of Burton’s persona, one probing and serious, one shifting and frivolous, stood in relation to each other is a question to which answers will emerge as we go along. There is no better place to begin than with a talent and penchant he shared with the lieutenant, and that was crucial to his ability to complete the pilgrimage, namely his remarkable ability to take on the features of people culturally unlike himself, partly through carefully acquired knowledge—at once of languages, behavior, and customs—and partly through disguise.
* * *
Burton began to combine these elements in the 1840s, while serving as a junior officer in the army of the East India Company (then still the ruling authority on the subcontinent). There he was assigned the task of gathering information about the region of Sind, a largely Muslim province on the border of Afghanistan (today it belongs to Pakistan). The region had escaped British control until 1843, when it was conquered and then autocratically ruled by General Charles James Napier. Burton had arrived in India in the previous year; although by no means foreign to the side of military life that involved combat and physical prowess (he was disappointed that he arrived too late to take part in Napier’s campaigns, and he subsequently fought in the Crimean War and wrote a training manual about swordplay), his Indian work chiefly involved reporting on local life, an activity for which he was especially well suited because of his remarkable gift for languages. Required (like other Europeans in his time) to study Greek and Latin as a quite young child, he also became fluent in French and Italian in his schooldays, during which his family lived on the continent for many years. At Oxford, where his father hoped he would prepare for an academic career, he set himself to learn Arabic, working on his own because no undergraduate instruction was offered in that language in the 1830s (he started off by writing the characters from left to right as in English, a reversal that provoked a laugh from the Oxford Arabist with whom he eventually made contact). This was the moment when he worked out a system of language study he would employ for other tongues later: carrying a grammar book constantly with him but working with it in multiple brief stretches never exceeding fifteen minutes each, reading some text of interest to him with the aid of a dictionary as soon as he had acquired a basic vocabulary (usually the work of a week), putting himself in contact with native speakers whose pronunciation he silently imitated, and then reading out loud to himself. His devotion to linguistic study was if anything only deepened by his decision to abandon university life and seek a military commission, and he eventually came to speak and write well in some twenty-nine languages, plus nearly a dozen associated dialects. Posted to India, he began to study Hindi before leaving England, and devoted much of the voyage to advancing his knowledge of it; arrived in Bombay, he sought out the best available native tutors, and with their aid soon added Gujurati and Sanskrit to his stock.
To all this he was driven by reasons both practical and personal. As he later wrote, there were two paths to advancement in India: distinguishing oneself through combat or developing special competency in local languages. Premiums were given to officers who could show their proficiency in Indian tongues, and Burton won several; there can be little doubt he was the best linguist in the colonial administration, indeed one of the best among Europeans of his time. One reason for his success in India was that he mixed a genuine passion for formal study with a more direct kind of exposure he shared with many of his fellow officers, namely short- and longer-term relationships with local women. Such connections were a very old story by the time Burton arrived; in the eighteenth century they sometimes involved real marriages, seriously undertaken on both sides, with acknowledged offspring, and based on a relative absence of prejudice difficult to imagine in the face of the racist views that were gaining power in Burton’s day.8 Burton had a number of liaisons with Indian women (one of whom remained a kind of romantic ideal to him long afterward), making him part of a system that, as he later put 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”—although often with oddities or limits, one officer being known for always referring to himself with feminine pronouns and adjectives.9 Burton’s passion for formal study protected him from such blunders. These linguistic achievements brought him to the attention of Napier, who assigned him to delve into conditions and customs in the newly conquered Sind, making him part of a general survey of the region directed by Walter Scott, nephew and namesake of the great novelist. In preparation Burton learned enough Persian and Punjabi to converse in those languages, both of which were spoken in the area.10
Competence in local idioms was necessary but not sufficient for gaining the kind of knowledge Burton sought, since a British officer speaking a tongue acquired in adulthood (never, to be sure, without an evident accent) was still an outsider and an object of suspicion. The inspiration to counter this situation through disguise did not surface all at once; at first Burton’s efforts to dress in local garb were not “intended to deceive,” but undertaken because “there is nothing so intrinsically comfortable or comely in the European costume, that we should wear it in the face of every disadvantage,” and because he quickly discovered that “peasants will not run away from us as we ride through the fields, nor will the village girls shrink into their huts as we near them.”11 Burton was by no means the first European to put on Eastern dress for such reasons; travelers had done it for over a century, including at least one woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.12 But mere convenience became secondary to the felt need to get beyond “the dense veil which the fearfulness, the duplicity, the prejudice and the superstitions of the natives hang before” the eyes of European officials. Such a barrier mattered little in regard to one part of Burton’s work in Sind, which consisted of surveying land and examining an existing system of canals on behalf of Napier’s project of improving both transport and irrigation in the province, thus raising the level of both prosperity and tax collections; but it was highly relevant to some of Napier’s other concerns, which involved improving the morals of the inhabitants and replacing what he considered barbaric and unnecessarily cruel practices with more humane and “civilized” ones. More generally, both Burton and his superiors were savvy enough to recognize that knowledge about everyday life was necessary in order to deal effectively with their subjects. “In a position where a foreigner is thrown into close intercourse with natives of the East, it is absolutely necessary to study the customs of their society a little, unless he desires every day to offend by apparent neglect and incivility, and to make himself ridiculous by misplaced attention and politeness.”13
Burton had no illusions that he could pass as an Indian of a sort familiar to locals. Instead his strategy was to take advantage of the presence of Eastern people with mixed identities (ones some anthropologists in our day call “hybrid”) in the places he wanted to explore; modeling himself on them allowed him to present himself in a guise that fit with and explained his impressive but imperfect language skills.
After trying several characters, the easiest to be assumed was, I found, that of a half Arab, half Iranian, such as may be met with in thousands along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. The Sindians would have detected in a moment the difference between my articulation and their own, had I attempted to speak their vernacular dialect, but they attributed the accent to my strange country, as naturally as a home-bred Englishman would account for the bad pronunciation of a foreigner calling himself partly Spanish, partly Portuguese. Besides, I knew the countries along the Gulf by heart from books, I had a fair knowledge of the Shieh [Shia] form of worship prevalent in Persia, and my poor Moonshee [his language instructor] was generally at hand to support me in times of difficulty, so that the danger of being detected—even by a ‘real Simon Pure’—was a very inconsiderable one.
The persona he adopted was that of “a Bazzaz, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins,” calling himself Mirza (an honorific title) Abdullah of Bushire. The disguise, which included oil to darken his skin and elaborate, expensive clothing, made him seem “Oriental” enough to escape being treated as a European, yet exotic enough to become an object of curious interest to the people he encountered. He was able to enter village squares, private dwellings, mosques, and places “where he heard music and dancing.” The information he could collect in this way freed him from the need to rely, as most Europeans in similar positions did, on native informants (a system
