The Rough Guide to India - Softcover

Abram, David; Sen, Devdan; Edwards, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1858287294 ISBN 13: 9781858287294

Publisher: Rough Guides, 2001

Synopsis

INTRODUCTION

"Unity in Diversity" was the slogan chosen when India celebrated fifty years of Independence in 1997, a declaration replete with as much optimism as pride. Stretching from the frozen barrier of the Himalayas to the tropical greenery of Kerala, and from the sacred Ganges to the sands of the Thar desert, the country’s boundaries encompass incomparable variety. Walk the streets of any Indian city and you’ll rub shoulders with representatives of several of the world’s great faiths, a multitude of castes and outcastes, fair-skinned, turbanned Punjabis and dark-skinned Tamils. You’ll also encounter temple rituals that have been performed since the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, onion-domed mosques erected centuries before the Taj Mahal was ever dreamt of, and quirky echoes of the British Raj on virtually every corner.

That so much of India’s past remains discernible today is all the more astonishing given the pace of change since Independence in 1947. Spurred by the free-market reforms of the early 1990s, the economic revolution started by Rajiv Gandhi has transformed the country with new consumer goods, technologies and ways of life. Now the land where the Buddha lived and taught, whose religious festivals are as old as the rivers that sustain them, is the second-largest producer of computer software in the world, with its own satellites and nuclear weapons.

However, the presence in even the most far-flung market towns of internet cafés and Japanese hatchbacks has thrown into sharp relief the problems that have bedevilled the subcontinent since long before it became the world’s largest secular democracy. Rooted in the monolithic hierarchy of caste, poverty remains a harsh fact of life for around forty percent of India’s inhabitants. No other nation on earth has slum settlements on the scale of those in Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta, nor so many malnourished children, uneducated women and homes without access to clean water and waste disposal.

Many first-time visitors find themselves unable to see past such glaring disparities. Others come expecting a timeless ascetic wonderland and are surprised to encounter one of the most materialistic societies on the planet. Still more find themselves intimidated by what may seem, initially, an incomprehensible and bewildering continent. But for all its jarring juxtapositions, intractable paradoxes and frustrations, India remains an utterly compelling destination. Intricate and worn, its distinctive patina – the stream of life in its crowded bazaars, the ubiquitous filmi music, the pungent melange of beedi smoke, cooking spices, dust and cow dung – casts a spell that few forget from the moment they step off a plane. Love it or hate it – and most travellers oscillate between the two – India will shift the way you see the world.

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Where to go

The subcontinent's most-travelled circuit, combining spectacular monuments with the flat arid landscape that for many people is archetypally Indian, is the so-called "Golden Triangle" in the north - Delhi itself, the capital, and within easy reach of it Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, and the Pink City of Rajasthan, Jaipur. Rajasthan is probably the single most popular state with travellers, who are drawn by its desert scenery, and the romantic Rajput past epitomized by the forts of Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, and the medieval palaces of Udaipur and Bundi.

North of Delhi stretch the mighty Himalayas. Kashmir was, until the escalation of tensions in the 1980s, the most touristed region of the mountains; see p.000 for why this book does not include a chapter on the state. We do, however, include very detailed accounts of the other Indian Himalayan regions, which partly as a result of government policy are rapidly developing their facilities for visitors. Both Himachal Pradesh - where Dharamsala is the home of a Tibetan community that includes the Dalai Lama himself - and Uttar Pradesh - where the glacial source of the sacred River Ganges has attracted pilgrims for over a thousand years - offer magnificent trekking, while deeper in the mountains, Ladakh and Sikkim are scattered with remote Buddhist monasteries.

East of Delhi, the River Ganges meanders through some of India's most densely populated regions to reach the extraordinary holy Hindu city of Varanasi (also known as Benares), where to witness the daily rituals of life and death focused around the waterfront ghats (bathing places) is to glimpse the continuing practice of India's most ancient religious traditions. Further east still is the great city of Calcutta, the capital until early this century of the British Raj, and now a vibrant centre of Bengali culture that also epitomizes contemporary India's most pressing problems, poverty and over-population.

Heading south from Calcutta along the coast, you come first to Orissa, where Puri's Jagannath Temple is the scene of one of India's greatest festivals, and the temple at Konarak has re-emerged from beneath the sands to re-state its claims as one of the most fabulous achievements of the medieval stonemasons. Tamil Nadu, further south, has its own tradition of magnificent architecture, with towering gopura gateways dominating towns whose thriving temple complexes are still the focus of everyday life. Of them all, Madurai, in the far south, is the most stunning, but you could spend months wandering between the sacred sites of the Cauvery Delta and the fragrant Nilgiri Hills, draped in the tea terraces that have become the hallmark of south Indian landscapes. Kerala, near the southernmost tip of the subcontinent on the western coast, is India at its most tropical, and relaxed, with lush backwaters teeming with simple wooden craft of all shapes and sizes, and red-roofed towns and villages all but invisible between the verdant canopy of palm trees. Further up the coast is Goa, the former Portuguese colony whose 100km-coastline is fringed with beaches to suit all tastes and budgets, from upmarket package tourists to zonked-out ravers, and whose towns hold whitewashed Christian churches that might have been transplanted from Europe.

Some of India's most memorable monuments lie far inland, on long-forgotten trading routes across the heart of the peninsula - the abandoned city of Vijayanagar (or Hampi) in Karnataka, whose ruins are scattered across a primeval boulder-strewn landscape; the painted and sculpted Buddhist caves of Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra; the deserted temples of Khajuraho and palaces of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. Finally, there's much-maligned Mumbai, an ungainly beast that has been the major focus of the nationwide drift to the big cities. Centre of the country's formidable popular movie industry, it reels along on an undeniable energy that, after a few days of acclimatization, can prove compelling.

As we've said, however, to appreciate your travels to the full you'll need to conserve your energies. On a long trip, it makes sense to pause and rest a while every few weeks. Certain places have fulfilled that function for generations. Dotted across the continent are the Victorian hill stations, resorts designed to escape the summer heat, created by the British towards the end of the last century wherever a suitable stretch of hills stood conveniently close to the workaday cities of the plains. Within the last thirty years, a network of "alternative" hang-outs for young budget travellers has also developed. These are often places where a tourist infrastructure had already been created, such as the beach resort of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, which is also the site of some of India's earliest surviving experiments in temple architecture, or Hampi, mentioned above, or Manali, a former hill station in Himachal Pradesh. Elsewhere, the presence of sand and sea is enough, as with many of the beaches of Goa, or Kovalam or Varkala in Kerala. In recent years, growing numbers of travellers have also been exploring the Andaman Islands, a remote tropical atoll around 1000km east of Tamil Nadu in the Bay of Bengal, whose clear waters have some of the most abundant marine life in the world.

Focussing purely on the subcontinent's touristic highlights, it is easy to gain the impression of an India little changed since Kipling's times. Clichs may well come to life on every other corner, but they are increasingly anachronisms in a country much more prosaic than many first-time visitors expect. India has modernized at a bewildering pace over the past two decades. This has made life a lot easier for the middle classes, but it has also made the country a far less 'exotic' destination than it used to be for foreign travellers, and the country's commercialism, poverty, pollution and disorder can get the better of even the most ardent devotee of India at some point. Yet for all this, India remains an utterly compelling place to travel, possessing an uncanny power to overwhelm, astonish, exasperate, delight, and transform everyone who goes there.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rough Guides
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1858287294
• ISBN 13: 9781858287294
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 1626