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BOOKS
Without A Map
So many good travellers but bad planning.
By Nilanjana S. Roy
There is no such
thing as "over-anthologised" in India, though with the number
of anthologies now taking shape in various publishing houses, I expect
there soon will be. Having said that, one of the more curious aspects
of this collection is the sense of familiarity it breeds. Dom Moraes has
united many of the usual suspects-Bill Aitken, Mark Tully, Vikram Seth,
William Dalrymple-in a melange of writers from abroad and writers from
India, not altogether unsuccessfully. It is interesting to note that in
this collection at least, writers like Jerry Pinto and P. Sainath more
than hold their own vis-a-vis Naipaul or Ginsberg, who write here with
the hearts of tourists. That is, perhaps, in keeping with the spirit of
this compilation. Any collection of Indian travel writing needs to decide
whether it's going to be a pilgrim's progress, a tourist's handbook or
a journey through the presently fashionable unknown India. This volume
attempts to straddle all three subgenres, which allows for variety but
not for coherence.
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THE PENGUIN BOOK
OF INDIAN JOURNEYS
Ed by Dom Moraes
Viking
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 369
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One of the perks
of reading anthologies is the pleasure of random browsing, but the sudden
shifts from Bruce Chatwin to, say, Sarayu Ahuja, or R.K. Narayan to Abraham
Verghese can be unsettling. I'm usually an advocate of the free-form anthology,
but this one might have benefited from having a chronological order imposed
on it-in fact, I tried the experiment of reading all the pieces here chronologically
and found a much more interesting book lurking inside.
 Despite
the unaccountable absence of names one might have expected to see, such
as Pico Iyer, there is still enough here to fill out a weekend's worth
of reading. Chatwin's "On the Road with Mrs G" is well on its
way to attaining the position of a classic; Jan Morris' "Hill Station:
Darjeeling, 1970" has lost none of its crispness with the passage
of time; Mark Tully's "Kumbh Mela" set the tone for the hundred
other Kumbh Mela pieces that have appeared since; Jonah Blank's "Ayodhya"
and Seema Qasim's "Kutch Touch" delineate two distinct streams
of intolerance; James Cameron's "Refugees" is an outsider's
snapshot of Bengal post-Bangladesh. A weekend's worth, easily. But no
more than that.
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