Learning to Like India
A couple of years ago, Seth Stevenson from Slate.com took a five-step approach to liking India. Like every good therapeutic self-help text, Stevenson’s piece begins with the soothing declaration: “It’s OK to hate a place.” That is followed by this little bit of exposition:
Travel writers can be so afraid to make judgments. You end up with these gauzy tributes to the “magic” of some far-off spot. But honestly, not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, “Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.” And that’s OK.
Stevenson’s five-part essay was selected by Jamaica Kincaid for the 2005 volume of The Best American Travel Writing. I have often used Kincaid’s marvelous and polemical A Small Place in my classes; there is nothing else that so quickly, and so effectively, calls into question the prejudices of the first world traveler in the third world. Why did she choose Stevenson? Because, I think, he’s so honest about so many things, including the ways in which he uses money to keep at bay the anxiety and the poverty, and of course the diseases, that seem to assault him during his visit to India.
By the way, the last part of Stevenson’s travelogue begins with the following words:
In the mid-1970s, famed author V.S. Naipaul (of Indian descent but raised in Trinidad) came to India to survey the land and record his impressions. The result is a hilariously grouchy book titled India: A Wounded Civilization. Really, he should have just titled it India: Allow Me To Bitch at You for 161 Pages.
Interesting.
I love Kincaid’s A Small Place. I assigned it to first-year students in a writing class, and traumatized some of them.
Comment by RL — April 27, 2006 @ 6:33 pm
It was refreshing to read someone who didn’t take the PC route and was willing to say (at length) why he just was not happy there.
Comment by Olinda — April 27, 2006 @ 11:41 pm