White Man's Guilt

Travel books on India are a cottage industry for thumb-sucking writer-wannabes in the West: plainly, there's no better place than the former colonies in which to achieve literary manhood. Unfortunately for them, the blunt xenophobia and facile contempt of Paul Theroux has been shunted into obsolescence; the imperatives of political correctness don't permit anything beyond the amusement-tinged condescension which is these writers' primary narratorial stance. Desert Places clearly breaks the mould—could it be because the author is a woman, white, and single, and therefore exposed to a wholly different experience of India, to far greater hardships than the relatively less vulnerable male traveller?

Let it be said right off: readers expecting a book in the recent tradition of Joe Roberts and Mark Shand are in for a surprise. Desert Places is an angry book and its raw scabrous honesty wouldn't endear it to the consumers of those cleverly contrived fictions where India is a charmingly exotic land peopled almost exclusively by charmingly eccentric natives. After a long time, we have a travelogue that's not content to skate merrily on the slick surfaces of ITDC's India but which ventures into areas from where few reports ever reach us. And it won't do to pounce, as some have, in a reflex of knee-jerk nationalism, on a few minor transliteration errors and hold them up as evidence of the narrator's basic unreliability and ignorance.

Davidson travelled with different groups during the course of her journey and the narrative records a variety of places and people. And since the latter are seen primarily through the narrator's own kaleidoscopically altering moods, they remain vague blurs. Davidson isn't a satisfying travel-writer on that score; most people in her book are little more than itinerant sources of discomfort or relief, prickly or consoling presences. Places fare better; her clean uncluttered prose unfussily recreates particular settings on printed page.

But it's at a different level that the book works best, and that's also where it scores over other books in the congested genre. It's where it enacts the painful contradictions in the situation of the estranged foreigner who while seeking virtue in a pre-modern culture is so severely undermined by the actual physical and psychological process of entering that culture that she lapses into the worst aspects of her disowned cultural self—that is, she becomes a memsahib. The shame, guilt and self-reproach that accompany these bizarre personality transformations occupy a large space in the book, and contribute to its rigorous honesty, its unflinching candour.

At another level, Desert Places confirms the truth of what Levi-Strauss said 40 years ago about white travellers in a fast-changing world. "The first thing we see as we travel around the world," he wrote in Tristes Tropiques, "is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind." The depredations of India's imported modernity besiege Davidson wherever she goes. Bruised and battered towards the end of her journey, she says she "loathed my initial romanticism more than my present incapacity to deal with reality". It is out of this loathing that a truly brutal insight emerges. "The disgust I felt," she writes, "the rage, was not at India but with humanity. If India was terrible, so was where I came from. Worse, because it was so spoilt, so comfortable, so oblivious and that comfort purchased at the expense of countries like this one. Each country leeching another and within all countries, groups of humans leeching other groups of humans down the pyramid, until you got to the very bottom, the little toy Rabari men."

From under this pyramid, Davidson crept out after enduring months of assorted illnesses: TB, brucellosis, tapeworm. The suffering is detailed throughout and you wonder what curious masochism prompted Davidson to persist so long. For, her edginess eventually infects the reader and you turn each page bracing yourself for yet another disaster. And when the journey abruptly ends after her camel's tragic death, you feel, along with a nagging sense of emptiness, genuine relief: the ordeal has come to an end! Such are the curious emotions this admirably courageous book provokes.