2,500 years of paradise

Part potted history, part memoir, a British journalist has drawn an entertaining and affectionate portrait of India as seen through the eyes of foreigners

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 couldn’t tell whether Shiva was the creator or destroyer. Today, as managing editor, South Asia in BBC, he is today regarded as one of BBC’s 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 Tsang’s — 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

  Next, Miller takes the reader into the courts of the Mughals, perceived by Indians as ‘foreigners’ generations after they ruled the better part of India. He chronicles the advent of East Indian Company and how perceptions of India changed, thanks to the tales of the returning ‘nabobs’. In colonial eyes, India was a strange combination of untold riches and grinding poverty.  Later, the guidebook, East India Vade-Mecum depicted India as a veritable male sexual paradise for the virile colonial in an obvious attempt to lure young British men to the colonies. By its second edition, however, the East India Company discarded the pretense that it was in India only for trade. So these sections were replaced by others prescribing necessities for ‘Ladies proceeding to India’.

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 foreigner’s account of India.

Miller juxtaposes historical references with personal experiences with varied success. For instance, he devotes page upon page to the Bollywood blockbuster Sholay — which unlike Raj Kapoor’s cinema that found resonance across the world, didn’t do much to portray India to foreign audiences. Often, Miller’s personal digressions reflect his own love affair with India. In Nalanda near Patna, Miller asked a group of Thai students on a pilgrimage what they thought about India. “India is dirty,” they say. His response, mercifully unspoken, was visceral: “f&@@ off to Thailand!” Miller also writes that he, during his annual Indian sojourn, would leave his family in Bombay and spend a fortnight in the villages of coastal Maharashtra. It became, he wrote, ‘his personal India’. He found that he could turn a blind eye to the corruption and violence around him and see only what he chose to see.

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 one’s hidden expectations and fancies, it’s 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 Verne’s 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. Miller’s handling of the changing mirrors and the realities they reflect, makes this book an interesting, informative and fun read.