The author of fifty plus books, including the translations in “literal” detail of all the graphic possibilities that could be mustered and blustered against the edifice of late Victorian England in a raging torrent of works that could be regarded as nihilistic Dadaism of the literary kind, ended up, grace to the efforts of wife Isabel, incinerated for posterity. She was intent on eliminating the evidence by throwing everything she could of this great Rabelasian adventurer into the holocaust of ignominy. And she almost succeeded in wiping out all of the evidence. Erotica-rein.
—Sir Richard Burton, initially went to India as a
member of the British army and almost immediately decided to appropriate Oriental costuming as a means of interacting more fully with his new surroundings: “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” (Burton, Selected Papers, 22). Burton went so far as to stain his skin with walnut juice in an attempt to move as a native in an alien culture that
he wanted to master by understanding and experiencing it from within, so to speak. Such an experience recalls the situation of James Kirkpatrick, another British imperialist who between 1797 and 1805 adopted Hyderbadi (Indian) clothing and ways of life, so much so that he married an Indian woman according to Muslim law (Dalrymple, xxxviii). As Dalrymple notes, such a case reveals a much more hybrid colonial world than the one that Edward
Said has charted: “with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders. . . . It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, easier to see things
in black and white” (xlv).—Read More:https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Hoeveler%20Interrogating.pdf
The she wrote a biography of her husband in which she tried desperately to fashion him in the image of her own fantasy. She would have everyone gullible enough to swallow that Burton was in fact, and at heart a good Catholic; perhaps with tendencies to drift to the fringes, but a waywardness blessed wit the sanctity of the saints and the word of J.C. as guiding principle in his actions. This, in spite of of his books being peppered with a mockery of superstition and priestcraft, whether Christian, Moselm, or Heathen. ” I ignore the existence of a soul and spirit,” he said publicly in 1878, “feeling no want of a self within a self, an I within an I.” And in the “Terminal Essay” he had written, ” The more I study religions the more I am convinced that men never worshiped anything but himself.”
Isabel did her best to eliminate evidences of his curiosity for exotic practices, fearful lest he be thought vicious because he collected data on what Victorian England called vice. He was, she insisted, ” in private life the most pure, the most refined, the most modest man that ever lived.” It is a sad and ironic circumstance that Burton for all his hunger for communication, for all his hypnotism and supposedly telepathic interchanges with his wife, never properly measured her capacity for destruction and never successfully established the communication that might have allayed it.
—In the meantime, the fifteen hundred subscribers to The Scented Garden kept writing to Lady Burton to ask when the promised work was to be in their hands. As she could not possibly reply to so many persons, and as the nature of some of the letters cast her into a state of wild perturbation, there seemed only one course open to her—namely, to write to the press. So she sent to The Morning Post the well-known letter which appeared 19th June, 1891, mentioning some of her reasons for destroying the manuscript, the principal being her belief that out of fifteen hundred men, fifteen would probably read it in the spirit of science in which it was written, the other fourteen hundred and eighty-five would read it “for filth’s sake.” The principal cause, the apparition of her husband, she did not mention.—Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4315/4315-h/4315-h.htm image:http://www.redtelephone66.com/2012/06/chiitra-neogy-the-perfumed-garden-1969/
In sum, the best of Richard Burton was either burned or buried. But that which is buried, whether by being locked in the library cases specializing in privately printed editions or simply by being scattered among the thousands of pages of his travel books, is eminently worth unearthing. In a sense, things have come full circle; Orientalism is a strong as ever, its juxtaposition with Chrsitianity bringing out the same reactions and sometimes curiosity that is expected of an evolving concept of what Liberal democracy is. Today, we can look at Richard Burton with the same kind of urbanity and detachment that he brought to the Arabs, and even ironically, the Mormons and it still evokes the same curiosity and intrigue as to how this fits in with a master plan if it does exist and to which Burton failed to acknowledge.
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