You can’t fault monisha rajesh for her sincerity. Throughout her epic haul through India’s railway system that she chronicles in her book Around India in 80 Trains, she is scrupulously fair, and also extremely self-aware. She knows that no matter how hard she tried, it would be impossible to ascertain the ‘soul of India’ in any meaningful way. Travelling for many months up and down and sideways through India, with a Scandinavian friend for company, Rajesh experiences quite a few epiphanies, and she makes an honest attempt to understand it.
Her cultural muddle of being a Londoner of Indian descent, whose previous experience of India is restricted to a brief and traumatic time in her childhood and sundry family weddings, prevents her from having any prior understanding of the country she’s travelling through. While that could be the premise for fresh observations, there aren’t any, at least for the book’s Indian readers.
In some ways, her talent for observation and the ability to write page-turning prose is held hostage to the high concept of narrative premise. Eighty trains are after all a lot of trains, and in the rush to notch up the magic number, what gets lost is any meaningful engagement with the journey. And in her battle to finish the trip in the stipulated time she gets to spend precious little in any of her destinations, all of which are on the traditional backpackers’ trail. Thus Khajuraho is passed by with a generic observation that the sexual liberalism of times past “were an anomaly in a culture that condemned sexual expression and eroticism”, Jaisalmer is an unhappy camel safari into the desert and the Osho ashram in Pune a madhouse filled with predictably cartoon characters. Although descriptions of specific trains do evoke a marvellous atmosphere, many more trains are just passed through.
The Old Patagonia Express this isn’t, nor is it In Xanadu or Empires of the Indus. Ultimately, with its bouncy prose and fast-paced detail, Around India in 80 Trains is the kind of book that you take on a journey, and leaf through to pass the time.