From Scylax to the Beatles: the West’s lust for India

From the Greek seafarer Scylax in 500 BC to the Beatles in 1968, there is a long history of foreign visitors being drawn to India. Many have come in search of the ‘exotic’ or the ‘other’, an idea of India that persists despite the best efforts of Edward Said’s post-colonial disciples. Not unnaturally, the Indian ministry of tourism colludes in this, their website displaying photographs of flower-bedecked idols, brightly painted elephants and smiling dancing girls, and encouraging the browser to ‘Match India’s rhythms to your heart, its colours to your mind, and find a travel experience that is yours alone…’

Down the centuries foreigners have  also come to India for rather more concrete reasons: the promise of trading opportunities and great wealth; invasion, conquest and the creation of empires; imperial service and missionary work; spiritual enlightenment.  In his wide-ranging and hugely entertaining new book, Sam Miller explores the varied motives that brought people to India, their experiences when they got there, and the portraits they provided of the country and its people in the form of letters, diaries, memoirs, travel books, novels, poems and would-be anthropological, archaeological, cultural and other studies.

As in Miller’s earlier book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2009), A Strange Kind of Paradise consists of main chapters with brief ‘intermissions’. The chapters follow a broadly chronological path and bear titles parodying those of a 19th-century adventurer (‘Chapter Eight: In which the Author is slightly rude about the Taj Mahal, considers the curative powers of cows’ urine, and fails to take a nuanced view of sati’), while the intermissions tend to be autobiographical. Miller married into a Bombay Parsi family, travelled widely in India as a correspondent for the World Service during the early 1990s, and has lived in Delhi since 2002; and while he insists that it is impossible to ‘know’ any country, let alone one as populous and diverse as India, he writes from a wealth of personal subcontinental experience.

The first reliably detailed account of India was provided by an ambassador called Megasthenes, sent in the early years of the third century BC from the eastern empire of Alexander the Great to the court of King Chandragupta at Pataliputra, a vast and sophisticated city which stood on the site of modern Patna.