Table of Contents

J. R. Ackerley, from Hindoo Holiday
Paul Bowles, “Notes Mailed at Nagercoil”
Bruce Chatwin, “Shamdev: The Wolf-Boy”
Robyn Davidson, from Desert Places
E. M. Forster, from Abinger Harvest
Allen Ginsberg, from Indian Journals
Hermann Hesse, from “Childhood of the Magician”
Pico Iyer, from Abandon
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Two More Under the Indian Sun”
Rudyard Kiplin, from Kim
Claude Lévi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques
André Malraux, from Anti-Memoirs
Peter Matthiessen, from The Snow Leopard
W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer’s Notebook
Ved Mehta, from Portrait of India
Jan Morris, “Mrs. Gupta Never Rang”
V. S. Naipaul, from An Area of Darkness
George Orwell, “Shootining an Elephant”
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from The Scent of India
Octavio Paz, from A Tale of Two Gardens
Alan Ross, from Blindfold Games
Paul Scott, from The Jewel in the Crown
Paul Theroux, from The Great Railway Bazaar
Mark Twain, from Following the Equator
Gore Vidal, from Creation

About the Author

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, which won the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering- The Buddha in the World. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement.