of the reader

is a silent proof of William’s success in his journey (and the mistaken nature of

Merin’s predictions of woe). In this sense, the logic of the text’s existence turns

Merin (and other similar figures throughout the narrative) into an overly-

paranoid worrier, in contrast to the stoic British traveller.

Dalrymple’s companions change regularly throughout From the Holy

Mountain. They still perform an important role in William’s characterisation,

however. They are represented in particular ways, often functioning as a

constraining presence that William needs to conquer. Dalrymple recounts his

journey to Aysut, which “started promisingly. At six in the morning a black

government Mercedes drew up outside my hotel; inside were a chauffeur and

an interpreter (or rather minder) named Mahmoud” (435). In his aside

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designating Mahmoud as a minder, Dalrymple diminishes the importance of

the interpreter (and therefore advances the portrayal of the protagonist as able

to communicate on his own). This move also represents William as someone

sufficiently important to require “minding.” Later, he shares his rebellion with

the reader, accentuating his adventurous, individualistic nature: “After lunch, I

gave Mahmoud the slip and walked out alone to the place where I wanted to

end my pilgrimage, alone” (451). The repetition of the word “alone” (despite

the fact that William is being driven around in a “government Mercedes”)

highlights the importance of a sense of independence to his characterisation.

In order to confirm Dalrymple’s authority as a traveller and a travel

writer, From the Holy Mountain is constructed as participating in a lineage of

European travel, and Dalrymple represents himself as a part of a family of

risqué and adventurous (if not necessarily scrupulous) travellers. Of the

monastery at Mount Athos, Dalrymple recounts:

it was decreed that nothing female—no woman, no cow, no mare, no

bitch—could step within its limits. Today this rule is relaxed only for

cats, and in the Middle Ages even a pair of Byzantine Empresses were

said to have been turned away from the Holy Mountain by the Mother of

God herself. But 140 years ago, in 1857, the Virgin was sufficiently

flexible to allow one of my Victorian great-aunts, Virginia Somers, to

spend two months in a tent on Mount Athos, along with her husband and

the louche Pre-Raphaelite artist Coutts Lindsay. (5)

He highlights the exceptional nature of his great-aunt’s presence, again, as well

as providing the most sensational interpretation of their activities: “It is the

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only recorded instance of a woman being allowed onto the mountain in the

millennium-long history of Athos, and is certainly the only record of what

appears to have been a most unholy Athonite ménage-à-trios” (5). Contrary to

Dalrymple’s brief, bohemian description, Lindsay is remembered for his

military service and, significantly, as an influential gallery owner and art

patron, rather than as an artist (still less as a “louche” one). Instances such as

this indicate the extent to which Dalrymple’s quest for a sensational story (and

interesting characterisation of the protagonist) come before an adherence to

historical detail.

As well as his great-aunt, Dalrymple also makes mention of other related

travellers who highlight his own more acceptable aims:

The English traveller the Hon. Robert Curzon is still considered one of

the worst offenders: after a quick circuit around the monastic libraries of

Athos in the late 1840s (in the company, I am ashamed to say, of my

great-great-uncle), Curzon left the Holy Mountain with his trunks

bulging with illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine chrysobuls. (9)

Such references serve to show the level of privilege from which Dalrymple

comes, as well as providing him with a strong travelling pedigree. They

provide an opportunity to perform his shame at his predecessors’ Orientalist

thefts and insensitivity. Dalrymple further situates himself in the broader travel

genre, through repeated reference to writers in whose wake he travels.

Sometimes, his journey turns around particular locations. Dalrymple stays in

the Baron Hotel in Aleppo: “a legendary place. Everyone from Agatha Christie

to Kemal Ataturk has stayed here, while Monsieur T.E. Lawrence’s unpaid bill

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of 8 June 1914 is still displayed in a glass cabinet in the sitting room” (133).

The most important thing about the Baron is its relationship with past British

travellers. Other accommodation options in Aleppo might have more Syrian

historical significance, but it is the specific, nostalgic connection to the

caricature of the British adventurer to which Dalrymple gravitates. He defines

past travellers in a particular way in order to facilitate an easy identification

with them:

it is still easy to see why this hotel appealed so much to a former

generation of English travellers. At eight this morning I woke up,

momentarily confused as to where I was, and looked at the wall beside

my bed. There hung an English coaching print and a framed portrait of a

black retriever with a pheasant in its mouth emerging from a village

stream beside a thatched cottage. …The inexplicably horrible food, the

decaying neo-Gothic architecture, the deep baths and the uncomfortable

beds: no wonder Lawrence and his contemporaries felt so much at home

here—the Baron is the perfect replica of some particularly Spartan

English public school, strangely displaced to the deserts of the Middle

East. (134)

In this formulation, British travellers are represented uniformly as upper-class,

public school educated men—a series of categories into which Dalrymple also

fits. Thus he establishes a place for From the Holy Mountain in a long and

illustrious tradition of elite travel to the East. At the same time, the imperial

processes which facilitate the “strange” displacement of British institutional

accoutrements go unmentioned.

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 One particular author to whom Dalrymple returns is award-winning

travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron. When From the Holy Mountain

covers the same territory as Thubron’s texts, Dalrymple seems obliged to

contrast their experiences:

When the travel writer Colin Thubron visited the convent in 1966, he

claimed to have witnessed a miracle: to have seen the face of the icon of

Notre Dame de Seidnaya stream with tears. In the same church I too

witnessed a miracle, or something that today would certainly be regarded

as a miracle in almost any other country in the Middle East. For the

congregation seemed to consist not of Christians but almost entirely of

heavily bearded Muslim men. (187)

While acknowledging those that have gone before, this passage also provides

Dalrymple with a means by which to differentiate his journey (and his persona

as travel writer) from that of Thubron. In contrast to Thubron’s more romantic

approach, Dalrymple’s project is represented as one that observes and records

people and practices from an objective distance, rather than becoming

entangled in debates over the status of purported miracles.

There are also frequent instances throughout From the Holy Mountain in

which Dalrymple emphasises the groundbreaking nature of his observations. In

most cases, the outcome of such a claim for scholarly importance is to link

Dalrymple to early forms or practices of Christianity, thus strengthening the

affinity required for the text’s central conceit—the comparison between and

kinship of John Moschos and William. Examples include Dalrymple’s

excitement at potential connections between Byzantine and Celtic Christians:

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“What has always fascinated me is the extent to which the austere desert

fathers were the models and heroes of the Celtic monks on whose exploits I

was brought up in Scotland. Like their Byzantine exemplars, the Celtic Culdees

deliberately sought out the most wild and deserted places” (106). His narration

of the argument for iconographic links shows his investment in the acceptance

of such a theory: “[the] illustrations in the Diatessaron were iconographically

identical to those in the first of the great illuminated Celtic gospel books, the

Book of Durrow” (109). Dalrymple spends a great deal of narrative time

advancing these connections between Eastern and Western Christianity.

Another instance, which attempts to physically place William alongside

“unchanging” Christian tradition, is found in the lengthy discussion of the

choral styling of the Urfalee Syrian Christian congregation. He asks

musicologist Gianmaria Malacrida: “So it is possible that what we heard

tonight may be the most ancient form of Christian music being sung anywhere

in the world?” (176). Dalrymple’s desire for the confirmation of this possibility

is evident, but is deferred by the scholar’s refusal to rush to conclusions:

“‘That’s speculation,’ he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

‘Wait until my research is published’” (177).

Representing From the Holy Mountain as an important contribution to

Byzantine history are its lengthy descriptions and interpretations of artwork,

particularly floor mosaics. He chronicles his experience visiting a collection

gathered by Kemal Jumblatt in Beit ed-Din: “There, laid out on the walls and

on the floor, in room after vaulted room, unstudied by scholars, unknown to the

outside world, lay what is without doubt the most magnificent collection of

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Byzantine floor mosaics to survive to the present day outside the city of

Byzantium itself” (232). Most important to this passage is the “unknown” and

“unstudied” nature of these mosaics, which places Dalrymple and his text in a

position to contribute to the body of scholarship on Byzantium. The careful use

of descriptors such as “magnificent” creates the impression of the importance

of this collection without overtly claiming that epithet. Dalrymple’s claims for

the groundbreaking nature of his viewing these objects increases to hyperbolic

levels when he states that he was “Carried away by the thrill of being one of

the first ever to see these mosaics” (235). Of course such a statement constructs

any Eastern viewers of the mosaics as unimportant. Specific historical sources

that Dalrymple discusses include the Oxyrhynchus papyri. He informs the

reader:

Before setting off on this journey, I had spent a week in the London

Library poring through some of the 142 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus

papyri that have been so far edited, translated and published. Taken

together they provide a uniquely detailed picture of a late antique city:

reading them is like opening a shutter onto a sunlit Byzantine street and

eavesdropping on the gossip, the scandals and the secret affairs of the

people milling about below. (399)

The image of a week “poring” over “142 volumes” invokes intense archival

research. The qualifying information—that William has perused some of those

that have been edited, translated and published—slips by almost unnoticed. His

compelling description of reading historical documents as equivalent to

eavesdropping on casual conversation elides all archives’ problematic

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relationship with a historical “truth,” as well as the highly contingent and

mediated writing, preservation, collection, translation, editing, and

interpretation process.

Comparisons can be made between From the Holy Mountain and a

chapter by Dalrymple called “Palestine: The Monks Tale” in a collection of

travel narratives entitled Intrepid Arabia. Dalrymple’s contribution to the

collection is a series of carefully-chosen excerpts from Holy Mountain which

leaves out the paragraphs dealing with historical events and William’s journey

in the footsteps of John Moschos. What remains is a much more jocular,

conversation-based piece (chiefly William and Fr. Theophanes talking about

religion, demons, the last days, and so on). “‘Fr. Theophanes,’ I asked, my

curiosity finally getting the better of me, ‘I don’t understand why you are so

worried by the Freemasons.’ ‘Because they are the legions of the Anti-Christ.

The stormtroopers of the Whore of Babylon’” (Holy Mountain 308). The style

of this modified version of From the Holy Mountain is remarkably reminiscent

of In Xanadu. It appears that, for Dalrymple, generic travel writing is

necessarily humorous.

In keeping with this construction, Dalrymple’s narrative histories are

presented in a serious manner similar to From the Holy Mountain. The

heightened authority of the non-fiction conventions of history and journalistic

writing seem to preclude the use of humour, in Dalrymple’s case.

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Chapter Four: White Mughals

Introduction

White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, first published

in 2002, marks the beginning of another phase in William Dalrymple’s oeuvre.

The text is a narrative history that tells a “tragic love story” (xxxix). As part of

this romantic plotline, Dalrymple uses his lengthy text to set out a broader

argument about the significance of relationships between high-level East India

Company officials and upper-class Muslim women. This chapter considers the

reception and positioning of White Mughals, before examining its presentation

of the British in India.

The narrative that forms the centre of White Mughals treats the marriage

of James Kirkpatrick, the British East India Company’s Resident in Hyderabad

from 1797 to 1805, and Khair un-Nissa, a young, beautiful Muslim woman.

Dalrymple tells the story of their mutual love and respect against the odds,

which included her previous engagement and his resistant Company superiors.

Their relationship is represented as being driven, at least initially, by the

fervour of her feelings for Kirkpatrick. Dalrymple uses the term “white

Mughals” to refer to those British men whom he represents as embracing

aspects of Mughal life and culture.

White Mughals was published to almost universal acclaim. Reviewers

called it a “great love story” (Mann), “both romantic and historically

revealing” (Blake), and it won a Wolfson History Award in 2002. As

Dalrymple later commented in an interview with Bron Sibree, “What was nice

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about White Mughals … is that it flattered everybody” (W13). He highlights

the text’s positive portrayal of the British, stating: “The British liked White

Mughals … because it depicted them as far less racist, more multicultural and

highly sexed than they thought they were, and the Indians liked it because it

portrayed the British copying Indian culture” (W13). In a comment that

quickly found its way on to the book’s cover, Salman Rushdie endorsed it as a

“brilliant and compulsively readable book.” In the publicity material

surrounding the work, Dalrymple positions it as simultaneously a

groundbreaking piece of historical research and a conscious return to what he

represents as the unfairly-overlooked genre of narrative history, invoking a

tradition of writers such as Stephen Runciman. He argues that White Mughals

provides a counter to the limitations of academic history writing: “One has to

break from the narrow world of academics and oneupmanship” (Dalrymple,

interview with Sanjay Austa). Later commentators, particularly Joy Wang and

Ann Laura Stoler (who writes brilliantly on the colonial interactions of class,

race and sex), raise suggestive and complex questions about White Mughals

with reference to the status of women and sex.

Despite all of this, the text is not just, or even primarily, a story about the

relationship between Khair un-Nissa and Kirkpatrick, or about the British in

India, although clearly these are important concerns. White Mughals’ central

narrative is that of Dalrymple’s journey through and around the pitfalls of

academic and traditional history and the dramas of archival research.

Overarching all of the work’s putative subjects is the story of William the

enthusiastic historian, and the serendipitous discoveries which reveal pieces of

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a “fully formed” history, ready to be transmitted to the public. This

overarching thread is most commonly constructed in ways reminiscent of

Dalrymple’s travel texts, although other representational strategies make use of

elements from detective fiction and quest tales. In its close reading of

Dalrymple’s history writing processes, this chapter owes a debt to Hayden

White’s Metahistory. White states that “It is sometimes said that the aim of the

historian is to explain the past by ‘finding,’ ‘identifying,’ or ‘uncovering’ the

‘stories’ that lie buried in chronicles.” (6). He goes on to counter this assertion

by emphasising the extent to which interpretation and “explanation” are central

to the historian’s task: “the same event can serve as a different kind of element

of many different historical stories, depending on the role it is assigned in a

specific motific characterization” (7). This chapter takes White’s conception of

historiography as a guiding precept to untangle the ways in which White

Mughals constructs its historical narrative.

Travel and History: Authenticity and Self-Fashioning

With the move into narrative history, the character of William unsurprisingly

evolves into an amiable enthusiast of Indian history and culture. The textual

construction of the work changes too, most obviously with the addition of

footnotes and endnotes, in keeping with the more scholarly intention of the

text. A tension is present in Dalrymple’s resistance to academic history, and a

simultaneous utilisation of the appearance of authority that its conventions

provide. The maps and glossaries that adorned previous works are retained, and

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are joined by an array of paratexts, giving readers a sense that this Dalrymple

monograph is both new and exciting while remaining comfortingly familiar.

The characterisation of the narrator begins early, in the work’s

Acknowledgements section. Instead of a typical, dry, to-the-point paratext,

Dalrymple uses the preliminary material as an opportunity to provide the

reader with a picture of the text and, crucially, its author, which will guide their

reading of the work. Of course this notion is hardly new, and as Gerard Genette

has comprehensively argued, all preparatory material functions in this way (2).

However, the paratexts that Dalrymple provides exploit this potential through

their length, volubility and multiplicity.

One of the central functions of the Acknowledgements is to continue

William’s characterisation, inherent in his earlier works, as the threefold

traveller / author / narrator, with particular emphasis on the traveller persona.

He writes:

I began work on this book in the spring of 1997. Over the five years—

and the many thousands of miles of travel—since then, innumerable

people have been incredibly generous with their hospitality, time,

expertise, advice, wisdom, pictures, editing skills, bottles of whisky,

family papers, camp beds and cups of tea. (xxvii)

In this section, which marks the beginning of the author’s journey into this

historical project, the routines of the historian seem uncannily similar to those

of the travel writer. The concluding reference to “camp beds and cups of tea”

conjures up an image of William as participating in a particularly quaint,

British sort of travel, in a boyish spirit of adventure. Perhaps this emphasis on

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“miles” of travel is simply an attempt to reassure Dalrymple’s travel writing

readership that this departure does not represent an unbridgeable gap. He

comments elsewhere that the shift is “like Dylan going electric: you feel like

you’re leaving half the followers behind!” (Interview with Tim Youngs 57).

Although an obviously flippant remark, this statement demonstrates the extent

to which Dalrymple’s self-consciously maintained authorial persona links his

evolving oeuvre. The development of Dalrymple’s travelling authorial persona

works in several ways. It differentiates Dalrymple from the many other

historians who deal with British imperial history, particularly those writing

academic histories. Further, it enables him to utilise the particular, difficult-to-

challenge, authority that comes with autobiography and grounded experience,

without sacrificing that of the historian.

Alongside several other paratexts, including “praise for the book,” a

dedication, and an extensive “Dramatis Personae” (reminiscent of dynastic

historical fiction sagas), is a request for donations. It reads:

The British Residency complex that James Achilles Kirkpatrick built in

Hyderabad, now the Osmania Women’s College, is recognised as one of

the most important colonial buildings in India, but its fabric is in very

bad shape and it was recently placed on the World Monuments Fund’s

list of One Hundred Most Endangered Buildings. A non-profit-making

trust has now been set up to fund conservation efforts. Anyone who

would like more information, or to make a donation, should contact

Friends of Osmania Women’s College, India, Inc. (White Mughals xxix)

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This somewhat unusual section works to represent Dalrymple as responsible

and caring, with strong connections to the community around which the book

is based. It advances a picture of the author and his readers as philanthropic,

wealthy figures—the type that might well consider making a donation for the

cause of restoration and history. This paratext interpellates a reader that cares

just as much as the author about the preservation of historical architecture,

suggesting an inclusive benevolent community. That the request for funds is in

order to preserve an “important” colonial building, as opposed to a Mughal

monument, highlights the aspects of Indian history that are most valuable to

this project.

The work’s introduction continues in a distinctly conversational,

autobiographical vein, situating White Mughals within Dalrymple’s life, body

of work, and state of mind. As well as advancing Dalrymple’s relationship with

the reader, this functions to highlight an autobiographical motivation for the

creation of the text, in contrast to an academic or fiscal one. It begins:

I first heard about James Achilles Kirkpatrick on a visit to Hyderabad in

February 1997. It was the middle of Muharram, the Shi’a festival

commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet.

I had just finished a book on the monasteries of the Middle East, four

years’ work, and was burnt out. I came to Hyderabad to get away from

my desk and my overflowing bookshelves, to relax, to go off on a whim,

to travel aimlessly again. (xxxi)

The first word of the introduction is “I,” and Dalrymple sets up his narrative

history by outlining his “discovery” of Hyderabad. The opening sentence

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shows William “hearing” about Kirkpatrick, but without mentioning who

brought him to his attention: the focus remains solely on the narrator. The

emphasis on the author as traveller continues too, with “aimless” travel

positioned as a restorative antidote to academic stultification. That an explicitly

non-fiction work draws so heavily upon autobiography is revealing for the

ways in which Dalrymple constructs himself and his brand of history. From the

beginning, Dalrymple’s book is history with the historian in the foreground.

In some instances, such an approach might seek to highlight the

individual and arbitrary nature of history, as Linda Hutcheon chronicles in her

description of novels that can be classified as “historiographic metafiction”—

works that deal with the past with a “narrative voice, wondering about its

reader, … thematizing or allegorizing, in a sense, the act of ènonciation, the

interaction of textual production and reception” (229). For Hutcheon, “[t]o

write history—or historical fiction—is equally to narrate, to reconstruct by

means of selection and interpretation. History (like realist fiction) is made by

its writer, even if events are made to seem to speak for themselves” (231-32).

In White Mughals this conception of history is elided. Rather, the

characterisation of Dalrymple works to reinforce a representation of the author

as an embedded, knowledgeable, passionate authority on the material with

which he works, and glosses the interpretative process through a teleological

narrative.

Contrasting Dalrymple’s different portrayals of the same place shows the

necessarily constructed nature of all narratives. Between From the Holy

Mountain and White Mughals Dalrymple published The Age of Kali, a

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collection of his journalism from 1989 to 1998. One piece in this collection is

also set in Hyderabad. The Age of Kali is a largely negative text about

contemporary India, and Hyderabad is presented as “a pretty unprepossessing

place” (199). In White Mughals, which offers a generally positive portrayal of

a past, British-influenced India, the description changes dramatically.

Dalrymple uses White Mughals to highlight the “timeless” qualities of the city

of Hyderabad, remarking: “It was as if Hussain had been killed a week earlier,

not in the late seventh century AD. This was the sort of Indian city I loved”

(xxxi). This temporal vagueness also assists in heightening Dalrymple’s

traveller subjectivity—if Hyderabad does not change, then Dalrymple can gain

physical access to its past through his presence there. He then sets himself up

as a guide for the (Western) reader to what he represents as an exotic, distant

and untouched locale:

a relatively unexplored and unwritten place, at least in English; and a

secretive one too. ... Hyderabad hid its charms from the eyes of outsiders,

veiling its splendours from curious eyes behind nondescript walls and

labyrinthine backstreets. Only slowly did it allow you in to an enclosed

world where water still dripped from fountains, flowers bent in the

breeze, and peacocks called from the overladen mango trees. There,

hidden from the streets, was a world of timelessness and calm, a last

bastion of gently fading Indo-Islamic civilisation where, as one art

historian has put it, old “Hyderabadi gentlemen still wore the fez, dreamt

about the rose and the nightingale, and mourned the loss of Grenada.”

(xxxi)

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This passage works both to increase Dalrymple’s authority as author through

his exploration of “unexplored and unwritten” territory, and to give the text a

value corresponding to its rarity and originality. Also important is the heavily

gendered representation of the city of Hyderabad—as a demure native woman,

veiling herself from “curious eyes,” ready to be romantically conquered by the

dashing traveller / historian. Behind this “veil,” a “timeless” India is again

invoked. As well as illustrating the different approaches of The Age of Kali and

White Mughals, this passage is an example of the way White Mughals blends

travel writing and history. By switching between the two, and using aspects of

both discursive modes, Dalrymple draws upon the different authorities

associated with each in order to support and legitimise this text.

Dalrymple’s rhetoric of exploration developed through his travel texts is

continued in this history work. It is also taken up by his reviewers. Margo

White calls him a “heroic researcher,” and describes his “breakthrough”

archival “discoveries.” Dalrymple also highlights, with ubiquitous gendered

pioneering metaphor, the originality of his work:

None of these [Persian and Urdu] sources had ever been translated into

English, and so were virgin territory for those unfamiliar with either

nineteenth-century Deccani Urdu or the heavily Indianised Persian that

the manuscripts were written in—which meant virtually everyone bar a

handful of elderly Hyderabadi scholars. (xxxiv)

Curiously, this emphasis on the rarity and authenticity of these sources results

in Dalrymple highlighting the fact that he himself is unable to read such

documents, although this is never explicitly stated. The crucial message here is

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that Dalrymple (unlike the “elderly Hyderabadi scholars”) is uniquely equipped

to guide the reader through this “virgin” historical territory.

Dalrymple then embarks on a narrative of his English-language research,

highlighting the breadth of his study and his tenacity:

Back in London, I searched around for more about Kirkpatrick. A couple

of books on Raj architecture contained a passing reference to his

Residency and the existence of his Begum, but there was little detail, and

what there was seemed to derive from an 1893 article in Blackwood’s

Magazine, “The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick”,

written by Kirkpatrick’s kinsman Edward Strachey. (xxxv)

Dalrymple heightens the excitement and challenges of often tedious archival

work by narrating his finds in a manner reminiscent of detective stories: “The

first real break came when I found that Kirkpatrick’s correspondence with his

brother William, preserved by the latter’s descendants the Strachey family, had

recently been bought by the India Office Library” (xxxv). The Blackwood’s

article to which Dalrymple refers, “The Romantic Marriage of Major James

Achilles Kirkpatrick, Sometime British Resident at the Court of Hyderabad”

(1893), is a brief, sentimental, amateur family history in a publication with a

particularly colonial / imperial focus and readership. The story that it tells

forms the backbone of White Mughals. Strachey’s history is similar to

Dalrymple’s in its first person perspective and autobiographical tendencies, as

well as in its subject matter. Strachey concludes his piece with the statement:

“Such is the story of Hushmat Jung (Glorious in Battle) and Khair un Nissa

(Excellent among Women), so far as I can give it. But I have been unable, from

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failing eyesight, to make complete examination of the papers, and some further

facts and fresh light may possibly be still found in them” (29). Despite this

qualification in the source material, there is little in White Mughals that

Strachey has not already covered, except the story of Khair un-Nissa after

Kirkpatrick’s death. The extent to which the love story of White Mughals has

already been written is hidden by Dalrymple’s narrative of his archival

discoveries.

As part of his narration of his “heroic” research, Dalrymple also carefully

describes the material properties of his findings:

There were piles of letter books inscribed “From my brother James

Achilles Kirkpatrick” (the paper within all polished and frail with age),

great gilt leather-bound volumes of official correspondence with the

Governor General, Lord Wellesley, bundles of Persian manuscripts,

some boxes of receipts and, in a big buff envelope, a will—exactly the

sort of random yet detailed detritus of everyday lives that biographers

dream of turning up. (xxxv-xxxvi)

Such passages create a sense of closeness between the reader and the research

and writing process—this particular vignette giving a behind-the-scenes look at

the dreams of biographers. This romanticised portrayal of historical research

emphasises the (“frail,” “leather-bound”) beauty of Dalrymple’s findings.

Scattered liberally throughout his narrative of his quest through the archives,

Dalrymple offers examples of the “mundane” details available to the

researcher—glossed as an inevitable part of the labour of archival work: the

letters contained details such as “the occasional plea for a crate of Madeira or

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the sort of vegetables Kirkpatrick found unavailable in the Hyderabad bazaars,

such as—surprisingly—potatoes and peas” (xxxvi). Dalrymple’s narrative of

his research and writing is conspicuously silent about the wide scope of the

historian to shape the story that begins in the archive.

Although vocal about the richness and variety of the sources available,

there is no mention of Dalrymple’s choice of one over another, or of any

interpretation of the material. Following the logic of this narrative, White

Mughals is told in the only way possible—through faithful transcription of the

already-present story from the archives. In Susan Kurosawa’s profile of the

author at the time of the text’s publication, Dalrymple describes the process as

like “watching a Polaroid develop.” 1 In the context of White Mughals’

representation as telling the only available historical story, then, it is

unsurprising that Kirkpatrick’s requests for Madeira, peas and potatoes are

dismissed as mundane rather than contributing to a picture of the Resident as

both engaging with India and missing Britain—this is the manner in which this

information best fits Dalrymple’s narrative.

In order to make the authenticity of his work more explicit, Dalrymple

inserts a footnote which explains: “It is one of the quirks of modern Indian

historiography that the Deccan remains still largely unstudied: little serious

work has been done on any of the Deccani courts” (xxxviii). Suddenly, White

Mughals is not merely a popular entry-point to Indian history, but also an

important contribution to knowledge. The sense of freedom from the strictures

1
In yet another instance of the dual representation of Dalrymple as historian and traveller, and
his text as an untheorised mixture of both, Kurosawa is a regular contributor to, and editor of,
the Weekend Australian’s “Travel and Indulgence” section.

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of academic research that William enjoys in relation to “antiquities” (74) in In

Xanadu is evident in the field of history, too: “In an age when every minute

contour of the landscape of history appears to be rigorously mapped out by a

gridiron of scholarly Ph.D.s, this huge gap is all the more remarkable”

(xxxviii). In contrast to the image of the network of PhD research as a

stultifying “gridiron,” White Mughals takes on the characterisation as free and

unlimited by academic constraints.

Strengthening the representation of White Mughals as direct transcription

from the archive is a sense of the providential appearance of crucial, authentic

sources. Dalrymple highlights the quirks of chance and the lucky status of the

narrative by chronicling his discoveries on the final day of his research trip to

Hyderabad:

There were some moments of pure revelation too. … The shop did not in

fact sell boxes, but books (or “booksies”, as my guide had been trying to

tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts

and very rare printed chronicles … [which] lay stacked from floor to

ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom-cupboard. More

remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told

him what I was writing he produced from under a stack a huge,

crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam, by Abdul Lateef

Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick’s letters.

The book turned out to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography

by Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate

aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. … I spent the rest of

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 the afternoon haggling with the owner, and left his shop £400 poorer, but

with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources. Their

contents completely transformed what follows. (xxxviii)

The “transformation” that Dalrymple chronicles here is the addition of an

Indian perspective to the British tale told by Strachey. In his Archive Fever,

Jacques Derrida plays with the phrase “en mal d’archive,” seeing one of its

interpretations as a “nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to

return to the origin” (91). Dalrymple’s fetishisation of these sources recalls this

nostalgic desire. The role of archival serendipity functions to reinforce the

sense of a single possible narrative, but also works toward the representation of

White Mughals as a book that was somehow meant to happen. The ever-present

emphasis on the rarity and authenticity of these discoveries highlights its status

as an important and original text. The centrality of these “previously

untranslated” documents to the positioning of White Mughals cannot be

overstated—they “completely transformed” the text. Betty Joseph reminds us

that “the archive is not evidence of the real India but of the ways in which

colonial rule went about the task of writing fictions and governing through

them” (20). She asks, provocatively, “What information was preserved and for

what purposes? Who gets left out, and why, when the historical record is put

together in a particular way?” (15). This questioning approach is absent from

Dalrymple’s compelling, coherent historical narrative.

The publicity surrounding the book’s publication contributes to the sense,

developed throughout White Mughals, of the pieces all miraculously falling

into place. In interviews and publicity material surrounding the work,

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Dalrymple combines this “luck” with a narrative of his personal investment in

the story:

All this material turned up after the advance from the publisher was

spent. So I took a great financial gamble, re-mortgaged my house and

spent two more years researching Kirkpatrick. I was hugely in debt at the

end of it, but within a week of being published, the book had gone to

being the No. 1 bestseller in London. So thank God for that. (Interview

with Mukund Padmanabhan).

Despite the faintly ridiculous notion of the privileged Dalrymple casting

himself in a kind of rags-to-riches story here, this tale of determination in the

face of potential financial hardship highlights the extent of Dalrymple’s

commitment to the Kirkpatrick narrative. Dalrymple’s focus, risk-taking and

eventual commercial success not only provide a narrative of the rewards of

individualism, but also work to further support the representation of the text as

serendipitous and Dalrymple as highly committed to his work. White Mughals

becomes a text of which God and the market approve.

Dalrymple makes the reader privy to certain of the thought-processes of

the author, and encourages a sense of openness and transparency by revealing

his connection to Kirkpatrick, his historical protagonist: “By 2001, four years

into the research, I thought I knew Kirkpatrick so well I imagined that I heard

his voice in my head as I read and reread his letters” (xxxix). His knowledge of

the material and the depth of his research are emphasised here, along with the

length of time spent on the project. His affinity with Kirkpatrick links his and

Kirkpatrick’s characterisation. This connection is encouraged in Dalrymple’s

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self-representation, both within and outside his text, until identification of

Dalrymple as a belated “white Mughal” becomes difficult to escape. As

Natasha Mann writes in a profile of Dalrymple around the time of White

Mughals’ publication:

I can’t resist making an analogy between Dalrymple and the hookah-

smoking white Mughals in his book. “Oh yes,” he says with good-

humoured openness. “No one spends five years digging up a corpse

unless they see some element of themselves.” Olivia, who has been

cooking lunch in the kitchen, pipes up. “He wears his Indian kit every

evening.” “My old kurtas,” chuckles Dalrymple. “It’s certainly a fantasy

fulfilment, I suppose. I admire James Kirkpatrick. His views are my

views. So, definitely a clear, unembarrassed, unequivocal identification

with the hero.”

Dalrymple’s extra-textual identification with Kirkpatrick, particularly the

statement that “his views are my views” works to mediate readers’ interaction

with Kirkpatrick—he becomes a figure whose views are able to be embraced

by a contemporary, apparently self-deprecating figure like Dalrymple. This

move makes Kirkpatrick (and others in Dalrymple’s “white Mughal” category)

recognisable to the modern reader, despite their temporal distance. Dalrymple’s

self-representation as an enthusiastic historian who performs a daily role-play

in his “Indian kit” enables various readings. It establishes Dalrymple’s passion

and eccentricity, and shows the depth of his connection to his subject. It is

worth emphasising that it is not India, or the Mughals with which Dalrymple

identifies—it is a particular version of British India, personified by the cross-

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dressing, hookah-smoking Kirkpatrick. The domestic surrounds that Mann

describes suggest that Dalrymple occupies his own world, one which is not

quite as temporally present as the rest of the population, but rather a relic from

Kirkpatrick’s hybrid era. This temporal ambiguity positions Dalrymple as

uniquely equipped to mediate the historical narrative for the modern Western

reader.

Dalrymple’s representation as linked with and sympathetic to his white

Mughals’ views is heightened when he informs the reader of his blood ties to

his subject-matter, giving him a biological as well as a representational

connection:

in the course of my research, 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 Watts 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.

(xli)

The relation of this discovery reinforces the characterisation of Dalrymple

throughout the book as a belated white Mughal himself. Of course, the

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presence of “Indian blood” in Dalrymple’s veins further adds to a rather

dubious essentialist sense of his authority to write on the behalf of the British

in India. That even his family was unaware of this connection highlights

Dalrymple’s considerable powers of research and “discovery.”

Through his continued identification with his white Mughal characters,

Dalrymple the historian, with his enthusiastic use of arguments about hybridity

and multiculturalism, paves the way for a significant re-visioning of the British

in India. Dalrymple continues his overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the

British in India not through an argument for the multiplicity of experiences of

the British / Indian encounter, but through a focus on the weakness of other

scholars: “This seemed to be the problem with so much of the history written

about eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century India: the temptation felt by so

many historians to interpret their evidence according to the stereotypes of

Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes with which we are so

familiar” (xlii). Dalrymple posits the need for a thorough reconsideration of

British / Indian history, and inserts White Mughals as a balanced antidote to

other, stereotypically-influenced, histories. Dalrymple’s approach to history is

represented as overcoming the problems faced by the (undifferentiated mass

of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians.

Dalrymple subtly inserts himself into a conversation between Kirkpatrick

and his contemporary, General William Palmer, to again emphasise his

connection with his characters: “the two were soon comparing notes on their

favourite varieties [of mango], agreeing—sensibly enough—that Alphonsos

were hard to beat” (273). This two word intervention (“sensibly enough”)

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continues the sense of the narrator’s presence—ready to add his opinion and

insight to aid the reader—and to represent the narrator alongside his white

Mughal protagonists, as a (albeit atemporal) part of the conversation.

Dalrymple is a third white Mughal in this discussion. His narratorial

interruption also implies an extensive knowledge of all things Indian, including

the particular merits of different varieties of mango.

Another way in which Dalrymple aligns himself with Kirkpatrick is

through heavily descriptive textual manoeuvres which recall the style of his

travel writing. In a passage in which Dalrymple conflates himself and

Kirkpatrick and takes on Kirkpatrick’s point of view, he states:

Early in the morning after a night of rain, the scent of flowering champa

wafting from a roadside tree, James would find that a thin haze veiled the

ground like a fine dupatta, blotting out the muddy road ahead but leaving

a strangely disembodied forest of palm trunks rising out of the mist,

silhouetting the half-naked toddy-tappers shinning up their trunks to

harvest their gourds. Roadside caravansaris—strikingly solid and

monumental after the floating world of the palms—lay empty but for

colonies of monkeys scampering in from the road. (394)

Dalrymple plays with temporality, locating himself (as narrator) in

Kirkpatrick’s era. The tense employed in this passage adds to this feeling of

temporal slippage—the haze that “James would find” and the caravansaries

that “lay empty” bring the two Britons together. Such instances erode the

distance between Kirkpatrick’s and Dalrymple’s times, and foster an

impression of closeness, which sees a combination of Kirkpatrick’s

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representation as a man ahead of his time, and of Dalrymple as endearingly

anachronistic.

Dalrymple’s detailed descriptions of the (high-status, academic)

environment in which he undertook research for White Mughals function to

involve the reader in the writing process, and to rarify it at the same time—it

both makes the environments familiar and highlights their prestige: “Day after

day, under the armorial shields and dark oak bookshelves of the Duke

Humfrey’s Library, I tore as quickly as I could through the faded pages of

Russell’s often illegible copperplate correspondence, the tragic love story

slowly unfolding fully-formed before me” (xxxix). The description of the tale

emerging “fully-formed” for Dalrymple might be read as lessening his

authorial role. However, in the context of the narrative of his research

practices, and of the contrasts advanced between Dalrymple and other

historians, the key words here are “before me.” He represents himself as a kind

of archival-based Sherlock Holmes figure, able to make meaning from the

clues where others struggle. Dalrymple’s evocative descriptions of the Duke

Humfrey’s Library reinforce a sense of his privilege, and also provide a

suitable backdrop for the revelation of Khair un-Nissa’s story after Kirkpatrick:

It took another nine months of searching before I stumbled across the

heartbreaking answer to that, in the Henry Russell papers in the Bodleian

Library in Oxford. The tale—which had never been told, and seemed to

be unknown even to Kirkpatrick’s contemporaries—bore a striking

resemblance to Madame Butterfly. (xxxix)

The specific library in which the papers were located is certainly not crucial

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for the text; however mention of the Bodleian Library adds to the sense of the

romance of discovery that Dalrymple constructs.

There are a number of ambiguities in Dalrymple’s representation of this

revelation. For instance, there is no justification for his assertion that the story

of Khair un-Nissa’s life post-Kirkpatrick had “never been told,” and that it

appeared “to be unknown even to Kirkpatrick’s contemporaries,” nor any

indication of who these “contemporaries” might be—British or Indian, closely

or distantly related to Kirkpatrick. Dalrymple’s description of the story of

Khair un-Nissa’s life and death as appearing “fully-formed” elides the presence

of authorial interpretation and influence. Given Dalrymple’s later statements

about the challenges of Khair un-Nissa’s story, such assertions are somewhat

misleading. Much later in White Mughals, after a multitude of compelling

descriptions of Khair un-Nissa’s strong will and individualistic yet loving

character, Dalrymple notes:

Though she was the central figure in the life of James’s family, and

clearly a quietly forceful personality, the loss of her letters means that

today we can see her only obliquely, reflected through the eyes of her

lover, her husband, her mother and her children. Only rarely—and then

indirectly—are her own words recorded. Nevertheless, through the

impressions of her family and her own actions, a coherent mosaic does

emerge. (343)

The import of this statement (that there is a significant gap in the archive, with

no surviving documents authored by Khair un-Nissa) is lessened as Dalrymple

strives to reassure the reader of the reliability of his representation. His

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insistence that a “coherent mosaic does emerge” manages to represent the

writing process without recourse to the author at all—the story simply

“emerges.” He uses convincing language to describe his central female

character: “Khair was clearly a pious, impulsive and emotional woman, as well

as being a remarkably brave and determined figure when the need arose, and

few people—certainly not her mother, grandmother, or her husband—seemed

willing or able to stand in her way once she had made up her mind about

something” (343). The repeated use of words such as “clearly” work to close

the archival gaps, even as they are revealed to the reader.

When it comes to the historical narrative, Dalrymple continues to trade

upon his authority as a travel writer, presenting the reader with a scene of

timeless India at the beginning of White Mughals: “Waiting in the shade of the

gates, shoals of hawkers circled around the crowds of petitioners and groups of

onlookers who always collect in such places in India, besieging them with trays

full of rice cakes and bananas, sweetmeats, oranges and paan” (3). Such

temporal generalisations (“onlookers who always collect”) render Dalrymple’s

knowledge of contemporary India somehow also applicable to its history, and

foster a representation of the narrator as someone who can travel to and guide

the reader through India’s past. Dalrymple the narrator is a consistent presence

throughout White Mughals, both in the footnotes and in the body of the text.

The footnotes throughout White Mughals ostensibly provide an

opportunity for Dalrymple to reference his source material and relate further

information. And they do achieve this. However, as these functions are also

carried out by the text’s endnotes, Dalrymple could equally have chosen to

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dispense with footnotes, leaving the reader to progress through an

uninterrupted narrative. What these notes provide—frequent reminders of the

sources and expertise used in the creation of the text, and regular opportunities

for the representation of Dalrymple as a scholarly India enthusiast—were

evidently judged to outweigh their intrusion into the story (an unusual choice

for a text aimed at a general audience).

In Anthony Grafton’s detailed examination of the function and history of

the footnote, he endows them with two central functions: “First, they persuade:

they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of

work, enough to lie within the tolerances of the field. … Second, they indicate

the chief sources that the historian has actually used” (22). The referencing

system employed throughout White Mughals also contributes to the

presentation of the text (as well as adding to the characterisation of Dalrymple

as author). For Grafton, footnotes tell a parallel story “which moves with but

differs sharply from the primary one. [They document] the thought and

research that underpin the narrative above them” (23). White Mughals uses a

combination of numbered endnotes and footnotes with symbols to provide the

reader with further information, including detailed references. The endnotes are

generally, though not exclusively, used for the particulars of Dalrymple’s

sources, and the footnotes (which are much more likely to be read) chiefly

provide an opportunity for Dalrymple to relate further or interesting

information, therefore extending the role of the narrator. Dalrymple’s footnotes

are vital to the maintenance of his characterisation as historian. They provide

an avenue for a direct reader-narrator connection. For example, a discussion

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about European conversions to Islam is continued in his footnote, which states

in a casual tone: “All this [conversion], of course, went down very badly at

home, and the treacherous ‘renegade’ soon became a stock character on the

English stage” (19). However, the footnotes are also used to provide

references, on occasion, and, likewise, endnotes are used for authorial

argument and anecdote, so as to give Dalrymple considerable latitude in how

and where he presents his additional information. This flexibility can then be

used for furthering certain representational strategies, while allowing the state

of the sources to remain unclear to the general reader. Chiefly, though, this

results in the rather comforting sense that all of the required information, but

not the “dry” history, is readily available in the regular, entertaining footnotes.

Similar rhetorical strategies are also employed in the body of the text.

White Mughals is laid out in a way that mirrors the narrative of Dalrymple’s

archival, authorial quest. This results in information being withheld from the

reader, or being introduced and then countered, as “new” material is brought to

the story. While this is a clever and engaging representational strategy which

adds to the suspense of Dalrymple’s narrative in a similar way to the structure

of the detective story, it also has other effects. This textual device is used to

advance and consolidate stories, characterisation and arguments unsupported

by Dalrymple’s source material. For example, in the introduction, Dalrymple

describes his growing interest in his eventual subject in a narrative of a visit to

Kirkpatrick’s residence in Hyderabad:

Here I was shown a battered token of Kirkpatrick’s love for his wife in

the garden at the back of the Residency. The tale—apocryphal, I

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 presumed, but charming nonetheless—went as follows: that Khair un-

Nissa remained all her life in strict purdah, living in a separate bibi-ghar

(literally “women’s house”) at the end of Kirkpatrick’s garden, she was

unable to walk around the side of her husband’s great creation to admire

its wonderful portico. Eventually the Resident hit upon a solution and

built a scaled-down plaster model of his new palace for her so that she

could examine in detail what she would never allow herself to see with

her own eyes. Whatever the truth of the story, the model had survived

intact until the 1980s when a tree fell on it, smashing the right wing.

(xxxiii)

This passage, and particularly the unambiguous assertion of Kirkpatrick’s love

for his wife, informs the reader’s reception and interpretation of the text that

follows. It is not until the final quarter of the lengthy work that the more

reliable interpretation of this object is provided. Dalrymple states:

As a home for the dolls, James built a four-foot-high model of his

planned new Residency mansion. The model still lies (albeit now in a

ruinous state) immediately behind the remains of Khair un-Nissa’s mahal

and within its old enclosure wall. Later tradition in the Residency has it

that it was built for Khair, who was locked so deep in purdah that she

could not go around the front of the house to see what it looked like—but

this story (still current in the town) clearly has no basis in reality. (344-

45)

Here the object, which has been taken for the last 350 pages to show

Kirkpatrick’s devotion to Khair un-Nissa, is used to show Kirkpatrick’s

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affection for his children, and mention of the purdah story is dismissed with the

zeal of a scholarly triumph over the old-wives’-tale. Thus, Dalrymple’s

equivocal statements at the text’s beginning (“whatever the truth of the story,”

“apocryphal, I presumed,”) can be seen as more complex than they first appear.

Dalrymple continues his self-representation as rigorous scholar in the

accompanying footnote, stating: “The fact that Kirkpatrick was ordering dolls

from Europe at the same time as he was building the replica—a fact unknown

to [preservationist Elbrun] Kimmelman—can be taken as clinching evidence of

their speculations” (345).

As an object invested with multiple meanings for White Mughals and

Dalrymple, the doll house also provides an example of the ways in which

Dalrymple (like any historian) necessarily interprets the evidence with which

he works. The request by Kirkpatrick for European dolls to inhabit this house

(“we know that James asked his agent to send out from England ‘a few Europe

dolls in high Court Dress’ for the children to play with—possibly as a way of

familiarising them with European dress and complexions” [344]) could be

taken as an indication of the extent of the children’s identification as European,

albeit European children in Hyderabad. Dalrymple, however, in the service of

his narrative, attributes the dolls’ presence to a need to familiarise the children

with “European dress and complexions.” Here, the children are so Indian that

they require concrete reminders of what Europeans look like.

A thorough reading of White Mughals reveals the extent to which

Dalrymple presents unreliable information as evidence, exploits the complexity

of the historical record, and relies on the chosen system of referencing to

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discourage the reader from pursuing further information. What differentiates

White Mughals from more academic treatments of imperial history (such as

Maya Jasanoff’s Edge of Empire) is its tendency towards exaggeration. Prior to

a lengthy quotation describing Kirkpatrick’s and Khair un-Nissa’s loving

relationship, Dalrymple states: “The dialogue put into James’s mouth in the

Gulzar i-Asfiya is presumably invented, but the substance of the conversation

has the clear ring of truth and tallies with all the other evidence” (206). While

initially (and appropriately) qualifying the reliability of the “invented” material

quoted, Dalrymple then, in the same sentence, endows it with an unquantifiable

“ring of truth” in what appears to be an attempt at legitimisation. Earlier on the

same page, Dalrymple works to bolster the value of the Gulzar i-Asfiya, calling

it “usually very reliable.” Such apparently overdetermined claims for truth

status culminate in a (presumably unintentional) impression of a flimsy

argument, requiring justifications not present in the source material.

Narrative passages expressing the points of view of the central characters

also reinforce this impression through their assertion of improbable, un-

knowable detail: “[Kirkpatrick] was forced to sit impotently in the Residency

gazing over the Musi [River] to the old city where Khair un-Nissa lived,

forbidden to contact her or reply to her letters” (235). This passage reinforces

the differences between academic and narrative history. Doubtless, if such an

action on Kirkpatrick’s part was documented in the material available to

Dalrymple, this would form a crucial element of his discussion of Kirkpatrick’s

and Khair un-Nissa’s relationship. The absence of documentation leaves

Dalrymple using persuasive language to put forward his opinion of

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Kirkpatrick’s behaviour, particularly evident in the use of words such as

“forced,” “gazing” and “forbidden.” Kirkpatrick is the chief recipient of such

representational strategies, as seen when Dalrymple narrates the process of

James telling his brother William about the affair with Khair un-Nissa: “he

made it clear that in fact he was far, far more deeply involved than this. He

wrapped up the revelation in the language of honour and duty so as to make it

seem less objectionable to his brother, and still pretended that the connection

was forced upon him; but the import was exactly the same” (235). Whether

James indeed “wrapped” his feelings in the “language of honour and duty” and

“pretended” that it was “forced upon him” or whether he was sincerely

expressing his feelings of duty at an unfortunate “connection” is open to

interpretation, though the language that Dalrymple uses is sufficiently strong to

elide this flexibility.

Another example of the ways in which Dalrymple makes use of his

sources is found in his description of the first British Resident in Delhi, Sir

David Ochterlony, who, despite his temporal and geographical removal from

the central story, is enlisted as another white Mughal figure: “When in the

Indian capital, Ochterlony liked to be addressed by his full Mughal title, Nasir-

ud-Daula (Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman:

every evening all thirteen of his consorts used to process around Delhi behind

their husband, each on the back of her own elephant” (30). This unambiguous

statement provides a picture of a man revelling in the trappings and advantages

of high Mughal society. It also reinforces Dalrymple’s vision of what it is that

is ultimately attractive about British / Indian “hybridity”—sexualised

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representations of cross-cultural interaction and the titillating possibilities of

the harem. It is only in the accompanying endnote that Dalrymple concedes:

“Sadly this much-repeated and thoroughly delightful story may well be

apocryphal: I have certainly been unable to trace it back further than Edward

Thompson’s The Life of Charles Lord Metcalfe (London, 1937), p. 101, where

it is described as ‘local tradition ... [which] sounds like folklore’” (514). The

entirety of Thompson’s reference to these unsubstantiated wives reads: “local

tradition tells how when he was Resident the gallant soldier’s thirteen wives

evening by evening took the air on thirteen elephants. This sounds like

folklore” (101). Again in the endnote, Dalrymple then reveals that “In his will

(OIOC L/AG/34/29/37), Ochterlony only mentions one bibi” (514). However,

even in the midst of the revelatory endnote he still attempts to bolster the truth-

value of this “delightful story,” arguing:

Nevertheless it is quite possible that the story could be true: I frequently

found old Delhi traditions about such matters confirmed by research, and

several Company servants of the period kept harems of this size. Judging

by Bishop Heber’s description of him, Ochterlony was clearly Indianised

enough to have done so. (515)

However, although employing persuasive language (“quite possible, “clearly

Indianised,”), Dalrymple provides no details to support this argument.

Later in the text Dalrymple again refers to the story, without any

reference to its “folkloric” status, cementing it in the mind of the reader. He

effects this through reference to Ochterlony’s only documented wife:

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 An even more dramatic change in status was experienced by General Sir

David Ochterlony’s senior bibi, Mubarak Begum. Though Ochterlony is

reputed to have had thirteen wives, one of these, a former Brahmin slave

girl from Pune who converted to Islam and is referred to in his will as

“Beebee Mahruttun Moobaruck ul Nissa Begume, alias Begum

Ochterlony, the mother of my younger children”, took clear precedence

over the others. (183)

Dalrymple presents the reader with several, overlapping pictures of the Delhi

Resident. Ochterlony is represented as an enthusiastic Indophile gentleman,

vastly enjoying his powerful position and the accoutrements that come with it

(including an abundance of women and elephants). In this later passage,

Ochterlony is seen as forming a strong relationship with one of the thirteen

women, adding to Dalrymple’s tally of Kirkpatrick-style men in a committed

cross-cultural relationship. This second image could have been developed

much more fully by leaving out Thompson’s unreliable reference to

Ochterlony’s multiple wives. That Dalrymple refrains from making this textual

move highlights the power of ideas of exotic, sexualised Indian women, and

the harem, throughout White Mughals. Inderpal Grewal sees the harem as a

colonial phantasm “of the incarcerated ‘Eastern’ woman, lacking freedom and

embodying submission and sexuality” (5). The cover of the United States

edition of White Mughals features a portrait of William Palmer and his family

in India. This image (which is also present as a colour illustration in the UK

edition which has Khair un-Nissa on the cover) shows Palmer with multiple

wives. This cover choice seems at odds with Dalrymple’s narrative of a

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committed, monogamous, cross-cultural relationship. However, both cover

images convey the same message about the attractions of India. Given such

portrayals, the white Mughal’s relationship with Indian women is represented

as one of power, pleasure, and decadence over one of mutual respect and

understanding.

Even later in the text, the story of Ochterlony is repeated again, this time

in a discussion of the fate of children of British and Indian relationships: “he

[Ochterlony] hesitates to bring them [his female children] up as Muslims, with

a view to marrying them into the Mughal aristocracy, as ‘I own that I could not

bear that my child should be one of a numerous haram’” (382). This statement,

which could, more probably, be taken as support for the argument against

Ochterlony having thirteen wives (and, significantly, shows the limited extent

of Ochterlony’s crossing over), is instead employed to reiterate the exotic tale

yet again. Dalrymple’s footnote to this passage works to counter any

conflicting interpretation, stating “This was rather rich coming from

Ochterlony, who, it should be remembered, was reputed to have thirteen wives,

all of whom took the evening Delhi air with the Resident, each on the back of

her own elephant” (382), without any reference. Whether this tale “should be

remembered” or not is clearly open to argument.

Here is a sustained and repeated example of Dalrymple using the sources

and his system of referencing to present an unreliable story which the reader is

invited to accept as truth. There is a possibility that, in the manner of more

postmodern approaches to history and narrative, Dalrymple’s reiteration of

different versions of this story provides a means by which to question its

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authenticity. However, taken alongside the emphasis throughout White

Mughals on the authority and legitimacy of both author and sources, the

valency of this possibility diminishes. The image of Ochterlony and his

thirteen wives atop elephants, promenading nightly around the capital, is a

captivating one, and its presence in the opening chapter of White Mughals

ensures its notice by reviewers. Kurosawa informs her readers that:

Those who went all the way and dressed in loose and flowing Indian garb

and smoked hookahs became known as “white mughals”—one

Scotsman, Alexander Gardner, embellished his adopted costume with

tartan; David Ochterlony took 13 Indian wives, each of whom had her

own elephant for family outings.

The power imbalances and imperial context behind these relationships pass

without comment by the reviewers. The simple statement that “Ochterlony

took 13 Indian wives,” regardless of its problematic truth status, has the

potential to open a conversation about the sexual and affective components of

imperial power. Instead, it is glossed as a novel, exciting part of a positive,

energetic, nostalgic portrayal of empire. The novelty of this image is conveyed

by Margie Thomson, who states: “Dalrymple tells many fascinating stories of

other British people who lived in a multi-ethnic style. Some of the images are

hilarious, such as that of General Sir David Ochterlony, who took the evening

air in Delhi along with his 13 wives, each of them on the back of her own

elephant.” In this way, “hilarious” Ochterlony and his thirteen wives become a

symbol of the enthusiastic, eccentric (and, crucially, harmless) white Mughal

figure, and almost for White Mughals as a whole.

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 The term “white Mughal” appears frequently throughout the text. This

liberal sprinkling works to naturalise the term, which is never explicitly

defined, as in: “The true reason for his removal, as Palmer immediately

realised, was that he represented exactly the sort of tolerant, Indophile white

Mughal that Wellesley most abhorred, and which he was determined to weed

out of the Company’s service” (263). In this instance, it is possible to read

“white Mughal” as a term in use in Kirkpatrick’s time, giving the category

further valency.

The importance of Dalrymple’s nomenclature and the overarching

narrative of his research and the relationship with his sources is most evident

when there are gaps in the archive. He dramatises a moment in which his

sources are incomplete:

And then, quite suddenly, nothing. In a story powered by a succession of

extraordinarily detailed and revealing sources—letters, diaries, reports,

despatches—without warning the current that has supported this book

suddenly flickers and fails. There are no more letters. The record goes

dead, with James critically ill, delirious and feverish on the boat. The

lights go out and we are left in darkness. (396)

In order to strike a balance between the dramatic tension contributed by the

chronicle of the failure of the archive, and the destabilising notion of an

unreliable empirical basis for White Mughals, Dalrymple highlights the general

reliability and richness of the archive. This is achieved through a series of

electricity-based metaphors, which, more subtly, position Dalrymple as

powered by his sources rather than having agency over them. The word choice

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throughout this passage—“extraordinarily detailed and revealing sources” that

are the “current that has supported this book”—emphasise the presence of the

sources (and the already-present story that they convey), even while

dramatically announcing their absence.

Such gaps in the source material, soon to be filled with Dalrymple’s next

revelation of a research breakthrough, form vital parts of the book’s meta-

narrative. More serious lacunae, which remain unaddressed, and are therefore

threatening to the narrative’s stability, are engaged with more briefly. What

remains unmentioned in this picture of a plenitude of sources is the lack of

documentation surrounding Khair un-Nissa. Dalrymple’s statements about the

“extraordinary” nature of his sources enables and encourages the reader to

forget such matters. Further, Dalrymple, as author / historian / narrator,

strengthens his link with the reader through the use of the word “we”: “The

lights go out and we are left in darkness” (396). At this moment, in the meta-

narrative of the author’s quest through the archives, both reader and narrator

are in the same place—the “dark.”

Dalrymple shares his lack of progress with the reader: “Four years into

the research for this book, I was still none the wiser as to what happened to

Khair. After James’s death, there was not one single reference to her in the

hundreds of boxes that make up the Kirkpatrick Papers in the India Office

Library in London” (401). Dalrymple’s need to work through such narrative

gaps is the aspect that most distances White Mughals from professional

historiography—here the narrative drive proves more powerful than the

sources on which it is based. He chronicles the discovery of further sources: “It

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was like coming up for air. After four years of searching, here at last was a

lead. The Begum was alive, and heading for Calcutta in the company of

Munshi Aziz Ullah. But what was she up to? I read on as fast as Russell’s

faded and often illegible copperplate would allow” (402). Details employed

here, especially the mention of copperplate, enhance the sense of Dalrymple as

archival detective following “leads,” as well as the authenticity of this

appropriately old-fashioned source. Dalrymple’s enthusiasm for his search, and

the story that he puts together, is palpable: “Yet even here the story does not

quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final,

extraordinary coda” (466). As well as conveying his excitement and driving a

long narrative forward, these passages also portray Dalrymple as a classic

detective, preparing his final dénouement.

Romance and Sensuality: White Mughals and Women

White Mughals is a text that positions itself in curious, and sometimes

conflicting, ways. These are demonstrated in its material construction—its

physical presence and attributes—which is both important and peripheral. The

work’s title evokes its concern with the British in India in the eighteenth

century, which is also evident in the majority of the text. The cover of the UK

edition, however, does not show a representative of these men, even

Kirkpatrick, on whom the text principally focuses. Instead, the cover features a

portrait of a pale, wistful-looking Indian woman, covered in jewels, which is

later revealed to be Khair un-Nissa (155-56). Dalrymple showcases his talent

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for portrait-interpretation, emphasising his heroine’s beauty and strong

personality:

Only one contemporary picture of Khair un-Nissa survives, and it dates

from 1806 … Yet even then, when she was aged about twenty, Khair un-

Nissa still looks little more than a child: a graceful, delicate, shy creature,

with porcelain skin, an oval face and wide-open, dark brown eyes. Her

eyebrows are long and curved, and she has a full, timidly expressive

mouth that is about to break into a smile; just below it, there lies the tiny

blemish that is the mark of real beauty: a tiny red freckle, slightly off-

centre, immediately above the point of her chin. Yet there is a strength

amid the look of overwhelming innocence, a wilfulness in the set of the

lips and the darkness of the eyes that might be interpreted as defiance in a

less serene face. (155-56)

Dalrymple’s lengthy description shows what he defines as beautiful and

attractive qualities in an Indian woman. She is childlike, a “delicate, shy

creature … timidly expressive.” Balancing this retiring representation are hints

of “strength… [and] willfulness,” although serenity is the adjective which

closes the description. In the many interviews he gives and in the publicity

material produced by the publisher, Khair un-Nissa is represented as the centre

of the story, to such an extent that Dalrymple thanks his wife in the work’s

acknowledgements for her patience: “Olivia has, I think, found living in a

ménage à trois with Khair un-Nissa a little more trying than she did previous

cohabitations with Byzantine ascetics, taxi-stands full of Sikh drivers and the

courtiers of Kubla Khan, but she has borne the five-year-long ordeal with

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characteristic gentleness and generosity” (xxviii). Dalrymple’s personal,

sexualised relationship with Khair un-Nissa again links him, wittingly or

unwittingly, with Kirkpatrick.

The tenor of Khair un-Nissa’s description is similar in many ways to the

treatment of India by Dalrymple. She becomes, in a somewhat predictable

move, a metonymic representation of the country. As Khair un-Nissa

“conquers” Kirkpatrick, so India “seduces” her colonisers, in this narrative:

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she

beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none

has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow

reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to

subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply

rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign

intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed. The Great

Mughals, as one historian memorably observed, arrived in India from

central Asia in the sixteenth century as “ruddy men in boots”; they left it

four centuries later “pale persons in petticoats”. Until the 1830s, there

was every sign that India would have as dramatic a transforming effect

on the Europeans who followed the Mughals. Like all the foreigners

before them, it seemed that they too would be effortlessly absorbed. (11)

Dalrymple represents the land as a seductress and agent of degeneration.

Following this line, then, Khair un-Nissa can be read as some kind of

personification of India, as the relationship between Khair un-Nissa and

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Kirkpatrick appears to take a similar form to Dalrymple’s description of India’s

effect on its colonisers. Further, the relationship between Khair un-Nissa and

Kirkpatrick can be read as a symbol for the British / Indian relationship,

loosely characterised as one of mutual attraction and love, though stronger on

Khair un-Nissa’s / India’s side. Or, perhaps more fruitfully, as an idealized

version of that relationship and how it might have played out without the

interference of the British Dalrymple characterises as “Imperial.” In the

concluding paragraph of White Mughals, Dalrymple indeed uses Kirkpatrick’s

and Khair un-Nissa’s relationship as an idealised expression of the positive

possibilities for cross-cultural communication:

The white Mughals—with their unexpected minglings and fusions, their

hybridity and above all their efforts at promoting tolerance and

understanding—attempted to bridge these two worlds, and to some extent

they succeeded in doing so. As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick

and Khair un-Nissa shows, East and West are not irreconcilable, and

never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them

apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so

again. (501)

Dalrymple credits his white Mughals with attempting to “bridge these two

worlds.” The decidedly complex, evolving, commercial and imperial context

within which they operated goes unspoken here, in favour of a sentimental

representation of respect and “mingling” across cultural boundaries.

Dalrymple’s text is full of “eccentric” characters whom he portrays as

Indophiles, and, crucially, as sexually attracted to Indian women. These two

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traits are represented as essentially intertwined. Dalrymple informs the reader

of a man known as “Hindoo Stuart,” an eccentric champion of India in the

early 1800s, stating: “Stuart was not just an admirer of the Indian religions, he

was also an enthusiastic devotee of Hindu women and their dress sense” (44).

Dalrymple gives figures such as Stuart more space in his footnotes—thus

presenting a picture of the text as a conversation between Indophile gentlemen:

“Stuart was also perhaps the first recorded devotee of what the Bollywood film

industry now knows as the wet-sari scene ....[writing] ‘the Hindoo female,

modest as the rosebud, bathes completely dressed [...] and necessarily rises

with wet drapery from the stream’” (44). This passage also draws a link

between past and present representations of Indian women, giving Stuart’s

words a (recognisable and harmless) modern referent for the contemporary

reader. White Mughals works to make such overt sexualisation an entirely

appropriate and natural component of imperial history.

Dalrymple paints a picture of a courtly India as experienced by British

East India Company officials, as inhabited by invariably exotic, attractive and

(implicitly) available women: “If there appears to have been no shortage of

beautiful Muslim Begums in Hyderabad, their European counterparts seem to

have been in shorter supply—and to have been something of a mixed blessing”

(121). Here, again, Dalrymple affects to speak from the same position as his

white Mughal characters, whom he portrays as surveying the country for the

most beautiful women. The implicit argument here is that the sexual

connection between British men and “beautiful Muslim Begums” was

inevitable, due to the limited number and regrettably unattractive countenance

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of the British female population. Cities such as Hyderabad are touted by

Dalrymple in White Mughals as places most fruitful for the cross-cultural

interaction that the text valorises: “[British men in] more distant centres of

Mughal culture made a more profound transition, dressing in Mughal court

dress, intermarrying with the Mughal aristocracy and generally attempting to

cross cultural boundaries as part of their enjoyment of, and participation in, late

Mughal society” (511). It is curious, then, that these places are also depicted as

entirely unsuitable for European women:

Hyderabad at this period was no place for a demanding, or fashionable,

or socially ambitious European woman. Unlike Calcutta, Madras or

Bombay, there were no milliners or portrait painters, no dancing or riding

masters, no balls, no concerts, no masquerades. Boredom and loneliness

led to depression, or dissipation, or that sour, embittered ennui that

Kipling depicted in his Mrs Hauksbees and Mrs Reivers a hundred years

later. (121-22)

It seems that even Dalrymple, such an enthusiastic advocate for British / Indian

relationships, cannot envisage a place for white women in this scenario,

perpetuating the trope of their need for protection from contamination.

Passages such as this make apparent the extent to which transculturation, for

Dalrymple, is dependent upon sexual relationships between British men and

Indian women.

With this in mind, the continual presence of sexually-inflected Indian

women in the text takes on added significance. Put simply, these women make

Dalrymple’s “white Mughals” possible. This explains the inclusion of lengthy

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paragraphs in praise of Indian courtesans familiar from City of Djinns, despite

their tenuous connection to the text’s central narrative and their geographical

distance from Hyderabad, in White Mughals:

This was the age of the great courtesans: in Delhi, Ad Begum would turn

up stark naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one would

notice: “she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of

pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws

flowers and petals in ink exactly as found in the finest cloth of Rum.”

Her rival, Nur Bai, was so popular that every night the elephants of the

great Mughal omrahs completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her

house; yet even the most senior nobles had to “send a large sum of

money to have her admit them ...whoever gets enamoured of her gets

sucked into the whirlpool of her demands and brings ruin in on his house

... but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in

possession of riches to bestow on her.” (172)

Interest in Delhi courtesans is not confined to White Mughals—indeed, it

seems to form a vital part of Dalrymple’s representation of Indian history. The

reader of a Dalrymple history is presented with an image of India as a place of

refined, sensual decadence. The underlying current of sexualisation throughout

White Mughals brings to mind Robert Young’s statement about nineteenth-

century racial theories, that they “did not just consist of essentialising

differentiations between self and other: they were also about a fascination with

people having sex—interminable, adultering, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex”

(181). Dalrymple’s emphasis on the overwhelming availability of these women

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works to represent those British men who pursued relationships with Indian

women as merely taking advantage of the apparent situation, rather than

actively exploiting their position of power.

Back in Hyderabad, Dalrymple expands upon images of India as

decadent, available and committed to a sensual existence:

Nizam Ali Khan even founded a department of his civil service to

oversee and promote the business of dancing, music and sensuality, the

Daftar Arbab-i-Nishaat (the office of the Lords of Pleasure). At the same

time there was an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary

experimentation: in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, poets at this time

wrote some of the most unblushingly amorous Indian poetry to be

composed since the end of the classical period seventeen hundred years

earlier. (172)

However, the more Dalrymple unpacks the situation, the less viable the image

of a decadent courtly atmosphere becomes, and power negotiations become

more apparent:

This approach was not in fact some radical colonial departure, but was

part of an old Indian tradition: providing wives or concubines for rulers

had long been a means of preferment in courtly India. As the British rose

to power across the subcontinent it became increasingly politically

opportune to marry princely Indian women to them, so binding the

British, and especially the British Residents, into the Indian political

system and gaining a degree of leverage over them. (170)

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Suddenly, an image of the curious British man taking advantage of a

heightened sexual environment and embracing other cultures transforms into a

much more mundane narrative of an East India Company official accepting

Mughal court tradition, or, indeed, accepting courtly favours that amount to a

bribe.

Dalrymple’s characterisation of Khair un-Nissa is particularly revealing

given the paucity of available source material with which to work. She is

therefore a character whose interpretation lies wholly with the author, and,

consequently, becomes a measure for the issues of particular importance to

Dalrymple. Much of the description of Khair un-Nissa highlights what

Dalrymple represents as her passion and love for Kirkpatrick. For example:

“About Khair un-Nissa’s motives there is little dispute: James Kirkpatrick

certainly believed that the girl had fallen in love with him, and he may have

been right: certainly nothing in her behaviour contradicts this view” (181).

Ironically, the overuse of the word “certainly” here indicates a level of

uncertainty. Further, the assertion that Khair un-Nissa’s “behaviour”

corroborates Dalrymple’s statements could have equally been made the other

way—that there was no evidence to confirm it, either. The lack of source

material with which to ascertain Khair un-Nissa’s mindset enables Dalrymple’s

representation. Here again, the need for narrative cohesion is more important

than historiography. The necessity of love and devotion to the narrative is

enough of a reason for the choice of this interpretation over its opposite.

Towards the end of the text, Khair un-Nissa’s death provides an

opportunity for lengthy description: “There was no clear cause for her

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condition: she just seems to have finally turned her face to the wall” (463).

Here, somewhat paradoxically, the lack of sources enables such statements—

without historical documentation, of course the cause of her death remains

unclear. Dalrymple highlights her beauty and reiterates the character traits that

he has constructed throughout White Mughals: “When she died—this fiery,

passionate, beautiful woman—it was as much from a broken heart, from

neglect and sorrow, as from any apparent physical cause” (465). The word

“apparent” is key here. The looseness of Dalrymple’s phrasing makes possible

the interpretation that a lack of physical symptoms was apparent to Khair un-

Nissa’s contemporaries. This is, of course, impossible to ascertain. That

physical (or other) causes of her death are not apparent in the historical record

makes a much less dramatic statement, however.

Dalrymple’s prose knows no bounds when it comes to his central Indian

female character—she is “like some broken butterfly, wounded, and unhealed

by the passage of time. At her most vulnerable point, she had opened up her

heart, only to be seduced, banished and then betrayed” (462). Echoes can be

heard in such passages of Dalrymple’s portrayal of the different stages of

British colonialism in India, and the shift between what he represents as hybrid

and imperialist modes. Dalrymple’s treatment of Khair un-Nissa is questioned

by one interviewer:

When I suggest he does rather idealise this young Muslim

noblewoman—often prefacing references to her with such adjectives as

beautiful, fragile, charismatic, butterfly-like—he holds up the paperback

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 edition of the book, which is graced with her image, and laughingly

responds: “Well, look at her. She is beautiful.” (Tuffield)

His response serves to further align the figures of Kirkpatrick and Dalrymple,

both represented as open-minded Britons with a fascination with Khair un-

Nissa. The response: “look…She is beautiful” is effective, and utilises one of

the few pieces of information now available. As to Khair un-Nissa’s butterfly-

like fragility or charisma, there is no such simple confirmation.

Dalrymple’s British in India: Hybrid or Imperialist

Throughout White Mughals, Dalrymple contrasts his “hybrid” protagonists

with other examples of British engagements with India which he terms as

imperialistic. Leaving aside that, as East India Company officers, Kirkpatrick

and his ilk were also undeniably imperial figures, Dalrymple concurrently

emphasises this hybridity and his own scholarly rigour at stepping beyond what

he carefully defines as the borders of traditional history:

The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far

less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have

been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history

books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography

of post-Independence India, or for that matter by the post-colonial work

coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow

the path opened up by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering

Orientalism. It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and

ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no

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 one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed,

for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of

crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. (xli)

Dalrymple brings together the disparate (and conflicting) approaches to Indian

history through a shared designation of them as (differently) limited by their

theoretical frameworks. In so doing he represents his work as unique in its

independent, fresh look at the field (free from theoretical “agendas”). This

argument is also an expression of an (untheorised) anti-academic sentiment

evident throughout White Mughals. Dalrymple’s use of words such as

“promiscuous” and “mingling” to describe this hybrid state is another example

of the way in which a positive British / Indian relationship is portrayed in

sexualised terms.

In his attempt to advance a picture of East India Company officers

engaging in widespread transculturation, Dalrymple uses common symbols of

“passing”—hookah-smoking and pyjama-wearing—to stand for “attempting to

cross cultural boundaries” (511). There is no explicit mention of what might

constitute such a boundary, or, indeed, how such boundaries might be

overcome. This vagueness allows eighteenth-century characters to be depicted

in the attractive language of multiculturalism without requiring specific

references. Dalrymple makes some acknowledgement of this point in

seemingly straightforward statements such as: “Having an Indian concubine

did not of course lead to any automatic sympathy with India or Indian culture

on the part of a Company servant—far from it” (35). However, in the sentence

immediately following, he significantly undermines the value of this idea.

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Indeed, he effectively negates it when he adds: “But it was recognised at the

time that in practice cohabitation often did lead to a degree of transculturation,

even in the transplanted Englishness of Calcutta” (35). Such highly-qualified

statements—“it was recognised,” “in practice,” “often,” “a degree of,”

“even”—introduce a sense of fairness, reasonableness, and charitableness to

the other side of the argument, without conceding Dalrymple’s own point. So,

despite the baldness of the first, theoretical, statement, the reader is left with

the sense that, in practice, the transculturating nature of these encounters was

significant.

Dalrymple uses inclusive language to maintain the representation of a

liberal community of readers, and simultaneously brings himself closer to the

audience:

the more one probes in the records of the period, the more one realises

that there were in fact a great many Europeans at this period who

responded to India in a way that perhaps surprises and appeals to us

today, by crossing over from one culture to the other, and wholeheartedly

embracing the great diversity of Mughal India. (10)

Dalrymple argues for the existence of a period in which the prevalence of

communication across cultures was higher than his readers might expect: “At

all times up to the nineteenth century, but perhaps especially during the period

1770 to 1830, there was wholesale sexual exploration and surprisingly

widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity” (10). This passage’s

complexity becomes visible under closer examination. The first point to

consider is what “sexual exploration” might entail, or even what would

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designate “sexual exploration” as “wholesale.” Whatever the conclusion, it

does not seem something that easily dovetails with mutual respect and

understanding, which is the implied outcome of this sexually-instigated

transculturalisation process as narrated by Dalrymple. The (unexplained)

“cultural assimilation and hybridity” appear more promising, particularly their

“surprisingly widespread” nature. However, without establishing what level of

hybridity constitutes a surprising one, the statement could be taken to indicate

something anywhere on the “cultural assimilation” spectrum. In the face of

White Mughals’ investment in the representation of sexual relationships

between British men and Indian women as constitutive of cultural

understanding, it is worth remembering the work of scholars such as Margaret

Jolly, who emphasise “the extraordinary presumption that sexuality between

white men and colonized women was indicative of racial harmony” (108).

Often, although undoubtedly relating instances in which Europeans take

on Indian dress and accoutrements, the sources seem to actively oppose the

point that Dalrymple wants to make about the depth of European attachment to

India:

An eyewitness account of one of the earliest defections was written by

the early English trader Nicholas Withington. His account gives a clear

picture of the number of independent Europeans on the loose in India at

the beginning of the seventeenth century, all of them intent on making

their fortunes and quite prepared, if necessary, to change and change

again their clothes, their political allegiance and their religion. (15)

This passage, more than emphasising any particular feeling for India, shows

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the fiscal and material advantages of such behaviour. Dalrymple’s statements

that “They also demonstrated the remarkable porousness and fluidity of the

frontier” (16) seem somewhat arguable, on closer examination.

Dalrymple does note that the British East India Company benefited from

Kirkpatrick’s interest in Mughal culture:

If, under James Kirkpartick, the Residency’s participation in the social

and cultural life of Hyderabad led to much cross-fertilisation of ideas and

the growth of a number of deep friendships between the Residency and

the omrahs (nobles) of the court, it also led to some very real political

benefits. European ignorance of the complex codes of Mughal etiquette

often caused unexpected and diplomatically disastrous offence at Indian

courts. (125)

Indeed, it seems that Kirkpatrick’s loyalty and concern is for himself and for

the British interest in India: “By mastering the finer points of etiquette of the

court and submitting to procedures that some other Residents refused to bow

to, James quickly gained a greater degree of trust than any other British

Resident of the period, and so was able to reap the diplomatic rewards” (128).

What perhaps needs further emphasising is the fact that even if Kirkpatrick was

overwhelmed with love for Khair un-Nissa, and it was this that was the driving

force behind his efforts at participation in the Mughal court, his work there

greatly benefited the East India Company’s position and power, and ensured a

British (rather than French) influence at the Hyderabad court. His efforts at

cross-cultural communication, whatever their motivation, achieved

unmistakably positive results for the Company’s imperial ambitions.

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Dalrymple’s emphasis on (and separation of) personal over imperial facets of

Kirkpatrick’s time in Hyderabad functions to downplay the impact of British

colonialism on India.

Dalrymple also offers other views of British experiences of Hyderabad

which provide a counterpoint to the arguments for hybridity that he wants to

make:

the cantonments were intrusions of unadulterated Englishness in the

utterly Indian landscape. Here the two youths went shopping in a

“Europe Shop”—an emporium which sold only imported luxury goods

from Europe—consulted a European doctor (about Elphinstone’s severe

clap) and went to see an English farce at a makeshift open-air regimental

theatre. They went shooting (though apparently only hit an owl), attended

regimental balls, gambled and played whist, billiards and backgammon

in the officers’ mess. (287)

If such vignettes serve to highlight Kirkpatrick’s higher level of cultural

assimilation by contrast, they also show that cultural isolationism was highly

prevalent (even during what Dalrymple represents as the heyday of the “white

Mughals”).

The contrast that Dalrymple makes between “hybridity” and

“imperialism” can be distilled in his description of the different directorial

styles of Wellesley and Cornwallis: “the old Marquis [Cornwallis] did not

believe in threats and belligerence as an instrument of policy, and saw no need

for the sort of naked imperialism imposed by Wellesley; moreover he was

appalled by the needless bloodshed and expenditure it had caused” (368). The

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outcome, put somewhat glibly, appears to be that subtle imperialism is

acceptable, but if it becomes “naked” then it is objectionable.

Overall, White Mughals portrays British / Indian imperial relationships in

a positive, sexualised, nostalgic manner. Dalrymple argues for the depth and

importance of his research and the paucity of accurate treatments of British /

Indian history. Together, these positions work toward an overwhelmingly

positive representation of the British imperial endeavour and an investment in

Dalrymple’s growing status as “expert” on India and Islam.

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Chapter Five: The Last Mughal

William Dalrymple’s second foray into narrative history, The Last Mughal:

The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, was published in 2006. In conversation

with Bron Sibree, Dalrymple mentions that “The book has been a bestseller in

the UK, and in India” (Interview with Sibree W13). Its popularity is indeed

widespread. According to the Sydney Sun-Herald, data supplied by Nielsen

BookScan’s book sales monitoring system had The Last Mughal as Australia’s

second-highest selling history work in June 2007, behind Antony Beevor’s The

Battle for Spain (“Top 10 History.”). Perhaps in response to such sales figures,

Dalrymple compares his work to George Lucas’s popular culture phenomenon

when describing his success and plans for future projects: “this has expanded

into a quartet, of which The Last Mughal is the first, although chronologically

it is the last. ‘I’ve signed a deal to write three prequels, rather like Star Wars’”

(Interview with Sibree W13). In the surrounding publicity, reviewers have seen

it as an unofficial sequel to White Mughals, with their similar titles inviting

comparison. According to Dalrymple, in contrast to the overwhelmingly

positive representation of Indians and Britons in White Mughals, “In The Last

Mughal, … ‘the Indians are portrayed as confused and disorganised, while the

British are depicted, I think accurately, as hideously vile, Victorian, genocidal

racists’” (Interview with Sibree W13).

As its title suggests, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi,

1857 chronicles the events of 1857 and what it represents as the change from

Mughal power (albeit under the influence of the British East India Company)

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to British power in India. The work closes with the end of the siege of Delhi,

the somewhat later death of the Mughal ruler, and the introduction of the “Act

for the Better Government of India.” This Act transferred the revenue-

gathering administrative functions of the East India Company to state control

(the Company’s original trading monopoly and profitability having evolved

into one of territorial expansion and tax-collecting) (Lawson 137). Of a wider

scope than White Mughals, which had the romantic storyline as its backbone,

The Last Mughal centres its narrative chiefly through a biographical focus on

Bahadur Shah Zafar II (called Zafar throughout by Dalrymple), the titular

Mughal Emperor. Other characters also provide a focus for the text. Some are

elite Indian figures: Ghalib (a prominent, Muslim court poet), and Maulvi

Muhammad Baqar (editor of the Muslim, Urdu-language court paper the Dihli

Urdu Akbhar). Others are British civilians and military officers: Sir Thomas

Theophilus Metcalfe (Delhi British Resident) and members of his family;

Brigadier General John Nicholson (British military hero who led the British

assault on Delhi with a mixture of “piety, gravity and courage, combined with

his merciless capacity for extreme brutality” [The Last Mughal xxiii]); and

Robert and Harriet Tytler (Robert was an officer and “veteran of the 38th

Native Infantry” [xxii]; Harriet’s An Englishwoman in India: The Memoirs of

Harriet Tytler, 1828-1858 [1986], are an important source). Notably

underrepresented are non-elite and Hindu characters.

Despite the manifestly different subject matter to White Mughals,

Dalrymple continues to provide his familiar version of British imperial history.

Dalrymple’s representation of a deeply attractive, symbiotic relationship

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between Britons and Indians, within a story ostensibly about a period of

conflict between them, is enabled by splitting the British into two groups. The

attractive British are those represented as a hangover from the White Mughals

era, contrasted with those that Dalrymple represents as insensitive,

overreaching, Victorian and, crucially, evangelist. The Last Mughal offers a

limited view of the events of 1857, located almost exclusively in Delhi (thus

providing a reason to leave aside the well-covered uprisings in places such as

Meerut, Kanpur and Lucknow). Dalrymple explains:

In this book I have chosen to limit references to developments elsewhere,

except in cases where the Delhi participants were explicitly aware of

them, thus attempting to restore the sense of intense isolation and lonely

vulnerability felt by both the besiegers and the besieged engaged in the

battle for control of the great Mughal capital. (11)

The notion that Dalrymple’s focus on Delhi makes The Last Mughal a rare text

does not stand up to scrutiny. This geographical location chiefly serves as a

justification for a more limited purview for an already longwinded text. As

well as delineating the work’s focus, this passage privileges sympathetic

qualities such as “isolation” and “vulnerability” over other representational

possibilities which might show the conflict as motivated by aggressive

militarism or the desire for revenge.

Dalrymple positions the overall narrative as a reasonably straightforward

chronicle of the simultaneous decline of Mughal power and the rise of British

influence in India. This narrative choice leaves aside (convincing) arguments

for a dramatic increase in British military influence significantly earlier. For

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example, Philip Lawson states of the period from 1748-63 that “Success in

war, the acquisition of territory and expansion of trade transformed the [British

East India] Company from just another enterprise in India to power-broker, and

even kingmaker in Bengal” (86). Dalrymple’s narrative also downplays the

lengthy, complex diminishing of the power of the Mughal empire prior to this

period.

Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram usefully précis the Mutiny and its

generally accepted causes:

In May 1857 a series of insurrections broke out across a large area of

northern India, which together are commonly referred to as the Indian

mutiny of 1857-8. A number of factors are now commonly accepted as

the main causes: the annexation of Oudh in February 1856, after which

Oudh became a province of British India; the General Service Enlistment

Act of 1856, which required Indian soldiers to accept service anywhere

… and a growing belief that British missionaries were conspiring with

officials to convert (Hindu) sepoys to Christianity. Finally, the so-called

greased cartridges affair was widely regarded as the spark which ignited

the mutiny. (ix)

Although his account does list these causes, Dalrymple’s text emphasises the

religious facets of the unrest, focusing particularly on the Muslim population.

He takes up this argument to the exclusion of concerns about land use and

taxation traditionally favoured by Marxist-inclined scholars. Dalrymple

represents such standpoints as more the product of wishful thinking than

research: “Some historians, pleased to have found a rare document from 1857

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that explicitly mentions economic and social grievances, have linked this

remarkably modern document with the Red Fort, and thereby perhaps

exaggerated its influence and importance” (220-21). The argument implicit

here is that Dalrymple would not be so hasty as to exaggerate or distort his

sources in such a way.

Dalrymple represents the root cause of the Mutiny as being a mutual lack

of cultural understanding, on behalf of both Indians and Britons in India. He

sees the cause of this lack in the growing religious fundamentalism on both

sides:

As the nineteenth century progressed, such rigidly orthodox views

gathered in Delhi, and the position of the ’ulama solidified, so that by the

1850s the tolerant Sufi ways of Zafar and his court slowly came to look

as old-fashioned and outdated as the hybrid lifestyles and open-minded

religious attitudes of the White Mughals did among the now solidly

Evangelical British. The stage was being set for a clash of rival

fundamentalisms. (82-83)

This is not a narrative that is new or that is unique to Dalrymple. 2 This story of

a “clash of rival fundamentalisms” is problematic because it removes any

consideration of the colonial situation from the conflict. It manages to displace

the material geopolitical reality of imperialism by privileging religion. It also

features an implied argument that there is no inherent problem with

colonialism, as long as it does not involve religious extremes (if the “tolerant

Sufi[s]” and “open-minded” White Mughals had their way, all would be well).

2
For a well-known example, see: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order. 1996. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

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Resorting to an argument for a timeless, fundamental, East / West difference,

distilled through religion, is uncharacteristic of Dalrymple, who elsewhere rails

against such formulations 3. It is his denial of imperialism that leads to such a

convoluted set of rhetorical strategies. Dalrymple later cements this

representation of continuing, timeless conflict by dramatic reference to

“today’s” issues: “Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across

a divide that many see as religious war. Jihadis again fight what they regard as

a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent women,

children and civilians are slaughtered” (485). The colonial context for the 1857

Mutiny is incidental to this continuing “religious war.”

The results of such an argument reach further than the text itself. This

representation of the Mutiny as a product of fundamental religious differences

between Christians and Muslims finds its way into reviews of Dalrymple’s

text. An example is Ross Leckie’s review in The Times, which distills

Dalrymple’s problematic argument down to a few sentences: “British

mercantile greed—and evangelical Christianity—sought dominance. Moderate

Muslims became fundamentalists. In 1857 the Indian Mutiny, the largest

popular uprising against British imperialism, was the result.” Thus, in two

moves, the vast Hindu majority disappears from the picture altogether.

Dalrymple’s positioning of The Last Mughal

Dalrymple uses the text’s introduction and its preliminary material to present a

narrative of his research and the production of the monograph. However, the

3
See his article: “Islamophobia.” New Statesman 19 Jan. 2004, Society sec.: n. pag. Web. 2
Jan. 2008.

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introduction to this work situates The Last Mughal in its historiographical

context in a more specific manner than the introduction to White Mughals does

for that text. This reflects the myriad existing work on the events of 1857 and

Dalrymple’s need to find, or create, a space for his contribution. This

positioning entails an explicit engagement with imperial history and its various

theoretical standpoints. As well as an opportunity for self-representation and

historiographical contextualisation, the introduction to The Last Mughal

provides a brief synopsis of the narrative which is fleshed out throughout the

body of the text. Perhaps due to its better-known subject matter (which

occupies a significant place in the British imagination), none of the narrative

techniques of suspense and mystery employed in White Mughals are present

here.

The first section of the introduction is a dramatic synopsis of Zafar’s

“fate.” This begins with his burial, moves back in time to his imprisonment,

and then further back into the past to offer a narrative of the decline of Mughal

power and the increase of British influence, then the Mutiny, British victory

and Mughal humiliation. This convoluted, not-quite-reverse, chronology does

not continue in the body of the text, but it provides an introductory narrative

that begins and ends in a dramatic fashion. The second section of the

introduction tells the story of Dalrymple’s research, and provides an

opportunity to remind the reader of his connections to Delhi and to India:

It is a story I have dedicated the last four years to researching and

writing. Archives containing Zafar’s letters and his court records can be

found in London, Lahore and even Rangoon. Most of the material,

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 however, lies in Delhi, Zafar’s former capital, and a city that has haunted

and obsessed me for over two decades now. (6)

His personal investment both in the story and the place is reinforced through

his description of his younger, backpacking self exploring the Indian capital:

In particular what remained of Zafar’s palace, the Red Fort of the Great

Mughals, kept drawing me back, and I often used to slip in with a book

and spend whole afternoons there, in the shade of some cool pavilion. I

quickly grew to be fascinated with the Mughals who had lived there, and

began reading voraciously about them. It was here that I first thought of

writing a history of the Mughals, an idea that has now expanded into a

quartet, a four-volume history of the Mughal dynasty which I expect may

take me another two decades to complete. (7)

This passage moves through the past and the future, to highlight Dalrymple’s

connection with the places that keep “drawing [him] back.” The depth of his

interest is cemented by reference to future, rather than current, projects in

which he is willing to invest “another two decades.” It is worth noting that—

like his previous works—despite his emphasis on his “fascination” with

Mughal India, it is the relationship between the British and the Mughals that is

at the centre of this text.

The introduction demonstrates the development of Dalrymple’s approach

to history from White Mughals to The Last Mughal. Dalrymple spends a

significant amount of time in the introduction enumerating the value and

importance of his sources—particularly those in Persian and Urdu. Unlike

White Mughals, there is no conceit of crucial texts being “discovered” by

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happenstance at the last minute. In The Last Mughal, the narrative advanced to

legitimate the text is one of hard research, translation and editing work. He

thanks his translator, highlighting the dedication and time involved in the

production of The Last Mughal:

This book would have been quite impossible without the scholarship and

industry of my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi. For four years now we have

been working together on this project, and much that is most interesting

within it—notably the remarkable translations from the sometimes

almost indecipherable shikastah of the Urdu files in the Mutiny Papers—

is the product of his dedication, persistence and skill. (xxv)

The research, translation and writing process is represented in a typically

approachable, autobiographical light, and located in the Delhi landscape: “one

of the most enjoyable aspects of working with him [Mahmoud Farooqi] on

Bahadur Shah Zafar has been gradually piecing together the events and shape

of this book over a Karim’s kebab, a Kapashera biryani or, more usually, a

simple glass of hot sweet National Archives chai” (xxv).

Further, Dalrymple, somewhat self-deprecatingly, uses the introduction

to advance his academic standing and highlight the seriousness of his approach

to The Last Mughal, to a degree absent in his previous works:

At the end [of the writing process], Professor Fran Pritchett at Columbia

volunteered to give the book the most thorough edit that I think any

manuscript of mine has ever received. It took me nearly two weeks to go

through all her notes, improved transliterations and suggestions, so I can

only imagine how much of her valuable time she gave up to produce

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 them in the first place. (xxv)

Dalrymple’s mention of Pritchett’s title and the university in which she works

adds to the academic credentials of The Last Mughal, despite Dalrymple’s

continuing hostility to academic history writing—he experiences the benefits

of academic advice without having to be a part of the system. That Pritchett

gave the text such a “thorough edit” and devoted her time and energy to its

improvement adds an institutional legitimacy to Dalrymple’s most “serious”

history text to date.

Dalrymple’s representation of his primary sources and his relationship

with them is crucial to the overall positioning of The Last Mughal. His hostility

towards theory and academic history writing, also evident in White Mughals,

continues here. This disdain for theory means that the remaining avenue for

advancing his textual authority is a reliance on “new,” “pure,” primary source

material. The sources on which Dalrymple places the most emphasis are what

he calls the “Mutiny Papers”: an “extraordinarily rich and almost unused

archive” (xxv) of materials “collected by the victorious British from the Palace

and the army camp” (12). The Last Mughal’s focus is chiefly Delhi’s elite

(both Muslim and British), as would be expected with the Mughal ruler as the

titular biographical subject. However, in his description of this archive

Dalrymple makes much of the “ordinary,” “street-level” nature of the sources

utilised, and highlights the impact of the events of 1857 on Delhi’s citizenry.

He states: “What was even more exciting was the street-level nature of much of

the material…they contained huge quantities of petitions and requests from the

ordinary citizens of Delhi” (12). Claims for The Last Mughal as a work of

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“history from below” produce a feeling of historiographic equality, fairness

and democracy—of Dalrymple giving ample time for all kinds of past Delhi

residents to air their views, and an affiliation with a whole ideologically

inflected school of scholarship. Although a particularly attractive image, it

conveys a sense of the archive as a neutral tool that records (and preserves

records) indiscriminately, which, as Tony Ballantyne reminds us, is a fallacy:

the manuscript collections, parliamentary papers, court records,

periodicals, and newspapers used by historians of South Asia are not

simply documents that allow us to access the colonial past, but rather

themselves were constitutive of the multiple inequalities of the past. This

recognition of the archive as both the product of the uneven diologics of

the colonial encounter and a space where the conceptual schemas of

colonialism were worked out raises fundamental questions about

historical scholarship. (107)

Dalrymple employs a much less nuanced approach to his project and the

archives upon which it is based than Ballantyne. Although he does not

acknowledge the archive as such an “uneven” space, Dalrymple’s work

nonetheless reflects it, in its predominant focus on elite characters.

Kalpana Wilson, in contrast to the majority of reviewers of this

monograph, questions Dalrymple’s claims for the sources that he champions,

and highlights the focus of The Last Mughal:

While Dalrymple enthuses about the “street-level nature” of the

documentation he has unearthed relating to “ordinary citizens of Delhi”,

the fact is that the overwhelming majority of the book, where it is not

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 revisiting the oft-cited accounts of various British officers and civilians

in Delhi, is written from the perspective of the Mughal elite of the city.

(109)

There is no doubt that The Last Mughal’s focus is on the upper strata of

society, both British and Mughal. Such a situation is, of course, not limited to

histories by Dalrymple. Archives privilege the powerful (although they can, of

course, preserve voices of the powerless that would be otherwise lost).

However, his continued insistence that the task of the historian is to tell the

stories of “ordinary individuals,” whose “fate” it was to be “accidentally”

present at such upheavals becomes problematic in this context. Dalrymple uses

a simultaneous recourse to “ordinary individuals” and a denigration of

theoretical “abstractions” to advance his argument against academic historical

approaches. He argues: “Cumulatively the stories that the collection [of papers]

contains allow the Uprising to be seen not in terms of nationalism, imperialism,

orientalism or other such abstractions, but instead as a human event” (13).

Without elaborating what a “human event” might entail, Dalrymple separates

ideas of nationalism, imperialism and orientalism from these “human events,”

putting forward an image of such abstract concepts being applied later, acting

as a barrier to human understanding of the past and having no relation to the

historical truth:

150 years after the event, scholars are still arguing over the old chestnut

of whether 1857 was a mutiny, a peasants’ revolt, an urban revolution or

a war of independence. The answer is that it was all of these, and many

other things too: it was not one unified movement but many, with widely

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 differing causes, motives and natures. (17)

Such statements work toward a representation of Dalrymple as above, and

unconstrained by, petty academic debate, which is portrayed as more

concerned with classification and terminology than the events themselves.

Dalrymple’s “answer,” which puts forward an image of plurality and

complexity, shows his sophisticated approach. It is in situations such as this in

which the utility of Dalrymple’s travelling authorial persona to his historical

project can be seen. He comments in an interview with Santiago J. Henríquez

Jiménez: “Serious travel should give you the birds [sic] eye view, and free you

from the imprisonment of your own culture and upbringing” (182). His self-

representation as a participant in, as well as having a cultivated critical distance

from, both British and Indian society adds to his historical authority here.

The continuing representation of Dalrymple’s texts as operating as travel

guides, despite their historical content, is evident in the Entertainment Weekly

report that the bestseller of the week of 29 June 2007 at the Globe Corner

bookstore, a “travel-guide shop,” is The Last Mughal. In a similar manner to

his earlier travel texts, Dalrymple’s histories promise an escape from dull

everyday life. As Georg Lukács states: “History shimmering colourfully in its

distance, remoteness and otherness has the task of fulfilling the intense longing

for escape from this present world of dreariness” (246). Dalrymple represents a

past India in which Britons escaped from their dull home existence to an exotic

land of harems, hookahs and dancing girls. Chris Bongie, in Exotic Memories,

highlights what he sees as two kinds of exoticism: “Whereas imperialist

exoticism affirms the hegemony of modern civilization over less developed,

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savage territories, exoticizing exoticism privileges those very territories and

their peoples, figuring them as a possible refuge from an overbearing

modernity” (17). In The Last Mughal we see a combination of these two forms,

depending upon the particular narrative context. The attraction of a past India

as an (exotic, hybrid) refuge from modernity is evident, and the text’s

conclusion, with the establishment of responsible British state rule of India,

affirms imperial hegemony. In a similar manner to White Mughals, Dalrymple

in The Last Mughal represents India and Indians as unchanging. This heightens

the narrator’s authority to speak about the country, given his extensive

experience of contemporary Delhi. For example, Dalrymple describes a

procession in 1852 as if it were something that he had witnessed: “The people

of Delhi have never much liked being restrained by barriers and were in the

habit of breaking through the bamboo railings hung with lamps that illuminated

the processional route” (27). Such representational strategies position the

narrator as a guide to the readers’ journey into the (transparent, accessible)

past.

Dalrymple argues that: “The British histories, as well as a surprising

number of those written in English in post-colonial India, tended to use only

English-language sources, padding out the gaps, in the case of the more recent

work, with a thick cladding of post-Saidian theory and jargon” (15). This

statement positions The Last Mughal as not only superior to previous British

engagements with Indian history, but to Indian accounts as well. He manages

to denigrate theoretical approaches without having to clearly define them, or

their problems. A brief reference to “post-Saidian theory and jargon” is

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sufficiently vague to gesture towards Dalrymple’s issues with theory without

having to engage with it in any meaningful way. Theory is represented as

something that is used as a poor replacement for proper research, and as

something that academics might rely upon instead of a legitimate and unbiased

direct engagement with the sources in question.

Here again The Last Mughal shows an evolution from White Mughals,

with the earlier text’s anti-academic sentiment moving to an outright

antagonism towards theoretically-framed histories and academic historical

practice. As part of his claim for original, groundbreaking archival research (so

necessary for authenticity when arguing for a step away from theory),

Dalrymple works to establish The Last Mughal as the first true engagement

with the sources it uses: “the question that became increasingly hard to answer

was why no one had properly used this wonderful mass of material before”

(13). Of course, this material has been used (though what Dalrymple’s

conception of “proper” use might be is unclear). As Ralph Crane and Anna

Johnston note, Flora Annie Steel accessed, used and described the Mutiny

Papers as early as 1894 (76). Dalrymple does modify this statement, although

notably only in his endnotes, with the qualification that: “It is true that several

scholars ... have already drawn glancingly on some of the material in the

Mutiny Papers” (498).

Dalrymple highlights the authentic Indianness of his sources by

emphasising their rarity and difficulties in translation, in an attempt to heighten

the legitimacy of the text in which they are employed. The detailed description

of the difficulties of reading these sources elides Dalrymple’s debt to his

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translator (which he elsewhere acknowledges):

Certainly the shikastah (literally “broken writing”) script of the

manuscripts is often difficult to read, written as it is in an obscure form

of late Mughal scribal notation with many of the diacritical marks

missing, and at times faded and ambiguous enough to defy the most

persistent of researchers. Moreover many of the fragments—especially

the spies’ reports—are written in microscopic script on very small pieces

of paper designed to be sewn into the clothing or even hidden within the

person of the spy. (14)

Mention of spies and code lends a hint of drama and adventure to the tale, and

simultaneously reinforces the sense that Dalrymple has made a greater effort

than other historians to uncover the truth, given such challenging source

material. Dalrymple’s description of the script in which these documents are

written emphasises his deep knowledge of and engagement with his sources,

despite his previously-mentioned reliance on his translator.

Dalrymple temporarily leaves aside the complexity of the dialect and

script in which many of these documents are written, and the relatively few

educated people who can read and translate it, instead blaming the sway of

theory over contemporary Indian historians, and the influence of Edward Said

and the Subaltern Studies group, for the lack of scholarly engagement with this

“wonderful” material:

at a time when ten thousand dissertations and whole shelves of Subaltern

Studies have carefully and ingeniously theorised about orientalism and

colonialism and the imagining of the Other (all invariably given titles

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 with a present participle and a fashionable noun of obscure meaning—

Gendering the Colonial Paradigm, Constructing the Imagined Other,

Othering the Imagined Construction, and so on) not one PhD has ever

been written from the Mutiny Papers, no major study has ever

systematically explored its contents. (13-14)

In his use of the description “carefully and ingeniously theorise” Dalrymple

manages to denigrate, in a kindly way, all of the Subaltern Studies publications

to which he glibly refers. His jibe at the convoluted nature of his invented

academic titles enables him to (again) invoke without engaging with a position

against which he defines his own work. His argument is enabled by the highly

qualified nature of this statement—that no “major study” has “systematically”

engaged with this material.

In conversation with Christopher Kremmer at the 2007 Sydney Writers’

Festival, Dalrymple explicitly described his history as being written in

opposition to both Said’s Orientalism and the Subaltern Studies group,

describing them as an orthodoxy to be challenged, and The Last Mughal as part

of that challenge. Thus, through both its intra- and extra-textual positioning,

Dalrymple’s work takes a highly conservative stance, albeit one advanced in

the language of hybridity and multiculturalism, that seeks to sidestep any

“isms” and follow on from traditional British imperial narrative histories. This

stance, and its carefully non-specific opposition to Said, is one constructed

with a general, rather than an academic, readership in mind. It is a positioning

statement to be reiterated at writers’ festivals and book tour events, for the

purpose of appealing to a particular readership and to sell books.

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 Such positioning may explain the infrequent academic engagement with

Dalrymple’s works to this point. David Carter considers the resurgence of a

middlebrow book culture, particularly in Australia, in “The Mystery of the

Missing Middlebrow.” Of most use to this consideration of Dalrymple’s works

is Carter’s notion of texts calling into being a particular kind of readership.

Carter notes that, for middlebrow texts, this is the “serious general reader,”

emphatically not the specialist (179). Some positive reviews echo Dalrymple’s

identification of a postcolonial hegemony which limits historical enquiry.

Andrew Rutherford’s review distances White Mughals from postcolonial

theory in several, connected ways:

The White Mughals …was not about the kind of Indophile philologist or

antiquarian an Edward Said-inspired orthodoxy is too quick to find

sinister, but about servants of Empire whom contemporaries readily

identified as having gone native—they had the clothes, the hours, the

wives and bibis. (Rutherford)

It provides an explanation of who the text is not about—“Indophile

philologist[s] or antiquarian[s]”—and an affirmation of the British figures’

“native” attributes. As well as this descriptive function, Rutherford’s

characterisation of an “Edward Said-inspired orthodoxy” that is hasty and

harsh with its judgments manages to position manifestly conservative texts

such as White Mughals and The Last Mughal as brave challenges to a

restrictive, monolithic interpretation of imperial history.

In contrast to his portrayal of theory, Dalrymple’s self-representation is

that of archival researcher as empiricist explorer. Peter Hulme’s description of

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“the dream of empiricism”—where famous explorers are “fine examples of

how to slough off the conventional wisdom of the ancients and encounter the

natural world face to face unencumbered by theories of any kind” (“Subversive

Archipelagos” 15)—highlights the lineage Dalrymple draws upon to effect his

position. In her review of The Last Mughal, Rachel Aspden highlights the

extent to which Dalrymple’s narratives carry a common argument: “For the last

17 years, William Dalrymple’s travel and history books have celebrated

syncretism. Nothing pleases him more than the ‘fluidity’ and ‘tolerance’

displayed by such champion integrators as Sir David Ochterlony.” In her

overwhelmingly positive review, Aspden nonetheless recognises the

sometimes awkward position that such an argument necessitates, noting “the

rhetoric of The Last Mughal, in which Zafar’s Delhi has to act as the type of

every liberal golden age threatened by the forces of extremism.”

Dalrymple’s engagement with both the subject of the text and with

ongoing debates about the writing of imperial history is evident in the

introduction. Whilst detailing his shift of focus from the eighteenth-century

context of his previous narrative history to the nineteenth-century world of the

present text, Dalrymple argues that:

No longer were Indians seen as inheritors of a body of sublime and

ancient wisdom as eighteenth-century luminaries such as Sir William

Jones and Warren Hastings had once believed; but instead merely “poor

benighted heathen”, or even “licentious pagans”, who, it was hoped, were

eagerly awaiting conversion. There is an important point here. Many

historians blithely use the word “colonialism” as if it has some kind of

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 clearly locatable meaning, yet it is increasingly apparent that at this

period there were multiple modes and very distinct phases of

colonialism. (10)

Here, Dalrymple begins by highlighting those whom he sees as positive

representatives of the imperial British, and arguing for the fluidity and

multiplicity of British identities in India. The text then moves to further

ameliorate the reader’s view of the British in India by shifting the blame for

any imperial unpleasantness onto contained (and easy) targets, thus preserving

the positive, hybrid facets of empire for the undifferentiated majority: “It was

not the British per se, so much as specific groups with a specific imperial

agenda—namely the Evangelicals and Utilitarians—who ushered in the most

obnoxious phase of colonialism, a change which adversely affected the White

Mughals as much as it did the Great Mughals” (Last Mughal 10). The

statement that this shift in colonialist phases (from benign to “obnoxious”)

affects those British who had adopted certain aspects of Mughal custom (whom

Dalrymple here identifies with the capitalised term “White Mughals”) to the

same extent as the Indian population is revealing and deeply problematic: at

best it equates these British figures with the Mughal elites, and, at worst,

trivialises the situation of those Indians who experienced the full extent of the

British imperial presence.

Other generalisations within Dalrymple’s argument offer problems too:

Hastings, one of Dalrymple’s “luminaries,” was Governor of Bengal and “a

prime specimen of the Orientalist in both the contemporary and the

postcolonial senses of the term” (Jasanoff 64). He was the subject of a seven-

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year-long impeachment trial, and his prolific translations of Sanskrit literary

works (which Dalrymple, understandably, applauds) occurred alongside his

project of translating and interpreting Hindu codes of law, in order to better

enforce a British justice system, itself an explicitly imperial project. Maya

Jasanoff highlights Hastings’

patronage of Nathaniel Halhed, whose A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776)

came to serve as a foundation for Company-administered Hindu courts.

The aim was to rule India by its own laws, but the effect was to impose a

British interpretation of what those laws were, to split Bengal’s (and later

India’s) population into rigid categories, to essentialize cultural

difference, and to sow the seeds of religious communal division. (64-65)

Comparisons between Dalrymple’s and Jasanoff’s treatments of Warren

Hastings provide a contained way to highlight the limitations of Dalrymple’s

approach. Both Jasanoff and Dalrymple advocate a nuanced view of empire,

and an emphasis on the partiality and complexity of individuals and

motivations in the imperial context. Jasanoff states of her project: “the history

of collecting reveals the complexities of empire; it shows how power and

culture intersected in tangled, contingent, sometimes self-contradictory ways”

(6). The similarities between their work break down, however, in the

arguments that they draw from this shared premise. Jasanoff refuses to resort to

a sentimental, nostalgic representation of the British imperial presence.

Dalrymple’s work, by contrast, allows for the rehabilitation of the reputation of

the British in India, with statements such as: “India in the 1840s and 1850s was

slowly filling up with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule

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and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it” (Last Mughal 61).

Here, crucially, it is not the British that are designated as a threat, but rather the

sub-group of “British Evangelicals” which is given the blame for what

Dalrymple represents as the changing face of the British in India.

Dalrymple’s representation of the historiographic context in which The

Last Mughal appears works towards a simple dismissal of academic history

and postcolonial theory as staid, self-serving, irrelevant, and unwieldy

institutions that produce unreadable works. In contrast, Dalrymple and The

Last Mughal are dynamic, fresh and unconstrained by an overarching

institutional paradigm. Dalrymple shares a disdain for theoretical approaches to

imperial history with David Cannadine, who argues that: “those who address

the empire from a post-modernist and post-colonial perspective … in such

tortured prose that it is often difficult to understand what they are saying, …

[have an] often sketchy … knowledge [of history], and … constantly overrat[e]

the power and reach of the British” (xvi-vii). Similarly, Dalrymple writes in a

review of The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley: “In the academic

study of the history of empire, where super-specialisation is the norm and

postcolonial theory is usually preferred to elegant prose, Colley is not quite

unique, but she is certainly an unusual figure.” Dalrymple takes the opportunity

to simultaneously compliment Colley and attack “academic” “super-

specialisation” and its inelegant “theory.” As Gyan Prakash notes, in the view

of “revisionist” (25) scholars such as Cannadine and Dalrymple—who “dislike

Edward Said and the postcolonial critics who cite French theory and argue that

the British Empire established lasting Orient / Occident and East / West

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oppositions in politics and knowledge” (25)—empire was motivated by “A

human story of interest and immersion in other cultures, languages and

artifacts—not mastery” (26).

Dalrymple and Cannadine also share similarities in their use of the first

person and autobiographical elements in their texts. Cannadine states that he

has been

reading about empire for as long as I can remember, and my first thanks

must be to those many imperial actors, imperial biographers and imperial

historians on whose voluminous recollections and writings this book is

based, even as I must crave the indulgence of experts in particular fields

who will feel (no doubt rightly) that I have oversimplified their

scholarship, misunderstood their interpretations and misrepresented their

views. (xxi)

The familiar tone and self-deprecating manner in which he constructs his

relationship with other “experts” functions to bring him closer to his

readership. Both Cannadine and Dalrymple work to reinforce the positive

outcomes of the British presence in India. As Prakash reiterates, “Stroke by

stroke, this … historiography seeks to redraw the portrait of the British

Empire” (26). For Dalrymple,

In the light of so much postcolonial disapproval, it is worth remembering

the reputation Victorian rule in India once enjoyed, even from Britain’s

fiercest critics. Theodore Roosevelt thought that Britain had done “such

marvellous things in India” that they might “transform the Indian

population ... in government and culture, and thus leave [their] impress as

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 Rome did hers on Europe.” (“Plain Tales” 48)

That “Britain’s fiercest critic” is represented by Dalrymple to be Theodore

Roosevelt, as opposed to any of those individuals who directly experienced

imperial rule, is revealing. The thrust of this statement is the overwhelmingly

positive contribution of British rule to Indian “government and culture,” and

the “disapproval” that postcolonial critics of empire voice is dismissed as

unfounded. In response to Cannadine’s treatment of the imperial British in

Ornamentalism, Sinha notes: “While the British imperial elite may appear

justly quaint and ridiculous in Cannadine’s account of the empire, they are also

credited with what turns out to be a rather valuable contribution to the vast

interconnected world of Britain and the Empire” (para 17).

Graham Huggan chronicles the different responses to, and ways of

dealing with, what he calls a “totemic critical work,” in his simply-titled “(Not)

Reading Orientalism.” Huggan is interested in a common “tendency to bypass

the text” (126). Huggan states of Cannadine’s Ornamentalism that it

“grudgingly acknowledges Said’s work before proceeding studiously to ignore

it” (133). Huggan concludes: “The most obvious thing to say here is that

Orientalism and the postcolonial criticism with which it is associated are

largely treated as straw categories” (134). The Last Mughal operates in a

similar fashion—invoking Said as a metonym for a postcolonial approach that

Dalrymple’s text defines itself against, but without acknowledging its (still

pertinent) arguments about power and representation.

Cannadine’s Ornamentalism has provoked an array of responses, both

positive and negative. Sinha highlights the importance of the theoretical shift

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undertaken in Cannadine’s work: “The assumptions that underlie

Ornamentalism represent a subtle re-working of contemporary scholarship that

points to a new direction for imperial history. The charming and often light-

hearted tone of the book thus masks a sophisticated intervention with

implications for the future of imperial studies” (para 3). Sinha states that the

contribution of Ornamentalism “lies in the methodological assumptions, which

help sustain an updated image of the British Empire as a bumbling and risible,

and yet kindler [sic] and gentler enterprise, than scholars have hitherto

assumed” (para 6). This image of the imperial British is also central to

Dalrymple’s writing.

In a rare critical review of The Last Mughal, Wilson concisely chronicles

Dalrymple’s modes of representing the British in India:

British actions both before and during the uprisings are attributed to the

growing influence of evangelical Christianity, which allows the author to

downplay other changes in the character of imperialism in this period and

to romanticise an earlier era of British plunder under the East India

Company from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Dalrymple contrasts

his apocalyptic, proto-9/11 view of 1857 with a previous golden age

where British officers of the East India Company adopted Indian dress

and “cohabited” with “Indian Bibis”. Displaying a remarkable

insensitivity to issues of power, race and gender, Dalrymple lovingly

portrays these “white Mughals” with their “numerous” wives as

“splendidly multicultural” and furthering an idyllic “fusion of

civilisations”. (107)

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As Wilson argues, Dalrymple’s focus on the evangelical movement enables a

simplification of other complex imperial factors at work in India at this time. In

turn, such simplifications work towards a more positive view of the British in

India, particularly those in what Dalrymple represents as the benign, “pre-

evangelical” phase. This sentimental representation of a valorised imperial

setting is made possible through a concomitant denial of the inherent gendered

and racial disparities of power.

The British in The Last Mughal

Much of the Mutiny coverage in The Last Mughal follows Brigadier General

John Nicholson, and the majority of the descriptions of the Mutiny in progress

are from the point of view of the British. Dalrymple represents Nicholson as

violent, bordering on psychopathic, which provides a sense of Dalrymple as a

fair, balanced interpreter of historical events and characters. This

representation of Nicholson is tempered with the argument that his psychosis is

necessary to the eventual British victory (199, 200, 306, 307). The amount of

energy and space that the text devotes to anecdotes of his ruthless efficiency

and short, stoic telegrams to his superiors highlights Nicholson’s importance to

the narrative’s portrayal of the British presence. The Brigadier General is a

breed apart from Dalrymple’s “hybrid” white Mughals, and functions to

represent the influence of religious fundamentalism on the Mutiny:

A taciturn and self-contained Ulster Protestant, it was said that while he

was District Commissioner in Rawalpindi, Nicholson had personally

decapitated a local robber chieftain, then kept the man’s head on his desk

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 as a memento. He was, moreover, a man of few words; one typical note

in the archives is a letter to [John] Lawrence which reads, in full: “Sir, I

have the honour to inform you that I have just shot a man who came to

kill me. Your Obedient Servant, John Nicholson.” (199)

Dalrymple’s text represents Nicholson as universally respected:

Nicholson inspired an entire religious sect, the Nikal Seyn, who

apparently regarded him as an incarnation of Vishnu. Nicholson tolerated

his devotees as long as they kept quiet; but if “they prostrated themselves

or began chanting they were taken away and whipped”. The punishment

never varied: “three dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails” (199)

Indian reverence for this figure works to counter the earlier representation of

Nicholson as psychotic and potentially unbalanced, focusing instead on his

charisma and leadership abilities. The relation of the story of his native

worshippers braving whipping in order to bow before him, despite his central

role in subduing the Mutiny, acts as an example of the rightness of British

colonial rule.

The Last Mughal’s dramatic rehearsal of violence inflicted by and visited

upon the British in India in 1857 functions as a cathartic form of textual

penance for Dalrymple and his British readership. Dalrymple’s reiteration of

this violence positions the author as someone unafraid to face the

unpleasantness of history. The way in which this violence is narrated, however,

still enables the overall representation of the British as an attractive group that

contributed positively to Indian society, despite the unfortunate influence of the

Evangelicals. As Gyan Prakash states, Dalrymple “assumes that but for the

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nineteenth-century imperial foolhardiness, the imagined eighteenth-century

empire might have remained intact” (29). In reference to realist fiction

accounts of suffering, Pam Morris notes “the effect of surface verisimilitude of

realist form is to naturalise such happenings as part of the inevitable condition

of human existence” (37). The Last Mughal’s chronicle of suffering and

violence reinforces the teleology of history. Roderick Strange shares his

reactions to this violent rehearsal within The Last Mughal, in an article about

Christianity and forgiveness: “It is a sickening episode, expertly narrated by

Dalrymple, and we recoil from the savagery.” The reader, through this

textually-mediated process, “experiences” and “recoil[s] from” the violence.

Such a reaction can function as a kind of penance for imperial wrongs, working

to absolve the contemporary Briton from associations of guilt at past atrocities.

Dalrymple narrates the motivations for British violence in Delhi: “Some

of the most brutal killers were those who had lost friends or members of their

own family at the outbreak … [like John Clifford, who] blamed himself for

[his sister’s] death, preceded—so British myth had it—by gang rape” (362). He

highlights the religious aspect of the British response to the Mutiny, which

supports his overriding argument about fundamentalism:

Over and over again, however, the British found it possible to justify

such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were

somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were

instead more like devils. In the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals, mass

murder was no longer mass murder, but instead had become divine

vengeance, and the troops were thus executors of divine justice. (363)

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Once more, it is the Evangelicals in particular who take the blame for the

negative aspects of colonialism. Dalrymple uses first-person accounts of

violence to bring the reader closer to this cathartic experience. For instance, he

quotes Edward Vibart at length:

the orders were to shoot every soul. I think I must have seen about 30 or

40 defenceless people shot down before me. It was literally murder and I

was perfectly horrified. … The town as you may imagine presents an

awful spectacle now … heaps of dead bodies scattered throughout the

place and every house broken into and sacked. (385-86)

The contemporary reader can safely identify with Vibart’s horror at these

images.

Another, quite different, way in which Dalrymple’s texts positively

portrays those Britons who participated in the administration of India is by

emphasising the bumbling, eccentric qualities of those who, Dalrymple argues,

enthusiastically embraced aspects of the Mughal culture with which they

interacted. In the case of Sir Thomas Theophilous Metcalf, he states: “Both

Metcalfe’s houses were surrounded by extensive estates, and were entered

through colossal Georgian gateways; both were decorated with follies, and

even, in the case of Dilkushe [translated as “Delighter of the Heart”], a

lighthouse, a small fort, a pigeon house, a boating pond and an ornamental

ziggurat” (53). The effect of such a list of architectural “follies” is to represent

Metcalf as a preoccupied, essentially harmless, figure, more interested in

building an “ornamental ziggurat” than colonial administration.

Dalrymple again advocates a vision of particular Britons in India as

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hybrid figures, people who crossed cultural and linguistic divides with ease and

pleasure. The Last Mughal makes this explicit: “The first East India Company

officials who settled [in Delhi]... at the end of the eighteenth century were a

series of sympathetic and notably eccentric figures who were deeply attracted

to the high courtly culture which Delhi still represented” (9). Such a statement

elides the commercial motivation for these “eccentric” characters’ presence in

the high courtly culture of Delhi while highlighting their “deep” attraction to it.

These figures are notably not “attracted” to India itself, but rather to its elite

“courtly culture.” Further, the use of the word “settled” downplays the

significant East India Company presence already established in India at the end

of the eighteenth century. Elsewhere, Dalrymple glorifies the British East India

Company rule of India as an oasis of tolerance and multiculturalism: “the India

of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and

religiously chutnified place than the most mixed areas of London today”

(Dalrymple, “Clash of Civilisations”). Dalrymple seeks parallels between

eighteenth-century imperial India and contemporary London, in order to

cement his arguments for the hybrid nature of this glorified period.

Dalrymple’s representation of the British in India in this book highlights

his position within debates about the writing of imperial history. By

emphasising the particularities and specificities of the British in India, he

appears to be following the example of the exponents of “new imperial

history,” such as Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, and many others.

However, in Dalrymple’s hands such arguments work primarily to champion

what he sees as the positive aspects and progressive figures within the British

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Empire. Further, he elides the work of those who do not fit his thesis, playing

on the differences in aim, opinion and policy between East India Company

officials in London and those in India. Dalrymple’s insistence on the “many

different ways of inhabiting, performing and transgressing the still fluid notion

of Britishness” (Last Mughal 10), recalls Cannadine’s Ornamentalism, in

which he asserts: “I am not sure there was ever such a thing as ‘the imperial

project’: even at its apogee, the British Empire was far too ramshackle a thing

ever to display such unanimity of action and consistency of purpose” (197-98).

In such a context, words such as “eccentric” and “ramshackle” work towards a

representation of the British as harmless, lovable and disorganised. Oriented in

this way, an emphasis on mutability and specificity shifts to an invocation of

eccentricity, implying an innocent, absent-minded approach to the imperial

endeavour. In obvious ways, then, Cannadine and Dalrymple follow in the

wake of J.R. Seeley’s famous statement, first published in 1883, that “We

seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of

absence of mind” (12).

The Last Mughal’s frequent portrayal of the British as bumbling conveys

the sense of the empire as kind-hearted and disorganised. As Dalrymple

reiterates: “It was certainly true that the British community in Delhi were an

eccentric lot, even by the standards of Victorian expats” (105). The British

Resident in Delhi from 1851, Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalf, is described as

keeping a “friendly but nonetheless firm eye on Zafar’s daily life” (37). More

emphasis is given to Metcalf’s interesting opinions than to his “firm”

surveillance of Zafar, however. Dalrymple writes: “[he] was a notably

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fastidious man, with feelings so refined that he could not bear to see women eat

cheese. Moreover he believed that if the fair sex insisted on eating oranges or

mangoes, they should at least do so in the privacy of their own bathrooms”

(49). Dalrymple’s descriptions of Metcalf’s idiosyncratic views on the conduct

of women imply a similarly outdated approach to governance. For Sinha, the

effect of such characterisation is an image of “an empire that is at worst a

baroque edifice designed, as with so many other quaint and harmlessly

ineffectual creations of conservative Tories, ... [by] an amusingly out-of-touch

British elite” (para 11). Here, Dalrymple’s affection and tolerance for

conservatism is evident, and forms another in a series of representational links

between Dalrymple and his historical British protagonists.

Narrative and history in The Last Mughal

Narrative history works in a very similar way to realist fiction in that both

forms effect the illusion of transparency. Both deal with characters and events,

with fiction having more scope for narrative innovation than history. Their

similarities extend to the ways in which these forms are experienced by the

reader, each entailing an investment in the text’s narrative world. As a

consequence of these formal attributes, narrative history occludes other

interpretations and historical perspectives to a greater level than history writing

that does not employ narrative devices to the same extent. This is not to argue

that academic history is devoid of this particular trait, but that the influence of

narrative in histories such as Dalrymple’s functions to obscure the inevitably

subjective nature of researching, interpreting and writing history. As Nicholas

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Lemann states: “Narrative done with skill feels true in some strangely

automatic way … Therefore, it has enormous power to mislead” (797). This

narrative drive, coupled with Dalrymple’s continually expressed distaste for

(particularly postcolonial) theory, works to obscure the extent to which all

history is constructed, and subject to theory and ideology, whether or not such

influences are foregrounded.

In fact, Dalrymple places theory and engaging writing at opposite ends of

the historical spectrum, arguing that “It seems to me that it’s perfectly possible

to do your scholarship and your work as minutely and as thoroughly as any

academic but to write it up not in the language of post-modernism and post-

colonialism and in the jargon of academe but in the language of literature”

(“Student Resource: William Dalrymple Talks”). He refers to Simon Schama’s

Citizens and Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad as works which he considers to be

written in a similar style (“Student Resource: William Dalrymple Talks”).

However, Dalrymple still desires a considerable amount of control over the

representation of his historical works, carefully regulating the terms with which

they are described, as Christopher Kremmer notes when interviewing him:

“When it comes to labelling his work, the author bristles at the term ‘popular

history’, preferring ‘narrative history’, and says he kept Simon Schama’s

history of the French Revolution, Citizens, by his desk as his [sic] wrote his

recent book” (30). Such statements also function to enhance Dalrymple’s

legitimacy by association—in this instance with well-known historian Schama.

Despite the many differences between Dalrymple’s two works of history,

both share a delight in captivating stories of Britons taking on Mughal custom.

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Several stories chronicled in White Mughals are continued (and compounded)

in The Last Mughal, with Dalrymple repeating, for example, the narrative of

Sir David Ochterlony and his thirteen wives’ nightly promenade on their

individual elephants. The convoluted approach to the referencing of this story

is also imported from White Mughals: even the endnote text is unchanged

between the two monographs (and not referenced to the earlier text). Such

instances function to give The Last Mughal the feel of a familiar Dalrymple

monograph, complete with entertaining and faintly titillating tales of the

attractions of British / Indian relationships.

Further details of Ochterlony’s documented mistress are present in the

endnotes of The Last Mughal. In the body of the text Dalrymple advances a

picture of Ochterlony and his “wife”: “Ochterlony was reputed to have had

thirteen wives, but one of these, a former Brahmin dancing girl from Pune …

took precedence over any others. Much younger than Ochterlony, she certainly

appears to have had the upper hand in her relationship with the old general”

(66). This jovial representation advances a feeling of equality and good will in

the relationship between the “dancing girl” and the “old general.” The endnote

provides a rather different picture, with Dalrymple referring to the background

of the “Begum” in more detail, relating that she was “brought from Poona in

the Deckan by one Mosst. Chumpa, and presented or sold by the said Chumpa

to Genl. Ochterlony when 12 years of age” (505). This discrepancy between

the text and its references is significant. Ochterlony, the figure that Dalrymple

uses as a metonymic representation of an Indian / British relationship that is

characterised by hybridity and cultural fusion and understanding, is shown in

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an entirely different light. Dalrymple’s continuing fascination with Delhi’s

courtesans (though they are further removed from this text’s chronology than

from his previous works, given The Last Mughal’s later setting) operates to

brand the text as a Dalrymple production: “The beauty and coquettishness of

Delhi’s courtesans were famous: people still talked of the celebrated courtesan

Ad Begum of a century earlier, who would famously turn up stark naked at

parties...” (110-11). The presence of these narratives in The Last Mughal as

well as his earlier texts highlights the extent to which this text conforms to

Dalrymple’s recognisable narrative history formula, despite its claims for

heightened historical significance.

Sex is used throughout The Last Mughal in two distinct ways. One is in

the predictable, Orientalist manner of depicting Indian rulers as dissolute and

decadent. Dalrymple’s description of the British annexation of Avadh, or

Oudh, is an instance of this: “The excuse for this [annexation] was that its

Nawab, the poet, dancer and epicure Wajd Ali Shah, was ‘excessively

debauched’” (126). This statement both puts forward and argues against such a

stereotypical treatment of the Nawab. However, the accompanying footnote

shifts the balance of this passage towards a British, Orientalist fascination with

sex. Written in a conversational tone, it gives William an opportunity to

represent his own enthusiastic interest to the reader:

Although it hardly justified annexing Avadh, it was certainly true that

Wajd Ali Shah was no blushing violet. The Royal Library at Windsor

Castle contains a large folio volume entitled the Ishq Nama (Love

History) of Wajd Ali Shah, which contains several hundred portraits of

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 his different lovers, one to each page, and annotated with a short poem

praising the qualities and amorous talents of each. (126)

This adds to the representation of the King of Avadh as debauched (and the

British as correct in their assessment of him). The vagueness of the passage—it

is unclear whether there are “several hundred” pages, portraits or lovers—

amplifies this representation. This narratorial interjection continues the

characterisation of William as the keen historian who simply cannot resist

sharing such delightfully quirky tidbits of information with his readers.

The other way in which sex is used in The Last Mughal is, like its

presence in White Mughals, as an untheorised shorthand for a state of mutual

respect and understanding between British and Indian men: “the British

officers, who once mixed with their men—and not infrequently cohabited with

the men’s sisters—had become increasingly distant, rude and dismissive”

(136). This easy equivalence between cross-cultural sexual relationships and

increased understanding is represented here as part of an earlier golden time,

and its decline (linked with Dalrymple’s representation of religious orthodoxy

as the cause of conflict between the two groups) is seen as heralding an

unfortunate rift.

Although The Last Mughal’s narrative structure differs substantially from

that of White Mughals, some similarities remain. Dalrymple’s treatment of

textual elements which lend romance and pathos to the narrative are an

example of this link. At the beginning of The Last Mughal, he states: “In the

words of the poem commonly attributed to Zafar, and said to have been written

shortly after his imprisonment:

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 ‘…Delhi was once a paradise,

Where Love held sway and reigned;

But its charm lies ravished now

And only ruins remain. …’” (25)

The quotation is appended with an appropriate endnote number, signifying its

reliable provenance for the educated general reader (who is interested but

presumably unlikely to follow up each endnote reference). The information

given in the accompanying endnote is not a record of the poem’s provenance,

but a simple instruction: “See footnote on p. 473” (499). The related passage

on page 473, in the last chapter of the lengthy work, is not an archival

reference. It is instead a complex statement which simultaneously discounts

and attempts to confirm Zafar’s authorship of the poems. Its context is

Dalrymple’s description of Zafar’s life in exile:

[He] sat silently watching the passing shipping from his Rangoon

balcony. He was allowed no pen and paper, so his own reaction to his

isolation and exile can only be guessed at. Certainly it now seems as if

the famous verses attributed to him in exile, expressing his sadness and

bitterness, are not the product of his own hand, though William Howard

Russell explicitly described him writing verses on the walls of his prison

with a burned stick, and it is not completely impossible that these could

somehow have been recorded and preserved. (473)

Even while acknowledging this point—that Zafar did not write the “famous

verses”— the language used works to undermine it; instead of the poems being

mistakenly attributed, it only “seems as if” he did not write them. After all,

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William Howard Russell “explicitly described” Zafar writing verses, and

“somehow” it is not a complete impossibility, they might have survived.

Dalrymple evokes the apocryphal notion of the writing on the wall here.

The apposite nature of the poems appears simply too attractive to

abandon. Indeed, a reading of these pieces was an integral part of the public

events at the Sydney Writers’ festival in 2007 to promote The Last Mughal.

The usefulness of these poems to the narrative (what better for a biographical

project than poetry written by the central historical character?) is such that the

unfortunate fact of their dubious authorship is hidden in a tangle of references.

The footnote elaborates at length:

Two celebrated ghazals long attributed to Zafar—“Lagtaa nahii hai dil

meraa” (Nothing brings happiness to my heart) and “Naa kissii kii aankh

kaa nuur huun” (“I bring no solace to heart or eye”)—are popularly

known in the subcontinent largely because of Mohammed Rafi, who sang

them for the Bombay film Lal Qila. But before that they had already

become popular in the late fifties thanks to the version sung by one

Habeeb Wali Muhammad on Radio Ceylon’s talent show, Ovaltine

Amateur Hour. In the sixties, the Rafi version then became a favourite on

All India Radio. Recent research by the Lahore scholar Imran Khan, and

backed by several other leading scholars of Urdu literature, has, however,

cast doubt on Zafar’s authorship of both verses. Certainly the ghazals do

not appear in any of Zafar’s four published divans, nor in the periodical

Hazoor-e Wala, where Zafar also published poems. I would like to thank

Professor Fran Pritchett and Sundeep Dougal for bringing these

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 developments to my attention, and also C.M. Naim, who, before

becoming a distinguished scholar of Urdu literature, was an enthusiastic

listener to Ovaltine Amateur Hour. (473)

This lengthy footnote achieves a number of varied outcomes, chief among

these being deferring the readers’ knowledge of the provenance of the poems

until the text’s final pages (unless, of course, the reader follows the three-step

process—from text, to endnote, to footnote—in the initial instance). It also,

through grateful reference to “Professor Fran Pritchett,” highlights the

scholarly work behind The Last Mughal. Curiously, this is the same Pritchett

that Dalrymple thanks in his acknowledgements for a “most thorough edit”

(xxv) of the work’s manuscript. If this information was part of the edit, then

Dalrymple had ample time to make the appropriate changes and to omit the

misleading references to these poems as written by Zafar at the text’s

beginning. Regardless, Dalrymple had the opportunity to change the original

reference. The continued representation of Zafar as author of this sentimental

poetry is another example of The Last Mughal’s valuing of narrative power

over historical accuracy. The reference to “Ovaltine Amateur Hour” as a

source of scholarly information also adds a quirky and mildly amusing element

to this footnote, continuing the characterisation of Dalrymple as the kind of

historian who revels in the oddities of his research.

The narrative of Dalrymple’s research, mirrored by the readers’

experience of the text, is one that is endemic to realist fiction, as Morris states:

what is implicit in the opening pages of most realist fictions: questions

are raised about characters and situations which will be resolved by fuller

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 knowledge gained during the course of the narrative. In this respect, the

reader’s epistemological progress through the novel imitates the way we

acquire knowledge of the actual social and physical worlds by means of

observation of factual details, behaviour and events. (11)

In this instance the reader is presented with the narrative of Zafar’s authorship

of the poems, which forms a central part of Zafar’s characterisation as a

physically feeble but romantic and self-aware figure. This image continues

until the text’s final chapter, when Dalrymple (and the reader) learn that its

provenance is unclear.

Reception and contextualisation of The Last Mughal

The Last Mughal has attracted a more mixed response than any of Dalrymple’s

previous books. Like his earlier works, it received an array of positive reviews.

Geoffrey Moorhouse, another historian who has written on India (see his work

India Britannica [1983]), commented that:

He has vividly described the street life of the Mughal capital in the days

before the catastrophe happened, he has put his finger deftly on every

crucial point in the story, which earlier historians have sometimes

missed, and he has supplied some of the most informative footnotes I

have ever read. On top of that, he has splendidly conveyed the sheer joy

of researching a piece of history, something every true historian knows,

telling of his elation at discovering in Burma’s national archives all

Zafar’s prison records, stored in Acrobat PDF files. (“Zafar the

Ditherer”)

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In his overwhelmingly positive assessment of The Last Mughal, Moorhouse

identifies Dalrymple’s skill in his self-representation and overall narrative

structure—the points that Moorhouse most praises are the autobiographical

insights that Dalrymple supplies, through the text’s overarching narrative of the

author’s research. The merits of Dalrymple as historian and The Last Mughal

as history are also espoused by Nigel Collet who, while praising Dalrymple’s

hard work and resistance to “fashions” of theory, simultaneously denigrates

much existing scholarship on 1857:

This lack of contemporary insight has been carried forward to our times

by the generations of writers who have piled up tome after tome on the

Mutiny and yet who have advanced historical knowledge by little more

than gradual increments of fact or interpretation. This sweeping, but I

believe justifiable, statement sadly also applies to the Indian historians

who have written on the period, who, rather than spend hours in dusty

archives pouring [sic] over obscure scripts, have preferred to follow their

British colleagues and extemporise on the “isms” and “ologies” of the

fashions of the moment. Their failure has given Dalrymple an

opportunity he has seized with gusto.

As such sweeping statements are prone to do, Collet’s and Dalrymple’s

representation of the state of the existing work on the Mutiny leaves little room

for texts that even Dalrymple elsewhere applauds. Saul David’s The Indian

Mutiny, which he has praised as “scholarly, well researched, well paced,

readable and comprehensive” (“Bloody Uprising”) is somewhat surprisingly

dismissed here. Similarly, C.A. Bayly’s Empire and Information: Intelligence

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Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780-1870, which Dalrymple

uses to buttress his arguments in White Mughals (512), is swept in with what is

represented as an undifferentiated mass of unfortunately limited histories. The

ways in which Dalrymple chooses to carve a niche for himself and his

approach to history entail a sustained critique of existing (particularly

postcolonial) approaches and practices. That Dalrymple’s work which engages

explicitly with historiography receives the most mixed response from other

historians is therefore unsurprising.

The work that The Last Mughal does in order to position itself within the

highly-delineated field of imperial history also provokes some less enthusiastic

responses than those espoused by Collet and Moorhouse. Comments from

Dalrymple add to the conflict: “Most of the time historians write for each other

rather than for the reader. Seema Alvi and Sanjay Subramanium are

exceptions. Thankfully for me, Indian historians are gazing at there [sic] own

navels, arguing at seminars but not writing anything” (Interview with Austa).

Irfan Habib’s article “Indian Historians Are Not Lazy,” which he calls a

response to “Dalrymple’s criticisms of Indian historians for their apparent

lethargy and obscurantism,” is an example of the local resistance his self-

positioning strategy can inspire. Dalrymple represents theory as an

unnecessary, obfuscatory orthodoxy which prevents unbiased interactions with

the historical record, and his reviewers take this on: “Why had historians not

used these papers before? As Dalrymple explains, what really happened

doesn’t fit any fashionable academic dogmas” (Harshaw). Here the “fashions”

of academia actively limit historians’ engagement with the sources.

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 There are more sustained arguments against Dalrymple’s representation

of Indian imperial history. Gyan Prakash brings together a number of salient

points, engaging with the autobiographically-inclined narrative of history

writing that Dalrymple provides:

As globalization compresses space and time, those privileged and

educated enough to travel between cultures find themselves increasingly

impatient with the legacies of imperial racism and nationalist myths. This

is understandable. But to retail the eighteenth century as a time when

Europeans and non-Europeans overcame racial and religious boundaries

is to fly in the face of historical evidence. To see the crossing of imperial

borders in the lives of “White Mughals” is to misrepresent both the

nature of interracial liaisons and imperial conquest. Empire made the

Frasers and the Ochterlonys possible. It was because of empire, not

despite it, that Europeans took an interest in non-European cultures. …

Astonishingly, Dalrymple fails to see the sense of imperial entitlement

that permitted Company men to penetrate indigenous culture and become

White Mughals. (Prakash 30)

Through Dalrymple’s representation of himself as a belated white Mughal

figure, the representation of his “original” white Mughal allies becomes a

personal one. Both Dalrymple and his inspirations are portrayed as privileged

enough to travel between cultures, and frustrated with imperialism and

nationalism (and their legacies). The extent to which the characterisation of

white Mughal figures is influenced by Dalrymple’s self-representation is

evident, as well as their (more overt) impact on the ways in which Dalrymple

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undertakes his own self-fashioning.

Despite his extensive rehearsal of the bloody nature of the conflict, on

both British and Indian sides, The Last Mughal concludes with a positive

representation of British rule. Curiously, however, this portrayal requires a

complete backflip from Dalrymple’s previous representational strategies. As a

rule, Dalrymple’s works use the presence of the British East India Company to

highlight hybridity, and to emphasise the “pre-colonial” nature of his white

Mughal period. At the end of The Last Mughal, this representation shifts

dramatically in order to continue a positive conception of the British state’s

control over India: “If Hindustan was to lose the Mughals, its rulers of nearly

three hundred years’ standing, it would at least now be ruled by a properly

constituted colonial government rather than a rapacious multinational acting at

least partly in the interest of its shareholders” (456). Leaving aside that the East

India Company, established and run entirely as a profit-making venture, would

be wholly acting in the interest of its shareholders, here Dalrymple takes on a

strange, self-justifying rhetoric which draws upon the teleology of history to

argue that, due to the laxity of the East India Company’s administration,

Crown rule is therefore good and appropriate. Any other possibility goes

unmentioned.

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Conclusion: The Age of Kali and Nine Lives

Dalrymple’s participation in the public sphere is not limited to his books. As

well as his regular monograph publications, he has also, over the course of his

career, published a multitude of newspaper articles, reviews and commentaries,

and hosted television and radio documentaries. He co-directs the DSC Jaipur

Literary Festival, with Namita Gokhale (“Blatantly Racist”). He has also

introduced a new edition of Fanny Parkes’ Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search

of the Picturesque (1850; 2002), as well as a Lonely Planet coffee-table book

entitled Sacred India (1999) and has become increasingly cited as an “expert”

on India and Islam. For instance, when making an incidental point about

increasing mobile phone traffic in an article about privacy and surveillance in

USA Today, Richard Willing observes: “The number of cellphone users [in

Pakistan] grew from fewer than 3 million in 2003 to nearly 50 million this

year, historian and South Asia specialist William Dalrymple says.” This choice

of Dalrymple as the appropriate “specialist” authority here illuminates his shift

in status from In Xanadu-style travel writer to wide-ranging South Asian

expert, effected by his self-positioning across a number of media and

publishing platforms.

This concluding chapter rounds out the examination of Dalrymple’s

works with a consideration of his journalism. Dalrymple’s journalistic

endeavours operate in parallel to his monograph writing, as seen in remarks

which situate those monographs. For example, in the acknowledgements to

City of Djinns, Dalrymple attributes his presence in Delhi to his employment as

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a “correspondent” (1). Of course, monographs and journalistic output can work

together, informing and giving context to readers in complex, overlapping

ways. This chapter looks at the ways in which the relationship between the

monographs that originally confer Dalrymple’s authoritative position, and the

numerous reviews and newspaper articles that Dalrymple writes, functions to

construct and maintain his status. Dalrymple’s journalism is inevitably

authorised by his position as a successful non-fiction writer (virtually all of his

articles are prefixed or suffixed with a statement informing the reader of his

latest monograph). However, the journalism brings to the fore the

contemporary relevance of Dalrymple’s knowledge and keeps his name in the

public consciousness. It acts as what Gerard Genette terms “epitext” (5)—

“those messages that, at least originally, are located outside the book, generally

with the help of the media” (5)—that works in the same way as paratexts that

are attached to the text proper, in encouraging a more “pertinent” reading of

the text (2). Dalrymple’s journalistic output works in service of the author and

his oeuvre, as well as in service of a particular text. Each piece of journalism,

regardless of its subject, has William firmly at its centre, enabling the reader to

get to know him without necessarily having to read one of his books. For

example, when writing about Baba, an Indian rap star, he explains Baba’s

appeal in terms of how it is experienced by William:

My parsimonious Delhi landlady nearly went as far as reducing my rent

when I told her Baba had granted me an audience; and while walking

with Baba into a Bombay hotel I found myself in danger of being pawed

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 to death by a crowd of voracious Indian Lolitas rushing forward to

embrace their hero. (The Age of Kali 139-40)

William’s evident enjoyment of the star status that his association with Baba

provides is the central point of this passage, rather than a reflection on Baba

himself.

Dalrymple’s regular contributions to publications such as the Guardian

or the New York Review of Books make him a recurring, recognisable presence

in the lives of the educated reading public. In this particular field, Dalrymple

comes to assume a kind of celebrity status. Robert Clarke illustrates the

affinities between travel writing and celebrity, and the ways in which this

“celebritization” process occurs:

as a genre, travel writing encourages the kind of attention to the

personality and public life of the traveller that is conducive to the

mechanics of celebritization. The travel book, so often written in the first

person, exploits the illusions of intimacy and parasociality that define the

dynamics of contemporary celebrity. (147)

Dalrymple’s first-person journalism also works in this manner, making use of

the autobiographical authority of travel and the ways in which the “public life”

of the traveller intersects with celebrity. The choice of quality newspaper

publications (in contrast to larger circulation papers like The Daily Mail) is

another way in which Dalrymple positions himself in relation to his audience,

and, indeed, how he targets an audience. The familiarity of his regular presence

in the papers may contribute to a receptive response to Dalrymple’s

monographs, arguments and self-positioning.

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 When discussing his publications from In Xanadu to White Mughals with

Tim Youngs, Dalrymple reinforces the simultaneity of his roles as traveller /

historian and journalist:

[WD:] There are many different styles of writing both within travel

writing and within journalism. I don’t see them as two different spheres.

They overlap and interweave.

TY: Do you feel or do things differently when you’re travelling as a

travel writer rather than a journalist, as opposed to the writing?

WD: No, not much, actually. I was in Palestine last year doing two pieces

for the Guardian and the sort of things I was doing there are exactly what

I was doing with Holy Mountain … So I suppose this is closer to first-

person journalism. (59-60)

This consistent mode of operation, despite the genre / media in question,

reinforces the autobiographical authority of Dalrymple’s textual productions.

This conclusion makes use of Dalrymple’s designation of The Age of Kali as a

“book of journalism” (Interview with Tim Youngs 37). Alongside his latest

monograph, Nine Lives, it is taken as a representative sample of his prolific

journalistic output. These texts anthologise, in revised form, much of

Dalrymple’s journalistic writing (however refined and expanded) over the two

decades from 1989 to 2009.

The Age of Kali

The Age of Kali negotiates the sometimes competing conventions of travel

writing and journalistic reporting. The work’s subtitle, Indian Travels and

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Encounters, elides this tension and positions the text as another of Dalrymple’s

travel books. The Age of Kali’s introduction does little to alter this perception,

opening with a description of the work as “a collection of peripatetic essays, a

distillation of ten years’ travel around the Indian subcontinent” (xi). Dalrymple

elaborates: “For six of those years I was based in Delhi working on my second

book, City of Djinns, while for the other four I wandered the region, on a more

nomadic basis, for a few months each year” (xi). Both of these statements

manifestly situate the author in the places about which he is writing and elide

his activities for the remaining months. The success of the positioning of The

Age of Kali as a travel text is evident in the 2005 edition of the Lonely Planet

guide to India, which enthuses: “The Age of Kali by celebrated travel writer

William Dalrymple is a superb compilation of insights gleaned from a decade

of travelling the subcontinent” (24). Dalrymple’s 1998 text has also been re-

published by Lonely Planet in their “Lonely Planet Journeys” series. Other

works in the series, which is a mixture of re-issues and original publications,

include several works by Eric Newby, Thornton McCamish’s Supercargo: A

Journey Among Ports (2002), and Sean Condon’s Drive Thru America (1998),

among myriad others. For Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, the presence

of the Lonely Planet Journeys imprint highlights the connections between

“high” and “low” forms of travel and writing:

The Lonely Planet imprint, among others, has begun to exploit this

overlap by establishing a sister series, Lonely Planet Journeys, which

converts the raw material of travel guides into more “literary” travel

accounts. This travelogue series, like its guidebook counterpart, is clearly

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 aimed at the lifestyle and mindset of self-styled “offbeat” travelers and

“irreverent” backpackers. (208)

While this styling of the Lonely Planet brand as catering to “offbeat” or

“irreverent” travellers is still valid, the positioning of Lonely Planet Journeys is

not quite as straightforward as Holland and Huggan suggest. The inclusion of

reprints of travel “classics” such as Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

alongside the first editions of new works such as The Blue Man: Tales of

Travel, Love and Coffee (1999) by Larry Buttrose (also a Lonely Planet

guidebook writer) complicates the “conversion” process from guidebook to

travel literature that Holland and Huggan foreground. With the dual strategy of

republishing seminal travel texts and fostering new travel writers, Lonely

Planet creates their own, branded, travel writing canon, which embraces both

their “offbeat” origins and their significant mainstream successes. In the case

of the Lonely Planet Journeys reprint of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, the

text is presented similarly to earlier printings (retaining the preface by Evelyn

Waugh, for instance). One notable addition is the book’s final page, which tells

the “Lonely Planet Story” in a jocular and conversational tone, ending with the

sentences: “All you’ve got to do is decide to go [travelling], and the hardest

part is over. So go!” The closing of the volume on this note, combined with the

presence of the Lonely Planet logo, works to align the power of the brand with

the cultural capital of the classic travel writer. The presence of The Age of Kali

in the “Lonely Planet Journeys” series is curious, as Dalrymple neither fits

neatly into the “classic” reprint category, nor is he a part of Lonely Planet’s

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stable of authors. The Lonely Planet imprint further bolsters the text’s

positioning as a straightforward travel book.

Regardless of its successful reception as pure travel writing, The Age of

Kali is primarily a collection of journalistic essays. The majority of these first

appeared as articles in periodicals including: Granta, the Spectator, the Sunday

Times Magazine, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, the

Independent Magazine, GQ, Islands Magazine, the Tatler and Condé Nast

Traveller. The mix of travel, “society,” lifestyle and men’s publications

indicates the variety of ways in which Dalrymple approaches his material in

this text. As Paul Fussell astutely notes, the trappings of travel writing enable

the success of a form that otherwise would be seen as unviable:

A fact of modern publishing history is the virtual disappearance of the

essay as a salable commodity … the [travel] genre is a device for getting

published the essays which, without the travel “menstruum” (as

Coleridge would say), would appear too old-fashioned for generic credit.

(204)

An exception to Fussell’s observation is Salman Rushdie, whose celebrity, and

the high quality of his polemical writing, has contributed to the success of his

essay publications (Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

[Granta, 1991]; Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 [Cape,

2002]). For Dalrymple, however, it is necessary to align this journalistic work

with his travel oeuvre. Without the powerful generic associations of travel

writing with adventure, individualism and with eye-witness description, his

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essays on Indian cities, culture and personalities would look remarkably less

marketable and exciting.

It is not until the next section of the introduction that the work’s

journalistic roots are made more evident. In the “Acknowledgements,”

Dalrymple thanks those who “commissioned articles from [him], and / or have

generously given permission for them to be reproduced,” (xv) and catalogues

the origins of each section of the book. At the same time, however, he is

careful to highlight the labour involved in adapting each element:

what is published here is in some cases very different from what

appeared in the articles’ first journalistic avatar: pieces have been edited,

trimmed and rewritten; some have been wedged together; others, where

appropriate, have been suffixed with a new postscript to bring them up to

date. (xv)

It is their difference from their origins and their continued relevance that is

emphasised here, in an effort to preempt criticism of the text as derivative or

outdated.

The Age of Kali’s contents page buttresses its positioning as another

typical Dalrymple travel text, as it is laid out geographically, with essays

arranged by location, under such headings as “The North,” “In Rajasthan,” and

“On the Indian Ocean” (which incorporates such disparate subjects as Réunion,

Sri Lanka and Goa). The only exception to this organisational principle is the

short section called “The New India” which has as its subjects Shobha Dé (a

popular romance novelist), Baba and multinational fast food companies.

Through its revealing nomenclature, which appears to label the rest of the

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essays as being about “old” India, this section makes obvious the ways in

which the text divides the Indian subcontinent both temporally and

geographically, typically emphasising the gaps between the “new” cities and

the “old” countryside. This untheorised distinction between “new” and “old” or

“timeless” Indias made in “The New India” section is problematic. It disavows

the obvious fact of temporal equivalence in favour of the common, nostalgic,

ethnographically-inspired conceit that travel to remote or rural or

underdeveloped areas is essentially travelling into the past. Here, invariably,

“new” is represented as capitalist, Western-influenced, urban and particular—

the preserve of certain groups or individuals—as opposed to universalising

statements about “old” or “timeless” Indian subjects such as religion.

Both The Age of Kali and Nine Lives are explicitly concerned with what

is represented as the uneasy fit of India and modernity. This is evident in The

Age of Kali’s title, explained with reference to Hindu cosmology:

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. … As I was told again and again on my travels around the

subcontinent, India is now in the throes of the Kali Yug, the Age of Kali,

the lowest possible throw, an epoch of strife, corruption, darkness, and

disintegration. (xi)

This statement encapsulates Dalrymple’s argument about the state of India, as

well as both highlighting his knowledge of Hinduism, and exoticising a system

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of belief that is represented as being based on a game of chance. 4 By leaving

unmentioned the extensive length of the Kali Yug, Dalrymple implies that its

“darkness” and “disintegration” are products of modernity.

Throughout The Age of Kali, Dalrymple advances a comparison between

the troubles of modern India (represented as stemming from partition,

independence, and cultural issues such as caste) and the beauty and

sophistication of its past (which is represented as somehow untroubled by caste

and other inequalities). India under British rule also belongs to this reified

historical representation. Dalrymple uses cities such as Lucknow and

Hyderabad as examples of India’s past glories, in the essays “In the Kingdom

of Avadh” and “Under the Char Minar.” He compares these cities, advancing a

notion of universal decline:

It is often hard to believe this [past cultural importance] as you drive

through Hyderabad today. For while the city is still fairly prosperous—

certainly a far cry from the urban death rattle that is modern Lucknow—

fifty years on it is a pretty unprepossessing place, ugly, polluted, and

undistinguished, all seventies office blocks and bustling new shopping

centres. (199)

It seems almost as if it is the city’s prosperity (and therefore its degree of

Westernisation) to which Dalrymple objects. Any departure from an idealised,

4
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica entry for “yuga”: “in Hindu cosmology, an age of
mankind. Each yuga is progressively shorter than the preceding one, corresponding to a decline
in the moral and physical state of humanity. Four such yugas (called Krta, Treta, Dvapara, and
Kali after throws of an Indian game of dice) make up the mahayuga (‘great yuga’), and 2,000
mahayugas make up the basic cosmic cycle, the kalpa. The first yuga (Krta) was an age of
perfection, lasting 1,728,000 years. The fourth and most degenerate yuga (Kali) began in 3102
BC and will last 432,000 years. At the close of the Kali yuga, the world will be destroyed, to
be re-created after a period of quiescence as the cycle resumes again.”

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Orientalist past attracts epithets such as “unprepossessing” or

“undistinguished” and therefore “declining.” This pessimism about the state of

contemporary India is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more obvious in the pieces in

The Age of Kali which are more firmly set in the present.

Nowhere in The Age of Kali is the end of British rule in India represented

as a positive event for India or Indians. On the contrary, it is seen as the point

at which Indian society’s degeneration accelerated. Those (represented as

expatriates and left-wing Britons) who celebrate the anniversary of the end of

the British imperial presence are designated as mistaken and out of touch by

Dalrymple: “In Britain there may have been widespread celebrations marking

fifty years of Indian Independence, but in India there has been much less

rejoicing” (83). Jenny Sharpe describes the “raj revival” impulse towards a

“representation of decolonization as the moment of ruin,” an argument which

“preserves a foundational moment of pomp and splendor as a monument to

imperial greatness” (143). This tendency towards a “raj revivalist”

representation is evident in The Age of Kali.

This gloomy outlook on contemporary India can be read as an expression

or symptom of a colonial nostalgia that contrasts a seemingly chaotic present

with a more ordered, graceful and civilised past. A focus on contemporary

issues can function to construct the past as a simpler, better version of India.

Such nostalgia is more obvious in some sections of The Age of Kali than

others, however the accompanying sense of pessimism about contemporary

Indian society makes its way into the majority of chapters in Dalrymple’s text.

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 Modern India is portrayed as an unstable, unsettling, disturbing place.

Throughout the various essays in The Age of Kali, this instability is seen to

stem from the dislocations produced when “traditional” India comes into

contact with “new” Western ideas. An illustrative example of this begins the

text, describing the political situation in the province of Bihar. Although

Dalrymple stresses that this is an extreme case, the choice of this story as his

opening view of the subcontinent is nonetheless significant. Further, this essay

is also entitled “The Age of Kali,” and so comes to represent the text as a

whole. He dramatises the death of G. Krishnaiah, newly-appointed District

Magistrate of Golpalganj at the hands of a crowd, allegedly encouraged by MP

Anand Mohan Singh. Rather than being simply a disturbing, isolated, example

of corruption, the actions of Anand Mohan Singh are taken as representative of

“quite how bad things have become in Indian politics in recent years” (5).

Dalrymple goes on to explain that “Singh was arrested, but from his prison cell

he contested and retained his seat in the 1996 general election, later securing

bail to attend parliament” (5). Vague accompanying statements advocate a

disparaging view of Indian process: “Justice in India being what it is, few

believe that the police now have much chance of bringing a successful

prosecution” (5). Here Dalrymple is able to criticise the Indian legal system

without having to specify what it is that “justice in India” is, and who

constitutes the “few” that do believe that the police have a chance of success,

much less the majority represented as sceptical.

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 In Dalrymple’s argument, this failure of judicial and political systems

stems from the endemically Indian (and particularly Hindu) “problem” of

caste:

The closer you look, the clearer it becomes that caste hatred and,

increasingly, caste warfare lie at the bottom of most of Bihar’s problems.

The lower castes, so long oppressed, have now begun to assert

themselves, while the higher castes have begun to fight back in an

attempt to hold on to their ground. Moreover, job reservations for the

lower castes have begun to be fitfully introduced around the country,

reawakening an acute awareness of caste at every level of society. (22)

Despite the universal reality of money eroding class or caste position, for

Dalrymple the caste system is represented as static, divisive and inherently

problematic. In his description, caste is seen to impact on Indian society only

after the departure of the British. Of course, this is a partial representation.

Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable chronicles the complexities of caste from the

dalit perspective. Dalrymple portrays post-independence India as a chronicle of

caste-related inequality (in contrast to a more positive reading such as a

nationalist narrative of democracy or “progress”):

Brahmins had ruled India for forty-four of fifty years of independence.

Kshatriyas (the second rung in the caste pyramid) ruled for two more

years, in the persons of V.P. Singh (1989-90) and Chandra Shekhar

(1990-91). Lower- or intermediate-caste Prime Ministers had been in

power for fewer than four years of the half-century since the British left

India. (9-10)

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The statement beginning this passage is particularly misleading—there is a

manifest difference between Brahmins ruling the country and individual Prime

Ministers being Brahmins. Dalrymple dismisses the importance or relevance of

factors such as which political party was in government in favour of a caste-

based representation of post-independence Indian political life. The end result

appears to be an essentialist argument that India and Western ideas do not mix,

that chaos and violence are the price that modern India pays for its attempts at

what are represented as essentially Western precepts such as equal opportunity

politics.

Despite the disparate subjects and necessarily fractured nature of the text,

the uniting feature is the presence of William, the narrator. The topics

addressed here include sati, widowhood, “blood” sacrifice to the goddess Kali,

caste “warfare,” and the extreme Hindu nationalist movement. Sections of The

Age of Kali vividly recall the preoccupations of the Raj (and, subsequently,

much Victorian fiction written or set in India) with sati and thuggee, including,

notably, Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896) and Confessions

of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor (1839). Despite Dalrymple’s different

approaches to each subject, their presence and treatment is telling. Dalrymple’s

inclusion of his (very carefully-argued) piece on sati is notable, and the

sensationalism of his description of the devotions paid to the goddess Kali

refuses to be dampened by the (brief) mention of their substitution of the blood

sacrifice for a non-violent alternative. Dalrymple shares the Raj’s

preoccupation with sati: a topic in which British interest was disproportionate

to its regularity and spread, and which was used as a justification for the British

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imperial intervention in India. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan argues that “The

abolition of sati in 1829 was the first major legislation of the East India

Company’s administration in India … [which] served as the moral pretext for

intervention and the major justification for colonial rule” (42). Jenny Sharpe

foregrounds the different ways in which women are used rhetorically in

imperial arguments: “When articulated through images of violence against

women, a resistance to British rule does not look like the struggle for

emancipation but rather an uncivilized eruption that must be contained” (7).

For Gayatri Spivak, “The protection of women by men” is often an occasion

for the birth of “not only a civil but a good society” (298). Dalrymple’s

juxtaposition of India under the British and declining independent India

through stories of female vulnerability (the plight of dalit women, prostitutes

and Hindu widows as well as participants in sati) highlights the goodness and

rectitude of the British.

The Age of Kali was published in India as At the Court of the Fish-Eyed

Goddess: Travels in the Indian Subcontinent (1998). This title, also the name

of one of the essays within the text, refers to the Hindu fertility goddess

Meenakshi. The Age of Kali’s subtitle, Indian Travels and Encounters,

suggests an easy intimacy of Dalrymple with India and its people. With the

shift from a Western to an Indian audience, the word “encounters” is no longer

present, removing this suggestion of Dalrymple’s status as expert participant-

observer. Apart from the title, changes occasioned by the Indian audience

include a different introduction and a re-ordering of some of the chapters. The

Indian introduction addresses the reader more directly than that of The Age of

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Kali, beginning: “There are very few sensations more annoying than being told

what to think about one’s own country by some foreigner who rolls in, makes a

few perfunctory interviews, then writes some ignorant rubbish in a paper at the

other end of the world” (xiii). As well as developing an identification with the

Indian reader, this version of the introduction immediately refers to the text’s

origins in newspaper articles. Dalrymple then proceeds to distance himself

from this caricature of journalistic insensitivity: “I would hope that I don’t fall

into that category; but it is nevertheless with some nervousness that I accepted

an offer from HarperCollins India to publish At the Court of the Fish-Eyed

Goddess in South Asia in a separate desi edition” (xiii). This admission of

anxiety works to position William as courting the reader’s approval, while

carefully failing to mention the text’s original title, and the fact that the desi

edition is itself an effort to gain a more positive reception. The desi edition

should therefore lessen rather than precipitate Dalrymple’s anxiety, by

providing an opportunity to curtail the negative emphasis present in The Age of

Kali.

This text illustrates the multiple uses of journalism for a figure like

Dalrymple. He incorporates himself in each piece that he writes, each article

acting not only to tell its individual story but also to take ownership of that

story. This firmly first-person approach also works to unite the disparate

subjects brought under the umbrella of the text. Both The Age of Kali and Nine

Lives feature an emphasis on the time William has spent with the subjects of

the text, and on their recorded speech. Dalrymple emphasises his “personal

experience and direct observation” (Age of Kali xi) and the strength of his

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subjects’ “stories and voices” (Nine Lives xiv). The Age of Kali covers

Dalrymple’s journalistic exploits of the early to mid 1990s, working alongside

his travel texts; Nine Lives forms a similar counterpoint to the period in which

his narrative histories were written.

Nine Lives

Dalrymple’s latest publication is even more firmly positioned as a travel text

than The Age of Kali. Hailed as the author’s exciting return to the travel genre

after a hiatus of ten years, Nine Lives was invariably treated as “proof” of the

health and vitality of the travel book. In a review naming it his “travel book of

the year” for 2009, Rory MacLean begins: “Back in the 1940s, Evelyn Waugh

predicted the death of travel writing.” After a glowing review, he finishes: “As

Dalrymple’s title suggests, travel writing itself seems to have nine lives.”

Similarly, Anthony Sattin begins his round-up review of the best travel writing

of 2009 with the statement:

The prophets of doom should fall silent: this has been an excellent year

for new travel writing, including books by authors who made their name

with travel, then moved to other genres. William Dalrymple hasn’t

written a travel book in a decade, but Nine Lives (Bloomsbury £20) sees

him in India, following pilgrims and searchers of spiritual enlightenment.

Despite this enthusiastic trumpeting of Dalrymple’s long-awaited return to

travel writing, Nine Lives remains close to The Age of Kali in the way in which

it is constructed. Given the growth of Dalrymple’s celebrity, and his

positioning as an expert and an author of weighty histories, it is unsurprising

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that Nine Lives is represented as more serious than The Age of Kali. In contrast

to his earlier journalistic text, Nine Lives’ focus is solely on religious faith,

albeit encompassing many varying manifestations. The construction of the

text—essays framed and enabled by travel writing tropes and discourses—is

the same as that of The Age of Kali. As well as the travel genre providing a

structural framework for the text, it also heightens Dalrymple’s authority

through its valuing of the author / protagonist’s presence as eyewitness and

participant-observer.

In a flurry of pre-release publicity, Dalrymple wrote about travel writing

and Nine Lives in the Guardian, and gave interviews to the Wall Street

Journal, the Courier Mail (Brisbane), Outlook India and the Telegraph India,

among many others. In these articles and interviews Dalrymple emphasises

what he represents as his changed approach to travel writing, in particular his

efforts to foreground his interviewees. Writing in the Guardian, he asserts:

I decided to adopt a quite different form. When In Xanadu was published

at the end of the 80s, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his

adventures were the subject; the people he met were often reduced to

objects in the background. 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.

This passage, through its rejection of the narcissism of the 1980s, attempts to

harness the authority of ethnographic-style direct reportage, and the illusion of

truth and transparency that realism brings. At the same time, through the use of

words such as “background” and “centre stage,” Dalrymple almost avoids

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referring to the writing process altogether, in favour of theatre-based metaphors

which play down the creative, authorial process inherent in the production of a

book. The wording and argument of this article is very similar to his

introduction to Nine Lives (xiv).

Nine Lives is a collection of essays, each focused on an Indian individual

and their different connections with religion. The text’s subtitle, In Search of

the Sacred in Modern India, foregrounds this focus (while simultaneously

highlighting the centrality of William to the endeavour, through the word

“search”). Although celebrated as a “return,” there is little resemblance

between Nine Lives and the knock-about, jocular, self-deprecating narrator of

In Xanadu, or even William’s earnestness throughout From the Holy

Mountain. In contrast, William spends much of his time as narrator in Nine

Lives (particularly in the introduction) emphasising that this text seeks to move

away from the use of the narrator figure. The ironic, and rather self-reflexive,

nature of the narrator being employed to persuade the reader of the text’s

resistance to the centrality of the narrator is evident. Of course, in a text based

upon first-person observation, this move is impossible. Instead what eventuates

is a narrative structured around William’s interviews with the subjects of each

chapter, combined with an ethnographic-style description of the people, the

situation and William’s interactions with them, in a tone reminiscent of

television documentary.

Dalrymple’s essays each focus on a discrete Indian religion (or

manifestation of belief), ranging through Jainism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism,

various facets of Hinduism and others. Mainstream Islam and Hinduism and all

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of Christianity are left aside in favour of more esoteric and exotic beliefs and

practices. Each essay typically begins with a description of William’s travel to

the place in which a particular belief is practiced, and then moves to an

interview with a person Dalrymple has chosen to represent the particular

community of belief. Like The Age of Kali, Nine Lives is ultimately concerned

with the spectre of modernity: one of the key words of its subtitle In Search of

the Sacred in Modern India is “modern.” Dalrymple’s title prefigures an

essential conflict between religiosity and modernity—in modern India, the

sacred is something for which a search is required.

Less apocalyptic than Dalrymple’s earlier text, Nine Lives documents

less violence and chaos than The Age of Kali. Its more personal narratives of

modernity’s impact on “the sacred” record a slow “dying out” of the practices

that William documents. This is seen in his conversation with Srikanda, a

sculptor of god-figures: “‘I don’t know,’ said Srikanda, shrugging his

shoulders. ‘It’s all part of the world opening up. After all, as my son says, this

is the age of computers. And as much as I might want otherwise, I can hardly

tell him this is the age of the bronze caster’” (204). Here Dalrymple silently

emphasises the importance of his work as what might be the last record of a

vanishing practice. In this way, Nine Lives forms what Patrick Brantlinger calls

a “proleptic elegy” (3) for such practices—a lament for something not yet

gone, which functions to hasten its demise. Sallie Tisdale, in her amusing,

though nonetheless forcefully-argued, review article on travel writing for

Harper’s, skewers the desire of contemporary travellers to be the last to

document places or practices: “He [the travel writer] wanders the back roads,

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then writes his book so that everyone will know what matters most: not to be

the first to see remote lands but to be the last to see the land remote.” The

concern in Nine Lives about the encroachment of “modernity” (read

“development”) on rural spaces and foundering religious traditions conforms to

Tisdale’s description of the importance of the travel writer being last as well as

first. Such visions of faltering practices are carefully balanced, however, by

Dalrymple’s descriptions of renewals of faith.

The “sacred” in Nine Lives is found in an emphatic renunciation of

modernity, exemplified by Ajay Kumar Jha, a Sadhu (wandering holy man)

who turned his back on his former life as a sales manager for Kelvinator in

Bombay (x). Dalrymple represents Ajay Kumar Jha’s story as the inspiration

for his text: “The idea for this book was born sixteen years ago, on a high,

clear, Himalayan morning in the summer of 1993,” when William meets his

subject (ix). In a manner typical of Dalrymple’s texts, the exotic geographical

details of this moment of inspiration are foregrounded. He conveys his desire

to investigate “The sort of world where a committed, naked sadhu could also

be an MBA” (xi). In the end, the juxtaposition of these narratives—one in

which young men embrace (Westernised) modernity, and one in which it is

rejected and a “sacred” existence is pursued—is used to argue for a more

peaceful reality than The Age of Kali. The pervading sense remains of India as

a timeless repository of sacredness that will continue in much the same manner

as it “always has”:

for all the development that has taken place, many of the issues that I

found my holy men discussing and agonising about remained the same

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 eternal quandaries that absorbed the holy men of classical India,

thousands of years ago. …The water moves on, a little faster than before,

yet still the great river flows. It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods

as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks. (xv)

For all of the commentary about Dalrymple relegating the narrator to the

background, he here claims ownership of the people whose stories he relates

with his use of the word “my.” And in spite of his assertions of the decline of

the practices that he documents in particular chapters (which also implicitly

work to emphasise the importance of Dalrymple’s work), the overall

conclusion of the text is curiously anti-climactic. Despite dramatic differences

in their depiction of Indian society, The Age of Kali and Nine Lives both arrive

at the same point: that the essential Indianness of India remains unaffected by

Western intrusions. Debbie Lisle notes the romantic formulation of difference

as “an expression of ancient wisdom that has been lost in the modern world…

others should be valued because they are closer to the mysteries of nature,

spirituality and the universe” (85-86). The consequence of such a

representation of India’s sacred resilience is the removal of any need for

Western guilt about or responsibility for any legacy of imperialism. The

difference between the two texts is, of course, that in The Age of Kali this

conclusion consigns the country to political chaos, while in Nine Lives it gives

the nation a steady, unwavering sense of the sacred.

The Dalrymple effect

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William Dalrymple is now more than a simple author: he is a multi-media

figure who makes use of television, radio, newspapers, magazines and public

appearances to great effect. He has achieved a particular kind of literary

travelling celebrity status. Clarke’s succinct recapitulation of scholarly

approaches to travel and to celebrity highlights the similarities between the

fields.

In recent scholarship, travel has been figured either as oppressive and

colonizing, or as a force for disruption, hybridity and liberation.

Likewise, celebrity has been represented ambiguously as either

emblematic of the degeneration in public tastes, authority and

authenticity, or as a vector through which alternative and anti-hegemonic

politics and identities may be embodied and emboldened. (145)

In a distinctly untheorised way, Dalrymple’s authorial persona works with the

liberated, hybridised ways in which travel is conceived, and the individualistic

notion of celebrity as a vehicle for alternative views. This can be seen in his

self-positioning against academic, postcolonial “orthodoxy”—instead

championing his individualist views. Clarke also highlights the “complicated

set of mediated relations [celebrity travellers and travel celebrities have] with

their readerships, and the ways they are read and received—the uses to which

their ‘lives’ and their texts are employed” (146). Comprehensively, reviewers

have taken on Dalrymple’s self-representation without questioning it,

continuing his portrayal of William the travel writer / historian as an

individualistic, passionate but also detached commentator.

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 Clarke highlights the potential for celebrity travellers to become

metonymic of “their culture’s attempt to manage the privileged status it enjoys

in those [colonial and postcolonial] travel spaces” (146). Dalrymple’s nostalgia

for simpler, cosmopolitan, imperial British / Indian relations (chiefly advanced

through a highly gendered, exoticised and sexualised argument for hybridity

and cross-cultural relationships) can be read as a metonym (or at least as a

pervasive symptom) of a more widespread British imperial nostalgia. Renato

Rosaldo defines such nostalgia as a “paradox” (69): “someone deliberately

alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they

were prior to the intervention. … In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia

uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to

conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (70). Dalrymple’s

“innocent yearning” for an imperial past is embodied in his authorial self-

representation.

Clarke asks the question: “How does the celebrity of a traveller influence

the production, circulation, reception and re-packaging of travel texts?” (148).

The kind of celebrity expert status that Dalrymple cultivates, and the authority

that it brings, have the potential to limit a critical approach to his texts and,

simultaneously, to encourage readers and reviewers to accept his arguments at

face value.

Joe Moran usefully distinguishes from studies of celebrity in general the

category of “celebrity author.” For Moran, celebrity authors are “usually

‘crossover’ successes who emphasise both marketability and traditional

cultural hierarchies” (6). Moran sees literary celebrity as a negotiated process,

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involving the authors who “actively negotiate their own celebrity rather than

having it simply imposed on them” (10). This is certainly true of Dalrymple.

This examination of Dalrymple’s self-positioning uses James English and John

Frow’s analysis of literary authorship and celebrity culture. Although English

and Frow’s author figure is clearly an author of fiction, their statement that

“The model of the author as brand name is … a matter of the careful

management of a persona” (52) informs my consideration of Dalrymple.

English and Frow highlight the importance of the study of literary celebrity,

given its impact on what they call the “economics of literature” and the

“accumulation of literary capital (or power), and its convertibility into or out of

other kinds of capital (or power)” (55).

The events surrounding the publication of Nine Lives serve as further

examples of the ways in which Dalrymple transcends textual boundaries and

negotiates his celebrity status. To celebrate the publication of Nine Lives,

Dalrymple went on the sort of publicity tour that he has undertaken for his later

books, encompassing a global itinerary of lectures and writers’ festival events.

Dalrymple also engineered a touring stage-show, featuring two of the more

musical / theatrical figures in Nine Lives and other artists collected for the

occasion. The program for the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival claims:

“Dalrymple weaves the story of his latest book Nine Lives through a rich

variety of South Asian devotional music and spiritual transformation. …

Curated and narrated by Dalrymple, each element of this concert represents a

spiritual tradition from his book.” This depicts the event as a direct

transposition from book to performance, reinforcing the experiential version of

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authority on which travel writing relies. The show purports to engage the

audience with the characters within the text, although without removing the

figure of William the “narrator.”

Dalrymple was featured in a number of events for the Sydney Writers’

Festival. “What’s on Sydney” informs readers that the:

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in partnership with Sydney

Writers’ Festival is honoured to present Internationally [sic] acclaimed

writer and historian William Dalrymple discussing In Xanadu—His [sic]

epic journey in the footsteps of Marco Polo. William will be signing

copies of his bestseller, In Xanadu, and his latest book, Nine Lives, which

will be available for purchase on the night.

At Adelaide Writers’ Week, Dalrymple continued the theme of actively

comparing his works, particularly his travel texts, with a “Meet the Author”

session that comprised readings from In Xanadu through to Nine Lives (with

the exception of White Mughals). He repeatedly stressed the “silliness” of In

Xanadu and his young age at the time of writing, representing his later works

as more mature and serious. The reading of Nine Lives was characterised by a

much more sombre tone so that his latest work was represented as a nuanced,

ethnographic study of religion in India. He also took the opportunity to

promote his upcoming show at the Sydney Opera House. The online program

for the Sydney Writers’ Festival describes the performers in the Opera House

show and provides brief biographies:

Paban Das Baul has been a singer since childhood. Born in 1961 in

Murshidabad, he incarnates the synergy of his place of origin….

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 Susheela Raman is an acclaimed British Tamil musician. … Her work

combines South Indian classical music with funk, jazz, soul and

blues….The Bauls of Bengal are a group of itinerant mystic minstrels

whose beliefs draw on Vaishnavite Hindu and Sufi Muslim

thought….Hari Das, a Dalit well-digger and prison warder (and a

character in William Dalrymple’s book Nine Lives) is a practitioner of

theyyam, the possession dance of northern Kerala.

The links of some of the performers to nations and cultures other than South

Asia hinted at here (especially Susheela Raman’s British links and

contemporary influences) are never explicitly mentioned by Dalrymple. For

example, when writing about the touring show for The Daily Beast, Dalrymple

(somewhat disingenuously) represents her simply as “a smoky-voiced Tamil

diva who is struggling to keep alive a dying sacred song tradition from the

temples of Tamil Nadu on the southern tip of India.” He also argues for a direct

link between the show and the stories in the book, although only two of the

many performers appear in the text, stating that he wanted “to let the people

featured in the book share the stage, and to illuminate the text by performing

their different sacred arts.” MacLean endorses Dalrymple’s show with the

explanation that “With his Nine Lives concert tour, Dalrymple recognised that

the old formulas have lost their appeal. Today, travel writers who want to reach

audiences beyond their immediate family need to find a different way of

delivering their books, and not simply by creating a fan group on Facebook.”

Represented as reaching for a “new” way of presenting travel writing for a

world changed by Google and YouTube, this curious variety show (which

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recalls the figure of P.T. Barnum) differs from other international touring

exports in that it is Dalrymple who remains the drawcard and mediator.

Whether the tour eventually serves to sell more copies of Nine Lives is

irrelevant. Its main function is to maintain and increase Dalrymple’s profile

and status as an entertaining interpreter of all things Indian for a Western

audience.

Another way in which Dalrymple moves beyond the position of author to

that of “expert” is through his reviews. The assumption implicit in the genre is

that the reviewer has a level of knowledge at least equivalent to or higher than

than the author of the book that is being reviewed, and is certainly more

knowledgeable than the general reader. Dalrymple uses his numerous reviews

to position himself and maintain the arguments developed in his monographs.

For example, many of Dalrymple’s reviews share the anti-academic sentiment

of The Last Mughal. In his appraisal of Nicholas Dirks’ The Scandal of

Empire, published in the New York Review of Books, Dalrymple states: “the

references point toward research based largely on secondary published

material, with an emphasis on the theoretical work of Dirks’s academic friends

and colleagues in postcolonial studies” (“Plain Tales”). He argues that the

work was produced in an academic atmosphere that is necessarily closed and

self-referential. The ways in which Dalrymple responds to the texts he reviews,

particularly those directly in his field such as Dirks’, help to reveal the

mechanics of his own self-construction. This emphasis on primary sources

(placed in direct opposition to academic, theoretical and postcolonial work)

shows Dalrymple’s continuing reliance on his status as travel writer,

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privileging first-hand, experiential, eye-witness accounts over a more scholarly

approach: “My principal objection was that Dirks … seems to have accessed

surprisingly few primary sources in the course of his research, and certainly no

primary source in any Indian language” (“Scandal of Empire”).

Tony Ballantyne’s scholarly review of The Scandal of Empire forms a

contrast to Dalrymple’s responses to Dirks’ work, although both express

similar reservations about the text. Where Dalrymple focuses on Dirks’

academic connections and the downfalls of theory, Ballantyne provides a more

engaged analysis, with statements such as:

[Dirks’] use of scandal as an analytical lens lacks precision and is

unconvincing: although he frequently asserts the centrality of scandal in

the operation of the empire, he does not effectively demonstrate the ways

in which scandal actually drove wars of conquest or enabled the

extension of colonial authority on the ground. (430)

Ballantyne concludes that, due to Dirks’ comparisons of “George W. Bush’s

America and Edmund Burke’s Britain” (430): “Ultimately, The Scandal of

Empire will be primarily of value to future historians of American intellectual

life who want to assess the debates around the American invasion of Iraq, but

this is not a work that really pushes the historiography of colonial India or the

British empire in any new directions” (431). In contrast, Dalrymple, less

interested in “new directions” for imperial historiography, objects to Dirks

“roundly criticizing the work of those historians of the [East India] company

who have gone before him.” The gulf between these responses to the same

work highlights the ways in which reviews function beyond their capacity for

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evaluating the text in question. Dalrymple employs reviews of histories as

platforms to advance his own arguments about imperial historiography, which

inevitably value experiential forms of authority.

His journalism betrays this tendency, too, as seen when denouncing those

capitalising on the events of 11 September 2001: “in the past few months there

has been a stream of ‘instant books’ on September 11, as self-appointed experts

on ‘Islamic terrorism’ have popped up to offer their musings on a religion

that—judging by their work—few seem to have encountered in person”

(“Islam’s Outcasts”). Such statements highlight the centrality of Dalrymple’s

self-positioning as a cosmopolitan figure whose authority is derived from

personal encounters with his subjects. This self-construction exists in tandem

with the character of the historian as passionate traveller and researcher, boldly

presenting his forays into what is represented as “virgin” archival territory (as

opposed to sullied and derivative scholarship).

Dalrymple writes and reviews regularly, and is published in high profile

and popular newspapers and periodicals, including, but not limited to, the

Times, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Independent, the New York

Review of Books and the Washington Post. Thus, through his articles and

reviews, in combination with his monographs, Dalrymple functions as a

gatekeeper figure, mediating both popular and academic texts, debates and

scholarship. Dalrymple possesses the power of a celebrity as one who is, by

virtue of their fame, given “greater presence and a wider scope of activity and

agency than are those who make up the rest of the population” (Marshall ix).

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 Dalrymple’s journalism—essays, reviews, and articles—works to

broaden and maintain his status as an authority on Indian history, politics and

culture. The value of his particular, ethnographically-inspired invocation of

experiential authority, combined with his move into the archives in his

narrative history works, is extensive.

The heady combination of Dalrymple’s travel and accumulated

experience of India, alongside his successful forays into the archives, has

enabled this elevation in his status. The two elements combine to advance the

representation of Dalrymple as simultaneously knowledgeable about historical

and contemporary India. The immediacy of travel negates the suggestion of

irrelevance which can (however unfairly) beset even “celebrity” historians, and

the weight of history counters the potential frivolity of the traveller. Dalrymple

also appears to relish the necessary publicity, which Aviva Tuffield documents

in the course of an interview about White Mughals: “When I suggest that he

might resent this extended promotional work, Dalrymple quickly interjects:

‘Not at all. I enjoy it. Writing is a grind and this is the reward. I’m a terrible

show-off and love performing.’” The combination of all of these elements with

Dalrymple’s clever self-fashioning contributes to his undiminished popularity.

In an analysis of Dalrymple’s self-representation in the fields of travel

and history, the figure of V.S. Naipaul is an appropriate parallel. As Rob

Nixon’s carefully argued London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial

Mandarin shows, Naipaul is a master of the strategic characterisation of the

author. Nixon describes London Calling as “working through the consequences

of the rhetorical ambience of exile and detachment that surrounds Naipaul’s

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nonfictional persona” (19). Both Naipaul and Dalrymple work at increasing

and maintaining their authority by the means of their self-positioning through

their works of non-fiction (and, simultaneously, through their presence in the

public sphere).

Travel writing has often been perceived as the poor cousin of fiction

(which is seen as “real” literature), and a common defence of the travel genre is

that it possesses the same recourse to invention and imagination as fiction.

Fussell works hard to defend what he sees as Robert Byron’s “masterpiece”

(79) The Road to Oxiana by highlighting the efforts that the author went to and

the literary conventions that he followed, stating: “it seems not to be a fiction.

But it is. It is an artfully constructed quest myth in the form of an apparently

spontaneous travel diary” (95-96). Nixon shows that, in an entirely opposite

way, travel writing’s non-fictional nature can provide more cultural capital

than fiction. He notes that:

[Naipaul’s] prestige as a novelist has surely assisted him in sustaining his

high profile as an interpreter of the postcolonial world. However, by

venturing into travel writing and journalism he has garnered a reputation

of a different order, one that goes beyond the conventionally literary to

the point where—in those border regions where British and American

belles-lettres meet popularized political thought—he is treated as a

mandarin possessing a penetrating, analytic understanding of Third

World societies. In short, he has grown into an “expert.” (4)

Nixon’s description of Naipaul’s use of the modes of authority supplied by

travel writing has significant resonances with Dalrymple and his work: “travel

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literature, as a hybrid genre, places two quite different styles of authority at

Naipaul’s disposal: a semiethnographic, distanced, analytic mode and an

autobiographical, subjective, emotionally entangled mode. Naipaul maximizes

his discursive power by alternating between these forms of authority” (15).

Both Naipaul and Dalrymple are inherently conservative in their arguments,

despite their self-positioning as individuals with the courage to stand up to

orthodoxy. They affect, albeit in different and nuanced ways, the persona of the

nineteenth-century British gentleman. Naipaul is represented as an “expert” in

a wide, third world, field whereas Dalrymple becomes an authority on India

and Islam. This is due in significant part to their use of self-positioning as,

simultaneously, outside, inside and between the cultures they are writing about

and those that they are writing for:

The empirical and even moral authority of his travel writing has been tied

to an interpretation of Naipaul as truly uncompromised by national and

political attachments. According to this reading, he possesses a singular

capacity to marry the roles of insider and outsider, thereby ostensibly

achieving an impartial style of apprehension. (Nixon 18)

Notions of diaspora and marginality are central here, despite the strange nature

of such labels for Dalrymple, given his privileged, upper-class position.

Naipaul achieves this “marriage” of the personal and the marginal to a greater

degree than Dalrymple. However, Dalrymple’s case is important because he

manages to reach a comparable style of self-positioning without Naipaul’s

brown skin, and the constant reminder of otherness (for a white, Western

audience) that this visual marker brings.

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 Dalrymple works to project this image of nomadic otherness onto / over

his white, privileged subjectivity through regular emphasis on the time that he

has spent away from the United Kingdom. He emphasises his disconnectedness

through statements such as:

this is not unique to the travel writer or traveller: any diaspora feels the

same. You talk to any Indian kid brought up here [in the UK] but sent

back to the Punjab for school holidays with all their cousins in the

Punjab. …there is a bit of them that can never be entirely English and

there is a bit of them which is always English when they go to the

Punjab. Travellers have the same dilemma if they spend enough time

away. (Interview with Tim Youngs 46)

Dalrymple compounds this self-representation as a cosmopolitan, travelling

figure through his wardrobe, which features a combination of Indian kurtas and

a particular style of travel-inflected clothes. These take their tone from what

has become costume shorthand for the quintessential (moneyed, male)

traveller: the rumpled linen shirt, well-made, well-scuffed brown leather shoes

and so on. The aesthetic achieved is certainly wilfully anachronistic in the age

of microfibre materials and drip-dry travel-wear. In an interview with

Dalrymple for The Age, Tuffield notes: “His enthusiasm is one of the first

things I notice about him—along with the ‘seasoned traveller’ look that he has

got down pat, wearing a crumpled collarless blue shirt and creased cream linen

pants.” Dalrymple’s wardrobe choices advance connections with India and also

with those inter-war British travellers like Byron and Waugh that Fussell

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eulogises in Abroad. For Fussell, Waugh is “a hero of British skepticism and

empiricism” (202). Of Byron, he enthuses:

Deeply infused with his humanistic curiosity, the travel book in his hands

becomes a vehicle of scholarship, but without forfeiting outrage and

humour, and without forgoing a generous comic embrace of all the

anomalies and dislocations synonymous with travel. (79)

His material construction, through its anachronistic nature, casts him as

somewhat removed from contemporary British society, without compromising

his overall Britishness. What emerges is a slightly eccentric figure who appears

more at home travelling, or in the archives, than within a particular nation or

national identity.

Dalrymple’s self-representation is not static. It changes in nuance

according to the situation (and which of his texts are under discussion). For

example, when undertaking interviews and other publicity events surrounding

the publication of White Mughals, he cuts a much more Orientalist figure (as

opposed to the travel-inflected persona attached to Nine Lives). Jackie Kemp

describes Dalrymple, his home and family in the course of her interview with

him at the time of the publication of Nine Lives: “Dressed in a flowing kurti,

eating weetabix under a sunshade on the verandah of his Delhi home, he

demonstrates in his own life a supreme ability to reconcile the cultural

collisions that make up this complex continent.” Here Dalrymple directly

embodies his work and his arguments. The most obvious instance of

Dalrymple’s self-fashioning is in relation to the publication of White Mughals.

Natasha Mann describes visiting his home in the United Kingdom in order to

267
interview the author: “The house is all pretty England outside, but full of

possessions from Dalrymple’s Indian life inside: Indian music is playing when

I arrive, and there’s a pungent aroma of burning incense.” This self-

representation is heightened by Dalrymple’s emphasis on his attachment to the

central female character in White Mughals, Khair un-Nissa. In an interview

with Tuffield, he relates the story of “catching his eight-year-old daughter

showing a friend that [paperback edition] cover picture and saying something

about ‘Daddy’s girlfriend’!”

Due to the sheer number of interviews and publicity events that

Dalrymple undertakes alongside the release of each of his monographs, there

arises an inevitable amount of repetition. The same anecdotes are shared, the

same description of how each text functions is given, and the ways in which

Dalrymple represents himself are consistent, though they shift in nuance with

each text. The extent to which the answers to similar interview questions

quickly take on a rehearsed quality is important. Such a recognition is not

intended as a criticism, rather as a means of highlighting the structured nature

of the book tour. That Dalrymple’s press engagements generally repeat

themselves works against an argument for a dismissal of his interview

comments or writers’ festival reading choices as “off-the-cuff” or “random”

and therefore deserving of less analysis. The uniformity of his publicity

appearances shows the extent to which each element is part of Dalrymple’s

performance and persona. Particularly resonating examples in this context are

the extracts and anecdotes chosen to illustrate Dalrymple’s texts. Stephen

Greenblatt enumerates the power of the anecdote as representative—it is

268
“significant in terms of a larger progress or pattern” (3). His image of

anecdotes being “seized in passing from the swirl of experiences and given

some shape,” highlights the anecdote’s character as simultaneously casual and

representative of a larger truth (3).

In Dalrymple’s promotion of White Mughals the anecdote chosen is

invariably the tale of Sir David Ochterlony and his thirteen wives parading

nightly around Delhi on their individual elephants. This story, in the text’s

endnotes, turns out to be “folklore” (514). The excerpts chosen to represent

The Last Mughal always include a reading of what Dalrymple introduces as

Zafar’s “final” poetry, lamenting the fall of Delhi. The endnotes of The Last

Mughal reveal that the poetry recited is not written by Zafar (473). These

mitigating sources behind the fragments that Dalrymple repeatedly chooses to

represent his texts are not mentioned in his readings, interviews or public

events. This is particularly important given the aura of “truth” that surrounds

Dalrymple’s works of history, and which is bound up in his arguments for the

value of narrative history and its ability to entertain as well as inform the

reader. Likewise, in the case of his Nine Lives concert tour, Dalrymple

represents the performances as a simple translation from text to stage. This

representation does not appear to be limited by the (much subsumed) fact that

only two of the performers feature in Dalrymple’s text.

Dalrymple’s self-fashioning is effected through his journalism,

monographs, reviews, public appearances and, lately, stage-shows. His

growing celebrity and expert status highlights the success of this self-

positioning in relation to the modes of authority available to the travel writer

269
and narrative historian: the uncontestable truth of autobiographical assertions;

the detached, objective findings of the ethnographically-inclined participant

observer; and, crucially, the continual shifting between the two. Analysis of

The Age of Kali and Nine Lives illustrates the ways in which Dalrymple’s

travel, history and journalistic writing work together to reinforce his self-

fashioning as an authority and to carry his arguments about past and

contemporary relationships between India and Britain into the public sphere.

That both Dalrymple’s self-representation and his version of Britain’s imperial

past are suffused with nostalgia for a particular idealised, sentimental vision of

empire as a place of hybridity and symbiotic relationships is significant.

Writers such as Dalrymple, who fall somewhere in between the “literary”

high-brow and the popular, best-selling types of contemporary travel writing,

have received little in the way of critical examination. This thesis, through its

focus on the popular works of Dalrymple, highlights the importance of this

overlooked area. David Carter makes the point (in relation to fiction) that

“neither literary criticism nor cultural studies have had much to say about that

broad domain of culture that is neither auratically high nor happily popular—

the vast middle where high culture values are folded into the commodity form

of quality entertainment or discerning lifestyle choice” (174). The self-

improvement or self-educational aspect of middlebrow reading is integral:

“Reading is being deployed for exercises in ‘self-fashioning’ in which class

privilege is rendered as a form of social conscience” (Carter 198). This aspect

of the author / reader relationship further cements Dalrymple’s position as

“expert,” as his work is situated as educational and improving for the reader.

270
Dalrymple’s combination of autobiographical and archival authorities and his

positioning of his later texts as strictly non-fiction, satisfy the self-educational

impulse of middlebrow readership.

English and Frow enumerate the difficulties encountered relating the

subject of the (fiction) writer’s texts to their authorial persona: “books are not

performances of a persona in the way that a film or a song can be taken to be:

the figure of the writer does not occupy the stage as that of the performer does”

(English and Frow 52). When considering works such as Dalrymple’s first-

person, heavily autobiographical travel and history texts, however, the subject

and the figure of the author are blurred in the eyes of readers and stage show

audiences.

Dalrymple’s autobiographical presence is the central thread that runs

through all of his works. Also common to Dalrymple’s monographs is a

continually positive representation of the British imperial past. He nostalgically

portrays British colonial relations in India (and the Middle East) as a syncretic,

hybrid model to be admired, emulated and cherished for its attractive

idiosyncrasies. This enables a representation of empire as an early version of a

sentimentally characterised globalisation. While an attractive notion, such an

investment in a vision of a global, humanist cosmopolitanism is necessarily

achieved through a denial or elision of the violence and power disparities

inherent in imperialism.

Dalrymple’s growing celebrity, and his spread over multiple genres and

various media platforms, is significant. The expert status with which he is

conferred, in combination with this media saturation, could see Dalrymple’s

271
version of India (past and present) becoming the popularly accepted norm.

That such a nostalgic, anachronistic, Orientalist interpretation of India achieves

this level of popularity is perhaps unsurprising—the vision of cross-cultural

cosmopolitanism that it advocates is an attractive one—however, such an

overwhelmingly positive representation of empire requires appropriate

balances.

Stephen Greenblatt’s succinct assessment that “Representational

practices are ideologically significant” (4) is particularly resonant with texts as

popular as Dalrymple’s. Lisle recounts the travel genre’s importance in the

colonial era for spreading Orientalist tropes throughout the wider population:

“unlike academic texts, travelogues were able to disseminate the power

relations of Empire to a much wider audience” (28). This popular range applies

equally today, enabled by new, multi-media strategies for audience

engagement.

Dalrymple’s frequent collapsing of the temporal boundaries between past

and contemporary India means that his representation of the past impacts on

readers’ conceptions of the present. Dalrymple’s oeuvre does not challenge

longstanding Orientalist representations of India (or the East, or Islam).

Instead, it reinforces them. The evident popularity of these views might be

expected, given their symbolic power yet it is crucial to question these

comfortable, Orientalist representations in order to move beyond inherited

imperial attitudes and narratives.

272
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