Author: Pankaj Mishra
Editor(s): Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 335
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330439529
Description
After more than fifty years of modernization, India is far from being made over in the image of a western country. It often poses hard challenges. The reaction it evokes are complex, ranging from awe and wonder to repulsion and rejection.
India in Mind is a stunning collection of the diverse and vivid reactions that the subcontinent has evoked in the greatest writers of our time. Its twenty-five pieces range form fiction and non-fiction to poetry, lighting up a thousand forgotten details about the last hundred and fifty years of a changing India. They reveal as much about the authors and their times as, with intuition and intelligence, about this vast country and its people.
Edited and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, one of the finest writers today, India in Mind includes all-time favourites as well as lesser-known treasures. J R Ackerley attempting to learn Hindi; Allen Ginsberg immersing himself in Benares; V S Naipaul searching for the India of his imagination-this brilliant collection is for all those who find India endlessly fascinating, as well as for those who enjoy exquisite writing.
All the contributors are individually introduced.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
J R ACKERLEY
>From Hindoo Holiday
PAUL BOWLES
Notes Mailed at Nagercoil
BRUCE CHATWIN
Shamdev: The Wolf-Boy
ROBYN DAVIDSON
>From Desert Places
E M FORSTER
>From Abinger Harvest
ALLEN GINSBERG
>From Indian Journals
HERMANN HESSE
>From Childhood of the Magician
PICO IYER
>From Abandon
RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
Two More Under the Indian Sun
RUDYARD KIPLING
>From Kim
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
>From Tristes Tropique
ANDRE MALRAUX
>From Anti-Memoirs
PETER MATTHIESSEN
>From The Snow Leopard
W SOMERSET MAUGHAM
>From A Writer’s Notebook
VED MEHTA
>From Portrait of India
JAN MORRIS
Mrs Gupta Never Rang
V S NAIPAUL
>From An Area of Darkness
GEORGE ORWELL
Shooting an Elephant
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
>From The Scent of India
OCTAVIO PAZ
>From A Tale of Two Gardens
ALAN ROSS
>From Blindfold Games
PAUL SCOTT
>From the Jewel in the Crown
PAUL THEROUX
>From The Great Railway Bazaar
MARK TWAIN
>From Following the Equator
GORE VIDAL
>From Creation