From the Chair: BOOKS

There is hardly a William Dalrymple title I have not read since he has been writing these last twenty years. Having had the good fortune to lunch with him after the 2009 Jaipur Literary festival, at which he disclosed his next work, I awaited Nine Lives, his seventh book, with the most eager anticipation. Instead of writing from the perspective of authorial experience, the allure of the exotic and being the hero of his own narrative, he had committed himself once again to a travel book, but this time written so that individual voices and stories of spiritual quest would shine. I was not disappointed. From the moving opening story of a young Jain nun and how she manages her terminal illness within the precepts of her community to “the most unreformed — and startling — of his subjects , the hardcore Tantric sadhus he encounters at the cremation ground of Tarapith in Bengal, living with jackals and vultures amid half-burned corpses and skulls and engaging in acts of ‘transgressive sacrality’ involving alcohol, hashish and ritual sex, Dalrymple remains self effacingly insightful about and deeply enamoured of the sub continent on the brink of rapid modernization.

Ruaridh Nicoll surmises: “That this book also makes its political points more powerfully than any newspaper article, while quietly adjusting a reader's attitude to faith, builds its importance. It meets Dalrymple's own criteria…., displaying a deep knowledge of the culture, yet is intimate with each interviewee. This is travel writing at its best. I hope it sparks a revival.”

THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE published 1954 by Lesley Blanch, a scholarly romantic and truly original travel writer who ran counter to the many mores of her generation and gender.
“There have been many women who have followed the beckoning Eastern star” says Lesley Blanch. She writes about four such women in The Wilder Shores Of Love — Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates and sent to the Sultan's harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss linguist who felt most comfortable in boy's clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara).

They all escaped from the constraints of nineteenth century Europe and fled to the Middle East, where they found love, fulfillment, and “glowing horizons of emotion and daring”. Blanch’s first, bestselling book, it pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on women escaping the boredom of convention. During recent travels this classic was re visited. I first read it perhaps 3o years ago and it sent my heart racing and wanting to take off. It still does.