Traveller's India: An Anthology (Oxford India Paperbacks) Book

India has long been a major destination on the beaten travel path. Bordering China, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea, India has hosted an impressive number of visitors over the years, and many of these visitors have penned their reactions--to the land and the climate, the tastes and smells, the philosophies and religions, the customs and bureaucracies, and the people in all their castes and tribes and regions and idiosyncrasies. For 2,500 years, people have been recording their observations of India. Thanks to the perseverance and zeal of H.K. Kaul, who made it his laudable mission to delve through centuries of dusty, archived manuscripts and bring them to light, this remarkable volume contains hundreds of insights inspired by India over the centuries. Flipping its pages is armchair travel at its best. Marco Polo enthuses over the pearl divers of Malabar in 1320, while William Hodges provides a detailed account of Massoolah boats circa 1780 ("flat bottomed, with the sides raised high, and sewed together with the fibres of the cocoa-nut tree"), and natives ("some ... wholly naked, and others so clothed, that nothing but the face and neck is to be discovered"). Afanasy Nikitin observes Hindu worship ("they raise high both hands and put them on their crown, and lie face downwards on the ground and stretch out on it") in 1466; Fanny Parks composes an ode to Ganesh, the patron of literature, in 1822 ("Moon-crowned! Triple-eyed! Thou who in all affairs claimest precedence in adoration! Calamity-averting Ganesh! Salam!!"). With a scholarly introduction on the history of travel to India, and a select chronology of writers who have added to the Indian canon, Kaul's anthology of travelers' tales offers an enormous variety of descriptions, reactions, and observations, providing hundreds of vignettes culled from the centuries, and some insights into the minds and preoccupations of the writers, as well.Read More