Monday, September 21, 2009

William Dalrymple on travel writing

"What happens to travel writing now that the world is smaller?" wonders the writer William Dalrymple:

The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of "Bokhara Burnes" may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe?

Certainly, the sort of attitudes to "abroad" that characterised the writers of the 1930s, and which had a strange afterlife in the curmudgeonly prose of Theroux and his imitators, now appears dated and racist. Indeed, the globalised world has now become so complex that notions of national character and particularity - the essence of so many 20th-century travelogues - is becoming increasingly untenable, and even distasteful. So has the concept of the western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captives to the pages of his album. In an age when east to west migrations are so much more common than those from west to east, the "funny foreigners" who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of the best travel pieces themselves. Even just to take a few of those with roots in India - Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra - is to list many of the most highly regarded writers currently at work.

I would argue that the best travel books do not even come under the travel label: they may thought of as books of history, anthropology or politics. In fact, my favorite books this year -- Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night; Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos; Vaasanthi's Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars; Sumantra Bose's Contested Lands; Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs to Differ -- are all travel books, even though their authors may not think of them in such a narrow way.

So Dalrymple's question, whether travel writing has a future, is a bit silly -- just small talk. Good nonfiction writing about a place or people -- whether it is history, a particular sociopolitical trend, or current affairs -- automatically qualifies as travel writing. And there's plenty of it going around.

5 comments:

Alex Engwete said...

You're right in your conclusion, Hari. That's "small talk" indeed. Two minds can't feel a place the same way. And your previous post just proves this contention... I'd also posit that if I were to sit in a hotel room in Mumbai and write something about Mumbai and India, it would come out differently than writing about both subjects with the help of Google search engine from a basement in Washington, DC.
I also take exception with the postmodernist claim by Darymple that "national character" and "particularity" are stuff of the past! Is he kidding me? With the rampant nationalism I see on the streets of America these days?

Krishnan said...

I am completely with you Hari on your assertion.

Hari said...

Thanks Alex and Krishnan. Dalrymple generally writes good essays. In this one, though, I thought he was merely trying to pass time – or it was a way to talk about his own upcoming book. Travel writing is not under any threat – I don’t think it ever was –because these days many authors combine travel with scholarship producing excellent, accessible books. Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus is just one example. There are also great books from journalists who have reported from a specific region for years, or even decades.

Alex Engwete said...

Hari, I forgot to mention that I also wrote a travelogue of sorts published this year (under my real name) in South Africa in the launch collection of the African Cities Reader. You could scroll down the table of contents and get to the essay "The Devil's Comma" or go directly here (it's in PDF format)...

Hari said...

Thank you very much, Alex. I haven't read it in detail, but the literalness of the Bible's interpretation in the Congo, which you write about, is fascinating.