SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT: FOUR DECADES ADRIFT IN INDIA AND BEYOND
Author: Murray Laurence
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 228
Price: Rs 399
One of the shortcomings of the travel memoir genre is that it continues to be dominated by white people travelling to the east and making every effort to regale us with tales of the breathtaking colours and the exotic smells, a vision they find sorely lacking back home. Sure, there are more books today about the reverse journey too -but they are focused on charting the promise of making it in the West, and not nearly enough on commenting as the dispassionate outsider.
Murray Laurence - who presumably means well, but when is that enough? - discusses four decades of his travels in India in his new book, Subcontinental Drift. Laurence is an Australian geography teacher who fell in love with India on his first visit in the 1970s and has returned to the country frequently since.
Only this is less a travel memoir than a rehash of the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that are uniquely Indian, but ones that, to any sensitive native (is one even allowed to use the term "patriot" in these fraught times?), are more items for consternation than humour. Autorickshaw drivers fleece customers, especially foreigners, yes. People are eager to please, sometimes to bathetic effects, true. Less problematically, many of us use the present continuous tense in English when we should use the simple present. All issues indeed, but haven't we read and heard and come across them in travel memoirs too often to merit any fresh interest?
The story begins in 1974, as Laurence and his then girlfriend and future wife Maureen arrive in Mumbai (then Bombay) from Nepal and are immediately caught up in the mad rush of a city that, even in the 1970s, was too crowded for an Australian. What follows is a mind-numbingly predictable journey across towns and cities on sundry trains that halt at rickety stations teeming with unwashed coolies and underage tea sellers.
Laurence name-checks the major tourist spots and interesting locales on any backpacker's itinerary: Jodhpur, Mahabalipuram, Varanasi, Chittor. But he offers little insight into these places. There are pages upon pages of conversations where nothing happens, save a plethora of opportunities for Laurence to flash his wit at the Indian tendency to shoot the breeze. In Puri, for example, he gets into a conversation with a "cow reader" who is keen to sell his services to Laurence. The "cow reader"promptly produces testimonials from satisfied customers, such as the man who was cured of shingles by the cow. It turns out the "cow reader" is really peddling cow urine, which Laurence gladly offers to an onlooker who proceeds to gulp it down with relish.
The book is littered with such incidents, which can be funny to a certain sensibility that looks upon these moments as a sort of circus that can be partaken with a simple airline ticket and escaped when the heart desires. To his credit, Murray refrains from getting high in Rishikesh, but that may be because the scope of his book demanded that he visit places other than India. (He "does" China too, and has similar deflating experiences.)
The book ends in 2008, as Pakistani terrorists storm Mumbai, and Laurence is woken from his exotic dream to face the real India (he was not a victim-he was in Delhi at the time but says grandly, if meaninglessly: "It seemed with awful clarity that India would never be the same again.") By now, his tone has softened, and while he cannot stop himself from mocking Indian pronunciation, he is finally interested in recording the beauty of the places he visits, such as the temples in Khajuraho.
The book fails, and not just because it is at best a blinkered view of India, peddling cliches by the dozen. Why would a writer in 2016 take us to an India that has been captured, and much more ably, by the likes of Paul Theroux and William Dalrymple? When Laurence is in the mood, he can write poetically, as he does here, describing Fatehpur Sikri: "…here I am, immersed in an imperishable dream of pink sandstone and poetry, meditating upon a lost empire's boundless might and utter disintegration…." But his vision remains constricted, glued to an India that is both embarrassing and, in many ways, long gone. Subcontinental Drift is nostalgia as memoir, but this nostalgia is neither pretty nor deserved. Why harp on the poetry of disintegration when there is much that is fresh and young to celebrate?
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