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Ever since Xuanxang (aka Hiuen Tsang), the Chinese traveller, visited here and wrote it all down, various chaps have taken a shot at figuring out India. M.G. Vassanji (A Place Within) is the latest in a line which, one is certain, will never end.

That’s the good news, as they say. The bad news is that Vassanji’s book is, well, let us just call it ordinary. It is probably a good idea to wait for the paperback edition.

Vassanji, a Gujarati Khoja, was born in Dar-es-Salaam. So were his parents. Sometime in the 1970s, they migrated to Canada, which is where Vassanji grew up.

Then, like so many others who have an Indian ancestry and are writers, he decided to come and find out for himself what this place is all about. He had about a month to do it in and perhaps that is why he writes so wistfully, “There is so much of India, I tell myself. How does one get to it?”

Well, laddie, you don’t, not even if you spend a lifetime trying to figure her out, because you missed the essential point about India: it is a nation-state in the Westphalian sense but that’s about it. It is not a country in the same way that Britain or Canada or Australia, or Iran or Egypt and so on are. It is more like one of those Russian dolls or, if you like parathas… those wondrous laccha parathas of Sikandra, with layer upon layer upon layer of dough swimming in fat, and, in the ultimate analysis, impossible to digest.

Vassanji also seems to have made the classic error of a quick in-out writer: He read the ‘right’ books and, even worse, met the ‘right’ people. So what he got at the end was a view of India that we are already familiar with. Khushwant Singh, after all, has nothing new to say.

Travel books are largely about exaggeration, invention (who is to disprove what you write?), sarcasm and, above all, a bit of nastiness of the sort in which V.S. Naipaul excels.

Vassanji is too nice, so he fails on almost every count. So if you view travel books as you might a soufflé, this one didn’t manage to rise.

As a Delhiwalla, I looked to see what he has to say about the city. And to my huge disappointment he writes about Old Delhi and Karims etc, rather than the newest one at Dwarka, Janakpuri, Rohini, Gurgaon on Delhi’s border where some really awful people (self included) live. That’s India, not Shahjahanabad.

Another trick, of course, is to write a travel book around a particular theme. Remember Paul Theroux on his trains and Alexander Frater, who literally chased the monsoon from Thiruvananthapuram to Cherapunji?

So what could be a theme for someone like Vassanji? I think they should have a crack at writing a travel book around the general theme of all those wonderful colonial libraries that our governments have allowed to go to ruin.

The Asiatic Library in Mumbai, the Connemara in Chennai and the National Library in Kolkata are good places to start with. And then there are all those State libraries, not to mention the ones in the homes of the former princes who at least bought books, even if they didn’t quite get around to reading them.

More Stories on : Books | T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan

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