Category: Personal

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006)

Once upon a time, a woman got a divorce, got into and out of a bad relationship, and then went on vacation for a year to get over it all. The resulting book, Eat, Pray, Love, became a massive bestseller (and the most popular travel book ever about India, which is why I read it), and the author got to be played by Julia Roberts in the movie (called Eat Pray Love, discarding both commas and context).

So why is this book so popular? Well, because it’s the perfect airport book.

First of all, there’s it’s shape and style. It’s long enough to keep you occupied but never difficult linguistically, structurally, or morally. Divided into three sections that are mapped out right there in the title, then chopped into 36 chapters each (for a mystical total of 108), it offers bites you can finish while you wait for the drink cart to get out of the way of the bathroom. The voice is punchy and familiar from Nora Ephron characters and especially Sex and the City, and there are lots of easy metaphors and pop culture references (something gets compared to the last helicopter out of Saigon).

Second, it’s sort of a travel book, so you feel justified in reading it on holiday, but there are no complex itineraries or deep dives into bloody history or vexing social issues, so you never feel pressured to do more, feel more, or understand more than you were already going to. The story remains firmly in the tourist point of view, and Gilbert is so winningly self-deprecating that you might not notice how she’s never quite self-critical. Everything is someone else’s fault, or no one’s really, and there are no problems in the world that Liz Gilbert can’t solve with pluck and gumption, because Liz Gilbert never engages with any problems that aren’t Liz Gilbert-sized ones. If you felt a little queasy about your holiday in other people’s misery, Gilbert spends 500 pages encouraging you not to notice. You have bigger fish to fry. You have to look inward if you want to save the world.

And you do want to save the world, don’t you? Gilbert does — and that, more than anything, is my biggest disappointment with this book.

At the start, Gilbert discovers, to her horror, that she doesn’t want to be married anymore, and eventually she works up the courage to get out. Then she gets into a bad relationship and has to find her way out of that. At last she decides that she’ll spend a year traveling, first to Italy, then to an ashram in India, and finally to Bali. There’s the possibility of a kind of feminist, humanist awakening here, a willingness to live for one’s own pleasure and joy, and for a while, living in Rome, that seems to be where Gilbert is headed. But there’s an undercurrent of self-doubt, and soon enough she’s on to the ashram for a spiritual cleanse, because too much fun is no good at all.

I had been looking forward to the India section of the book — that’s where my interest mainly lies — but alas, Gilbert decides to give up her plans for a wider tour of India and stays in the ashram the whole time. Her unquestioning faith in its benevolence is discomfiting for anyone familiar with the darker side of India’s guru culture, as is her lack of curiosity about the poverty she sees just beyond the gate. Instead, she makes a big drama out of her distaste for a long, boring morning chant, something hard to take too seriously if you had to do davening every morning in Hebrew school.

The climax of all this looking inward is a reconciliation with her husband. Not her actual husband, mind you, but an imagined version of him, who is very forgiving. One might have hoped for recognition that forgiveness from others isn’t required, or that what Gilbert is really doing is learning to forgive herself, but that never arrives. She has been forgiven by her husband’s spiritual presence, and that is that.

And so, newly armed with a vague sort of spiritual awakening, Gilbert arrives in Bali, where she fails to read Pico Iyer just as hard as she failed to read Gita Mehta in India. She goes to Ubud, of course, because that’s where spiritual types go, and she parties with expats, and she goes to bed with a handsome Brazilian. She also befriends a local single mom, and in Bali the big climax comes when Gilbert decides to buy her a house, or at least raise the money for one. In the midst of all this, Gilbert realizes that the woman’s daughter’s name, Tutti, means “everyone” in Italian, and manages to portray this admittedly generous act of white saviorhood as somehow saving the whole world. This whole trip was doing inner work, see — inner work that the Balinese don’t have the resources for but probably don’t need anyway because they’re so picturesque and traditional — and that inner work has allowed Liz Gilbert to become the generous kind of person who sometimes makes an effort. It’s a disappointing conclusion, very Protestant, casting what seems to have been a pleasant period of excursion as a kind of stealth Via Dolorosa. I went to Southeast Asia a few years back, Bali included, and traveled around and had a lovely time saving no one from anything, and that’s quite OK.

But is it bestseller OK? Probably not. For that, you’re better off with a sitcom character like Liz Gilbert, someone who turns every experience into an episode, who overcomes obstacles without ever changing very much, and who winds it all up with a pretty romance.

When I traveled to India as a young man, I was without a doubt a tourist. I pored over Lonely Planet travel guides and used them to plan my itinerary, which included musts such as the Taj Mahal and the Palace of Winds in Jaisalmer. I bought a plane ticket and carried travelers checks and a camera in my rucksack, staying at hotels and eating at cafes where I could meet and hang out with other tourists.

In beginning to write about this experience, which was formative in my life, I began to ask myself why I picked India of all places — what alchemy of cultural signals delivered to my brain this singular thought. But an ancillary question also arose, which is how this entire mode of travel came to be. How did we all learn to venerate beaches and mountains rather than grain fields and power plants? What was the origin of the infrastructure we’ve come to expect — the hotel room with bathroom en suite, the buses, the guidebooks?

Eric G. E. Zuelow has done his best to figure it all out. Though Zuelow starts with a few stabs at ancient tourism — he has a tendency to start chapters with panoramas so sweeping as to become ridiculous — the larger arc is one that all feels pretty familiar if you know your European history, although Zuelow does a fine job of putting it all together in the right context. We begin with the 18th-century Grand Tour for gentlemen, see how Romantic ideas of the sublime alter what’s considered worth seeing and doing, and watch as technology and social change expand tourism down the social ladder. Inventions like steam ships, steam trains, automobiles, and planes are obvious means of widening tourism’s scope, but Zuelow is good at connecting these inventions (and others less obvious, like the bicycle) to social changes such as changing beach culture, working class summer camps, and much more.

This is a hinky book, with many gaps that the author acknowledges, which is the result of a first foray into an understudied field. (One might say that Zuelow has gone off the beaten track, to borrow a tired phrase from the tourism industry.) It’s also full of fascinating stories like the rise of Thomas Cook from a promoter of Scottish tours to a worldwide travel manger or the complicated process of turning train travel from a terror to a luxury. As we get into the period after World War II, we get to see the creation of the sort of family car trip that was, by 1983, so mockable in National Lampoon’s Vacation, and then the shift from that kind of trip to more individual, personal journeys of the sort valorized in Eat Pray Love.

Through it all, Zuelow reminds us just how important tourism is, both economically and culturally. It has now spread from the West to the world, and it’s something nearly everyone aspires to, and nearly everyone who can engages in. We live for our vacations. Considering the huge place tourism has in our lives and societies, it’s a wonder there aren’t more studies like this. One hopes there will be.

John Whelpton, A History of Nepal (2005)

Nepal’s history is complex and fascinating, full of surprising stories, peculiar personalities, and unexpected turns. In A History of Nepal, John Whelpton avoids all that.

Whelpton’s book is a specialist’s book about a nation-state. Environment, prehistory, and everything else through 1753 is done away with in a brief preliminary chapter, and only a little more space is given to the Gorkhali conquests and Rana rule, which lasted until 1951. That’s when the country opened to outsiders, and the remainder of the book reads like a series of UN reports.

Whelpton’s methodology doesn’t help. The period from 1951 tp 1991 is divided into three chapters: domestic politics and foreign relations, economy and environment, and changes in Nepalese society. But of course these things don’t happen in isolation, so we get our picture of modern Nepal in fragments and repetitions, many of them tedious in the extreme. The chapter on politics is exhausting, full of names, parties, and intrigue, but without much in the way of personalities or narratives to help the reader keep track. Or care. In the economy chapter we literally get annual grain yields, and the chapter on social change manages to be highly technical and specific without ever giving a window into anyone’s actual lives. Nepal, in this telling, is a land of politicians and parties, of development projects and economic trends, of demographics and ethnic identities, but not of actual people. Instead, we get sentences like this: “Against this background, Nepal had to negotiate a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank in the mid-1980s, the conditions attached including not only moves towards balancing the budget and reducing the trade deficit but also action on poverty reduction.” It might as well be Bolivia or Burkina Faso.

Whelpton ends with a chapter on democracy and disillusion, having published his book in the unfortunate year of 2005, just before the Maoist insurgency came to an end, the Maoists entered parliament, and the Kingdom of Nepal became a republic.

It’s impressive to write a history of a country so storied and inspiring — home to lamas, Gorkhas, the highest mountains in the world, to rhinos and tigers, to Hindus, to Tantric Buddhists, to adherents of B’on and even older animist traditions, to hippies and freaks and adventurers — and come up with not a single poetic sentence.

Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History (2021)

In the Annapurnas, I was rarely alone. My prior idea of backpacking came from Yosemite, a park mostly closed to human habitation, where the illusion of solitude in unspoiled nature is available even on a short walk along a marked trail to a well maintained campsite. On the Annapurna trail, you’re always close to the nearest village, and even in forest passages or canyons of windswept boulders, you’re apt to be passed by a flock of goats or a train of bell-jingling yaks. The picture of the Himalaya as devoid of human life — one that comes from the expedition literature of the mountaineers who strive for the uninhabitable peaks — is a false one, as is the idea of the Himalaya as a zone of hidden and isolated Shangri-Las.

In Himalaya: A Human History, Ed Douglas puts the focus squarely on the many and diverse peoples who have called the Himalaya region their home for thousands of years. In a history that one feels obligated to call “magisterial,” Douglas tries to break out of the usual focus on Western sahibs and artificial national boundaries, albeit with mixed success. The paucity of indigenous writings and the vast wealth of Western material inevitably tips an English-language writer’s scales, and Douglas is a good enough writer to recognize a good story when he finds one. As for national boundaries, they may be artificial, but their effects on practical reality require somewhat separate tellings of the histories of Nepal, Tibet, and West Bengal (other regions such as Bhutan get less coverage).

Douglas is a fine writer who wears his knowledge lightly. There are sentences and passages so good, I wish they were mine, like this one: “Climbing is hard and unnecessary, a strange luxury.” Or this one: “We instinctively think of mountains as eternal, but they’re not. They are falling to bits and being remade like the rest of nature — like us.” He’s also, as I mentioned, a wonderful miner of stories, and he turns up some extraordinary facts, such as the occultist and Black Sabbath subject Alister Crowley nosing about Darjeeling, or the Nazis getting the swastika not from any Indo-Aryan connection but from the mosaics of Troy, or even that Nepal’s income from tourism as a percentage of GDP is actually lower than the global average, contrary to the impression most visitors get that tourism must be the mainstay of the cash economy. At times this tendency leads into odd byways, such as the long passages on botanists. Not that these aren’t interesting, but the peculiar shifts in focus can make it hard to keep the larger picture in view. There are also moments, though not too many, when the machismo inherent in being a climber and journalist sneaks its way into the writing.

Still, whatever its shortcomings — and some of them are also strengths — Himalaya is an outstanding book that will remain essential to anyone hoping to understand the region and that won’t be surpassed for a generation or more.

James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

You may never have heard of Lost Horizon or James Hilton (who also wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips), but you have heard of the magical place he invented: Shangri-La.

Lost Horizon is the story of a group of Westerners who, fleeing a revolution in Afghanistan, are crash-landed in the Himalayas and find their way to a mysterious monastery called Shangri-La. It turns out that this monastery is run not by an Asian, but by a Catholic monk from Luxembourg who has discovered the secret, if not to immortality, then to immense longevity. The head lama, seeing that he will die soon, recruits one of the Westerners to take over, presenting Shangri-La as a kind of repository of human culture and decency, hidden in the mountains, that may be able to weather the storm and share its wisdom after the coming dark age. The Westerners face a choice between a peaceful, contemplative life lasting centuries, but separated from the outside world, or an attempt at escape.

The novel really took off after the Frank Capra movie in 1937 and its publication as the first Pocket Book paperback in 1939. During the years of World War II, the idea of Shangri-La seems to have taken on a powerful resonance. When President Roosevelt converted a Maryland government camp called Hi-Catoctin into a presidential retreat in 1942, he named it Shangri-La — later renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower.

As a novel, Lost Horizon is an amusement cleverly laced with high culture references designed to make the reader feel smart while not demanding any actual knowledge, a trick Umberto Eco would later put to use to great effect. Artistically Lost Horizon is unimportant, and it has very little to do with anything actually Himalayan. The monastery a pastiche of Chinoiserie, complete with a beautiful Chinese girl who plays Rameau beautifully on the harpsichord, of all things.

For our purposes, though — understanding the train of Western fascination with South Asia that put one young traveler there in 1997 — Lost Horizon is a key of the puzzle. As a mass popularization of Theosophist-inspired ideas about a mystical Tibet populated with hidden Masters, Lost Horizon’s impact is enormous. The name Shangri-La began to attach to all sorts of things, not least rock and roll: the girl group supposedly got it from a Queens restaurant, and it turns up on an album by The Kinks in 1969 and by The Electric Light Orchestra in 1976. In fact, Shangri-La seems to have floated free of any real connection with the Himalayas at all, yet it seems undeniable that it contributed to a growing fascination with that part of the world at a time when Nepal was first opening to tourism and as a generation of young people set out on what would become known as the Hippie Trail (or the Hashish Trail) to Kathmandu.

Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (1996)

If you want to understand how the East became mystical for Americans of the sixties and seventies, you have to understand an earlier wave of spiritualism. The names may be familiar even if you’re not sure who they are: Gurdjieff, Annie Besant, Krishnamurti. None was so influential as Helena Blavatsky, who in the middle of the nineteenth century proclaimed herself both to have traveled to Tibet (almost certainly a lie) and to have been contacted mystically by Spiritual Masters who resided in the mountains of Tibet.

Why people believed this Russian fabulist is difficult to understand, and one wishes Peter Washington had expended less energy ridiculing his subjects and more energy delving into why and how they came to mean so much to their followers. One also wishes he paid more attention to the role of women in these organizations, and how that stood out from the rest of society, creating a space for female empowerment that was otherwise hard to find. Still, this is the best and most detailed account — often overly detailed — we are ever likely to get of the evolving world of spiritualism that began with Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, then expanded out in various directions to encompass various teachers.

The influence of the Theosophists was surprising, and surprisingly widespread. Most startling is the impact it had on the places from which they claimed to derive their teachings. Annie Besant, who became president of the Theosophical Society, was also an important voice for Indian independence and an influence on Gandhi. And the Theosophist embrace of Sri Lankan Buddhism had an impact on Sri Lanka itself, reviving it there while popularizing it in the West. Walter Evans-Wentz, the translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was a Theosophist. So was Alexandra David-Neel, who wrote Magic and Mystery in Tibet and inspired everyone from Kerouac and Ginsburg to Alan Watts and Ram Dass.

Washington’s approach can be frustrating. His meticulous attention to the internal disputes of the very disputatious spiritual organizations he covers at times causes him to lose sight of the larger story. There are hints that we will see how all this Theosophy business will emerge as the Age of Aquarius, but we never quite see it happen, instead concluding with vignettes of the remains of these older organizations as they limp toward the end of the 20th century, dated relics gone respectable, like Esalen or The Society for Ethical Culture. One needs to move on to Karma Cola to see the aftermath, but that work is not, like this one, scholarly, and there’s a gap. Still, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon provides an important part of the story of the West’s fascination with the East, showing how the mostly academic and literary ideas of the oriental renaissance were transformed into a popular esotericism that continues to this day in crystal shops and yoga studios across America.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

I read On the Road because something close to half of the travelers interviewed in Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland’s The Hippie Trail: A History cited it as an inspiration. As a story, there’s not much to it. Sal Paradise goes to places like Denver, San Francisco, and eventually Mexico by hitching, hoboing, and driving. Along the way, he does a lot of drinking with friends, treating women like accessories rather than people, and getting very revved up about trips to jazz clubs.

There’s a lot to dislike about the book, which emerged before feminism or civil rights had gone mainstream. Like many a travel writer before and since — Thoreau comes to mind — Sal’s adventures are financed by periodic infusions from family members who actually work for a living. And this is the story of a white male slumming with poor Mexican immigrants and Black people and even poor whites whose misfortunes he romanticizes relentlessly.

But that’s not all it is. On the Road is also exuberant, joyful, wild, and amoral — thrilling the way Jane’s Addiction records were thrilling, with lines like “Ain’t no wrong now, ain’t no right” and “I love them whores, they never judge you / ’cause what can you say when you’re a whore?” There’s something enticing in the mad verve for life and the whole I-don’t-give-a-fuck ethos.

On the Road is blessedly short on self-justification, but there are hints of a reason for the ennui that afflicts so many of the characters. Though published in 1957, On the Road was first written in 1951, about travels that took place in 1947 and 1948, in the shadow of the war, which comes up only obliquely in references to people met in the Navy or to GI money coming in. For a later generation, raised on Red scares, under-the-desk drills for nuclear attacks, and paranoid conformity, the echo of that rejectionism was a siren call, and road tripping seemed like a way to break free of the constraints of ordinary life.

And what about the East? Sal Paradise never does make it further than Mexico, but as he puts it, “It was only Nuevo Laredo but it looked like Holy Lhasa to us.” Then he fantasizes about a grander journey and calls Benares “the Capital of the World.” The exotic dream of the holy Orient is there already in 1957, back before Ginsburg’s India trip, back when Kathmandu tourism was still the preserve of rich retirees, mountaineers, and big-game hunters. How did he know? How did Kerouac, never leaving North America, become the pied piper for a generation who would travel ten thousand miles to throw him off for Krishna, the greatest pied piper in world history?

We’ll see. Dharma Bums is on the reading list. But from what I understand, all this mystical mumbo jumbo was missing from the scroll version of On the Road, the famous first draft written on a single long sheet of paper. Somewhere between 1951 and 1957, it emerged. It’s notable that Huxley published The Doors of Perception in 1954, and 1956 brought the publication of the influential The Third Eye, a bizarre fake story of Tibetan Buddhism written by one Cyril Henry Hoskin, who claimed to have been occupied by the spirit of a monk named Lobsang Rampa. A swirl of poorly sourced dharma and karma and Tibetan mysticism was in the air, ready to coalesce into the saffron-and-sitar sixties.

Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (1950)

This is an insane book.

I don’t mean that it’s bad, or that it’s wrong. The basic premise — that there was a second, oriental renaissance in Europe that followed the first, Greco-Roman renaissance, and that this second renaissance, precipitated by the discovery and translation of ancient (mostly) Sanskrit texts like the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bhagava Purana, had a profound effect on European philosophy and literature — is hard to argue with, especially after all of the data Schwab marshals.

And boy, does he marshal. The editors of this volume — an English translation of the 1950 French original, produced in the 1970s — warn that the bibliography is only partial, and couldn’t possibly encompass every work Schwab mentions. It runs to twenty-six pages.

What comes off as insane about this book is Schwab’s casual familiarity with the entire world of French and German orientalist scholarship for two hundred years. By all appearances, Schwab somehow not only read all the major works by all the major scholars, but also all of their minor works, and all the works of the minor scholars too, and the entire runs of periodicals like the Journal Asiatique and Reveu de deux Mondes. He knows what this minor figure said about that minor figure in someone’s salon in 1814. He is also intimately familiar with the literature and philosophy of the time, everyone from Hugo and Nerval to Goethe and Schopenhauer.

I suppose Schwab had time on his hands. Simmering beneath all of this Borgesian erudition is a thesis that one imagines must have been personal. For Schwab, the French and Germans took the oriental renaissance in two incompatible directions. For the Revolutionary French, the discoveries of oriental antiquity led to a kind of universalizing principle, a search for the commonalities across all times and nations. The Germans, meanwhile, smarting from the humiliation of French conquest and growing increasingly isolated as French rather than German became the international European language, somehow linked themselves to the Indo-Aryans and imagined that the deeper origins of all valuable culture belonged not to the Greeks and Romans, but to the Aryans from whom the Greeks and Romans borrowed their culture and to the Germanic barbarians who conquered Europe thereafter.

The German theory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny or make much sense, but it was a fantasy that played out gruesomely in the years Schwab must have been conducting his research. As a Jew, Schwab was dismissed from his government post in Paris in 1940, then reinstated in 1944. I haven’t been able to discover how he survived the war — this man who delves into the personal lives of generations of scholars never says a word about himself — but it must not have been pleasant.

Reading this book was a slog, though I would recommend it to anyone whose field of study is what used to be called orientalism. It is very French, which means a lot of abstract diction and philosophical maundering that may or may not mean something if you can parse it, as well as an assumption that the reader knows all about the Second Empire and the Paris Commune and the like, in the way that an American author might drop a casual reference to Brown v. Board of Education or Prohibition-era bootlegging and expect readers to understand it. The English edition has a preface by Edward Said, which is as erudite and impenetrable as his Orientalism. (Indeed, it was Said who led me to Schwab by continually quoting him, and you can see that Said picked up not just facts but a whole style of discourse, not necessarily for the good. Orientalism can sometimes read like an angried up version of The Oriental Renaissance.) I’m fairly sure I didn’t understand half of this book, but I’m glad I read it.

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2017)

Since before it was founded, experts (one hesitates, in this context, to call them pundits) have been predicting that India is too diverse, too poor, too fractious to survive as a single nation. To gather up this endlessly complex state and its history into a single volume is a formidable task. To make it readable, at times gripping, with coherent themes and threads, is a triumph of scholarship and literary craft. (Salman Rushdie did it, more or less, in Midnight’s Children, but as a novel, with the freedom to ignore or change whatever didn’t fit the story.)

In fact India began as two nations, and it came as a bitter surprise to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, that Jawarhalal Nehru decided to use the colonial English name for his country, rather than calling it the Republic of Bharat or something else entirely. Except in fact India began as dozens of nations, if you count all the princely states, not to mention lingering European colonies, that were eventually absorbed into the Republic. (You’ll find that the word “subcontinent” is extremely rare until the 1920s, and takes off in the 1940s, when the politically amorphous region called India had suddenly to be distinguished from a potential, then actual nation-state called India.)

Guha starts before independence but focuses on the compelling story of how this mess of a country made its progress in the world. There is plenty of ugliness — Partition, military defeat from China, language riots, anti-Muslim riots, anti-Dalit riots, fights over Kashmir, massacres in the Punjab, famines, poverty, and lesser-known stories like those of the ongoing tribal conflict in Nagaland — but Guha, without underplaying the moral gravity of these issues, gives well deserved space to India’s many triumphs as well, from rising literacy to successful elections, from agricultural development to joining the global economy as an IT powerhouse.

Very large nations — India, China, the United States — tend to be inward-looking. There’s enough there to keep one occupied, and the neighbors are far off. (Whenever a European says Americans don’t know geography, I ask her to name any six American states and any two state capitals.) And there is always a danger, in any national history written by a native for a domestic audience, of becoming too parochial and assuming too much insider knowledge. Will a non-French reader know what the Second Empire is and means? Do people outside of America know about McCarthyism? Guha does an admirable job of avoiding this trap, which can be especially dangerous in India, a land of endless factions and acronyms (a scroll through today’s Hindustan Times gives us UP, DDMA, BJP, and BCCI).

Guha is unapologetically a secularist, a democrat, and a liberal. Since I am too, I found this perspective companionable enough. I share his distaste for the reactionary, antidemocratic forces in Indian history: the religious nationalism of Pakistan, the dynasticism of the Nehrus, Indira Gandhi’s quasi-fascism, and especially the contemporary rise of Hindutva, which threatens to destroy Indian pluralism and wipe away Muslim Indian culture older than the Magna Carta because it’s not Indian.

If you’re looking for a thorough, deeply researched, readable history of modern India, India After Gandhi is a fine choice.

John Keay, India: A History (2000)

John Stanley Melville Keay, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, is a particular kind of Englishman (man is used here intentionally) who is decent enough to know that the British Empire was a monstrosity but also deep down pines for a time when you could still think it was marvelous. He’s written admirable histories of India and China, but most of his works are about the heroic activities of intrepid white men in the Orient: Himalayan exploration, the great trigonometric survey of India, the spice route, the English East India Company, the end of the British Empire across Asia. While Keay doesn’t shy away from showing these explorers and colonizers as venal and nasty, the focus stays on them. Still, no one else is writing these studies, and if you want a one-volume history of India, Keay is what you’ll find.

India: A History has a dutiful quality about it. Keay loves a ripping good yarn, God bless him, and in India there are none until at least the Muslim period. Before that, the only textual resources we have are triumphal inscriptions and numismatics, unless you want to buy into the Sanskrit epics as history. Keay makes the best of all the toing-and-froing of various Guptas and Mauryas and Vijayanagars, but you can tell he’s bored, even as he tries to tie it all to bits of architecture to give it some interest. His relief is palpable once he gets to the Mughals and Rajputs, for which there are texts with stories, and his account of the Indian independence years is useful in understanding India today. Post-independence India gets a whirlwind postscript, but after some six thousand years, you can forgive him that.

Plowing through this tome (again) felt like a chore, and I’m not sure how useful any of it will actually be to my writing, but I can now say, like a good, responsible author, that I have read a history of the country I’m writing about. And if that history has a whiff of the pucca sahib about it, well, so does the country.