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Permalink William Dalrymple is Not an HistorianBy Haroon A review of The City of the Djinns, by William Dalrymple You can feel an adventure brewing, the echo of past Scotsmen who plunged into a mess of cities and landscapes called India, and found themselves transformed. There is no doubting William Dalrymple's achievements in : He not only introduces us to, but makes us fast friends with, a variety of characters, at turns amusing, suspect, charming and absurd. From the lifestyles of hijra households and their sexual transcendence, to the very princesses of the Mughal line, working in libraries now, Dalrymple brings Delhi fully and truly alive, taking us in by way of spectacularly well-written prose and daring excavations into a past that needs notice.
A travelogue is not an academic exercise, and one should not be too critical of someone lacking the fitness to meet the necessary standard for the latter. Regardless, can that excuse what Dalrymple has done? There is a difference between unearthing history and reviving prejudice. He is obsessed with a narrative of Muslim decay, decline, decadence and dominance, in turns evocative and provocative. That is his traveler's license. But his uncritical sympathies for Hinduism rarely extend to the means and manners of Indian Islam; too often, it is Islam that arrived in India a stranger, somehow either a refugee or a ruin or a riot. And this often, though not always, extends to his portrait of Islam more generally. When it comes, for example, to the stories of Khidr, Dalrymple makes passing mention of the alleged story of Khidr in the Qur'an, and then insists the Qur'anic tale's roots lie farther in the past -- that the Qur'an simply borrowed Mesopotamian myth. He gives for us no evidence for this concoction, in fact bases it upon the most tangential inference, which in no courtroom or dissertation defense could pass any muster. More disturbingly, he sees Sufism as something alien to Islam, much like an Islam to an original India, repeating an uninformed Islamophobe's trope: Sufism began, Dalrymple fantasizes, when Christian and Mid-eastern mystics, converted to Islam but dissatisfied by its supposedly dry legalism, sought to import their prior spirituality into an Islamic framework. The proof? There is none. That Sufism is in fact the development of certain strands of the Prophetic character, much as orthodox Islam is, and that the two evolved together and often go hand-in-hand, that is unimportant. The Orientalist assumption that nothing so beautiful as Sufism could come from Islam sounds too much like the belief that Italian artists were responsible for the Taj Mahal. But Dalrymple wants to have his bias and hate it, too. When "the Muslims" conquered Delhi in 1192. As if there was a "the Muslim" army -- as if most, if not all, indigenous sources refer to the invaders as Turks, as Greeks even, but never by their religion. He imagines the conquest of India to be a conquest by Islam and for Islam, when it is clear the goal was plunder and power. One might forgive him his stereotypes and caricatures were it not for the crudity with which they were drawn: Islam did not enter South Asia in 1192. Islam first entered South Asia in the 7th century, by way of Arab traders, who settled in the south -- peacefully -- intermarried and became speakers of native tongues. Not to mention centuries of indigenous developments following the Arab conquest of Sindh, which gave Sindh and the lower Punjab an Indo-Saracenic spice all its own. None of these are material for Dalrymple, and take away from his otherwise welcome and wonderful unveilings of the depths of life in much of Delhi's history. There is here a deeper problem, which tends to see in the laudatory praises of kings, written by flattering servants conscious of their monarch's political ambitions, a truth: A belief that history, as written by the conqueror's clique, is history. That Islam is not only a foreign force, which came into India by force of arms, but it is a stale and pathetic religion, somehow lacking in its own internal capacity for producing beauty; Nizam al-Din is painted as a great saint, but somehow an exception to the Islamic rule. (Because, of course, Sufism is somehow a foreign impulse, with Christian roots.) Muslims have a debt to pay, but they can accumulate no credits. What is about Islam, and even, at times, monotheism more generally, that allows the liberal critic the ability to overlook in Hinduism, or Buddhism, what he cannot stand in the Abrahamic? Is it too close for comfort, too close to the liberalism the critic feels existentially critiqued by? Dalrymple romanticizes Hinduism, at the end of his journey, paying no mind whatsoever to the voluminous literature that argues for the construction of a Hindu identity from British, Islamic and demographic impulses; quite simply, the Hinduism he wants to see, the timeless essence of India that lies buried under the pretensions of Muslim conquerors, never existed. It is, then, not a City of Djinns, but a history of Djinns. Travel with him, but pack some salt.
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Tags: India, Travel, Book reviews, Literature, William Dalrymple, Orientalism (all tags) William Dalrymple is Not an Historian | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden) William Dalrymple is Not an Historian | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden)
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