A Country the size of a continent, home to a sixth of humanity. An ancient civilization that is also a modern democratic republic only half a century old. A nation that is several countries in one. As in ages past, India continues to facinate travelers who are, in the words of Dom Moraes, the editor of this anthology, ‘startled, annoyed, and attracted by its colossal, inexplicable diversities’. More has been written about in than any other Asian country. The Penguin Book of Indian Journeys brings together pieces by some of the best contemporary writers in the English language. Travel writers – Indian and foreign, as well as compulsive wanderers without a home – engage with the comforts and the chaos, the convictions and the contradictions of modern, independent India. R.K. Narayan does a leisurely tour of Karnataka, taking the ‘emerald route’ up and down and Ghats; V.S. Naipaul rages through hot, crowded and apathetic New Delhi; and Vikram Seth flies back, after months of hitch-hiking in strange lands, to familiars, respite and Delhi customs. Ruskin Bond explores the laid-back Agra of the 1960s in the shadow of the unchanging Taj; and midnight’s child Salman Rushdie returns to the land of his birth to try and answer a riddle: Does India exist? At the Kumbh Mela, the world’s biggest religious festival, Mark Tully meets a 300-years-old sadhu. In the forests of the Western Ghats, Abraham Verghese hopes to run into the brigand Veerappan. Jan Morris rides the toy train to ‘the most celebrated of Indian hill stations’ that is ‘all smallness’. And Bruce Chatwin hits the road with the entourage o the post-Emergency, out-of-power Indira Gandhi to see ‘Madam in action’. Also in these pages are Paul Theroux, Khushwant Singh, William Dalrymple, Andrew Harvey, Amit Chaudhuri, allen Ginsberg, Joe Roberts and P. Sainath, among others, taking us to places as familiar or remote as Jaipur, Ladakh, Behmai and the Cut-off-Area. Beginning with a brilliantly insightful introduction by Dom Moraes, this anthology provides an absorbing, lively and always interesting portrait of life in contemporary India.
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