The Hall of a Thousand Columns
By Tim Mackintosh-Smith
John Murray 2005
What do you do when you’ve had your fill of education, exhausted your chosen avenue of professional qualifications and find yourself looking for yet further kicks? Get a job? Join a circus? Or simply procrastinate by embarking upon yet another gap year, as the subject of the second book in Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s proposed trilogy, a young lawyer from Tangiers, chose to do? This ‘year out’ would eventually take him twenty-five and in its course as far as China and three times further than Marco Polo. During the ten years he spent in India, he rose through the ranks to become a senior Delhi judge yet left the subcontinent with nothing. Hardly a round-the-world spin with STA then.
The traveller’s name was Ibn Battutah and in 1325 at the age of twenty-one, he left his native city on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Twenty-seven years later, having made no notes, he began to write up his entire journey. Rather than err on the side of caution, however, he set down a suspiciously detailed account which stretched the credulity of even his contemporaries. Nearly seven centuries after that, our Arabist author and his illustrious illustrator Martin Yeoman set out to follow in his footnotes in an attempt to discover his India, test his stories and thereby, they hope, ‘find’ history.
At first sight, this is an ambitious goal: IB’s recollection is notoriously shaky in places and the time elapsed between the two visits is far from insignificant. However, when the author discovers the titular hall, centrepiece of Muhammad Shah’s palace in Delhi, still standing although in current use as an improvised public lavatory, we begin to realise that the quest is not entirely in vain. Indeed, the book is at its strongest when history is ‘discovered’ and it is difficult not to feel some stirring of emotion, even if only a vicarious one, as Mackintosh-Smith sits on a stone bench where his quarry had waited over 650 years before or visits the site of a Suttee ceremony observed and chillingly described by the traveller. That such ceremonies persist in modern-day India gives the newly unearthed history considerable resonance and make the whole task look even more hopeful. ‘Years are subjective’, it says in the preface, and with Mackintosh-Smith’s help they have a tendency to contract dramatically.
With this subject matter, of course, The Hall of a Thousand Columns is not a travel book in the traditional sense: it is, if anything, a travel book about a travel book, a work of biography and autobiography moulded into one. There are at least three of them in the relationship; IB, Mackintosh-Smith and India, the author’s experiences of place largely directed by and reflected through Battutah and his travels. This provides Mr Mackintosh-Smith, a self-confessed newcomer to India, with some much needed direction in his first attempt at a notoriously difficult country. It also forces the book towards an odd mix of history, historiography, hagiography, biography, autobiography and good old-fashioned travel writing, with mixed results.
The trilogy’s award-winning first volume, Travels with a Tangerine, profits from the author’s familiarity with the culture, traditions and particularly the language of its Middle Eastern setting. Mr Mackintosh-Smith has an obvious affinity with language which has not been lost in the present book. His punning style appeals to me, though it may repel others, while his various apposite neologisms (my favourite is ‘castratosphere’) and detailed expositions of Arabic translations are both extremely skilful and hugely entertaining. As an Arabic speaker in India, however, the opportunities for linguistic tomfoolery are obviously considerably reduced. The vast majority of the gaps are satisfactorily plugged by bringing Yeoman to the fore as a fellow traveller, but others are not. While it is easy, for instance, to see why one might include a long discourse on qat chewing in a book about Yemen, it is harder to appreciate the relevance of a somewhat disingenuous account of London drug use in a work about Ibn Battutah’s time in India.
By what standard, then, is the present book to be judged? To pit it against VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness (for my money still the best travel book about India) is to ignore the central motivating historical factor, IB himself; but to view it as a work of history or historiography is to gloss over the considerable rôle of the author as subject matter. This is perhaps a debate best left unresolved since the merit of the work is considerable from any angle. Mackintosh-Smith produces several Naipaul-worthy evocations of modern India, in particular that typically seamless bonding of fantastical history and everyday life so familiar to the visitor. For instance, on encountering a Delhi magician, the author is surprised to learn that the Battutah-era Kamrup Kamakhya Academy of Magic is still in existence and more so at the deadpan detail that it was ‘founded by a guru who had 371 children [who] had a fight with another guru who also had 371 children’ with the result that ‘they were all turned into animals’. Wonderful stuff.
