My perspective combines the Bourdieusian notion of literary field with a development of Genette's theories on the nature of paratext. This study aims to elucidate the key characteristics of the critical text from both a symbolic and a pragmatic viewpoint. It is a rewarding project to study the Delhi based expatriate writing of William Dalrymple, Sam Miller, Dave Prager, Rana Dasgupta and Raza Rumi as it is rich with voices, strategies, issues and images that are resonant and iridescent with meaning for not only expatriates and transnationals but also for every resident, settler, writer and thinker associated with Delhi As the expatriate feels objectified and marooned in an alien city, she also gazes back at the city as a resistive tool to manage her objectified otherness. The expatriate’s gaze is the Lacanian gaze where the gazed object does not remain mute or inanimate but speaks back to the gazer in a reciprocal relationship. It has dazed and enticed the global jet-setters in equal measures. The above inquiry suggests that Delhi is an important world capital on crisscrossing loci of rapid and incessant global flux. This paper examines some of the best known examples of expatriate novels located in Delhi with the objective of placing Delhi on the map of important urban-global narrative trajectories traced by the expatriate novel.
While we derive a sense of expatriate life and times in Delhi cumulatively from a clutch of sources like forums of shared experience and information and blogs, interviews, articles, and reports etc., expatriates in Delhi have also found the urge and the ethos to write longer narratives. There are several narratives that are born out of foreign presence in global cities, and Delhi is no different. The city’s expatriate population has been steadily on the rise in India. Possibly the main theme of Dalrymple’s work as a whole is his own cultural development, from callow travel writer to culturally sensitive historical commentator. In practice, however, it tends to result in a reduced emphasis on the other, and the figure of the first-person narrator, ostensibly relegated to the background, proves to be more resilient than anticipated.
His choice of history as his preferred method of representation in theory allows his chosen cultures to represent themselves. Despite the increasing specialization, however, Dalrymple’s approach has if anything become less elitist in nature he has even been known to offer his services providing guest lectures on Indian history to select tour parties. While such depth would be out of place in tourist discourse, some of it – the historical dimension in particular – is unusual even for travel writing.
The work of William Dalrymple reflects a series of transformations, from straightforward travel writing, through more complex and profound encounters with the places and people of various Eastern nations, in particular India, to what most recently might best be described as narrative history.
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