In 1842, round about the time Alfred Tennyson, still be to be knighted, was publishing “Ulysses” to universal acclaim as the portrait of the ideal man of his age, a man cast pretty much in the mythical mould was stepping off the ship in Bombay. Richard Burton had left behind a chequered career at Oxford, having apparently celebrated his expulsion by driving his horse and carriage over the college’s flowerbeds, and believed that India would help consummate his passion “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.
One-and-a-half centuries later, yet another writer with wanderlust in his soul and multiple languages on his tongue-tip has resurrected the man the world now remembers largely as the translator of the Arabian Nights. Biographical fiction is not the easiest of literary forms, but it’s tough to imagine Iliya Troyanov — born in Bulgaria, refugee in West Germany, Kenya-bred — did not recognise a kindred soul in Burton.
Flair for languages
From that uneventful landing in Bombay, Burton went on to chart an unprecedented career in the East India Company — unprecedented not so much in terms of what he achieved by way of command and decoration, but what he didn’t. An inborn flair for languages, honed by childhood stints in France and Italy, flowered in multilingual India and Burton picked up Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati in quick succession; an attempt to pick up monkeyspeak from a roomful of imprisoned primates, however, came to naught.
The streak of maverick, coupled with his linguistic skills, made Burton a shoo-in for a spy: From Baroda, he was sent to Sindh where, in between the painfully prosaic job of surveying land, he disappeared for days on end in local garb under the alias of Mirza Abdullah to determine the leaks and holes in British intelligence. The trail led to a brothel housing only men and boys, which was apparently frequented by red-coated officers who could not always keep their mouths shut.
Unlike Ulysses, the adventure won Burton no kudos: Instead, it made him a suspect in the eyes of the Company — how could he know the truth of the situation if he had not partaken of the forbidden fruit himself? — and effectively stymied his India career. Not so his pioneering spirit, though: Burton would go on to become one of the first Westerners to do the Haj and explore the interiors of East Africa in an effort to find the source of the Nile, the Victorian equivalent of today’s race to launch the first commercial flight to space.
Troyanov’s intricately constructed, densely imagined reconstruction of the life of Burton is less biography, really, and more an investigation of the curious spirit that was idealised but perhaps never fully accepted by contemporary society. Just as the passing of the ages has morphed Ulysses from the perfect man to the flawed protagonist who abandoned wife and son to feed his own selfish desires, so Burton has come full circle — from questionable “native-lover” to a distillation of the best of the Western intellect: a thirst for knowledge, an openness to the “other” and an ability to view both with equanimity.
Interesting intersection
In view of current world scenarios, the intersection between Islam and the outsider is particularly remarkable. Hailing from a culture which subscribes to “force” as the ultimate way to impose one’s will, Burton spends years perfecting his Muslim persona, even undergoing circumcision. “If I assume somebody else’s identity,” he says at one point, “then I can feel what it’s like to be him.”
It’s not that simple, of course, as his teacher tells him (“Fasting is not the same as starving.”). But the hunger to understand that which has always been on the other side of the divide is genuine, the sympathy is unwavering. Troyanov helps the cause further by being completely matter-of-fact about the drama in Burton’s life; instead of making it read like a thriller, he treats his subject’s life like a philosophical treatise.
Distanced perspective
In each of the three sections of the book, Troyanov uses a double narrative device: An omniscient view of Burton’s own reality, which rarely attempts to explain the mind, and a narrator at a remove, who superimposes his own interpretation on the situation. Perhaps intentionally, the effect is rather distancing. Burton remains an enigma till the end, though the prism through which he is viewed changes. The Collector of Worlds, fluently translated by William Hobson, is one of those books that yields rich pickings over repeated readings.
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