Category: Personal

William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993)

OK, so I can see what all the hype is about. William Dalrymple is a deft storyteller with a fine sense of pacing, an eye for detail, and the depth of research to back it all up.

City of Djinns isn’t his most famous book, but it’s the one most structured as a travelogue about India, so that’s what I read. In it, Dalrymple peels back the layers of Delhi’s history, moving in reverse-chronological order: Partition, the British Raj, the Mughals, and so on, back to the scant remains of the time of the Mahabarata. It’s a clever approach, one that creates a surprising degree of suspense that would have been lacking if we’d gone the other way: the Raj and Partition and modern India are well enough known, but the deeper threads, the long-lost layers, keep us wondering just how far back we can go and what strange wonders we might discover there.

Dalrymple marries this story to a cycle of a year spent in Delhi. His own personal adventures are limited and structured enough that they feel illuminating rather than self-indulgent, and his relationship in particular with his taxi-wallah connects with his various jaunts to historical sites and to meet with various people who represent different aspects of Delhi’s history. Still, one wonders whether Dalrymple’s personal activities really did map so neatly, so that he always ran across the next layer back in Delhi’s history at just the time of year when he’d finished with the last. There are just too many coincidences of this sort — sometimes presented with clunky cliffhanger transitions — which calls the whole framework into question. How much of this really happened? How much happened in the way Dalrymple described it?

For all that, I learned an enormous amount about Delhi from the always entertaining City of Djinns, and I would approach the city differently if I visited it now, having read this book. Some of Dalrymple’s approach, both to historical time and to the spinning of good yarns, seems well worth appropriating for my own work. In particular, I can imagine peeling back the layers of history I want to tell, from my own personal choice to travel to India, to the cultural millieu that made that choice plausible, to the world of spiritualism behind that, and back to the Oriental renaissance.

In City of Djinns, William Dalrymple shows himself to be a fine popular historian and travel writer with a flair for revealing anecdotes and a skillful way with research. These are high achievements for any writer.

Sam Miller, India Through Foreign Eyes (2014)

Is this a travel book or a history? Both and neither, to its detriment. It purports to be a selective telling of the history of foreign (not, thankfully, always Western) descriptions of India, but Miller injects enough of his own story that it’s also about his own experiences and relationships in India that the book tilts out of balance, feeling self-indulgent in a way it might not have if it had just been a story about Sam Miller with some history thrown in.

Part of the trouble is with the personal story Miller has to tell, and with the way he tells it. He starts off by saying he’s married to an Indian woman and has lived for many years in India, which serves as a kind of preemptive defense should anyone think him too English. This is fine as far as it goes, but gradually little details slip out that show that this graduate of Cambridge and SOAS is something other than an ordinary traveler who fell in love. He more or less waltzes into a job as the BBC’s lead India correspondent — a position he takes first as a substitute for the well known travel writer Mark Tulley, who’s out of town when a crisis erupts — and later we discover that Miller is living in the same Delhi apartment where William Dalrymple wrote City of Djinns. No wonder he got blurbed by Dalrymple! No one is this well connected by sheer accident, and this degree of privilege, hidden but hinted at so you don’t miss it, makes Miller’s frequent protestations of ordinariness and commitment to Indian feel strained and awkward.

There were, here and there, some interesting nuggets that I’d overlooked, like the discovery that Steve Jobs, influenced by Be Here Now, quit his Atari job and wandered around Northern India with holy men for a while. For the most part, though, India Through Foreign Eyes felt like a competently edited summary of various books by John Keay and others, with a bit of travelogue thrown in. It was perhaps most helpful in pointing to the kind of travel book I don’t want to write: one where the erudition feels like summary rather than synthesis, and where the travel feels like interlude rather than adventure.

Patrick Holland and Graham Huggin, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998)

In preparation for writing a book about travel, I’m reading a lot of travel books. In preparation for that, I read Tourists with Typewriters, one of the few books of critical analysis of the travel genre. The focus is on contemporary travel writing, which for Huggan and Holland means the latter half of the twentieth century.

Intelligent but sometimes muddled, Tourists with Typewriters never quite lives up to the witty promise of its title. It’s very much a book of its time. Published in the same year that I finished my first travels in India and Nepal, it freights itself with the word “millennium,” goes for a swim in the murky waters of a poorly articulated postmodernism, and takes breathless notice of an internet just beginning to transform everything about travel.

Still, it has much to offer if you’re about to take a deep dive into travel writing’s greatest hits, with trenchant looks at everyone from Theroux and Chatwin to Naipaul and Iyer. In a chapter on post-colonial writing, Huggan and Holland throw some good punches at the anachronistic British white males bumbling about in embarrassed nostalgia for empire, and also at some of the writers from the colonies who seem interested more in indicting Western culture than in talking about real people and places. Following that, a chapter on “zones” takes a look at the recurring tropes in writing about the tropics, the Orient (mainly Japan), the South Seas, and the arctic. While South Asia doesn’t make the list, the analyses of these other zones is fair warning that any travel book is in danger of reaching for easy cliches. It was this chapter, more than anything else, than made it clear to me how necessary it would be to read the heavy hitters on India — Naipaul, Dalrymple, Tulley, Sukhetu Mehta — if only to avoid unknowingly repeating them. After all, my image of India was shaped not just by personal experience, but by The Lonely Planet, which in turn was shaped by received ideas about India. It’s not that one must never repeat anything another author has said — the Taj Mahal was beautiful when I went there, even if others had already said so — but that one should understand the tropes and framings that animate the works of others and make a conscious decision about whether to echo or counter them.

Things get more difficult in a chapter called “Gender and Other Troubles,” which runs into what I think of as the gay traveler’s paradox: that for a Western male traveler, fucking the locals is exploitive if they’re women but liberatory if they’re men. To be fair, Tourists with Typewriters was written before intersectionality became a watchword, but it’s still a startling oversight. You could make the case, I suppose, that there’s a difference in what it means to be a woman engaged with a foreigner and a man engaged with a foreigner, and that this difference is decisive — men, for example, may have more local power, and aren’t at risk of pregnancy — but no such case is ever made. There does seem to be an argument that gay men, more than straight men, are traveling in search of opportunities for legitimate sexual expression that have to be suppressed at home, but this too is suspect when you’re talking about men leaving behind, say, Britain of the fifties for the South Pacific. Why should the gay escape from prudery be privileged? And why shouldn’t gay travelers be held to account the way straight ones are for their unequal relationships?

The chapter on “postmodern itineraries” is as muddled and impenetrable as you would hope, and a final chapter, on travel writing at the millennium, is one of those adorably dated looks at an early internet in motion. Best not to say too much about them. Overall, Tourists with Typewriters is useful both as a window into what is considered travel writing serious enough to review, and into some of the more common pitfalls of such writing.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922)

There is much that is wrong with Siddhartha.

For one thing, it’s an orientalist fantasy of India written by someone who’d never been there. Siddhartha is a quintessential product of the German Oriental renaissance, which, free from the practical realities of colonialism, could maintain an Orient of the mind, an Orient of ancient texts. Siddhartha takes place not in any real India, but in the India of Shakuntala. And I know the dark turn this German Orientalism had already taken, casting the Aryans as the true founders of Western civilization, demoting the Greco-Roman and Semitic to mere sterile interlopers — and, with them, the Napoleonic French who had so recently humiliated them, and their language, which had taken over European intellectual discourse as the replacement for Latin. We all know where German Aryanism ended up, and though this can’t be blamed on Hermann Hesse in 1922, the Germanic presentation of haughtily pure and perfect brahmins can be a little discomfiting.

Siddhartha is also, like all of Hesse’s important works, an adolescent book, in that it elevates the very adolescent quest for independence and self-knowledge into the highest good over a lifetime. Such a quest is a common enough pursuit for young adults, in the West at least, but most of us make our peace with the inevitable ambiguities of life and shift our focus to other concerns: love, family, career, creativity. We may feel twinges of regret for lost idealism, but in Siddhartha, this comes to be seen as a full-blown betrayal, which is an appealing view if you’re still in the midst of your youthful discovery phase and sure — as young people tend to be — that you will never settle into the ordinariness of your fucking parents.

And there is the further irony in putting all this adolescent rebellion into an Indian setting. India, still in the twenty-first century a land of arranged marriages and caste-bound social lives, is less amenable to quests for personal independence than almost anywhere else. Reading V.S. Naipaul and others, one gets a sense of how embedded Indians are within complex networks of identity. Who you are is who you are among, and there is little notion of simply rejecting all of it and starting fresh as an individual. This is a German idea, not an Indian one.

When I first read Siddhartha in my senior year of high school, I knew very little about India and nothing about German orientalism. I did know that I was struggling to break free of my parents’ religiosity, just as Siddhartha struggled to break free from the empty ritual life of his father. Four years later, when the idea of traveling to India came to me in a half-sleep, surely Siddhartha was there in the background. I didn’t travel to India on a conscious spiritual quest. Like Siddhartha, I felt I’d already had enough of teachers, that I needed to discover the world on my own, which is why I spent no time in ashrams or monasteries during that trip.

But perhaps Hermann Hesse had something to do with my half-formed notion that wandering aimlessly around India was a way to break free from a prescribed and rote course of life. I went to India because it was easier than starting a career, and because I was terrified of starting a career, which I imagined would chain me to a desk for forty years with no summer vacations and no adventures. Just why I thought India was the right place to go is a question I’ve been pursuing, and Siddhartha is one of the points of direct contact I can identify between the cultural body of received ideas and my own young self.

I remember, back in high school, liking Siddhartha and then not liking it. I liked — loved — the part where Siddhartha rebels against his father and goes off to find himself. I waited for him to become the Buddha, so I was startled when the Buddha turns out to be someone else. And then I remember being disappointed when Siddhartha went to the city, fell in with a courtesan, and became a wealthy merchant. I was still too young to get it. When Siddhartha finally leaves that life for the simplicity of being a ferryman, and at last finds true enlightenment in his old age, I saw it as too little too late. Who wants to wait so long for enlightenment, or to suffer so much along the way?

What Siddhartha misses — what Siddhartha misses — is that the way to find meaning in ordinary life is through human connection. Siddhartha stays aloof. He enjoys his courtesan but doesn’t marry her. He never has a child (that he knows about). He’s generous in business, but he never sees his business dealings as important to the community. What most of us learn is that to know thyself, you have to know others. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life that is examined but not experienced is no life at all.

Young people just starting out in life don’t know all this. What I learned in India was, first, what it was like to be utterly alone, and second, how to connect with others. I didn’t quite learn how to take real life seriously — that would come later — but it was the beginning of my discovery that what’s outside is more interesting than what’s inside.

For all its flaws, Siddhartha had me on the edge of tears for much of the way through. It’s a beautiful fable, and one can recognize the absurdity of one’s adolescent self while still mourning the passing of that self and its passions. Maybe that’s what this whole project is, writing about that formative four months in South Asia. Maybe that’s what the bildungsroman is, and why they’re written by adults rather than children.

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Difficult, tendentious, infuriating, indispensible. What is there to say now about Orientalism, a work that altered its field so profoundly? Orientalism, for all its flaws — and they are many — is a book like On the Origin of Species or The Interpretation of Dreams, a book that created around itself a before and an after. For any Westerner writing about the East, Orientalism is something you have to grapple with (and if you haven’t it shows, Elizabeth Gilbert!).

The first time I read Orientalism, I remember arguing with Said quite a bit as I went along. This time, having read a great deal more of the scholarship he’s talking about, I didn’t argue as much. It was clearer what he was attacking and what he wasn’t, and it read less like an assault on all of Western thought than like a lament for the shift from the earliest Orientalists, the translators and enthusiasts, to the institutionalized purveyors of recycled truisms in service of empire.

A danger, with Orientalism — one for which Said takes some of his critics to task in an afterword — is slipping into that universalist mindset, which is exactly what Said is attacking. A lengthy book insisting that the recurring error of Orientalism is to essentialize should not be read as essentializing all of Western thought or scholarship. Another danger is letting Orientalism live too much inside your head, to where you can no longer speak your own thoughts and experiences because you hear Edward Said whispering in your ear, questioning whether your thoughts are your own or just the received idea, and if the latter, whether you’d be doing harm by recapitulating them. If everyone who travels to India, for example, reports seeing many of the same things, there is the possibility that it’s because those things are actually there, and that they are interestingly different from what you find elsewhere, and that it’s not merely a set of received ideas derived from books.

That said, it’s undeniable that we all came to India expecting or hoping for certain things — carrying certain ideas — and Said is illuminating in describing how these ideas came to be, and how they came to be repeated.

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)

I used to love John Steinbeck, around the same time that I loved Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Not everything holds up. As I got older, Steinbeck’s dime-store preachiness began to seem cloying, and I thought of Cannery Row as his novel with the least of that stuff. Rereading it again, I’m sorry to say that it too suffers from the usual Steinbeckian defects.

I read this book somewhere in India, or at least I think I did. My travel notes mention that I read Steinbeck, and I can’t imagine what other book of his I might have read, but I honestly don’t remember when or where I read Cannery Row on that trip.

Reading it now, it’s an interesting contrast to On the Road, written around the same time. Kerouac and Steinbeck both write about bummy folks in California, but where Steinbeck valorizes and patronizes his poor characters, turning them into clowns or saints or clown-saints, Kerouac actually lives among them, is one of them. Cannery Row is an elegy; On the Road is an ejaculation.

And what hath all this to do with India? Not much, I’m afraid, except that I probably felt back then like Steinbeck was doing something noble in trying to give humanity to the poor, something India can make extremely difficult.

Mark Liechty, Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (2017)

In 2002, on my second trip to the Indian Subcontinent, I began with a ten-day meditation course at Kopan Monastery in the Kathmandu Valley. We began our days in silence, sipping our chai to the sound of Tibetan Buddhist prayer emerging from the main gompa: deep, rumbling chanting, punctuated with cymbal clashes and horn blasts. For ten days, we lived among the Tibetans. The monastery served as a school for children, and we watched as the young monks engaged in raucous outdoor debating sessions, or simply ran and played as kids do, little streaks of excitable maroon zipping in and out of the buildings.

Our course was led by Karin Valham, a Swedish nun who had come to Nepal in the 1970s and stayed on. In the afternoons we got into debates with her, sometimes contentious, and I began to wonder how well she understood either Tibetan Buddhism or Western philosophy. A couple of times we had answer sessions with Lama Lhundrup, through a young translator, and tried to get answers to our more difficult questions. At one point, the lama was giving a fairly mechanical idea of how karma works — if you’re handsome, it’s because you were humble in a past life, if you’re rich it’s because you were generous, and so on — when a woman asked if this meant people in Hollywood had the best karma. There was a long exchange between the translator and the lama, and then the translator asked, “Excuse me, Hollywood is in America?”

It was a charming moment, and we took it as a delightful proof of authenticity: here was a small remaining corner of the world where Hollywood was less important than holy words. But perhaps we should have known better.

In Far Out, Mark Liechty tells the story of Kopan Monastery and much else besides. This unusual book is a fascinating look not just at how tourists came to Nepal and responded to it, but how Nepal and Nepalis responded to tourists and shaped their experiences. Beginning in the 1950s, Nepal became a playground for the wealthy who wanted to go to the ends of the earth, a kind of last haven of Raj nostalgia where you could meet exotic royalty and hunt tigers. That phase gave way to mountaineering and adventure tourism, driven by the 1953 summitting of Everest.

And then, starting in the 1960s, the hippies started to come, both on the overland route and increasingly by air. Liechty clearly has a soft spot for this generation of travelers — it’s there in the title — and like a lot of people, he seems to imagine it as something of a golden age. And for a lot of Nepalis it was. Liechty, who speaks Nepali, conducted extensive interviewers with Nepalis who were part of the tourist trade, or who partook of the hippie culture. One gets an extraordinary, all-too-rare sense of the Nepalis as participants in the global youthquake that shook that era.

The hippie phenomenon lasted a little longer in Kathmandu than elsewhere in the world, but it had to fade there too, and it did, especially after Nepal banned marijuana sales (but not possession) under US pressure. Liechty seems a little chagrinned at the newer wave of Westerners who were less willing to slum it and get dysentery, who wanted basic creature comforts on their relatively short vacations, though this era also brough a lot more money to Nepal (but you can get the impression tourism is the main part of the Nepali economy, when in fact it’s just 7.9%, well under the global average of 10.3%). As Pico Iyer discovered in Video Night, tripping gave way to trekking in this era.

Liechty also documents another shift in Kathmandu that has broader global parallels. I had already noted that Tibetan Buddhism was for Gen X what Hinduism had been for the boomers. Ravi Shankar played at Montery Pop, the Beatles and Donovan went to Rishikesh, and Swami Satchidananda spoke at Woodstock. Well, I went to the Tibetan Freedom Concert, hosted by the Beastie Boys, and everyone was there. Hinduism lacked a way for outsiders, mleccha, to become a real part of it, but Buddhism welcomed everyone.

And that’s where Koman Monastery comes in. We saw it as a Tibetan institution, but it turns out to have been something more complex and hybrid. Liechty tells the story of Zina Rachevski, a Hollywood socialite, an heiress of Russian, possibly Russian Jewish, descent and pretended royalty who was known as “the princess,” had an affair with Marlon Brando in Paris, declared herself the reincarnation of Madam Blavatsky in Greece, and eventually wandered to India, where she met two Tibetan lamas living in a refugee camp. She got them out of there and into better lodgings, then brought them to Kathmandu, where she encouraged them to teach the Westerners who hung around Bodnath (there appears to have been some sort of rivalry between the Buddhist trekker types there and the Hindu stoner types out by Swayambunath). Rachevsky wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, and after a while she seems to have been pushed out. In the end she departed for a three-year silent retreat at a remote monastery near Everest — her Buddhism seems to have been sincere — and there died of a stomach ailment. She was in her forties.

No one ever mentioned Rachevsky while I was at Kopan. She’s a poor fit for an institution that sells itself as an authentic outpost of Tibetan culture — more authentic than what you can find these days in Tibet itself, since Kopan is free from Chinese government inteference. Yet Kopan is an authentic manifestation of something Nepal excels at, which is bringing together elements of its own culture, those of its neighbors north and south, and those of the West to create something unique and inviting. The earliest Westerners to visit Nepal were struck by its syncretic mix of Hinduism and Buddhism, and that syncretic instinct lives on: in Tibetan monasteries with Swedish nuns giving courses designed for Westerners, in restaurants where the pizza is topped with buffalo cheese, in trekking lodges of Thakali-style stone with names like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, where they bring the apple fritters and spring roles to the hot table with the brazier of coals underneath to keep your legs warm. India has a reputation for absorbing and making Indian every influence that comes to it; Nepal, always a little different, has its own way of taking those outside influences and reflecting them back in enticing ways. Liechty tells this story well and with admirable depth, giving Nepalis a voice in their own story of engaging the wider world through the twentieth century.

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (1970)

Roland Barthes went to Japan. Or did he?

In what has to be one of the strangest dodges in the long history of travel writing, Barthes opens his book about Japan by declaring that he will not be “claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse),” but rather gather together some features from somewhere, call them a system, and name that system Japan. Are we clear? So later, after rhapsodizing about chopsticks and before rhapsodizing about the shape of Asian eyes, when Barthes lets it slip that he’s been checking out boys in rope bondage, you should keep in mind that there are in fact no boys, no ropes, only a system, and so you needn’t worry whether Monsieur has engaged in any major gesture of Western discourse.

Such slight of hand, of course, is not convincing, and one wonders if it’s all tongue in cheek. The caveat is as much a tradition of travel writing as descriptions of native dress, and here Barthes has simply taken it to a degree of absurdity worthy of a post-structuralist. What comes across, once you get past all the mumbo jumbo, are the sketchy observations of a clever visitor who liked Japan very much during his short time there. This is fine, I suppose, but Empire of Signs is already a short book, and if you were to take out the impenetrable semiotics nonsense, it would be little more than some jottings. Which is maybe all that it is.

So why did I end up reading it? Because people who write about travel writing inevitably cite it, that’s why. And here, perhaps, is Barthes’ most skillful magic trick: he has written a travel book that he claims is not a travel book, and in doing so he has turned it into a suitcase, always there for the next theorist to unpack.