A review of In Xanadu: A Quest

Kongbrailatpam Rajeshwar Sharma *

If Yaoshang had not lost its charm, the thought of writing this review would not have come across my mind. Since May 2023, Manipur has been under ferocious attacks that appear to be carried out with the philosophy of Ghengis Khan who is recorded to have said, "Happiness lies in conquering one's enemies, driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters."

Yaoshang, under the shadow of fear and gloom, looks like a wilted flower that has lost its beauty. The soul of the spring festival of Manipur seems to have fled its age-old tradition. Without the sound of drums and graceful dance, the five-day long Yaoshang festival is empty and monotonous. The get-together of young married women in their traditional dresses at the Yaoshang feast is the beauty and flavor of the colourful festival.

But it is gone once and for all. The courtyard-play or Shumang Leela of Yaoshang is lost in the jungle of soap operas of Bollywood. Young girls along with their teen-aged sisters begging money on the streets are not only a feast to the eyes but also a delight to boys and young men alike.

Nowhere are the joys of Yaoshang seen today. The Moon lit dance in the night is at the heart of the festival. In the absence of it, Yaoshang is not less than a garden without flowers. All the charms and beauty of this great festival have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

As I had nothing to do during this tedious, five-day long festival with all its empty giggles and cackles of boys and girls that filled every lane of our neighbourhood, I could not help but pick up the book and spend the days reading it. A nephew of mine bought me the book from Kolkata recently. It is a travelogue, a genre which I rarely read.

The book is a paperback edition of William Dalrymple's In Xanadu: A Quest. The white cover of the book depicts a picture of four elephants standing in a row covered with a red carpet. They are carrying Kubla Khan and his soldiers in a large palanquin under a decorated grey canopy, which is mounted on the elephants.

The picture looks quite interesting to me, for it ignited my passion to explore the medieval world of the Mongol warriors. Apart from the tempting picture, the title of the book reminds me of my college days at North Point, Darjeeling when we studied Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous romantic poem Kubla Khan where Xanadu is described as a place of beauty, pleasure and violence: "A savage place! as holy and enchanted/As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"

In Xanadu : A Quest was first published in Great Britain in 1990 by Harper Collins. The one which was gifted to me is an Indian edition, and it was published in India in 2017 by Bloomsbury. Its author, "William Dalrymple, a scholar of Trinity College Cambridge who has been researching the journey of Marco Polo and the conditions of China at the time of Kubla Khan."

By profession, he is a historian as well as a bestselling author whose books include In Xanadu, From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives and Return of a King. These books have put him in the limelight of literary world. For his writings, William Dalrymple has won several prizes.

Among them, Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway Award and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize are worth mentioning. Besides being a bestselling author, William Dalrymple is a co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival which is one of the largest and the most vibrant literary gatherings of the world.

He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi. In Xanadu : A Quest is as much a record of "the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate" as a tapestry of adventure, history and culture which are interwoven with pictures of diverse cultures and landscapes painted with the magic words of William Dalrymple.

It is a twentieth century modern pilgrimage of the author to Xanadu the summer palace of Kubla Khan's vast empire that stretched from the Euphrates to the Pacific Ocean. Not only is it a pilgrimage but it is also an expedition to retrace the torturous journey of Marco Polo which covers a distance of "twelve thousand miles of extremely dangerous, inhospitable territory, much of which seemed still to be closed to foreigners,"

In the second half of the 13th century two Venetian brothers, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo along with Niccolo's son, Marco had already travelled such a long distance on the back of camels and horses along with their caravans.

In the autumn of 1271, Marco Polo along with two friars – Friar Nicolas of Vicenza and Friar William of Tripoli who were sent by Pope Gregory, came to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to "fetch the Holy Oil" and take it to Kubla Khan in order to prove that "the Law of Christ was best, and all other religions were false and nought", for the emperor "had shown great interest in Christianity".

When they arrived at Ayas, an ancient Turkish port city, the two friars fled to Acre because "a rumour spread that Baibars had set off northwards from Damascus with a large force, and panic swept the port." To follow the footprints of Marco Polo, the childhood hero of the author, William Dalrymple at the age of 21 embarked on an epic journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu in the summer of 1986 when he was "towards the end of my second year at university."

At Jerusalem he visited the Holy Sepulchre to take "a phial of Holy Oil" to Xanadu just as Marco Polo and the two friars did. Although his expedition was hard and arduous, the narrative is sprinkled with humorous anecdotes. At the outset of his journey, William Dalrymple set his eyes on the relationship between the three patriarchs at the Holy Sepulchre. There was no love lost among them.

The bickering and hatred among the monks at the holiest place of Christendom is described in a manner that would make a reader laugh : "Last month one of the Armenian monks went crazy : thought an angel was telling him to kill the Greek patriarch. So he smashed an oil lamp and chased Patriarch Diodorus through the choir with a piece of broken glass."

Another funny anecdote is described at the beginning of the fourth chapter where the author writes about a Japanese co-passenger whose name happened to be Condom: "and the dolmus (A Turkish bus) was two hours late. Laura and I sat in the middle row. Behind us were two families of grumbling Iranians. Ahead sat a solitary Japanese. His name, so he said, was Condom."

Besides these humorous incidents, there are anxieties and suspension as well in the narrative without which the book would have been a mere travelogue that gets dusted on the shelves. Like the plot in novels, the narrative in the travelogue, In Xanadu: A Quest, climbs up until it reaches the climax.

After passing through Syria, Turkey and Iran, the epic journey brought the author and his partner, Laura to its peak in Pakistan where they faced the bureaucratic hurdles in getting the permits from the Pakistani officials and the Chinese embassy in Islamabad so that they might cross over to China through the Karakoram Highway that links Pakistan to China. They arrived at Lahore on 26th July 1986.

Lahore is a beautiful town and its best time of the day is twilight. In praise of the town, William Dalrymple writes, "Lahore is one of the most beautiful towns I have seen: if it were not teetotal I would see very little reason ever to leave it."

Apart from its beauty, Lahore pampered the author with all its luxury and hospitality of their host. "Such pampering is fast softening any resolve to continue the Journey", writes the author. After a waste of almost two weeks at Lahore and Islamabad they were told that no permits were required to pass through the Karakoram Highway or the Kunjerab Pass. The author writes indignantly, "The fools in London knew nothing."

Apart from being a travelogue, In Xanadu: A Quest is nothing short of a history book where pages are crowded with kings and their generals; where battles, kingdoms and monuments are described page after page. As one reads the book, one is bound to come across Baibars the Mameluke Sultan, an "exslave who had once been returned to the market place by a dissatisfied buyer on account of his excessive ugliness."

After the Turks had captured Jerusalem in 1244, he established himself "the most feared and most powerful figure in the Middle East." Baibars defeated the Mongols and drove them back east of the Euphrates. Towards the end of the book, the summer palace, Shang-tu which was called Xanadu by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his famous poem Kubla Khan "known to every schoolchild", is described in the words of Marco Polo.

It was built on the first plateau of the steppe which is one hundred miles north of Peking. Xanadu was Kubla Khan's favourite residence. It was a palace where the rooms were "all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers.."

William Dalrymple and his friend Louisa, who joined the journey at Lahore after Laura had left for Delhi, nearly missed their illusive destination because Xanadu is in Inner Mongolia which is "a sensitive border region facing China's old enemy, the Soviet Union. The area is closed to foreigners." With sheer grit and determination, they set out for Duolon in Inner Mongolia, the nearest town to Xanadu.

The last few pages, where William and Louisa are whisked away in a jeep by Mongolian police, are riddled with suspense that keeps the reader wondering whether they will make it or not, or whether they are taken away to be deported. But it turned out to be an irony when they found that they were being taken to the place where Xanadu is.

No sooner did William and Louisa reach the base of the ramp that leads up to the throne of Kubla Khan than they stood where Marco Polo had once stood at the end of his journey seven hundred and eleven years before.

Then they recited in unison ST Coleridge's poem that had immortalized the summer palace of Kubla Khan:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With watts and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills.
Where blossom'd many an incense – bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills.
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.