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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Book Review | A Strange Kind of Paradise
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Book Review | A Strange Kind of Paradise

Fasten your seatbelt to enjoy this disorderly but inspired romp through India's past and present

The Sanchi stupa was commissioned by Emperor Ashoka, whose grandmother may have been Greek. Photo: ThinkstockPremium
The Sanchi stupa was commissioned by Emperor Ashoka, whose grandmother may have been Greek. Photo: Thinkstock

A bumpy read

Sam Miller | A Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes

If you enjoy the genre of “India books", you’ve heard of Sam Miller. He’s the author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2010), an ambitious travel guide, Blue Guide India (2011), and most recently, A Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes, an eclectic historical travelogue.

Books that explore the occasionally creative, sporadically comical, and at other times, disastrous encounters between foreigners and India, have appeared in the past, such as Father India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West by Jeffery Paine. Some of the same characters turn up here—such as E.M. Forster—but the scope of Miller’s tome surpasses its predecessors. It spans thousands of years, from the first ever mentions of India in European classical sources to modern times, winding up with brief discussions about Steve Jobs’ hippie trip in the 1970s and the depiction of poverty in the Academy Award-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire.

One of the pleasures is the style, which is quite mad and disorderly. Random footnotes jostle with eccentric opinions and the sporadically bizarre autobiographical disclosure. I was happily surprised to learn that Peter Sarstedt was born in New Delhi since one of my own early bands used to cover his big hit Where Do You Go To, My Lovely? Such are the unexpected discoveries to be made and would have been impossible without Miller’s quirky modus operandi.

A Strange Kind of Paradise —India Through Foreign Eyes: Hamish Hamilton, 403 pages, Rs 599
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A Strange Kind of Paradise —India Through Foreign Eyes: Hamish Hamilton, 403 pages, Rs 599

The best passages are undeniably those where Miller takes us to the places he talks about. In search of Megasthenes we visit Patna, where he foot-fondles the remains of ancient Pataliputra, now a mosquito-infested swamp, and makes the startling discovery that Ashoka the Great may have had a Greek grandmother. Although that conjecture cannot be proven, he correctly points out the fact that portions of Ashoka’s rock edicts were written in Greek.

We journey to explore Heliodorus’ pillar, erected by another Greek envoy in rural Madhya Pradesh thousands of years ago, a testimony to the global connections of antiquity, then on to Jesus’ tomb in Kashmir and to Kerala to see Saint Thomas’ bone relic—here the ever-curious Miller manages to identify it as a part of the ulna (a bone of the upper arm).

And that’s just for starters. Innumerable people march past, ranging from the Chinese monks who searched for Buddhist manuscripts, Muslim scholars, Mughal conquerors, colonial characters and The Beatles, of course.

The first half of A Strange Kind of Paradise coheres, but the second is unfortunately a bit scattered. I suspect that the paucity of source material from ancient times forced Miller out on to the road to connect the dots through highly inspired speculation. Once the colonial period begins, with its subsequent deluge of documentation, we get a roll-call of everybody who ever uttered aloud a thought on the subject of India, and no matter if the author was some old poet who only dreamt of the country. It turns the book into so much deskwork, a library catalogue of instances of Indophilia and Indophobia, or a VIP passenger manifest of all the ships—and planes—that ever came.

It might have been sensible to pick important travellers for in-depth analysis to demonstrate the diversity of Western concerns. Instead, Miller virtually namedrops every celebrity with the remotest interest in anything Indian, and then crams in surveys of Indian cuisine in Britain and accounts of BBC’s India-related programming. Contrary to the title, there’s hardly much space left to explore what India looked like through those foreign eyes.

However, the book still works as a kind of encyclopaedia of travels to and from India, though some parts, such as the accounts of select Indians abroad—Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore—could constitute the backbone of a parallel story worthy of a separate book.

Save for that minor complaint, A Strange Kind of Paradise exemplifies the way I enjoy history—the erudite traveller taking us philistines to places, digging out piquant nuggets of obscure information to entertain with. To paraphrase Bette Davis: Fasten your seatbelts because it’s going to be a bumpy read.

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Published: 22 Feb 2014, 12:27 AM IST
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