Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an Indian Village

This collection of memoirs recounts the author’s childhood experiences in the quiet and supine India of villages. The Indian village in the first half of the last century was not a fairy tale world, as numerous accounts of human misery set against its backdrop have testified over the years, but it was still a world where a child could run across a green meadow studded with palm trees, dreaming of catching the end of a huge rainbow spanning the sky. Set in Sankhari, the author’s village by the sea in Orissa, the reminiscences are imbued with a childlike sense of wonder: the dreaded butcher thus turns out to be messenger from a goddess, while a princely exterior hides a hapless vagrant. Even the ghosts are not frightening in this place, and the journey to the alien world across the river is filled with the possibility of romance more than terror. Chasing the Rainbow is a homage to a way of life that was until recently so real. This book will not only appeal to readers nostalgic for a bygone world but will also serve as an invaluable record of village life in early twentieth-century India.