Introduction

It was never part of my plan to be a travel agent, but when, at nearly seventy years of age, my partner decided to reinvent himself as a travel specialist to the south of India, I went along with it.

My book is about the years we spent struggling with this crazy reincarnation.

Many people have described the way in which the ancient and modern coalesce and live side by side in India. Time is different there. Sometimes it is seen and experienced as cycles. Sometimes the modern “miracle” of growth and increased wealth make it appear as though the rush for modernisation is a lemming-like race for a cliff edge which will leave the past behind and reconstruct the continent afresh in a new and unknown way.

James's travel business gave me a good excuse to ignore the unknown and just look at the surface and just as we were planning our last trip I realised I knew no more about the place than I did when we started, naively, six years before. South India has been neglected by historians who concentrate on the days of the Mughul and the British Empires. The south seemed to have no place in any history I read, and while the past came and bit you on the nose everywhere you looked, from the wandering cows to the washing done in every stream, the hand-crafting and makeshift solutions to the way of life. The active religious ceremonies are played out exactly as they would have been a couple of thousand years before, little was written down.

As I investigated the complexity of the country, I became aware that politics coloured versions of the past at every turn. The past was not only another country, it was another universe which paralleled and intersected this one. Hooked by the powerful emotional stew of fascination and terror, I now wanted to understand what had drawn me in.

This blog is about the bits I left out of the book.