The Collector of Worlds, Iliya Troyanov, translated by William Hobson, Faber, Rs 495
Fiction in Burton’s shadow

There is this little scene in Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds. Greying, gregarious Sidi Mubarak Bombay — who has accompanied Richard Francis Burton and John Speke on their expeditions to the source of the Nile — sits on a stone bench outside his house in Zanzibar, regaling friends with his travels through the rainforests, and says of Bwana Burton: “I can’t describe him fully because he never showed himself to me fully. I always had the feeling he was on the other bank and there was no ferry in sight to negotiate the river between us.”
It was not just Sidi; much of Victorian England could not negotiate that river. They were at a loss, even while facing Burton, someone who resembled an Arab and spoke in strange tongues — 25 languages and 15 dialects, including Hindi and Marathi — and put together, of all things, a Simian dictionary. In the age of coattails and proselytising, he changed clothes as well as religions with ease, masquerading as a Kashmiri Brahmin in Baroda and an Arab Sheikh in Mecca. He would feverishly explore the dark latitudes of Africa, stumbling upon the Lake Tanganyika and searching for the origins of the Nile, as he would impishly decipher the eroticism of The Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights to a corseted London that promtly blushed. Translating Baital-Pachisi into Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry, he dared to call it the precursor to the English novel. Richard Burton was a Renaissance man caught in the wrong century.

Recently, when Troyanov (born in Bulgaria and brought up in Germany and Kenya) went on the Haj, he had the latter’s book Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah in the rucksack. He did not open the book, but the journey itself was a repeat of Burton’s. In his novel, The Collector of Worlds (published in German in 2006), Troyanov does not simply retrace Burton’s life; he imagines the extraordinary picaresque through India, Arabia and Africa.
Strangely, Troyanov doesn’t fall for the temptation of making this a Burton-centric narrative; instead, in a brilliant twist, he intersperses the book with first-person accounts of Burton’s servant Naukaram (what if Thomas Wright called him Allahdad in his biography); the letters by the clergy of Mecca and Jeddah, worried about this western interloper in the holy city; and anecdotes by Sidi Mubarak Bombay. For a polyglot, Burton doesn’t even have too many lines in the novel. Some of his letters are reproduced, some quotes are kept, but mostly he is refracted through the dialogue of others. For all his disguises, he is not even the spectacular White hero, the drama is what surrounds him — in Baroda, Sindh, Mecca, Zanzibar and beyond. Call it multiple narratives about a man who himself distrusted monologues.

Through Sidi, Troyanov even makes fun of Burton and Speke’s expedition: if the former, lying feverish, makes and moves mountains on his map, the latter refuses to acknowledge the African names of villages and lakes. Sidi says: “Everyplace he saw on the trip… he immediately gave a name as if he were giving gifts to the children of poor families.” When they come across what is later called Lake Victoria, Sidi tells Speke, “But Sahib, the lake already has a name. It is called Nyanza.” “Nonsense,” cried Bwana Speke, and I felt the anger coming to a boil in him, “how can it have a name? I only discovered it today. Don’t you understand, Sidi, it hasn’t existed on the maps until now.” When Nyanza becomes Victoria, it is not only a tribute to the queen but also to Speke’s mother, who by some happy chance is her namesake.
Troyanov has spent enough time in India and written two books, Mumbai to Mecca and Along the Ganges, to ensure that his lyrical, luminous descriptions are shorn of the exoticism that is usually bred by short-term contact. But there is one slip-up: in a book where nomenclatures are significant, he could have avoided referring to Sri Lanka that was still Ceylon.

Ads By Google