Sacred Fractures and Subaltern Cosmologies: Reconfiguring Postcolonial Travel Writing in William Dalrymple's Nine Lives and The Age of Kali

This article examines the transformation of postcolonial travel writing through a sustained analysis of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009) and The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (1998) by William Dalrymple. Situating Dalrymple within the long history of British travel narratives on South Asia, the study argues that his work occupies a transitional position between imperial ethnography and ethically reflexive postcolonial witnessing. While The Age of Kali documents political fragmentation, insurgency, and communal tension in late twentieth-century South Asia through a liberal-humanist lens, Nine Lives experiments with polyphonic narration by foregrounding the lived religious experiences of marginalized spiritual practitioners. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and contemporary travel writing scholarship, this article contends that Dalrymple neither reproduces colonial authority nor entirely escapes its structural residues. Instead, his texts dramatize the unstable ethics of representation in a globalized literary marketplace. By comparing the crisis narrative of The Age of Kali with the sacred ethnography of Nine Lives, the article demonstrates how Dalrymple reconfigures the genre’s epistemological assumptions while remaining entangled in the mediating power of authorship. Ultimately, his work reveals the possibilities and limits of travel writing after empire.