Travel Literature and the Search for Cultural Memory: A Study of William Dalrymple's Travel Writings

Author

K. Sunitha

Abstract

 Travel literature is a hybrid genre that is neither memoir nor history nor journalism, but a journey both geographically and psychologically and culturally. In regard to this broader theme, this paper focuses on the work of the Scotland-born but India-based writer, William Dalrymple, whose body of work, including In Xanadu (1989), City of Djinns (1993), From the Holy Mountain (1997), The Age of Kali (1998), and Nine Lives (2009), reconfigures the genre in a unique way through a blend of historiography, ethnography, and personal narrative. The study proposes a two-fold effect of Dalrymple's travel writing, as it registers physical travel through Asia and the Middle East as well as excavations of cultural memory layered beneath the landscapes of the present day. The paper takes a qualitative approach, using close reading, postcolonial and genre theory analysis, to examine how Dalrymple challenges the colonial heritage that pervades the travel-writing tradition while trying to write against Orientalist stereotypes. His storytelling methods—the alternating of archival and first-person information, ventriloquism of local voices, and the self-reflexivity of the travelling narrator—are of particular interest. The study also examines the impact of his work on the distinction between the historian and the traveller and the creation of a "historical travelogue" as a hybrid genre. Despite the ongoing critical debates about travel writing and the authority of the travel writer and his or her representation of the other, Dalrymple's contribution to travel literature is his ability to make the past present and to contest it, making travel writing a tool for cross-cultural and trans-temporal understanding rather than a record of foreign difference.

Keywords

Postcolonial travel writing, historiography, genre hybridity, cultural memory, orientalism, narrative voice, south Asia, and historical travelogue.

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