
Author: V S Naipaul
Ved Mehta/Eminent Contributors
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 335
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780330439527
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 reactions 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 from 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 cast 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
1. From Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley
2. Notes Mailed at Nagercoil by Paul Bowles
3. Shamdev: The wolf boy by Bruce Chatwin
4. From Dessert places by Robyn Davidson
5. From Abinger Harvest by E.M. Forster
6. From Indian Journals by Allen Ginsberg
7. From childhood of the Magician by Hermann Hesse
8. From Abandon by Pico Iyer
9. Two more under the Indian sun by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
10. From Kim by Rudyard Kipling
11. From Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss
12. From Anti Memories by Andre Malraux
13. From the snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
14. From a writers Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
15. From portrait of India by Ved Mehta
16. Mrs. Gupta never rang by Jan Morris
17. From an area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul
18. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
19. From the Scent of India by Pier Paolo Pasolini
20. From A tale of two gardens by Octavio Paz
21. From Blindfold games by Alan Ross
22. From the jewel in the crown by Paul Scott
23. From the great railway bazaar by Paul Theroux
24. From following the equator by Mark Twain
25. From creation by Gore Vidal