Travel Writing and Cultural Tourism: William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives and Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering

Abstract

My first chapter speaks to the limitations of certain literary genres by illustrating how the conventions of travel writing ensure that spiritual belief remains an object of study for the secular subject. The ethnographic impulse embedded in the travel conventions used by Dalrymple and Mishra constrain the spiritual traditions they examine turning them into catalysts for their narratives’ self-consolidating secular visions. Consequently, although their focus on spirituality aligns them with the other narratives discussed in this book, their representations of sacred spaces remain confined to a secular language and symbology. The rest of my book provides a response to this chapter by illustrating what a spiritually interventionist reading can effect.