Abstract:
As an established literary genre, in which the factual and the fictive narrative
conventions intersect, travel writing, with its vivid descriptions of people and places has had
a consistent ethnographic focus. Literary and cultural theory during the last three decades,
has led to critical debates over the definition of cultural boundaries and the aesthetics and
politics of cultural representation. In representing a cultural space, the contemporary travel
writer recognises that stories and histories are complexly interwoven across geographical and
national boundaries. He therefore has to engage with the realities of transculturation, cultural
displacement, and cultural hybridity as distinctive features of a complex global world.
William Dalrymple‘s travel writing is reflective of this engagement at both the thematic and
the stylistic levels. It marks a sustained interest in the study and representation of the many
layered cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent, both in terms of historical legacy and
the dynamism of current social and political change. With a repertoire that draws extensively
on archival research, intertextual reference and on direct observation and personal interaction
during his travels across India and Pakistan, Dalrymple combines various narrative strands
and gives authority to multiple voices. The research study contextualizes Dalrymple‘s travel
narrative as a polyphonic cultural representation Towards this end it attempts to explore his
use of the historical and ethnographic modes through which a range of articulations
serve to represent the cultural diversity of the subcontinent.
