2,500 years of paradise

A STRANGE KIND OF PARADISE: INDIA THROUGH FOREIGN EYES Author: Sam Miller Publisher: Penguin Pages: 427 Price: Rs 599

In A Strange Kind of Paradise, Sam Miller analyses how centuries of foreigners from the ancient Greeks to Victorian pornographers to the politically-incorrect crew of the BBC show Top Gear have perceived India. Having lived in Delhi since 2002, Miller also documents his own love affair with the country, evolved from when, as a first-time visitor to India in the nineties, he couldnt tell whether Shiva was the creator or destroyer. Today, as managing editor, South Asia in BBC, he is today regarded as one of BBCs most experienced India hands. Miller wades through historical tomes, foot gropes the ruins of Pataliputra that lie beneath muddy mosquito-ridden waters and travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers, to compile a history of India imagined.

Miller writes that the earliest surviving written travelogue to India is by Scylax, a Greek sailor who lived about 500 years before the birth of Christ. His version of India, writes Miller, reads like an ancient Star Trek. Scylax described seeing Skiapodes (men with feet so large, they could use them as umbrellas when supine), Monophthalmoi (men with one eye, Cyclops-like in the centre of the forehead) and Emotikoitoi (men with large and flappy ears that doubled as sleeping bags). 2300 years ago, his compatriot Megasthenes was also struck by the strangeness of the Indian race, but his account of the governance of wealthy Pataliputra, capital of Magadh, is the first significant foreign account of India. One of the most interesting historical accounts of India was Hiuen Tsangs in 7th century AD, he wrote about the pleasures of Kashmir and the spiritual wonders of Varanasi, eerily resonating with modern travel writings.

Sam Miller

Miller describes Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore as the two personalities in the early 1900s who determined how India was perceived abroad. The reader is left strangely bereft as Miller fails to flesh their roles out in detail. In the same chapter, however, he brings to life the fascinating controversy surrounding Mother India a rather libellous analysis of Indian sexual and gender mores by Katherine Mayo. Not only did she exaggerate the ill-treatment of Indian women, she also famously misquoted Tagore on the subject of child marriage. Gandhi wrote a most un-Gandhian 3000-word review deriding her book, in what was perhaps the first Indian attempt to challenge a foreigners account of India.

This, in many ways, is the significance of A Strange Kind of Paradise. Miller has demonstrated how the travelogue is much more than an objective account of a physical journey. Redolent with ones hidden expectations and fancies, its a journey of the mind. Fittingly, the book has wonderfully weird chapter titles (for example, Chapter Three is entitled, In which the author is besotted with a transgendered monk, takes a seventh century electronic quiz, and is almost very rude to a pretty woman). This makes the Table of Contents a fun read and a great marketing ploy to attract random book browsers in bookshops.

For trivia buffs, A Strange Kind of Paradise is peppered with nuggets of useless but piquant information. I learnt that Jules Vernes protagonist Captain Nemo was the Indian prince Dakkar, nephew of Tipu Sultan. Also that Marco Polo wrote that some Indian birds passed diamonds in their faeces. All in all, an entertaining history emerges for the reader through these travelogues, much like a funhouse mirror through which the reader can see India through the eyes of the Other, distorted yet familiar. Millers handling of the changing mirrors and the realities they reflect, makes this book an interesting, informative and fun read.

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2,500 years of paradise