Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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shared neither his boss’s premise nor his aims—to dangers that had damaging consequences for his career. Worried by rumors that British troops were frequenting homosexual brothels in Karachi, Napier assigned Burton to bring him information about such places (as the only officer who could speak any local language, he was the obvious choice). “Carefully disguised,” Burton visited several of them, reporting on what he found with the same kind of close observation and moral detachment he displayed in many other connections; but some of his contemporaries were bound to take his detailed account as evidence that he had a more direct involvement in the behavior he described. Napier closed down the brothels but he did not accuse Burton of enjoying them, and he kept his promise not to send the document to the East India Company offices where others might see it. For two years it remained hidden in the general’s files; but after Napier returned to England (like Burton in search of medical treatment) someone found the paper and maliciously sent it to higher-ups in Bombay, with the recommendation that its author be dismissed from the service. Burton was not in fact forced out, but his career in India was gravely compromised, leaving little or no chance for him to advance to higher office there.16
The brothels were absent from the books Burton published about India (he later mentioned them in his notes to the Thousand and One Nights), but the texts included incidents he knew would be shocking to many British readers. Among these was his report that respectable women in a certain ethnic group in Goa commonly exposed their breasts in public, while “females of loose character are compelled by custom to cover the body.” Another was that pregnant Hindu women betook themselves to shrines displaying phallic carvings in the hope that the respect shone to them would make their babies come out male. Burton recounted such things in the same neutral tone and with the same freedom from moral judgment he displayed in his various reports to Napier. Sometimes his subject was cultural incomprehension itself, as in the incident that began when a British officer whipped idle natives on a river bank for not going to the aid of a man struggling not to drown in the water; they remained unmoved by this treatment (Burton observed that offering a rupee would have made them jump to help the stranger), forcing the officer to dive into the river and pull the man out himself. Instead of offering gratitude, however, the rescued swimmer responded to the officer with an unexpected question: “Sahib, you have preserved me, what are you going to give me?” and, when no charity was forthcoming, cursed his benefactor, who then whipped him as he had the bystanders who earlier refused their help.17 A similar attention to cultural difference inspired Burton’s suggestion that Sindian childrearing practices were more loving than European ones because Western “parents are engrossed by other cares—the search for riches, or the pursuit of pleasure—during the infancy of their offspring,” and his explanation for why Muslim women were less devoted to motherhood than Hindus—that the greater prospect of remarriage for the former, should their husbands divorce them, made them worry more about losing the charms of youth through childbirth.18
One subject of particular interest to Burton in India was religion, including both ritual practices such as Muslim conversion ceremonies and rites of circumcision, and the intellectual content of different faiths. He noted that the stark contrast between Hindu polytheism and Muslim devotion to a single god did not prevent the two religions from each taking on features of the other. Thus “the Hindoo” has learned from neighboring Sikhs (whose monotheism stemmed from exposure to Islam) “to simplify his faith: to believe in one God,” albeit while still finding divine powers in such potent natural phenomena as rivers. In a parallel way, Islam in India as elsewhere absorbed some of the magical practices and the belief in djinns (genies) and other spirits both benign and hostile that Mohammed had sought to curb, but which remained common in regions where his teaching spread. Both cases were examples of a phenomenon evident closer to home, the way Northern European Protestantism and Mediterranean Catholicism both absorbed elements from the religions—Druid or Pantheistic—that flourished before Christianity arrived.19 Burton defended Islamic practice in terms that would recur in his later writing, for instance admonishing a fictional “John Bull” on a visit to Sind: “You might take a lesson, if not too proud to be taught, from their regularity in performing their religious duties; high and low almost all pray twice a day, some as many as five times, in public too, so that there may be no shirking,” and adding that, in contrast to the situation faced by French or Irish Catholics, “their priests will allow them to peruse their scriptures translated into the vernacular.”20
Burton recognized that much of the religious life he observed was rooted in folk practices, and like others in his time he found some of these attractive because they displayed the qualities of color, directness, and innocence often cherished by romantic writers. But he also found evidence that the proximity of contrasting forms of religion generated religious attitudes of quite a different sort, closer in spirit to the urbane and worldly posture of the lieutenant in Goa who made every religion his own without holding to any. Referring to the Amils (a group of Hindus now thought to have emigrated to Sind in the Mughal period, but whose descendants would flee to India when the province became part of Pakistan in 1947), he noted: “From mixing much with the members of another faith, and possessing a little more knowledge than their neighbors, many of these men become Dahri, or materialists, owning the existence of a Deity, but dissociating the idea from all revelation, and associating it with the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications. A few are Atheists in the literal sense of the word, but it is rare that they will trust their secret to a stranger.” Such rejections of revealed religion were “less common in the unenlightened East than it is in the civilized West,” but those Easterners who advanced them were “formidable”: “the European [unbeliever] seldom thinks proper, or takes the trouble, to make converts to his disbelief; the Oriental does, and aided by his superiority in learning over the herd, he frequently does it with great success.” Burton saw a link between the appearance of such heterodox ideas and two other phenomena that interested him, one the spread (particularly in Persia) of Sufism, an inward, esoteric, and mystically inclined offshoot of Islam often seen as suspect by orthodox Muslims, the other the work of Indian Vedantic thinkers who interpreted Hindu myths and scriptures as philosophical allegories rather than sources of doctrine and practice; together these two developments led him to predict (much too optimistically) that “a mixture of pantheism with pure deism, will presently be the faith of the learned and polite in both these countries.”21
This whole complex of attitudes, like the picture he gave of the lieutenant in Goa, stood very close to Burton himself. He was drawn to Sufi practice, so much so that before ending his first Indian stay in 1847 he went through a course of study and exercises that led to his being ordained as a Sufi master, and he retained ties to Sufism throughout his life; on the Mecca pilgrimage being a Sufi would be part of his disguise, and the desire he expressed in the book to experience the “inner life” of Muslims may have had a Sufi ring, too.22 At the same time, however, his later writings would turn this multiplicity of cultural and religious involvements into a rejection of the singular truth claims that particular faiths make on their own behalf, issuing in a frank skepticism toward all forms of established morality and religion and making him appear (using the distinction he noted in regard to the Amils) more as an “Oriental” atheist than a European eclectic. It is in those later texts that the most extreme and challenging consequences Burton drew from his attempt to inject himself into cultures not his own would come to the surface.
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Before we can approach these writings, however, we need to look more closely at Burton’s manner of inserting himself into Eastern life, and the ways it both altered and confirmed his identity. A number of writers have recognized that taking on the character of an “Oriental” over weeks or months and establishing relations with others on this basis had the power to destabilize his own sense of who he was. His wife may have been the first to suggest this, reporting that in Cairo he lived as a native, til (as he told me) he actually believed himself to be what he represented himself to be.”23 Even some writers who see Burton largely in terms of complicity in imperial domination think the line between imitation and identification is especially difficult to draw in his case.24 Certainly some of Burton’s contemporaries believed he had crossed a border they thought it important to maintain; the pilgrimage book raised fears that he had actually become a Muslim, or at least abandoned Christianity,