topics: |  travel | history | india

Excerpts

Over a number of centuries at the beginning of the second mill BC, a
pastoral race known as the Aryans poured into northern India as they did
into Europe.  They spoke a language or something very like it called Sanskrit
and they were taller and fairer than the people already in India.  I have
sat in a rly carriage opposite an elderly couple whose resemblance to my
grandparents was uncanny.  In old people the skin grows pale and composes
itself about thebone structure in a way that emphasizes the features.
European or Indian, the Aryan in us all becomes unmistakable. 45

cantonment: not as one fears a barbed-wire enclosure full of soldiers but
a peaceful residential area with large houses in big gardens.  Here the
sahibs could escape from India to a mock Chesham Bois and concentrate on
bridge and growing dahlias. 44

Publisher's blurb

India challenges the visitor like no other country. Vast, ancient, and
impossibly demanding, it is never just a holiday or an
assignment. Advertisements call it an experience; it changes people in
unexpected ways. To comprehend and enjoy this experience, there is no
better introduction to the traditions and inhibitions of the world's most
complex society than Into India.

The product of tireless travel rather than of academic scholarship, this
book prepares the visitor for India and greatly enriches later
recollection. Amidst chaos it finds logic and from frustration reaps
reward. In identifying and illuminating the role of Rajputs, Brahmins,
Sikhs, Marathas, Kashmiris, Tamils, and a dozen other communities, it makes
penetrable and intelligible the past glories and the present problems as
well as the passions and the politics of an otherwise bewildering
society. Traveling from Kashmir to Kerala, from Gujarat to Assam, Keay
cheerfully succumbed to the pull which draws the visitor deeper and deeper
"into India"--from the cities to the villages, from the hotels to the
ashrams, and from the sweeping first impressions to the ever-deepening
insights. "Dust and distance become constant companions ...punctuated by
moments of such intense and arresting beauty that all else, poverty, heat
and sickness, are forgotten."

Written in the 1970s, Into India achieved classic status and remained in
print for twenty years. John Keay has since written more specialized
studies of India and elsewhere, including a major new history of the
subcontinent. But this reissue of his first book, with a new introductory
chapter setting it in the context of the present, will be enthusiastically
greeted by all to whom India appeals. John Keay has been visiting India for
thirty years.  His other books on India-related subjects include two books
on nineteenth-century exploration recently reissued as The Explorers of the
Western Himalayas, India Discovered about scholarship under the British
raj, and The Honorable Company, an acclaimed history of the English East
India Company.

Keay is also the author of The great arc,
a history of the great trigonometrical survey of India in the early 1800s.