Travelling cultures: religion, travel, and subjectivity in V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers (1981) and William Dalrymple's Nine Lives (2009) as texts that interrogate the metropolitan subjectivity of the traveller who arrives at sacred sites from a discursive grounding in secular modernity and whose rationalist, post-Enlightenment notion of travel as observation, empirical experience and knowledge, embedded in a conception of physical space as a tangible, homogeneous entity, enters into an interpretive struggle with travel as associated with a set of metaphysical ideas and identity practices which formulate the itinerary act as austerity, penance, subversion, transformation and social protest. Using Emmanuel Levinas's idea of the ethical encounter, Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability, and Michael Taussig's idea of mimesis, this essay explores how travel in conjunction with non-secular epistemes and praxes reconfigures culture, agency, selfhood, and power outside the rubric of modernity and liberal individualism.