<p>Fanny Parkes, who lived in India between 1822 and 1846, was the ideal travel writer - courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her delightful journal traces her journey from prim memsahib, married to a minor civil servant of the Raj, to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture. Fanny is fascinated by everything, from the trial of the thugs and the efficacy of opium on headaches to the adorning of a Hindu bride. To read her is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India - the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the more eccentric "White Mughals" who fell in love with India and did their best, like Fanny, to build bridges across cultures.</p>

Begums, Thugs, and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes

Travel

Parkes, Fanny

Asia

Sickle Moon

Dahris Martin, a young American, arrived in the holy city of Kairouan in the late 1920s. There she was privileged to witness traditional Tunisian domestic life from within. Her unique portrait of the city and people tells of bare-foot pilgrims and Bedouin, the deflowering of virgin brides, spirit possession, and dances held for djinn. The author was born in New York, studied at Columbia, and worked for Doubleday, before embarking for Tunisia. Originally published in 1937.

Among the Faithful

Biographies & Memoirs

Martin, Dahris

Community & Culture

<p>Bruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveler of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our own time. He lived in Iran through the 1979 revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan and could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight. Although he lived in the lands of Islam he also knew all the artistic treasures of Christendom. His curious combination of talents - scholar, linguist, musician, translator and teacher - were duplicated by an international network of friendships with poets, spies, aid-workers, diplomats, artists and writers.Speaking Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili and could lecture fluently in French, Italian, English or German. In the last fifteen years of his life he lived for a third of the year in Delhi with William Dalrymple, hunting down unpublished Mughal histories and providing the author with translations of historical documents. It was an extraordinarily successful double act, which produced four revisionist south-Asian histories that were also international best sellers. The rest of the year was balanced by other travels, working as a dragoman-guide or pursuing his own esoteric researches, based in the modest footprint of a tiny attic in York, triple-lined with books. It was worthy of a medieval wandering scholar or a bare footed Dervish.Bruce had a number of identities, which gives this collection of original essays from trusted friends and old colleagues a dazzling diversity. They give a fascinating insight into a remarkable and diverse life. He was a man who could quote Hafiz from memory, rustle up a lethal cocktail, lose himself in Brahms, open any door, organize a concert within days of arriving in a foreign city or walk across a mountain with just walnuts and dried mulberries.</p>

Tales from the Life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist (Sickle Moon Books for Eland Publishing)

Travelers & Explorers

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