I browsed the first half of this book and found it to be slightly more literary than I prefer, which made me set it down in favor of other books. The excerpt for Robyn Davidson's "Desert Places" made me add that book to my wish list.

This is an anthology of writings about India by foreigners. The extracts are all short - maximum 20 pages. It's almost all travel writing, memoir or journalism - of the 25 extracts, only 4 are from works of fiction (Kim, The Jewel In The Crown, Gore Vidal's Creation, and a short story by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala).

I'm not a huge fan of travel writing, so a lot of the selections didn't work for me. Many of them seemed to say more about the writer than about India itself (eg Pier Paolo Pasolini's astoundingly patronising reaction to middle-class Indians). But the range of authors selected were interesting: Claude Levi-Strauss and Andre Malraux among the more usual suspects. Allan Ginsberg contributed a hallucinatory diary:

Dec 22, 8 PM -

Walking (in dhoti & lumberjack shirt) thru Benares alleyways, turning corners past toy stands, thru red gates up Vishwanath alley past the temple - thru a grate seeing crowd round the lingam chanting slow-beat of drum vary-voiced tuneless mass - beautiful harmonies, ending as I passed out the back courtyard past the huge stone cow, with acceleration of drums - past the square where in daytime sell red and blue & yellow bright colored powders displayed in cones of dust -

I should also mention the great intros which Mishra has written for each contributor - far from the usual bland summaries of life & work. JR Ackerley's includes this:

After serving eight months as prisoner of war in a German camp, he studied at Cambridge University where he met, among other furtive gay men, EM Forster, who had visited India in 1922 and had spent some time at the court of a campy Maharajah. As it turned out, the Maharajah was then looking for a secretary and had even written to H Rider Haggard for help in locating someone who resembled Olaf, a character in Haggard's The Wanderer's Necklace. The Maharajah wasn't impressed by Ackerley's good looks but fell for his poems. ( )