1. Oriental Exhibits

The Englishman as Native

In “The Adventure of the Empty House” Sherlock Holmes recounts for Watson his ascent from the abyss of Reichenbach Falls after his struggle with Moriarty and proceeds to fill in the blanks of his own history. The Reichenbach Falls episode, we learn, opens up an interesting gap in Holmes’s professional life, mandating a condition of perpetual secrecy and disguise that replicates—with interesting variations—his professional activity as consulting detective. During his absence from London, he tells Watson, he has been concealing his identity and safeguarding himself by becoming an explorer and disguise artist manqué:

I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.^[1]

The offhand reference to Mecca as an appropriate site for Orientalist scrutiny and information retrieval seems calculatedly to invoke Sir Richard Burton and that extraordinary two-volume travel book, the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855), which made its author a byword for romantic adventuring and cross-cultural impersonation among his contemporaries in England. Obviously there are several layers of mimicry at work in the account of the detective’s travels—Holmes mimicking Burton mimicking eastern/Muslim ontology. It seems to me a suitable point of departure for a consideration of the questions embedded in the categories of colonial identify formation, performance, and cross-cultural exchange. I propose to examine these through the ways in which Burton performs and hyperbolizes “your genuine Oriental” in his accounts of Sind and in the Personal Narrative. What I probe is not so much Homi Bhabha’s theoretical construction of the constitution of the colonial subject through the process he calls mimicry but a specular version of that subject. I consider not the hybrid reformulations of the colonized native, the mimic man who is “not quite/not white” but instead the colonial observer who assumes the postures of authenticity and seeks to displace the native informant.^[2] My interest here lies in establishing what the appropriation of such a subject position does for the field of colonial encounter. A consideration of the semiotic of disguise within the economy of cultural and racial exchange that operates in this text, together with its manipulations of bodies, frontiers, and identities, allows us to read the Personal Narrative as an engagement with, and response to, the unsettling and sometimes even counterhegemonic possibilities of native inaccessibility and native insurgency. It also illuminates in fascinating ways the discursive reach in the colonial context of a concept of identity grounded in mimicry, as well as the epistemic contradictions and contestations that provided the (uncertain) conditions of possibility for colonialism.

By 1852, when he conceived of his pilgrimage to Mecca, Burton had already made a minor reputation for himself in India as a polyglot Orientalist and an expert in manipulating the complexities of cultural exchange. He had “attacked Arabic” at Oxford and been tutored in Hindustani in preparation for his Indian service. He made such rapid progress in London and on his voyage to Bombay that he was, as he claimed, able upon reaching India in 1842 “to land with eclat as a raw griff and to astonish the throng of palanquin bearers that jostled, pushed and pulled me in the pier head, with the vivacity and nervousness of my phraseology.” ^[3] In Bombay he resumed his language lessons, learning Gujarati, Hindustani, and some Persian from a Parsi munshi (teacher), eventually finishing first out of twelve candidates in the Hindustani examination given by the government of the East India Company; later he was to achieve similar honors in the Gujarati examination.^[4] During his seven-year Indian sojourn he also learned, with differing degrees of expertise, Sanskrit, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Telugu, Arabic, Persian, and Toda.^[5] His schooling in Indian languages and the Indian social text appears to have been further supplemented by a liaison, or a series of liaisons, with Indian women, which were not at all uncommon at the time: “The Bibi (white woman) was at this time rare in India; the result was the triumph of the Bubu (coloured sister). I found every officer in the corps [at Baroda, where he was stationed initially] more or less provided with one of these helpmates. We boys naturally followed suit.” ^[6] These were liaisons whose pedagogical usefulness he underlines: “The ‘walking dictionary’ is all but indispensable to the Student, and she teaches him not only Hindostani grammar, but the syntaxes of native life.” ^[7] And, further, “It connected the white stranger with the country and its people, gave him an interest in their manners and customs, and taught him thoroughly well their language.” ^[8] To him the bubu system was configured as the arena of mutual exchange and diplomacy. He was to regret as politically damaging the onset of Victorian morality, and the arrival in India of Victorian women, that disallowed such interracial sexual arrangements: “The greatest danger in British India is the ever-growing gulf that yawns between the governors and the governed; they lose touch of one another, and such racial estrangement leads directly to racial hostility.” ^[9] But he also noted the occasional perils of such individualized instruction and of any unthinking and inappropriately gendered mimicry of what is presumed to be nativeness: “It was a standing joke in my regiment that one of the officers always spoke of himself in the feminine gender.” ^[10]

In 1843 Burton was appointed regimental interpreter and was ordered, with the 18th Bombay Native Infantry, to Sind, which had recently been conquered, with considerable brutality and in contravention of treaties with local rulers, by Sir Charles Napier. Since he had by this time already qualified as an interpreter in Hindustani and Gujarati, he soon hired a Persian munshi teach him Persian, Arabic, and Sindhi.^[11] At this time he also adopted the clothing of the region and—to a substantial degree—the company of Sindis and other “natives” of many nationalities (including Persia), a move that allegedly made him unpopular with his fellow officers: “My life became much mixed up with these gentlemen, and my brother officers [again] fell to calling me the ‘White Nigger.’” ^[12]

Despite the enormous reputation as a heroic figure that Burton seems to have acquired in our own century (witness the number and popularity of Burton biographies, including the latest one, by Edward Rice, and the film version of Mountains of the Moon [1989]), Burton does not seem in his own day to have been particularly well thought of or greatly liked by his peers. Notwithstanding his extraordinary linguistic skills, his undoubted bravery, and his host of other talents, he was something of an outcast both in the Indian Army and in the Foreign Office, and he spent most of his life in unimportant, unprestigious diplomatic missions and outposts of the empire. Whether this was the cause or the effect of his fascination with the liminal character of masquerade is impossible to establish. It should be noted that Burton was fond of promoting himself as a free and unorthodox spirit who was bound to shock the intellectual and sexual sensibilities of his Victorian contemporaries. Even the notorious Latin footnotes on clitoridectomy and infibulation in the Personal Narrative, presented in rather ostentatious and loudly protested defiance of sanctimonious editors and publishers, are grounded quite unambiguously in the discursive practices of a(n) (increasingly respectable) discipline (anthropology) that often took a delight in outraging sexual decorum and religious pieties. In the same spirit that had prompted the Latin footnotes, he made the following acerbic comment about contemporary Christianity: “A visit after Arab Meccah to Angle-Indian Aden, with its ‘priests after the order of Melchisedeck,’ suggested to me that the Moslem may be more tolerant, more enlightened, more charitable, than many societies of self-styled Christians.” ^[13]

Burton was to stay in Sind and serve under Napier, who had been appointed governor of the province, until 1849. A number of important ethnographical works resulted from this sojourn—Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley (1851); Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1852); and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). But what was perhaps most interesting about the years in Sind was that Burton began for the first time to impersonate “natives” or “Orientals” (though never locals) on a fairly regular basis in the service of the colonial state. In a departure from the practice of other British intelligence officers, who bought their information from native agents, Burton decided to absorb the office of the native informant in himself. The great difficulty, and yet the absolute necessity, of passing as a native was continually underlined by Burton: “The first difficulty was to pass for an Oriental, and this was as necessary as it was difficult. The European official in India seldom, if ever, sees anything in its real light, so dense is the veil which the fearfulness, the duplicity, the prejudice and the superstitions of the natives hang before his eyes.” ^[14] He decided to pose as Mirza Abdullah, a “half Arab, half Iranian” merchant from Bushire in the Persian Gulf, and in this guise he enjoyed—so he tells us—considerable social and amorous success, including—according to his niece Georgiana Stisted—an unfortunate affair with “a beautiful Persian girl of high descent”;^[15] he also brought back for Napier lurid details of infanticide, wife killing, and wrongful executions among the Sindi population. His charm, especially with women, and his status as a cloth merchant apparently gave him access to private homes, even to harems, and brought him matrimonial proposals from the fathers of marriageable women. He played no ordinary merchant but a man of expansive interests:

Sometimes the Mirza passed the evening at a mosque listening to the ragged students who,…mumbled out Arabic from the thumbed, soiled and tattered pages of theology upon which a dim oil light shed its scanty ray, or he sat debating the niceties of faith with the long-bearded, shaven-pated blear-eyed and stolid-faced genius loci, the Mullah. At other times, when in a merrier mood, he entered uninvited the first door, whence issued the sounds of music and the dance;—a clean turban and a polite bow are the best “tickets for soup” the East knows. Or he played chess with some native friends, or he consorted with the hemp-drinkers and opium eaters in the estaminets, or he visited the Mrs. Gadabouts and Go-betweens who make matches amongst the Faithful and gathered from them a precious budget of private histories and domestic scandal.^[16]

Nonetheless, his mastery of native identity was as yet incomplete. His accent would not allow him to impersonate a Sindi, and there were gaps in his knowledge of Shia practice that had to be plugged by his munshi (though he claimed to have fooled his teacher on one occasion with the perfection of his disguise).^[17]

Burton was rarely content simply to pass as a native of this variety. His fondness for multiplying identities, as well as his penchant for coming off as wilier than the natives, led him to impersonate an English official as well as the official’s factotum and confidant, Mirza Abdullah. Thus by day he played Burton the English officer, surrounded in his tent by munshis, scribes, servants, telescopes, and the other appurtenances of English power and given to “a sort of Oriental dress.” In the evening, the Mirza circulated among the hangers-on in the Englishman’s camp, gathering information and dispensing details about his English patron. Frequently, he says, “had he to answer the question how much his perquisites and illicit gains amounted to in the course of the year.” ^[18]

Burton seems to have affected on occasion the exulting self-confidence in his own knowledge and cunning that is manifest in the passage above. It is certainly not difficult to imagine that his description (through the words of a Goan man) in the book on Goa of “Lieut.———, of the———Rgt.” may have been a wish-fulfilling self-portrait, though it is important to note that a satirical note is by no means absent: “[He] was a very clever gentleman, who knew everything. He could talk to each man of a multitude in his own language, and all of them would appear equally surprised by, and delighted with him. Besides, his faith was every man’s faith.” ^[19] This must be juxtaposed with what he wrote elsewhere at about the same time:

Thus you see how it is that many of our eminent politicals—men great at Sanscrit and Arabic, who spoke Persian like Shirazis, and had the circle of Oriental science at their fingers’ ends;…turned out to be diplomatic little children in the end, which tries all things. They had read too much; they had written too much; they were a trifle too clever, and much too confident. Their vanity tempted them to shift their nationality; from Briton to become Greek, in order to meet Greek on the roguery field; and lamentably they always failed.

So much for active dealings with natives.^[20]

While these comments can usefully be read as expressions of scholarly and professional competitiveness directed at other, armchair Orientalists, they cannot but be seen also as a commentary on Burton’s own ambitions; they do speak to his sense that only superior force could prevail against eastern peoples, who were invariably more practiced than Englishmen in craftiness. His invocation of the political officer (and spy), Alexander Burnes, and of the British commander in Kabul, Sir William Macnaghten (both of whom had been assassinated by Afghans in Kabul in 1841), doubly underscored the futility and the danger of engaging in deceit with such enemies. Such oscillations between a sense of infallibility and a sense of helplessness were to persist, as we shall see, in his Meccan sojourn.

Burton was involved in some diplomatic missions while in Sind. And it appears that Napier sought Burton’s linguistic and shape-changing skills for another important project in 1845. The source for information on this project is Burton himself; the following is his account of the production and effects of the “scandalous report” that he claimed brought his Indian career to a close. It seems that Napier was told

that Karachi supported no less than three lupanars or bordels, in which not women, but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price, lay for hire.…Being then the only British officer who could speak Sindi, I was asked indirectly to make enquiries and to report upon the subjects; and I undertook the task on express condition that my report should not be forwarded to the Bombay Government, from whom supporters of the Governor’s policy could expect scant favor, justice, or mercy.^[21]

This was a serious problem for Napier, as the brothels were supposedly catering to British troops, both white and brown. Burton accordingly visited the brothels as Mirza Abdullah, accompanied by his munshi; just how his information was obtained is never specified, though there has been a great deal of speculation on the question of Burton’s participation in the activities he describes. In any event, he apparently produced a report on the Karachi brothels that was full of details so candid that his superior put the report away in his secret file, where it was to remain for two years, until it was brought to light by one of Burton’s opponents and used to punish its unorthodox author. Burton was to allude briefly but pointedly to this report in the famous “Terminal Essay”—which includes a section on pederasty—that is positioned at the conclusion of his translation of the Alf Laylah wa Laylah (rendered by Burton as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night),^[22] but the “original” has apparently disappeared. Fawn Brodie speculates that it was burned by Isabel Burton or her sister.^[23] Edward Rice, like at least one other Burton scholar, suggests that the report, if there was one, was an oral report that never existed as a written document.^[24]

Burton was usually careful to maintain—no matter how much he might occasionally attempt to titillate or outrage his metropolitan audience with hints of his own participation in “abominable rites”—that none of this cross-cultural traffic could be allowed to dislodge the semiotic of racial and cultural difference in which colonial epistemology was grounded; and in Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851), he speaks with a profound revulsion of the Eurasian body that resulted from Portuguese-Indian miscegenation in Goa: “It would be, we believe, difficult to find in Asia an uglier or more degraded looking race.” ^[25] Miming the native, especially for the purpose of decentering native identity, retained, however, a powerful hold on his imagination. Gail Ching-Liang Low usefully points to the pleasures and disavowals that mark such impersonation: “Constantly aware of the whiteness underneath the disguise, he derives great pleasure from his warding off of the native threat (the fear of castration); his clothes as fetish permit both the acknowledgement of difference (on which his identity as master is based) and the simultaneous disavowal of that castrating difference.” ^[26] In the book on Goa Burton describes, not without admiration, Portuguese methods of conversion in that territory: “The Portuguese sent out in all directions crowds of missionaries, who, as Tavernier informs us, assumed the native dress, and taught under the guise of Jogees and other Hindoo religious characters, a strange, and yet artful mixture of the two faiths. That these individuals sacrificed the most vital points of their religion to forward the end they proposed to themselves, we have ample proof; at the same time that they were eminently successful, is equally well known.” ^[27]

After a few years in Europe following the unsatisfactory cessation of his Indian service,^[28] Burton applied to the Royal Geographical Society for funding that would enable him to undertake a trip to the holy cities of Islam and thereby remove a “huge white blot” from the European cartographic construction of the Near East. It is instructive at this point to read Burton through the Conrad of “Geography and Some Explorers” and of Heart of Darkness. Conrad speaks of looking at the map of Africa as a boy and seeing satisfyingly numerous blank spaces that left room for the enactment of imperial fantasies.

At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map…I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.…I have been in some of them.…But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank so to speak—that I had a hankering after.…True, by this time it wasn’t a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.^[29]

As a boy Conrad dreams of visiting these blank spaces, conscious, even as he fetishizes the blankness of Africa, that his arrival signals the erasure of that blankness. When he is a man, however, the blank spaces have been “filled up” by the twin inscriptions of geographical knowledge and colonial possession. Likewise, in the Personal Narrative, the white blot that is Arabia (or Sind) in the British imagination provides the perfectly constructed theater for the authorized script of colonial impersonation, inscription, and occupation.

Burton was not by any means the first white man to make a successful pilgrimage to Mecca, but his predecessors (among them Giovanni Finati, Joseph Pitts, and Ludovicus Vertomannus) had compromised their standing either by embracing Islam or by failing to provide full and accurate details of the city and the shrine. In other words, some had dispensed with the necessity of disguise by converting; others had failed to complete the purpose of the pilgrimage, which for them as Europeans and non-Muslims extended beyond the experiential domain and embraced the discursive; it entailed not just the successful completion of the physical act of pilgrimage but also its appropriate (and exhaustive) narrativization. It was possible, as Burton himself concedes, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca after a formal declaration of conversion to Islam. As Thomas Assad notes, such an option would have relieved Burton of the unremitting pressures of miming native identities and orthodoxies of various kinds.^[30] But such a move would have been counterproductive to the project as Burton conceived it. As a new convert (and a European), he would, he felt, run the risk of being unpopular with the locals; certainly he would be the object of native scrutiny: “My spirit could not bend to own myself a Burmá, a renegade—to be pointed at and shunned and catechised, an object of suspicion to the many and of contempt for all” (Personal Narrative, 1: 23). He had therefore to be a “real” Muslim, which also meant being a “real” native; this was a paradoxical position that allowed him to be free of obvious scrutiny (and therefore free to observe and document and categorize all that came his way) while enforcing on him an unrelenting vigilance in order to stave off that very scrutiny.

Burton’s journey was, he tells us, successfully undertaken in 1853 in the guise of Shaykh Abdullah, a Pathan (Afghan from India) darwaysh (dervish), and doctor of colorful reputation who had been born in Bombay and educated in Rangoon. This identity was built up and modified—often by fits and starts and often in response to suggestions from friends and well-wishers as well as in response to the difficulties his disguise of the moment created—during his passage through several Muslim lands. In Alexandria he was Mirza Abdullah; there, he tells us, “the better to shield the inquisitive eyes of servants and visitors, my friend, Larking, lodged me in an outhouse, where I could revel in the utmost freedom of life and manners. And although some Armenian Dragoman, a restless spy like all his race, occasionally remarked voilà un Persan diablement dégagé, none, except those entrusted with the secret, had any idea of the part I was playing” (Personal Narrative, 1: 11). Later he became Shaykh Abdullah rather than Mirza Abdullah (thus effecting the transition from Shia to Sunni in nomenclature). The initial mistake of assuming Persian and therefore Shia identity could not be as easily forgotten by those around him, who it seems looked upon him as a Shia posing as a Sunni: “Although I found out the mistake and worked hard to correct it, the bad name [of Ajami, Persian] stuck to me: bazar reports fly quicker and harder than newspaper paragraphs” (Personal Narrative, 1: 14).

In Cairo, where Burton spent a considerable amount of time and began publicly to appear as a Pathan educated in Rangoon (the better, he said, to rationalize his linguistic and other errors), he also assumed the professional status of a hakim (doctor) and a darwaysh. This procured him entry—as his status as purveyor of fashions had in Sind—into private homes, including women’s quarters, though his reputation for sanctity and wisdom was severely compromised on the eve of his departure by an act of public drunkenness and boisterous conduct.

The figure of the pilgrim or the religious mendicant was, or was to become, a favored disguise for other fictional and real colonial characters. Kim O’Hara, as the lama’s disciple in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, is an obvious instance. And, as Thomas Richards reveals to us, the secret mapping of Tibet by the British India Survey involved the deployment of Hindu pandits garbed as pilgrims, whose beads and staves served as instruments of reading and measurement. What he says about the mode of production of such knowledge is not without its applicability to the situation of someone like Burton:

[N]ot only did [Captain] Montgomerie’s [of the British India Survey] monastic technology integrate topological surveillance into the rhythm of everyday Tibetan life (thus making it also imperceptible), but it also introduced a paradigm of surveillance as a migratory phenomenon (thus rendering obsolete the fixed fortifications of blockhouse, conning tower, escarpment, and frontier). At one and the same time the Tibetan project combined an extended form of measuring extended space using body-based units of measure (as with the span and the fathom), a medieval form of clocking time by dividing the day into units of prayer (as called for by St. Benedict’s Rule), and a modern form of vehicular surveillance by projectile (as compiled by stealth flights and satellite reconnaissance).^[31]

For Burton, the assumption of darwaysh status was carefully thought out. As he saw it, the darwaysh was a figure of total subjective license in the Islamic world, bound by no orthodoxies or regulations:

No character in the Moslem world is so proper for disguise as that of the Darwaysh. It is assumed by all ranks, ages, and creeds;…Further, the Darwaysh is allowed to ignore ceremony and politeness, as one who ceases to appear upon the stage of life; he may pray or not, marry or remain single as he pleases, be respectable in cloth of frieze as in cloth of gold, and no one asks him—the chartered vagabond—Why he comes here? or Wherefore he goes there?.…In the hour of imminent danger, he has only to become a maniac, and he is safe; a madman in the East, like a notably eccentric character in the West, is allowed to say or do whatever the spirit directs. Add to this character a little knowledge of medicine, a “moderate skill in magic, and a reputation for caring for nothing but study and books,” together with capital sufficient to save you from the chance of starving, and you appear in the East to peculiar advantage. (Personal Narrative, 1: 14–15)

This already available prototype allowed him an unscripted, subjective space in which he could establish his own identity as adventurer and disguise artist as well as an identity as a model—if idiosyncratic—Muslim. Edward Rice advances the thesis that Burton’s pilgrimage was not, in the strictest theological sense, a transgressive act. He claims that Burton actually embraced Islam, albeit an unorthodox variety of it (he apparently became a Sufi-influenced Ismaili), and that the pilgrimage to Mecca was no more than his right as a Muslim. Rice bases the evidence of Burton’s so-called conversion on his descriptions of his initiation into the Sufi brotherhood in Sindh, and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus. He points, too, to the fact that Burton’s comments on Islam and Islamic culture were almost invariably sympathetic and respectful.^[32] Such an attempt to investigate Burton’s “sincerity” or to clarify his position in positivist terms seems to me not just dubious but beside the point. (I will point out, however, that no other evidence—however broadly defined—of such a conversion exists: Burton himself claims only to have been initiated into a number of exotic socioreligious fraternities, including those of the Sikhs and the Nagar Brahmans.) Certainly the speaker in all of Burton’s writings—travelogues, letters, journals—positions himself always as an unassimilable subject: in relation to his metropolitan audience, he is the knowing insider who has penetrated and participated in every exotic and forbidden mystery. In relation to Islam or the Orient, he is a “Frank” who must ceaselessly and vigilantly encode his behavior within a cultural system and must keep establishing his credentials, which are, however, much more impeccable than those of the Muslims or Orientals by whom he is surrounded. It also seems to me that Burton’s regard for Islam can most suggestively be read in the light not of his religious loyalties but of the opportunities it provided him to dramatize his heterogeneous affiliations in unorthodox and provocative ways.

These manipulations of subject positions need to be foregrounded in a reading of Burton’s work, and Homi Bhabha’s work on the unstable economies of identity production in colonial discourse allows us a way of reading Burton’s impersonations. Bhabha locates in mimicry the site of an ambivalence and uncertainty that can throw into question the grounds of the entire imperial enterprise. He draws our attention to the subversive or at least the destabilizing potential of the move that reproduces asymmetrical difference under the sign of assimilation/sameness; the mimic man, the subject-in-process, functions as a supplementary instance that, far from (only) stabilizing the imperialist self, (also) interrupts its coherence through defamiliarization.^[33] Thus “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.” ^[34] Yet this necessary difference—which cannot be uncoupled from repetition—is itself the source of anxieties about the ontological stability of the original. Thus the mimic man, rather than simply capitulating to the colonizer’s narcissistic desire to reproduce himself, articulates through an imperfect doubling, through repetition and difference, a challenge to the notion of the normative, authoritative, and reproducible colonial self even as he acquiesces to and upholds colonial authority.^[35]

What happens when Bhabha’s formulation of the inherent ambivalence of colonial discourse and its hybridized effects is traversed by related preoccupations and anxieties—the necessity for impersonating the native or the fear of going native? The last is of course one of the defining tropes of colonial discourse, which plays in innumerable ways with that ominous and ever-present possibility; and it meshes rather neatly with Bhabha’s analysis of the colonizer’s paranoid anxiety about the integrity and stability of his identity. But the project of native impersonation seems to point not to the ambivalence but to the self-possession and single-mindedness of colonial discourse; it seems to open up a different set of ontological and positional possibilities in texts like those of Burton or Kipling, reformulating the tropes of mimesis, mimicry, fluidity, and exchange. When figures like Burton or Kim O’Hara assume their disguises, they seem to do so with the fullest faith in their own unfragmented subjectivity and in their ability to disguise and conquer. Their miming of native identity is part of a successful rearguard action that not only renders the native transparent but also undoes the effects of the “sly civility” of the native (the “sly civility” that, through the process of prescriptive mimicry, re-presents or reconstructs the colonizing subject).^[36]

This miming of nativeness is an imperative in several colonial texts. In speaking of the staging of cultural identity in nineteenth-century British India, Satya Mohanty points to the endeavor in Kipling to render “the white man as simultaneously invisible, or at least capable of invisibility in a context that renders him eminently spectacular.” ^[37] This staging of the white man as invisible and inscrutable is obviously and intimately tied to the production of the native as a scrutable object. In Burton, this is typically accomplished by portraying native identity as a literal narrative of the body. For him, training as a Muslim in preparation for his pilgrimage involves making an inventory of certain elaborately ritualized behaviors and “unnatural acts”:

Look, for instance, at the Indian Moslem drinking a glass of water. With us the operation is simple enough, but his performance includes no fewer than five novelties. In the first place he clutches his tumbler as though it were the throat of a foe; secondly, he ejaculates, “In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful!” before wetting his lips; thirdly, he imbibes the contents, swallowing them, not sipping them as he ought to do, and ending with a satisfied grunt; fourthly, before setting down the cup, he sighs forth, “Praise be to Allah!”—of which you will understand the full meaning in the Desert; and, fifthly, he replies, “May Allah make it pleasant to thee!” in answer to his friend’s polite “Pleasurably and health!” Also he is careful to avoid the irreligious action of drinking the pure element in a standing position. (Personal Narrative, 1: 6)

Elsewhere, too, the Personal Narrative avers that the eastern body must be read literally, and the lower the subject on the racial-social-moral hierarchy, the more literally must the body be read. Phrenology and “physiognomy” are, for Burton, the ideal critical practice in the face of the native body; and the sacred name of Gall, the founder of the pseudoscience, is invoked as an aid in reading the features of the Badawin (Personal Narrative, 2: 81). While the civilized (European) body is rendered either impenetrable or at least metaphorical by the influences of civilization, the native body that is unmarked by anglicizing influences (Burton abhors the “denatured” native, and in this he is typical of many colonial officials) is available in a natural and unmediated state for scrutiny.

What are the implications of the native’s seeming imitability? How do we read the multiple and contradictory valences of disguise, mimicry, and/or impersonation in the field of colonial discourse? On the one hand Burton’s easy transition between varied identities underwrites imperialism’s avowal of faith in a stable and coherent colonial self that can resist the potential pollutions of this trafficking in native identity. If the colonial self is stable and unassailable, then it might be expected to follow by the logic of imperialism that the native self is, like all the blank or dark spots on the map, a void, an uninscribed and infinitely malleable space. The native can thus be made over in the image of the colonizer. Not only this, the colonizer can in turn simulate the native in a movement that Kaja Silverman designates, in the instance of the T. E. Lawrence of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a “double mimesis.” ^[38]

It is important at this point to specify the manifold implications of double mimesis, to note the disjunctions between Burton’s miming and Lawrence’s. In Silverman’s reading of Seven Pillars, Lawrence offers himself up as a paragon of essentially Arab heroism to his Arab followers: “Lawrence suggests in that text [Twenty-Seven Articles] that the best way to lead is to constitute oneself as an ideal within the terms of the native culture—to outdo the Arabs in representing ‘Arabness,’ becoming in the process a standard to follow.” ^[39] Burton’s objectives in the other-producing strategy called double mimesis are in effect similar, though he does not spell them out as seemingly self-consciously as Lawrence does. But both the conditions of his impersonation and the epistemic parameters of his “identities” are very differently constituted from the way they are in Lawrence; he deploys a radically different technology of representation. Lawrence was very obviously and openly an Englishman in Arabia; despite his putative popularity among the rebel soldiers or his assumption of Arab clothing, it would have been, from the evidence of his writing, extremely difficult (for Englishmen or Arabs) to (mis)recognize him as an Arab. His erotic and masochistic investment in Arab masculinity also may have created a dynamic of masquerade that, one imagines, must have been conspicuously different from the conditions that obtained for his nineteenth-century predecessor.

Burton, unlike Lawrence, has an ethnographer’s curiosity about the “mysteries” of Islam; his public identity as Englishman has to be methodically and thoroughly erased in order to guarantee the authenticity of all that he observes. At the same time, the Personal Narrative is even more the story of “Shaykh Abdullah” than it is the story of Muslim pilgrimage; the narrator has to be both voyeur and exhibitionist at the same time, enacting a more embellished and legitimate Muslim identity than those “real” Muslims around him even as he takes great pains to observe their behaviors without exposing himself. Thus Burton, hoping to pass for a Muslim making a pilgrimage to Mecca, is never content to blend in, to be inconspicuous, to be one of the crowd. In a situation that would appear to call for self-effacement more than anything else, he stages his identity in the most flamboyant of ways, constantly drawing the attention of his Muslim companions to his learning, his linguistic facility, his skill with medicine, his sexual charm, and his unusual courage. He corrects Muslim divines on points of Koranic law, performs “miracles” when the ship to Mecca is mired in mud, calls ostentatiously for food in the midst of an attack by the Badawin, and flirts conspicuously with the wives of patients, noting with delight his companions’ comments about “the Afghan Haji’s obstinacy and recklessness.” He has, as Said points out, a percipient understanding of the fact that identity is the result of one’s mastery over particular systems of signification: “All of his vast information about the Orient, which dots every page he wrote, reveals that he knew the Orient in general and Islam in particular were systems of information, behavior, and belief, that to be an Oriental or a Muslim was to know certain things in a certain way, and that these were of course subject to history, geography, and the development of society in circumstances specific to it.” ^[40] His moment of greatest tension—and triumph—occurs when he meets a “real” Pathan, who he fears might unmask him. Instead, the Pathan, asked to guess Burton’s nationality, identifies him as a fellow Pathan. He is also triumphant—though less so—at those moments when other Englishmen take him for a native; Burton desired not simply to pass for a native in the east but also to have it suspected in England that he had actually gone native and that he had put a dangerous distance between himself and the cultural appurtenances of the west, particularly “civilization” and Christianity.

There is more at work here than just a sensational display of Burton’s manipulation of identity through his proficiency in eastern languages and vast knowledge of Muslim culture. The point is not only to blend in but to stand out, not only to see but also to be seen—and to be seen as one wishes to be seen. Burton seeks to create in the process of display a model of native behavior for natives to admire and imitate; hence the acts of representation that will establish him as both actor and creator of native identity. Thus, while anglicized natives (who are always presumed to be male) are capable only of imperfect acts of mimesis that point to their condition of perpetual lack, they themselves are entirely imitable by the colonizer. The colonizer in fact can enact the natives better than the natives can simply be themselves; double mimesis allows the natives to be interpellated as natives, not just as mimic men. It is no coincidence that this process conforms in many ways (though without the important mediating process of mimicry) to the anthropological/ethnographic mode, in which a native informant reproduces for the benefit of the ethnographer the information about indigenous societies that was generated by the discipline in the first place.^[41] Burton was, we might remember, one of the pioneers of the discipline of anthropology, helping to found, along with James Hunt, the Anthropological Society of London in 1863 and delivering several papers before its members in his capacity as one of the society’s “lions.” ^[42]

It should be clear by now that this double mimesis differs at important points from Lawrence’s. In Silverman’s reading, there is a distinct and an external racial Other whom Lawrence essentializes and in whom he can misrecognize himself, an Other who is substantialized in figures like Feisal and Ali ibn el Hussein.^[43] This Arabness or otherness is separate from and anterior to his arrival on the Arab scene. Burton, on the other hand, resemanticizes—instead of simply imitating—native or, more properly, Muslim (these categories often function as one in Burton) identity; it is not possible for the native to be properly a native, to have access to a subject position as native, without imitating Burton. Part of this drive to call Muslimness into being must have derived from Burton’s own powerful (if equivocal) identification with Arab culture and with Islam; Patrick Brantlinger comments that “Burton’s ideal Arab is an idealized self-portrait.” ^[44] However, there is, for Burton, no essential—that is to say, unique, unchanging, and ahistorical—native identity since it can be reconfigured, revised, and re-presented by him. (British identity is not an issue in the same way, though, as we shall see, it is by no means unproblematic.) What is designated native identity, then, is an act, an impersonation—but with important qualifications. Manipulation, play, and impersonation are only available to those on the right side of the colonial divide. So for the native, identity, while not essential in the usual sense of the word—since it can be and is subject to colonial dislocation and manipulation—is not an act; natives are denied irony or distance with respect to their identity. Each new identity created for them by the colonizer or the colonial situation becomes in turn essential for them; theoretically they could occupy a series of essential identities in response to the models offered by the colonial state or its emissaries (like Burton).

Somewhat uneasily linked to this notion of native permeability, malleability, and lack of essence is the notion that the native is an opaque entity who must be known, categorized, and fixed in the most complete way possible. But while natives have a capacity (an imperfect one) for mimicry, they have no capacity for self-examination or self-representation or for offering up their subjectivity in any way that will usefully mesh with the colonizer’s various information systems. So, while “[c]olonial power produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible,” ^[45] it is nonetheless a system of representation that simultaneously entertains a profound anxiety about the native’s slipperiness and inscrutability. It is in order to constitute the native, then, as a knowable entity that impersonation, surveillance, and interpellation by a colonial observer are necessary; the last procedure would in fact banish the necessity for surveillance altogether. Even the native informant is not to be trusted (not in Burton’s narrative, at least) in this enterprise of making the racial Other transparent, not the least because the native informant is often the anglicized, upper-class native who is most conversant with the codes constituting colonial selfhood and thus supremely in a position to order and control the flow of colonial knowledge. In Kipling, the collaborationist native of Macaulay’s fantasy has been transformed into the Bengali babu. It is almost always the babu—the subject who, because of his education, class position, and racial identity, is the most appropriate candidate for the position of native informant—who is the most sinister of all anticolonial forces. The impersonation of the native by the colonizer is thus deployed as the most appropriate heuristic device in a context that relies on the contradictory—and unstable—tropes of native permeability and native resistance to definition.

What emerges is the following equivocatory notion: the native is without history and identity (that is, without any significant subjective autonomy and without any of the psychosocial components that might complicate the work of colonial interpellation) and capable of radical reconstitution by the colonizer; since the native does not possess a stable and coherent self, s/he can be easily imitated by the colonizer; the native is also opaque and secretive and resistant to rendering her/himself accountable to western modes of reportage. Hence individuals like Burton must insinuate themselves into eastern life in order to render it accountable.

The assumption of such a subject position has, however, some decentering implications for the hegemony of the colonial self, as it becomes evident that Englishness and nativeness are part of a single signifying chain and that each forms the other’s horizon. In Burton the schoolboy glee at being able to hoodwink the natives is generally paramount, though at various points the process of endless impersonation and exchange is problematized and made inseparable from a profound sense of ontological incompleteness. In later years Burton was to speak of this desire to splurge in a constant flux of identities as constituting for him a somewhat embarrassing psychic need:

I can scarcely persuade myself that great events are brought about by mere imposture, whose very nature is feebleness: zeal, enthusiasm, fanaticism, which are of their nature strong and aggressive, better explain the abnormal action of man on man. On the other hand it is impossible to ignore the dear delights of fraud and deception, the hourly pleasure taken by some minds in finessing through life, and in playing a part till by habit it becomes nature.^[46]

We see here, quite clearly, I think, Burton’s sense of the contradictions of his position—not just his sense, for instance, of the discrepancy between the heroic male action of imperial conquest and the feminizing pursuit of deception and indirection that is supposed to assist and even authorize the imperial project but also his sense of a somewhat disconcerting confusion of selves and roles. Englishness here is nothing other than the capacity for the impersonation of non-Englishness, even as native identity has proved to be only that which is not English.

What is also worthy of note is the fact that despite Burton’s drive to name Muslimness and nativeness as his own creation rather than a category that might be at least provisionally indigenous and despite his insistence on outdoing natives at being natives, he must always occupy a space on the margins of the discourse he wishes to recast.^[47] As a “half-Arab, half-Persian” merchant in Sind, he is an outsider who can pass as an Oriental because little is known about the national/ethnic, linguistic, and other categories he supposedly inhabits. He must depend to some degree on local ignorance of “the real thing.” Similarly, in Hejaz and Arabia he can be an outsider once more, this time a Pathan; wherever he goes, he signifies a pervasive liminality, if not a pervasive alterity. As a native, he is both familiar and alien; and all imperfections in knowledge, language, and other behaviors can be the function of his always being from “somewhere else.” Note, too, that the fantasy of the (English) man who can be all things to all people, as well as the liminal figure who is neither outside nor inside, must borrow its model from Sufism. The figure of the darwaysh is a peculiarly privileged one in the Islamic world, a figure representing scholarly curiosity, mobility, and freedom from all provincial constraints.

What also needs to be stressed is the way in which these manipulations and self-dramatizations are subtended by, or in dialectical relationship with, a keen sense of anxiety—anxiety about native inscrutability, insurgency, and threats to personal safety. The sense, however temporary, of mastery achieved by Lawrence through reflexive masochism and double mimesis is never fully achieved for Burton; colonial mastery is never fully or convincingly stabilized. There is the profound insecurity and uncertainty that authorizes the miming of native identity in the first place; if natives were transparent they would not require scrutiny and interpellation. Besides, there is always the fear, in the Personal Narrative, that the natives might be observing Burton, rather than he them. His attendant Mohammed al-Basyuni (“the boy Mohammed”) identifies him unerringly as a white man upon the chance discovery of his instruments and has to be argued out of this belief by the other pilgrims. On the road to Medina Burton feels himself watched during his (ritual) ablutions and prayers (Personal Narrative, 1: 168); at other moments he has to evade inquisitive and observant companions. Moreover, while Burton (and his companions) may be convinced of the effectuality of his performance as native, there is always the fear that he may be the wrong kind of native, and he often needs advice from friendly natives before and during his pilgrimage about the ethnic and professional roles he should assume. His initial and ill-conceived assumption of Persian (Shia, that is, and therefore heretical in Sunni Hejaz and Arabia) identity dogs him all the way from Egypt to Mecca, reminding him of the limits of his enterprise, just as he is identified as a detested Turk in East Africa, where he wishes to pass for an Arab.^[48] In Mecca he is drawn into conversation with some Meccans, who concur in their conviction of his being Persian. And at the conclusion of the pilgrimage, Mohammed once again, and most categorically, names him as a sahib, an incident that raises interesting questions about what passes for success in Burton’s account of his pilgrimage. By the time he boards a ship to return to Suez, he is marked as “an Englishman rumoured to have gone to the Holy City” (Personal Narrative, 2: 276) and is bemused by the failure of the Turkish pilgrims on board to respond in an appropriately hostile fashion to this report.

Burton himself seems fairly self-conscious about his anxieties, which are repeatedly invoked and displaced. These anxieties are often mediated, unsurprisingly enough, by memories of India. In an early footnote he says of the British presence there:

As regards Indian opinion concerning our government, my belief is, that in and immediately about the three presidencies, where the people owe everything to and hold everything by our rule, it is most popular. At the same time I am convinced that in other places the people would most willingly hail any change. And how can we hope it to be otherwise,—we, a nation of strangers, aliens to the country’s customs and creed, who, even while resident in India, act the part which absentees do in other lands? Where, in the history of the world, do we read that such foreign dominion ever made itself loved? (Personal Narrative, 1: 37–38, n. 1)

Not coincidentally, this is followed by a footnote (added to the second edition of Personal Narrative in 1879) about the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Clearly, India must have been very much on Burton’s mind as he made this pilgrimage; he had spent a good part of his adult life there, and, once in West Asia, he decided that he could most safely and convincingly assume the role of a Pathan apothecary raised in India. The matter of India thus becomes an important subtext to the account of Burton’s presence in the Muslim holy land. His skills as a disguise artist, undercover agent, and ethnographer are corroborated by repeated invocations of his ethnography of Sind, undertaken at Napier’s behest in the interest of surveying and pacifying a turbulent—and recently colonized—population. Hejaz and Arabia reminded him at every turn of his years in Sind (as Sind—so named after its conquest as “Young Egypt” on account of its putative fertility—was to evoke a land he had never seen). The memory of India, which on this pilgrimage became the memory of the familiar, the memory of a colonial home as it were, must also be seen at the same time as a psychic device for territorializing the unfamiliar.

In speaking of the Indians, Burton makes an interesting point about staging the colonial identity for the benefit of the natives:

I am convinced that the natives of India cannot respect a European who mixes with them familiarly, or especially who imitates their customs, manners, and dress. The tight pantaloons, the authoritative voice, the pococurante manner, and the broken Hindustani imposes upon them—have a weight which learning and honesty, which wit and courage, have not. This is to them the master’s attitude: they bend to it like those Scythian slaves that faced the sword but fled from the horsewhip. (Personal Narrative, 1: 40)

The man who would be king must constitute himself as a spectacle for an adoring native audience. The civilizing mission demands the careful maintenance of nonpermeable boundaries. Difference and discipline are thus maintained as part of the same process. Imitating the native as, presumably, East India Company officials in the eighteenth century were in the habit of doing,^[49] is inadvisable because the Indian does not acknowledge innate superiority: s/he reads the colonizer’s body absolutely literally. It is possible to read in this an anxiety about what it is that constitutes British superiority, since it must be so zealously guarded and embedded in precise systems of signification. Can this superiority inhere in nothing more than appearances? And if imitation is not the proper role for the Englishman in the tropics, then what can be said about Burton’s own subject position? Burton of course is careful to distinguish himself from the great body of colonial administrators—“what might be perilous to other [European] travellers was safe to me,” he boasts at the start of his narrative. Thus his tale presents itself to us as the story of one man’s unduplicable encounter with the inscrutability of Islam and the Orient. He feels that he alone can be a native as successfully as he is a sahib. He is capable of a fungibility of identity that can deceive the natives as well as preserve the prestige of the empire.

In Egypt and in Arabia, though, Burton is reminded continually of the double-edged implications of this fungibility through his evocations of his Indian experience. The subject of India arouses a fairly acute anxiety, an anxiety that is generally displaced onto Indian subjects. The Indian (for the British imagination in the nineteenth century, the quintessential colonial subject) is identified as “the most antipathetical companion to an Englishman”; s/he is the practitioner of a “sly civility,” wily, slippery, discontented, outwardly subservient but always in anticipation of “a general Bartholomew’s Day in the East,…look[ing] forward to the hour when enlightened Young India will arise and drive the ‘foul invader’ from the land” (Personal Narrative, 1: 38). Even the reported Anglomania of a British ally like Ranjit Singh is simply a cover for the most treacherous designs. In a later, related footnote, Burton remarks: “This was written three years before the Indian Mutiny. I also sent into the Court of Directors a much stronger report—for which I duly suffered” (Personal Narrative, 1: 38, n. 1). Burton loved to embellish his narratives with proofs of his own prescience and complaints of ill-usage from Philistine superiors. The question of whether or not Burton was a good prophet is not, however, relevant here, nor do I think the question a particularly compelling one. The fact is that, no matter where Burton traveled in Asia or Africa, he always found proofs of various kinds testifying to the rebellious and hostile spirit of the native population. In his account of Goa he had voiced his certainty about impending Indian violence against their English rulers; and toward the end of the Personal Narrative there is a footnote that claims to have anticipated the 1858 “Jeddah massacre” of Europeans and Christians. In The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860), that account of the journey to the source of the White Nile, the murder of a European provides the impetus to narrative, and reminders of this murder resurface periodically over the course of the work. This testifies less to oracular or prognosticative abilities than to a profound, indeed almost a paranoid, anxiety about the British presence in the colonies, a presence which is indissociable from an ur-text of native violence and insurgency that threatens to repeat itself endlessly in colonial history. Besides, this construction of the native as an always potentially murderous subject nudges the reader toward reading the protagonist’s actions in a particular register, translating espionage into besieged heroism. An encounter with the east that is traversed by fear and threat may establish the power of the east and its capacity to deflate grandiloquent imperial pretensions. What it also does is name the east as aggressor, opposing itself to what is constructed, as Mary Louise Pratt reminds us, as “a non-interventionist European presence.” ^[50]

But the specter of a reversal of the balance of power in colonial relations is no sooner raised than it is framed, distanced, and rendered absurd. Burton thus fixes the “bombastic Babu” with his nationalist pretensions within a moral-racial hierarchy that forecloses on the possibility of the babu’s success. He turns for support—as he will continually during his pilgrimage—to the textual evidences of Orientalism, invoking a talismanic name that immediately guarantees its truth value and reinforces Said’s point that the accuracy of Orientalist textual representations was validated above all by ascertaining their correspondence with the works of other Orientalists:^[51]

As my support against the possible, or rather the probable, imputation of “extreme opinions,” I hold up the honoured name of the late Sir Henry Elliot.…“These idle vapourers (bombastic Babus, and other such political ranters), should learn that the sacred spark of patriotism is exotic here, and can never fall on a mine that can explode; for history will show them that certain peculiarities of physical, as well as moral organisation, neither to be strengthened by diet nor improved by education, have hitherto prevented their ever attempting a national independence; which will continue to exist to them but as a name, and as an offscouring of college declamations.” (Personal Narrative, 1: 40–41, n. 2)

Nonetheless, in spite of the dexterous textual management of the babu’s anticolonial and nationalist pretensions, the text continues to register a very precise sense of the writer’s vulnerability. The delight in disguise, in playacting, and in deceiving others is inevitably bound up with reminders that this is more than a game; if it is a game it is the kind of Great Game that is played in Kim, where the penalties for failure may be fatal. The anxieties Burton expresses about the British presence in India must have been multiplied enormously in Mecca and Medina. He was, as he conceived it, engaging in an act of explicit territorial and psychic aggression by which he sought to force the Muslim world to submit to a series of hermeneutic violations. The narrative predictably oscillates between a gusto at the success of various maneuverings and stratagems by which its author bested the entire east and an extreme and anguished sense of vulnerability. Throughout there is close attention to the details of disguise, to all the manipulations of the body (including circumcision), to all those ceremonies that permit European man to offer himself up as a simulacrum of the Muslim without actually surrendering identificatory autonomy.

The various extended descriptions of the stratagems Burton had to employ in order to make notes and sketches also register this equivocal sense of mastery and threat. Arabs are represented as innately suspicious of activities like note taking, measurement, mapmaking, and surveying, an attitude Burton attributes to ignorance and superstition:

Pilgrims,…carry, I have said, a “Hamail,” to denote their holy errand. This is a pocket Koran, in a handsome gold-embroidered crimson velvet or red morocco case, slung by red silk cords over the left shoulder.…For this I substituted a most useful article. To all appearance a “Hamail,” it had inside three compartments; one for my watch and compass, the second for ready money, and the third contained penknife, pencils, and slips of paper, which I could hold concealed in the hollow of my hand. These were for writing and drawing: opportunities of making a “fair copy” into the diary-book, are never wanting to the acute traveller. He must, however, beware of sketching before the Badawin, who would certainly proceed to extreme measures, suspecting him to be a spy or a sorcerer. Nothing so effectually puzzles these people as the Frankish habit of putting everything on paper; their imaginations are set to work, and then the worst may be expected from them. The only safe way of writing in the presence of a Badawi would be when drawing out a horoscope or preparing a charm; he also objects not, if you can warm his heart upon the subject, to seeing you take notes in a book of genealogies. (Personal Narrative, 1: 239–40)

Not all suspicion can be so ingeniously circumvented. Note the following observation, one among many that testifies rather querulously to the Arab/Muslim dislike of being observed and catalogued: “A stranger must be careful how he appears at a minaret window, unless he would have a bullet whizzing past his head. Arabs are especially jealous of being overlooked, and have no fellow-feeling for votaries of ‘beautiful views.’ For this reason here, as in Egypt, a blind Mu’ezzin is preferred, and many ridiculous stories are told about men who for years have counterfeited cecity to live in idleness” (Personal Narrative, 2: 318). The connections that are gestured at here, between colonial sight and oversight, are a not uncommon feature of colonial travel literature. Pratt describes a characteristic placement of the observer in such writing, a placement she reads as central to “the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene.” ^[52] In such a scene, and in such a position, the observer can subject the circumambient landscape to an endless and all-encompassing gaze. Moreover, such a posture can without any obvious strain be absorbed into the discourse of aesthetics and Romantic conceptualizations of landscape. Thus, Burton implies, it is not simply the western traveler (“a stranger”) who is denied access to a panoptical vision; access is denied as well to easterners, who have then to resort to trickery to obtain their ends.

Yet Burton seems fully capable of eluding the putative paranoia of the Arabs. When he actually gains entrance, through the intercession of his attendant, the boy Mohammed, to the Kaaba itself (not a routine part by any means of the ordinary Muslim’s pilgrimage, as he is careful to inform his readers) he acknowledges fear openly—“my feelings were of the trapped-rat description” (Personal Narrative, 2: 207)—but is still collected enough to continue on his mission: “This did not, however, prevent my carefully observing the scene during our long prayers, and making a rough plan with a pencil upon my white Ihram [pilgrim’s robe]” (Personal Narrative, 2: 207).

What, moreover, we are never allowed to forget is Burton’s own separation from the collective cultural experience of pilgrimage.^[53] This experience, however persistently coded as authentic, is always also raw material to be organized into a narrative for Orientalists, ethnographers, and the reading public in England. Indeed, when Burton is face to face with the Kaaba, he is not overcome as the other pilgrims apparently are by a sense of religious awe (though he does hint, significantly, that his emotional response to the sight of the shrine is deeper and richer than theirs); he is filled instead with a sense of mastery and of his difference from all his companions:

There at last it lay, the bourn of my long and weary pilgrimage, realising the plans and hopes of many and many a year.…and how few have looked upon the celebrated shrine! I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtains, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride. (Personal Narrative, 2: 179)

The trope of dual cultural and racial citizenship is staged and restaged by Burton, only to unravel at moments like these. Thus, when he enters Medina, he is momentarily moved, like his companions, at the sight of the city, but soon the traveler’s duties of observing, measuring, and recording reassert their preeminence. At the sight/site of the Kaaba, this breakdown is complete. He can only view the shrine in the light of the discoverer’s prize; Mecca becomes, like the European maps of Arabia, a blank space emptied of history and human presence (except his own). All his fellow pilgrims and friends are swallowed up by the margins, and all that is left is the romantic colonial tableau vivant in which the explorer sees, names, and claims the east for the first time. Even as he penetrates the Forbidden City, he proleptically envisages the enactment of the British imperial design—“It requires not the ken of a prophet to foresee the day when political necessity…will compel us to occupy in force the fountain-head of Al-Islam” (Personal Narrative, 2: 231). Later he contemplates the extinction of the slave trade in Mecca—to Burton always a synecdoche for imperial intervention and the deployment of the civilizing mission—and delights in the fact that none of his companions suspects him of such subversive thoughts.

Burton, though, is rarely as explicit as he is here about the appropriation of the holy places of Islam for the British Empire. What we are given instead is a variety of legends about the impending desecration or takeover of Mecca by infidel forces: “almost every Meccan knows the prophecy of Mohammed, that the birthplace of his faith will be destroyed by an army from Abyssinia. Such things bring their own fulfilment” (Personal Narrative, 2: 323, n. 2). Muslim legend writes itself here as congruent with British imperial ambitions. It is worth noting that all these prophecies of defeat are located in the body of the text, whereas the statement of imperial aims is written almost as a footnote, in the footnotes, and in a manner which preempts British intentionality and makes the British simply the agents of world-historical processes: “till the day shall come when the tide of events forces us to occupy the mother-city of Al-Islam” (Personal Narrative, 2: 268, n. 2).

This vision of the overthrow of the Arabs is positioned, appropriately, at the conclusion of the Personal Narrative, and it provides the most apposite of codas for the profoundly self-referential narrative of the double mimesis. Earlier in his account Burton had mentioned Egypt’s special qualities as the “most tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of Europe” (Personal Narrative, 1: 114), though with characteristic ambivalence he had noted the inhabitants’ “contradictory” loathing of the Europeans (especially the English) and their “long[ing]” for European rule. Here Burton’s (re)production of an idealized eastern subject position becomes even more comprehensive and ambitious in its reach at this moment of projected closure, as he recasts himself as more than just an agent of British imperial destiny. Hitherto he has exhibited himself as both the originator and the model of nativeness; here he positions himself as the interpreter par excellence of the texts of the Arabs, texts that encouragingly mirror imperial fantasies of aggrandizement and prefigure a colonial history that can only have one trajectory. In such a scenario, neither natives nor their futurity can hold any mysteries: they can but inhabit identities and destinies constituted elsewhere, but they must nonetheless claim that destiny as their own. The ultimate aim of colonial mimicry is not simply to constitute natives as objects to be studied; it must also produce natives as self-reflexive subjects, who know themselves as others (the colonizers) know them. What Gayatri Spivak terms the “territorial and subject-constituting project” ^[54] of colonialism is authorized in this Whiggish invocation of Arab prophecies and the Arab collective memory, which demand nothing less than the imperial yoke. What Burton envisions, in other words, is the mapping of British India onto the to-be-British territories of Egypt and Arabia. What had occasionally proved for him an uncomfortable fit between the psychic and territorial space called India and the territory of Al-Islam (including Egypt, Aden, Hejaz, and Arabia), the former inviting disidentification, if not outright revulsion, while the latter was not without a powerful appeal to his sense of an intensely masculist honor, is, temporarily at least, held in abeyance at this moment.

The use of the Arab prophecies as the figuring of the legitimacy of colonialism is an arresting exercise, one that surely calls for a gloss, however brief. For this I turn to Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose compelling discussion of the “failure” of modernity in postcolonial India, albeit about a later and quite different moment in colonial history, resonates with the one under consideration in this chapter. In “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” he speaks persuasively of the differences between a bourgeois and a colonial (in his case, Indian) modernity. Among other things, he calls our attention to the “antihistorical and antimodern” elements in the latter; he takes note for instance of the “devices of collective memory,” including subaltern and elite constructions of “‘mythical’ pasts/futures,” which were deployed by (colonial) Indians in the process of claiming subjecthood.^[55] What the instance of the Personal Narrative would suggest is that such modes of remembering/foretelling are also, (perhaps) paradoxically, a staple of the teleology of a bourgeois (and colonizing) modernity, which demands the “premodern” and “mythic” as a condition of the narrative of history and universal reason. Burton must remember an Arab past in order to imagine a British imperial futurity.

Notes