India

This work on India has culled accounts of that country from a wide variety of sources, aiming to offer a depiction of its beauty, its melancholy, its sheer richness and diversity and its culture. The material has been drawn from, among others, colonial housewives, Forster, Naipaul and Chaudhuri.

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"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be familiar to lovers of literature, but the real joys are often to be found in material rarely seen before - in the unpublished diaries of colonial housewives, the letters of French botanists, and the reflections of returning exiles.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.