Goa and the Blue Mountains Or Six Months of Sick Leave Richard Francis Burton 9781313802109 Books
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Goa and the Blue Mountains Or Six Months of Sick Leave Richard Francis Burton 9781313802109 Books
Given the rather detailed reviews already given I have not much to add other than to say that the author was traveling as a tourist through already well-known areas and so has not much to say of interest except to complain about anything and everything. Burton later went on the explore uncharted areas in Arabia and Central Africa - I think I'll stick to his works detailing those adventures rather than read his boring commentaries complaining about the Portuguese (which I'm sure he must also do in his work about Brazil, which I think I'll skip) and and other mundane things. Skip this one...Product details
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Goa and the Blue Mountains Or Six Months of Sick Leave Richard Francis Burton 9781313802109 Books Reviews
Richard Burton gave me a rare insight into the attitude of the British in India almost exactly 100 years before I was born in a small town about 10 miles from Ootacamund. It was very interesting to me to read a description of Burton's passage up to Ooty on horseback. The railroad and roads (with their 13 "hairpin bends") came later I suppose. That region of India is very dear to my heart and I carry many pleasant memories of my life in the Nilgiris.
Richard Burton, the famous, 19th century British traveller, started his career in India, but is mainly known for his works on Arabia and Africa. One of his earliest works, this book covers a period when he went on sick leave from his post in Sindh (now part of Pakistan) to the Nilgiri Hills in southern India. True to later form, Burton did not travel there by the usual route, but took a small coastal sailing ship down to Goa, stopped there for a look, then continued down to Malabar (part of India's Kerala state today), from where he travelled overland to Ootacamund, a "hill station" in the present state of Tamilnadu. The University of California Press reproduced his book with all its original spellings of Indian words, its early 19th century jokes and puns, and English words long since gone out of fashion. No doubt India fascinated Burton's inquiring mind and he looked into many subjects not ordinarily found in the genre of Indian travel writing produced between 1830 and 1930 by a myriad Englishmen and some English women as well. As someone who knows a bit about India, and particularly Goa, I would say he was not all that accurate. He did notice that Goan Christians remained Indian in most ways and that they were divided by caste like the Hindus, from whom they had been converted. However, his picture of the caste structure in Goa is not accurate, nor were his observations of Goan life anything more than those of a tourist. When Burton arrives in Malabar, he switches tone for some reason and supplies the reader with vast amounts of information culled from various reports or books, leaving almost no personal impressions. He reverts to his own observations as he climbs up towards Ootacamund.
I like travel books very much and long looked forward to reading this one. I was disappointed. It reminded me of a scene I once saw on an Australian TV comedy show. A chef pulls out a perfect pizza from an oven. You can see the cheese, the salami, the mushrooms, the beautiful crust. Mmm. The chef says, "And here's our pizza"--- and suddenly sneezing hugely right into it----"with a special mozzarella sauce !" Burton wrote what could have been a very interesting book, never mind accuracy. But his sneering, racist attitudes of contempt for everyone and everything, his total willingness to enforce his will on Indians with kicks and punches, his constant professions of boredom, and his scorn for each person he meets, even his own countrymen, cover the travel with a disgusting sauce, even though he may have been typical of his times. (and one should not condemn, blah, blah, blah) I must conclude that this book is not for everyone, only for the truly determined or for those who wish to research the author. For that latter purpose, the book is no doubt revealing.
What could be better than Victorian travel literature by Richard F. Burton. Not much. Burton is no slouch when it comes to travel, he takes the hard routes across his continents not the comfy ones that his fellows take and so he sees more and is better able to put the "normal" English experience of India into a wider context. Burton is never given the tasks or assignments he had hoped to get so he sets himself the task, out of mere boredom perhaps, of categorically describing India, its geography, ethnography, religions. He describes India in all manner of ways of describing a place including history of its cities and Goa's history is quite ripe with meaning for Burton as it tells the story of why the Portugese empire fell..., a tale which Burton feels has a lesson for the English. That he was an expert linguist helps and that he had an appetite, insatiable apparently, for all kinds of experience makes his book a kind of interdisciplinary collection of datas, some more significant than others but the effect is that he experienced a place in every way imaginable. He was romantic in that he was not suited to live within anyones boundaries but his own(he was expelled from Oxford), and scholarly, but his was a kind of scholarship that tested existing knowledge of India in the field. Perhaps a growing disillusion with England & what it really was to be English made him particularly susceptible to other knowledges and ways of being. He learned an immense amount about the lives of various natives by blending in and acting as one of them but he did this much as a spy does this, as a means of gaining information, not as an end in itself. He was perfectly suited to be a spy. Properly used someone like Burton would have been an invaluable source of information as to what actual Indians thought. If there were more like him the empire would have better understood the country it was ruling over and so more effectively ruled it, however, most Englishman felt it best to erect and enforce an invisible boundary between himself and the cultures of India. And Burton, who often dressed according to local custom even in his English quarters, was not popular among his peers nor was his information ever taken very seriously. His commanding officers simply were unable to see the value in his ability to play so many roles and so were unable to give him a role worthy of him to play. Among his narrow minded fellow officers he became his own man, a self-styled cultural anthropologist with a minor disciplinary interest in ethnographic mimicry who filled volumes with his very rare and particular talents for cross-cultural interaction and observation.
Like many travel narratives the highlights are in the little details(uncomfortable transports, unfriendly hosts) and side stories. No detail is ever lost on Burton and in matters of stories what counts most is the personality of their teller. There is none better than Burton.
Burton's keen powers of observation--and his keen dislike for almost everyone he sees--are all on full display in this early work. The man was a brilliant linguist and scholar and one of those people for whom the term "explorer" was clearly designed during the 19th century. He was also a first class self-promoter who was always at war with his critics. Reading him nowadays involves a bit of perverse pleasure because politically correct Burton distinctly was not. In this travelogue of Portuguese India, his power to stimulate the reader's interest may not be as cock-sure as it is in his Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and in his translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night, but it's fun reading notwithstanding.
Given the rather detailed reviews already given I have not much to add other than to say that the author was traveling as a tourist through already well-known areas and so has not much to say of interest except to complain about anything and everything. Burton later went on the explore uncharted areas in Arabia and Central Africa - I think I'll stick to his works detailing those adventures rather than read his boring commentaries complaining about the Portuguese (which I'm sure he must also do in his work about Brazil, which I think I'll skip) and and other mundane things. Skip this one...
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