Tales travellers tell

RANJIT HOSKOTE

ANYBODY who has had a long conversation with someone from another culture will recognise the faint edge of fatigue that spoils such an exchange, when the talk swings around to differences of value and perception. Suddenly, it becomes apparent that you and your friend have disappeared as individuals, and the conversation has become a solemn dialogue between cultures. This, unfortunately, is an occupational hazard of trans-cultural conversation, especially while travelling abroad; you can either complain bitterly about it when you get home, or you can do something more sensible and reflect on such encounters in long-play format, i.e. by writing a book.

And in fact, the critical and popular success of books like Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land (1992) and V. S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief (1998) remind us that travel writing remains one of the most widely read genres of literature. This is no mean accomplishment, given the fact that air travel has robbed the voyage of its romance, and no place in the world can preserve its essential mysteries against the onslaught of the galactic hitch- hiker.

What we look for in a writer's account of his wanderings among strangers, at its best, is not the lavish description of exotic locales. We cherish, rather, the moment of piercing insight, the troubling yet exhilarating awareness of difference, the subtle shift and rupture of cultural assumptions so long taken for granted that they seem to be laws of nature. These offer proof that the writer has travelled, not only outside his society and culture, but also outside himself.

The moment of insight can take the form of illumination, self- loathing, rage or high comedy. Often, it emerges from the knowledge that our relationships are immutably framed by the spectral presences that continue to haunt us, even in this supposedly post-national age. But equally, it can spring from the simple realisation that people can respond to one another out of the acknowledgment of a common humanity, without invoking the estranging ghosts of the last 800 years.

The traveller has not, of course, always been a reliable narrator. The supposed mirage-mongering of Marco Polo was subject to suspicion even in his own time. Following in his footsteps, the Orientalist and the Empire Builder set out to look for the spices of Ind, the source of the Nile, the Garden of Eden. The influential White mythologies of the Orientalist and the Empire Builder shaped the West's view of the world. Worse, these mythologies of otherness were transmitted to us as superior wisdom, and changed the way we looked at ourselves, as colonial, and later, as post-colonial subjectivities. We became others to ourselves: robbed of their own history, generations of Indians struggled to reconcile the knowledge of a complex and impressive past with the peculiar idea that India was "discovered" by enterprising brigands like Vasco da Gama. The intertwining strands of trade, religion, invasion and settlement, from which this densely multi-cultural subcontinent derives its identity, were mapped through the fundamentally unsound and ideologically dangerous schemes of periodisation that colonial historians laid down.

The civilising mission of the migratory milord lives on in writers like Paul Theroux, a smug and nasty poseur who is incapable of travelling outside himself. People like Theroux travel through countries, seeing there exactly what they expect to see. Such writers delight in the cliche: the tropical passivity of the Indians, the inscrutability of the Chinese, the aggressiveness of the African (always "African", by the way; Kenyans, Tunisians, Congolese, Nigerians don't exist, apparently). Curiously, Theroux's sometime icon and current bete noir, Naipaul, shares many of these traits: a deplorable fact that is nowhere more apparent than in the wind-bag opinions that he advances about Indian history, and which are dutifully repeated as authoritative statements by the proponents of Hindutva from whom the bilious Sir Vidia got them in the first place.

Thankfully, such horrors have been counter-balanced by the warmly empathetic accounts of Peter Levi and Bruce Chatwin. And then there are gifted anthropologist-novelists like Amitav Ghosh, whose In An Antique Land should be required reading at every Indian school, college and university. The book represents the questioning and not the conquistador side of the scholar-gypsy's art. Its narrative braids two strands together: the first is concerned with the lives of a Jewish merchant who lived in Mangalore in the 12th Century, and his Tulu slave, and their involvement in the Indian Ocean trade with Arabia and Africa; the second, with Ghosh's own period of residence in an Alexandrian village as a researcher, and his encounter with a contemporary Egyptian community. Along the way, the book evolves into a detective hunt for the glyphs of a lost language that holds the secrets of our past.

Stripping off the outer layer of history as many of us have been taught it, Ghosh shows that our knowledge of who we are must be tailored from absences, footnotes, slippages; from inscriptions that have been partly erased, from trade languages that no one now speaks, from metaphors once shared across the oceans. No identity is absolute in the way our friendly neighbourhood pracharak sees it.

In a time of growing and aggressive parochialism, writers like Ghosh remind us that the ethnocentric Right-wing version of history isn't the only one available; and that there have been better futures in our past. Ghosh's antique land is not so much an imaginary homeland as it is an area of light and hope.

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