Goa, and the Blue Mountains: Or, Six Months of Sick Leave [Paperback]

Richard Francis Burton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

Burton was a young British officer during the colonial period in India. Recovering from cholera, he was sent to the Nilgiri hills to recuperate. He journeyed along the coast of western India, visiting such places as Goa (the last remnant of the mighty Portuguese empire), Calcutta, and Ootacamund (the British rest-station). Burton's writing reflects the intolerance common in the imperialist era, and yet his insatiable curiosity led him to talk to the outcasts of society as well as the elite. While Burton has an unkind word for everyone, he also displays sincere compassion and a keen eye for local culture.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Richard F. Burton was a noted nineteenth-century British explorer, best known for discovering the source of the Nile. Dane Kennedy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska and the author of Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Duke 1987). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

He was known as a rake, an explorer, and a lover of ancient languages. Sir Richard Burton's complex character is fully on display in his first book Goa, and the Blue Mountains, published in 1851.

As a British army officer in India, Burton contracted cholera, and he was sent to the Nilgiri hills to recuperate. Rather than proceed directly there however, he took a leisurely journey down the Indian coast, for he wanted to experience the "exotic East". (Burton later translated the Kama Sutra and produced an extremely naughty version of the Arabian Nights.) He is drawn to the town of Seroda, for instance, by the promise in English periodicals of "a village, inhabited by beautiful Bayaderes...Eastern Amazons...high caste maidens...equally enchanting to novelty-hunters and excitement-mongers..." Reality of course proves much different, and Burton reacts with the bitterness of a disappointed lover: he finds that "the ladies all smoke, chew betel-nut, drink wine and spirits..." and that "a stranger soon learns everything is done to fleece him..."

Burton mingled with everyone in India: he posed as an English gentleman looking for a wife to gain entrance into a school for girls, and attended balls at the palaces of tarnished royalty. He met an old beggar in Goa from whom he elicited the tragic story of a failed romance. When Burton offered aid to the man, he refused: death held no danger for this former soldier, and Burton was genuinely touched.

As to the best method of travel in India, Burton recommends:

"If in good health, your best plan of all is to mount one of your horses, and to canter him from stage to stage, that is to say, between twelve and fifteen miles a day. In the core of the nineteenth century you may think this style of locomotion resembles a trifle too closely that of the ninth, but, trust to our experience, you have no better. We will suppose, then, that you have followed our advice, engaged bandies for your luggage, and started them off overnight, accompanied by your herd of domestics on foot. The latter are all armed with sticks, swords, and knives, for the country is not safe one, and if it were, your people are endowed with a considerable development of cautiousness. At day-break, your horse-keeper brings up your nag saddled, and neighing his impatience to set out, you mount the beast, and leave the man to follow with a coolie or two, bearing on their shoulders the little camp-bed, on which you are wont to pass your nights. There is no danger of missing the road: you have only to observe the wheel-ruts, which will certainly lead you to the nearest and largest, perhaps the only town within a day's march."

He traveled widely, visiting Goa, Seroda, and Panjim, and devoting the latter portion of the book to his sojourn in the Nilgiri hills. He is often unsparing in his characterizations of "romantic" locales and showed the dirt and grime that was often a potent aspect of a city, yet he can wonderfully evoke the beauty of the Indian countryside: here is his description of the province of Malabar:

"The general breadth of the country, exclusive of the district of Wynad, is about twenty-five miles, and there is little level ground. The soil is admirably fertile; in the inland parts it is covered with clumps of bamboos, bananas, mangoes, jacktrees, and several species of palms. Substantial pagodas, and the prettiest possible little villages crown the gentle eminences that rise above the swampy rice lands, and the valleys are thickly strewed with isolated cottages and homesteads, whose thatched roofs, overgrown with creepers, peep out from the masses of luxuriant vegetation, the embankments and the neat fences of split bamboo interlaced with thorns, that conceal them..."

Burton's strength lies in his ability to reveal the consequences to India of not only colonial rule, but also centuries of domination by a variety of religious attitudes. The British come under his piercing scrutiny as do the Portuguese, Hindus, Moslems and others. Intolerant? Yes, but also razor sharp.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: The Narrative Press (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589760387
• ISBN-13: 978-1589760387
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,525,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In Goa, History Speaks to Burton, January 31, 2002

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Goa and the Blue Mountains or Six Months of Sick Leave (Hardcover)

What could be better than Victorian travel literature by Richard F. Burton. Not much. Burton is no slouch when it comes to travel, he takes the hard routes across his continents not the comfy ones that his fellows take and so he sees more and is better able to put the "normal" English experience of India into a wider context. Burton is never given the tasks or assignments he had hoped to get so he sets himself the task, out of mere boredom perhaps, of categorically describing India, its geography, ethnography, religions. He describes India in all manner of ways of describing a place including history of its cities and Goa's history is quite ripe with meaning for Burton as it tells the story of why the Portugese empire fell..., a tale which Burton feels has a lesson for the English. That he was an expert linguist helps and that he had an appetite, insatiable apparently, for all kinds of experience makes his book a kind of interdisciplinary collection of datas, some more significant than others but the effect is that he experienced a place in every way imaginable. He was romantic in that he was not suited to live within anyones boundaries but his own(he was expelled from Oxford), and scholarly, but his was a kind of scholarship that tested existing knowledge of India in the field. Perhaps a growing disillusion with England & what it really was to be English made him particularly susceptible to other knowledges and ways of being. He learned an immense amount about the lives of various natives by blending in and acting as one of them but he did this much as a spy does this, as a means of gaining information, not as an end in itself. He was perfectly suited to be a spy. Properly used someone like Burton would have been an invaluable source of information as to what actual Indians thought. If there were more like him the empire would have better understood the country it was ruling over and so more effectively ruled it, however, most Englishman felt it best to erect and enforce an invisible boundary between himself and the cultures of India. And Burton, who often dressed according to local custom even in his English quarters, was not popular among his peers nor was his information ever taken very seriously. His commanding officers simply were unable to see the value in his ability to play so many roles and so were unable to give him a role worthy of him to play. Among his narrow minded fellow officers he became his own man, a self-styled cultural anthropologist with a minor disciplinary interest in ethnographic mimicry who filled volumes with his very rare and particular talents for cross-cultural interaction and observation.
Like many travel narratives the highlights are in the little details(uncomfortable transports, unfriendly hosts) and side stories. No detail is ever lost on Burton and in matters of stories what counts most is the personality of their teller. There is none better than Burton.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Once you get past Burton's racism and intolerance......, July 15, 2007

By 

Seakay (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Goa, and the Blue Mountains: Or, Six Months of Sick Leave (Paperback)

Richard Burton gave me a rare insight into the attitude of the British in India almost exactly 100 years before I was born in a small town about 10 miles from Ootacamund. It was very interesting to me to read a description of Burton's passage up to Ooty on horseback. The railroad and roads (with their 13 "hairpin bends") came later I suppose. That region of India is very dear to my heart and I carry many pleasant memories of my life in the Nilgiris.

6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars If India were a pizza......., December 17, 2003

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave (Paperback)

Richard Burton, the famous, 19th century British traveller, started his career in India, but is mainly known for his works on Arabia and Africa. One of his earliest works, this book covers a period when he went on sick leave from his post in Sindh (now part of Pakistan) to the Nilgiri Hills in southern India. True to later form, Burton did not travel there by the usual route, but took a small coastal sailing ship down to Goa, stopped there for a look, then continued down to Malabar (part of India's Kerala state today), from where he travelled overland to Ootacamund, a "hill station" in the present state of Tamilnadu. The University of California Press reproduced his book with all its original spellings of Indian words, its early 19th century jokes and puns, and English words long since gone out of fashion. No doubt India fascinated Burton's inquiring mind and he looked into many subjects not ordinarily found in the genre of Indian travel writing produced between 1830 and 1930 by a myriad Englishmen and some English women as well. As someone who knows a bit about India, and particularly Goa, I would say he was not all that accurate. He did notice that Goan Christians remained Indian in most ways and that they were divided by caste like the Hindus, from whom they had been converted. However, his picture of the caste structure in Goa is not accurate, nor were his observations of Goan life anything more than those of a tourist. When Burton arrives in Malabar, he switches tone for some reason and supplies the reader with vast amounts of information culled from various reports or books, leaving almost no personal impressions. He reverts to his own observations as he climbs up towards Ootacamund.

I like travel books very much and long looked forward to reading this one. I was disappointed. It reminded me of a scene I once saw on an Australian TV comedy show. A chef pulls out a perfect pizza from an oven. You can see the cheese, the salami, the mushrooms, the beautiful crust. Mmm. The chef says, "And here's our pizza"--- and suddenly sneezing hugely right into it----"with a special mozzarella sauce !" Burton wrote what could have been a very interesting book, never mind accuracy. But his sneering, racist attitudes of contempt for everyone and everything, his total willingness to enforce his will on Indians with kicks and punches, his constant professions of boredom, and his scorn for each person he meets, even his own countrymen, cover the travel with a disgusting sauce, even though he may have been typical of his times. (and one should not condemn, blah, blah, blah) I must conclude that this book is not for everyone, only for the truly determined or for those who wish to research the author. For that latter purpose, the book is no doubt revealing.