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Eye on the exotic India in Mind
It’s deftly edited by Pankaj Mishra who takes care to make brief but crisp introductions of various writers. Though the sequence of the narratives doesn’t reveal any discernible order either chronologically or otherwise, they do make spellbinding reading. The simple, evocative details of the people and places are painted with poetic brush and emotive rush of words flowing straight from the heart; in contrast to laboured and often contrived word play of many of the current "fly-by-night" celebrity writers. As Mishra writes in his introduction about the Western responses to the enigma of India, it rarely inspires pure affection or admiration and the reactions are complex, ranging from awe and wonder to repulsion and rejection. A famous writer who made a journey to India in quest of its spiritualism, particularly the practice of chastity, was W. Somerset Maugham. In 1930, he undertook the "British Grand Tour of India"—Benares, Agra, Kerala and Goa. He met a number of holy men; experiences that later got weaved into his novel The Razor’s Edge. In fact, V. S. Naipaul later turned this experience of Maugham into the starting point of his novel Half-a-Life. And Maugham records his discussions on the subject with the erudite Dewan of Mysore: "When I began to speak of religion in India as being the basis of all their philosophy, he corrected me. "No," he said, "that is not so. There is no religion in India in your sense of the word; there are systems of philosophy, and theism, Hindu theism, is one of its varieties." Andre Malraux, the intellectual French Minister of Culture, was also fascinated by India’s spirituality. He records his visit to Elephanta caves vividly: "Their link with the bowels of the earth suggested an entire subterranean India, secretly watching over the India of the villages, the animals, the processions of urn-carrying women, the majestic trees, while the towns, chimerical and theatrical, made ready to return to dust." Although the American author Paul Bowles travelled 8,000 miles mostly through villages and small towns of India, he was candid enough to call it "a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance." Describing his stay in Cape Comorin (present-day Kanya Kumari) in 1960, he records: "On such still nights, the waves breaking on the nearby shore sound like great, deep explosions going on at some distant place. There is the boom, which can be felt as well as heard, and which ends with a sharp rattle and hiss, then a long period of complete silence…You almost feel the sea by your bedside." Besides landscapes, there are evocative descriptions of architecture in the book. Jan Morris, the famous chronicler of the British Empire, describes her view of New Delhi in 1975: "Seen early on a misty morning from far down the ceremonial mall, Rajpath, New Delhi is undeniably majestic—neither Roman, its architects said, nor British, nor Indian, but imperial. Then its self-consciousness is blurred by haze and distance and by the stir of awakening Delhi." How true even today! Pico Iyer, the celebrity travel writer and essayist of Indian parentage, sketches an eerie picture of New Delhi experienced at midnight excerpted from his novel Abandon: "As they drove into the spectral capital in the nigh—it was 2 a.m. now, local time—he felt as if he were moving through a battlefield at the end of some medieval war. Here and there, figures were sitting by small fires along the side of the road, their eyes wild as the headlights caught them, while others plodded along with bullocks in the middle of the half-deserted street … India had the one thing that California lacked, he realised—native ghosts." The Western traveller to India seems to broadly fall into three categories—romanticising Indophile, unraveller of the Indian enigma and the India-baiter. In this collection, among those whom India baffles notwithstanding the empathy is E. M. Foster, and the baiters are: Naipaul, Mark Twain and Bruce Chatwin whose article on the "Wolf-Boy" is typical of the selective reportage of India’s morbid oddities. Interestingly enough, the most poignant and telling essay on the arrogance of British imperialism is George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant, while in the police service of Burma. Leaving aside such
angularities and predominantly an eye for the exotic India, the essays
are literary gems culled from various sources. They are a collector’s
item for the aficionados of exquisite travel writing. |
Quality
travel writing is a journey that reveals as much about the traveller as
the world he describes. This anthology revisits some classic travel
writings about India by the finest Western writers. Its 25 pieces
include writers like Paul Bowles, Jan Morris, Paul Scott, Mark Twain,
Rudyard Kipling, Andre Malraux, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Pico
Iyer, Bruce Chatwin, V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Hermann Hesse.
Collectively, they create a fascinating mosaic of Indian images as seen
through the last 150 years.