Book Review - India in Mind

http://www.the-week.com/25may01/lifestyle_article5.htm

From Australian writer Robyn Davidson’s toilet travails with the Rabari nomads in the Thar desert to Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan quest for the snow leopard, India in Mind is a literary map of sorts, multi-dimensional in diverse perspectives that range from Rudyard Kipling to Mexican poet Octavio Paz to ‘beat’ gay writer Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals (‘naked saddhus who don’t talk, crosslegged smoking dope/ to overlook the corpse meat-dolls’).

The collection is remarkable in the breadth of subjects it encompasses, with Hermann Hesse’s spiritual mysticism and Andre Malraux’s philosophical ruminations on Ellora and Elephanta cheek by jowl with Somerset Maugham’s portraits of the vina player and the Dewan of Travancore and Bruce

Yet it is a collection that disappoints—despite vivid descriptions of people and places, the characters remain cliched caricatures and slightly ridiculous in their attempts to measure up to western standards. Mark Twain’s bearer, whom he names Satan, V.S. Naipaul’s unreliable Kashmiri hotelier Mr Butt or J.R. Ackerley’s distracted maharaja. Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s stories are exceptions, yet, tellingly, Jhabwala’s patronising Margaret memsahib and Scott’s supercilious Mrs Grigson are not Indian.

Mostly, however, what you miss is a sense of the unexpected—an insider’s intimate view of the depths below the colourful vibrancy of the streets of Varanasi or the tombs of the Tughlaqs. You miss the belongingness of a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy, the affection of Ruskin Bond or the matter of factness of Jim Corbett.

India in Mind is a collection whose literary credentials are impeccable—an expert and diverse selection accompanied by Pankaj Mishra’s introduction to each writer, which makes for interesting reading, yet it remains naggingly unsatisfying and somewhat uninspiring.