Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
the Dahomey customs he told of a tribe that had nearly been annihilated because its members believed that putting a sacred snake on the path to their village would defend them from their enemies (the reptile was dangerous, Burton maintained, only to rats). This does not mean that he regarded all such “civilized” judgments as superior to those of less advanced people: contesting the common European view that Africans in general led “a wretched existence,” he maintained that “the so-called reflecting part of Creation will measure every other individual’s happiness or misery by his own; consequently it is hoodwinked in its judgment. Considering the wisdom displayed in the distribution and adaptation of mankind, I venture to opine that all are equally blessed and cursed.” Generalizing this judgment in another place, he wrote that “nations are poor judges of one another; each looks upon itself as an exemplar to the world and vents its philanthropy by forcing its infallible system upon its neighbor. How long is it since popular literature has begun to confess that the British Constitution is not quite fit for the whole human race, and that the Anglo-Saxon has much to do at home, before he sets out a-colonelling to regenerate mankind?” (To which Americans in the first decades of the twenty-first century may sadly respond that for some of their elected leaders such a time has, alas, not yet arrived, even now.)
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This skepticism, dashing cold water on both the claims cultures make to regulate the lives of their members and on their belief in the high worth of their values, became a central element in Burton’s meditation on cultural difference sometime in the 1860s. That this attitude should be understood as a fruit of his longstanding sense of never belonging wholly to any single culture, and of his attempts to carve out for himself some kind of space between different ones, can best be seen by looking at the two works in which he gave it most explicit expression, Stone Talk (1865) and The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yezdi (1880).
The two writings strike different tones, the first excited and aggressive, the second calmer and more reflective, and only the former speaks specifically about life in the nineteenth century, but the two works are very close in spirit. Both are written in verse, there is much overlap in their content, and both put ideas and sentiments that are clearly Burton’s own in the mouths of imagined “Orientals,” a Hindu in the first and a Muslim in the second. Burton never publicly admitted being the author of either, a tactic that served to shield him from the opprobrium that giving voice to radical critiques of morality, religion, and contemporary British and European life would have been bound to call down on his head; but not putting his name to the works also allowed him to speak at once as a person with a particular cultural identity—not his own—and as an anonymous voice coming from no definite place. The first book, a dialogue between an English scholar, “Dr. Polyglott,” returning very tipsy from a dinner at which the talk was “’Bout India, Indians and all that,” and a London paving stone that his inebriation helps him to see as the metamorphosis of a long-ago Brahman, was published under the name “Frank Baker” (“Frank,” as Fawn Brodie notes, was a version of Burton’s own second name, Francis, and Baker the family name of his mother); the second claimed to be a translation by “F.B.” of a poem by the Persian friend (and Mecca pilgrim, since he bore the honorific “Haji”) whose name appeared on the title page. Burton printed 200 copies of the first but few survive because his wife, Isabel, quickly recognizing him behind the pseudonym and fearing that enemies would use the book to damage his chances for getting desirable appointments from the Foreign Office, bought up as many copies as she could find and burned them. With its more polished and sweet-sounding style, the Kasidah seems to have been partly inspired by the success of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (published in 1859), which Burton hoped to emulate, but in contrast to its model it found little success with the public (although it has recently been reprinted a number of times). Like Fitzgerald’s book, Burton’s affirms the pleasures of life in the present over the promises of any future or beyond, but the Kasidah is peppered with anti-religious ideas that most readers at the time would have found shocking.63
One thing that made Isabel so anxious about the possible impact of Stone Talk on Burton’s career was the book’s wide-ranging and acid-voiced criticisms of contemporary European life. A major focus was on moral and religious hypocrisy, especially in regard to English sexual and moral prudery and its effects on women; putting this critique in the mouth of a Hindu allowed its anti-Christian dimensions to receive especially free rein. No less harsh, however, was the blast against imperialism, an evil in Europe since the time of the Romans: “But SHE forgot / to plunder subjects; You do not.” The “death and doom” brought by “the ravening Saxon,” and that left “India once so happy, now / In scale of nations sunk so low,” was so palpable that the very mention of her name in the House of Commons “clears every bench to England’s shame.” (This did indeed happen on some occasions in Parliament.) Similar effects of imperial domination were evident among “the Red Man in the [American] West,” as well as in Turkey, Tasmania, and Japan. Nor were things better inside Britain itself, where many poor people had been turned into virtual slaves, condemned to inhabit such places as “the dread dens of Manchester.” All the same, no horror of the time was worse than the actual slave trade, “blacks bepacked like cotton bales, / Sold like cattle, lashed till raw / By nankeen’d whites in hats of straw.”64
The strong accents in which these things are condemned (and the fatuous replies put in the mouth of “Dr. Polyglott”) make it evident that Burton shared the views of his Brahman “stone. These features of Stone Talk cast strong doubt on the claims put forward by some writers that his negative pronouncements about Africans, even when couched in terms of race, were those of an apologist for empire. In fact, Burton had been a critic of it all along, condemning British domination of India for the hatred and animosity it bred even before he left in 1849, and in one unwelcome memo effectively predicting the bloody uprising that shook the foundations of British rule in 1857, leading the crown to take over the East India Company’s status as the Raj’s sovereign authority. He repeated this diagnosis in the autobiographical memoir published by his wife, describing how the rigidity of the Company’s administrators and their failure to understand local life led them to turn once flourishing villages into places of poverty and suffering; in contrast, the native rulers whom the Company displaced had taxed heavily when harvests were good and lightly when they were not. “Anglo-Indian rule had no elasticity, and everything was iron-bound; it was all rule without exception. A crack young Collector would have considered himself dishonored had he failed to send in the same amount of revenues during a bad season, as during the best year.”65
The religious and moral radicalism and the extreme cultural relativism of both Stone Talk and the Kasidah sprang in large part from the generalization of these views. Railing against the readiness of British Protestants to condemn Catholics for their errors and to attribute immorality to countries still loyal to the papacy, thus hypocritically casting a veil over their own lapses, the Brahman insists that religious beliefs are never founded on anything objective, and that people simply absorb whatever views happen to hold sway where they grow up:
Chance birth, chance teaching—these decide
The faiths wherewith men feed their pride;
And, once on childhood’s plastic mind
The trace deep cut, you seldom find
Effaceable, unless the brain
Be either wanting or insane.
The Kasidah applies the same perspective to morals:
There is no Good, there is no Bad;
these be the whims of mortal will:
What works me weal that call I “good,
what hams and hurts I hold as “ill”:
They change with place, they shift with race;
and, in the veriest space of time
Each Vice has worn a Virtue’s crown;
all Good was banned as sin or crime.
In the notes appended to his “translation” of Haji Abdu’s verses, “F.B.” refers back to these lines when he says that his friend was “weary of … finding every petty race