In Xanadu

In Xanadu. A Quest

William Dalrymple

Bloomsbury. First published 1990.

In 1986 William Dalrymple, now a well-known interpreter of modern India to the West and to Westernised Indians, and the organiser of the glitzy annual Jaipur Literary Festival, was a student at the University of Cambridge, UK, when he applied for and obtained a scholarship to travel along the route taken all those centuries ago by Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu in China (then Mongolia). The book is an easy-to-read backpacking travelogue, narrating Dalrymple's more or less open-minded encounters with a variety of cultures and situations, all of which he approaches with an easy patronizing attitude typical of such travellers and such books. The fact that these encounters are mainly with ancient civilisations recently freed from the colonial burden lends an additional asymmetrical dimension to them, missing from the travel books of, say, Bill Bryson. One may argue that Dalrymple was a callow youth, a product of the late (or post) hippy environment that sent droves of white youth out East to gain 'mystic knowledge' and 'wisdom'. However, Dalrymple himself acknowledges no such motivation. He simply wants to travel, and to seek distraction from the mundaneness of his University curriculum. And therefore there is in the book a lack of any kind of self-consciousness, or any obvious expression of being conscious about the asymmetry. As Dalrymple notes in the 'Acknowledgements', which he wrote 26 years later, the book 'records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naive and deeply Anglocentic undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self - bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations - is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of;...'

Be that as it may, if we filter out all the bumptiousness and suppress our resentment at the white man, a relatively poor or middle-class white man, being able to so easily go where he pleases all across the globe, the book is an extremely interesting, though narrow and impressionistic view of the countries he travels through - Israel, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and China. He ultimately reaches Xanadu, to the north of Beijing, only to be disappointed by the lack of any remaining hints of the past grandeur described by Marco Polo. All-in-all a very readable, light book.