"How can the mind take hold of such a country?" asked E.M. Forster in "A Passage to India". How indeed? For the past 2500 years conquerors, travellers, traders, missionaries and artists have left records of their encounters with the subcontinent - bewitched, bemused, amused, dismayed - and this book is culled from the best of them. The first accounts which reached Greece spoke of giant animals which could detect gold with their snouts and of women who would give themselves to any man in exchange for an elephant. As Indian ...
Read More
"How can the mind take hold of such a country?" asked E.M. Forster in "A Passage to India". How indeed? For the past 2500 years conquerors, travellers, traders, missionaries and artists have left records of their encounters with the subcontinent - bewitched, bemused, amused, dismayed - and this book is culled from the best of them. The first accounts which reached Greece spoke of giant animals which could detect gold with their snouts and of women who would give themselves to any man in exchange for an elephant. As Indian culture slowly evolved, it inspired a glorious profusion of comment, observation and misapprehension, encompassing the sublime and the ridiculous in almost equal measure. Many of the authors quoted here, such as Naipaul, Kipling, Chaudhuri and Forster, will be familiar to lovers of literature, but the real joys are often to be found in material rarely seen before - in the unpublished diaries of colonial housewives, the letters of French botanists, and the reflections of returning exiles. India is overwhelming in its beauty, its melancholy, its sheer richness and diversity; no other culture can offer such a range of experience.
Read Less
Very Good. 1992 John Murray, London. First Edition. No additional printings listed. Trade paperback. NOT Remaindered. NOT ex-library. Black and white plates. Binding tight. Covers have light edge and surface wear. Spine NOT creased. Covers lightly curled at corners. Pages clean and unmarked. 264 pages.
