JOIN USI think I know what he meant. Bone crunching bus rides, marathon train journeys and endless long haul flights can take their toll on the most ardent traveller. There must be an easier way to do it. And there is. Why not relax in the comfort of your armchair and lose yourself in a good book? You can’t beat a decent bit of armchair travel.
What follows are descriptions of three classic books set in India, which are based on various foreigners’ experiences of travelling and living in the country. They appear here not merely because they are very good reads, but because in their own particular ways they each provide very different outsiders’ snaphots of the country: that of an anthropologist who travels with a group of villagers, a fugitive on the run from the law and a young backpacker on his first trip abroad.
Third Class Ticket
Put 40 Indian villagers in a railway carriage, and go to visit the country’s holy places. How will they get on? What adventures will they have? Third Class Ticket by Heather Wood, which was released in 1980, details a true life journey around India by a group from a poor, tradition-bound village during the early 1970s. The author hooks up by accident with them and produces a book that is gentle, funny and desperately sad, with superbly well-developed characters and a wonderful evocation of the complex interactions between them.
The story is based on an elderly Indian woman who, knowing she is dying, arranges to leave her money to her village — with the proviso that it is put to good use by buying a third-class ticket around India for each person in her Bengali village. The book describes the plight of the village elders who become the first group to undertake the journey. The reader becomes emotionally involved with the characters as they discard entrenched village prejudices and have their eyes slowly opened by the diversity of India.
Third Class Ticket presents a traveller’s perspective of India, but one from a very unique point of view, that of a Bengali villager, albeit seen through the eyes of a foreigner. The trip challenges the preconceptions of the villagers, most of whom had never been out of the village before and had little if any concept that they belonged to the larger concept of ‘India’. An excellent anthropological travelogue narrated by a very perceptive foreign woman.
Shantaram
This is a quite famous book, partly as a result of the huge amount of media acclaim showered on it since its release in 2005. Shantaram may not be a travelogue in the strictest sense of the word, but nevertheless, Gregory David Roberts undertakes an incredible life journey. It is his autobiographical account of being on the run from the Australian authorities and ending up as an international fugitive in 1980s Mumbai. From there, he embarks upon an almost fantastic sequence of events where he lives in an urban slum and then a village, sets up a health clinic, falls in love, goes to prison in India and becomes involved with the Mumbai mafia, which somehow eventually leads to him going to Afghanistan to fight in the war against the Russians. It’s got everything but the kitchen sink itself.
Roberts is a convicted armed robber and a former heroin addict, and at times, you may read the book and think it is about a not very nice person who finds himself in not very nice situations. He is a violent, hard man who surprisingly writes with a good deal of sensitivity in places. Regardless of what you may think about Roberts, it is definitely a page-turner. He writes extensively about his time in the slum, village life and his mafia friends and clearly has a deep love for India and Indian people.
In places, the text may be too absurdly poetic and simplistically preachy with various philosophical takes on good, evil, love, hate and anything else that takes the author’s fancy. After a while this can grate a little. And you may wonder just how much the author embellishes the text with fictitious events or conversations. However, Roberts is a very good writer. His style is engaging and holds the attention, while providing exceptional insight into an India that relatively few outsiders (or for that matter, Indian people) get to see.
Are You Experienced?
Are You Experienced by William Sutcliffe (1997) is a fictitious travelogue based on a 19-year-old British backpacker who visits India for the first time during the mid-1990s. This is a classic book on the traveller circuit in India, and the first 100 or so pages are definitely laugh-out-loud funny. The main character experiences intense culture shock, nightmare rides, terrible illness and acute homesickness. Foreigners who have travelled in India always tend to recognise large parts of themselves in the book, and often cringe with embarrassment in doing so.
Whereas Shantaram offers an almost incredible take on the ‘foreigner-in-India’ story, Sutcliffe dishes up a more standard format that the majority of visitors can readily identify with. Sutcliffe often goes for quick, cheap laughs, sprinkling the text with characters that are sometimes too stereotypical and events that are often exaggerated for maximum effect. The book loses its way a little after a while, but the idiosyncratic hilarities tend to make up for the deficiencies.
Beneath the humour, however, there is a serious point being made about modern travel. Too many visitors go to the same places to do similar things and have similar experiences because they are all reading from the same script — the Lonely Planet guidebook. That’s why so many foreigners who have been to India can readily identify with the main character’s experiences and the places he visits.
Whereas Shantaram and Third Class Ticket are based on experiences that are unique to the authors themselves, in writing Are You Experienced, William Sutcliffe cleverly tapped into the pysche of many a backpacker, and for that reason alone, was on to a sure-fire winner from the outset.
In ‘getting away from it all’, the modern backpacker, the flotsam and jetsum of the travel industry, gets willingly washed up on the shores of far away lands, and then too often merely searches for the comforts of home and seeks to congregate with like-minded people from his or her own culture. That is one reason why the book is funny — albeit in a desperately sad kind of way.