EXPLORER, linguist, writer, anthropologist, soldier, diplomat, translator, poet, sexologist: Richard Burton was a Victorian Prometheus.
In 1842, at the age of 23, he arrived in India as a lieutenant in the service of the East India Company. For the next seven years he absorbed the cultures and languages of the sub-continent. Serving in Bombay, Baroda, Karachi, Sind and Goa, he mastered more than one language a year, emerging as the Indian army's star student in Hindustani, Gujerati, Marathi, Sindi, Punjabi, Arabic, Telugu, Pushtu, Turkish, Armenian and Persian.
He perfected the art of "going native", which enabled him to make his celebrated journey in disguise to Mecca in 1853. He proved himself an anthropologist of genius and wrote four books, of which his volume on the peoples of the Sindh is still used as a guide to the ethnology of the area by the locals themselves. The mature Burton was in all essentials what India in these seven years made him.
Christopher Ondaatje, who seems to be a larger-than-life character himself, is clearly obsessed with Burton. He decided to retrace his hero's route in India and Pakistan, spending a vast amount of time and money going in harm's way - for, off the beaten track, tribal law is really the only writ that runs even today, and for this reason Ondaatje needed the protection of armed bodyguards.
Nevertheless, much of the journey was plagued by the more mundane problems of tropical disease and Third World bureaucracy. As always with lavishly illustrated books like this, the pictorial record makes one forget the squalor of the sub-continent by emphasising the beauty, and it must be said that Ondaatje's colour photography is quite stunning. In terms of production values this book is a nonpareil.
On the project itself I was initially inclined to doubt. The "footsteps" mode of romantic biography or part-biography was of course popularised by Richard Holmes in his well-known volume a decade ago, which, according to some commentators, marked a revolution in biography as distinct as that inaugurated by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians in 1918.
My own experience of "footsteps" made me sceptical. Myself a Burton enthusiast, I once tried to follow his route in Brazil, only to find that the great climax of his journey down the Sao Francisco river, the mighty Paulo Afonso waterfalls, had been turned into a trickle by a giant hydro-electric plant which completely ruined the romance Burton had spoken of. "Footsteps" biographers often report similar examples of modern technological vandalism. My scepticism is also in part methodological. It seems to me the English are absurdly attached to the idea of spirit of place as an "open sesame" to the lives of the great, and that in this they fall victim to what A.N. Whitehead memorably called the "fallacy of simple location".
It is pleasant to record, therefore, that Ondaatje has avoided pitfalls of the romantic biographer. He never stretches the evidence farther than it will go, and his claims for his achievement are modest and sober-sided. He succeeds because the lndian sub-continent has changed less than the First World or its would-be analogues in the Third.
Sindh, unlike the Sao Francisco river, is much as Burton saw it, and Ondaatje convinces in his Burton empathy beyond what it would be reasonable to expect. His text is always absorbing and often illumined by striking insights, either from himself or the many indigenous Burton scholars he runs to ground. After reading so many gimmicky, phoney or ill-researched travel books recently, I found this one a genuine pleasure. It is a must for the Burton buff, of whom I wish there could be a greater number.
