MODES OF CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE SUBCONTINENT: A CRITICAL STUDY OF WILLIAM DALRYMPLE’S TRAVEL WRITING

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.