Destination India: From London Overland to India is the last co-authored book of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph—the intellectual stalwarts and eminent scholars of modern India. The book under review is an intellectual biographical account of their joint academic journey of six and half decades revealing the historical trajectory of their writings. The book is neatly divided into three essays in a compact and small size with an attractive lay out.
Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph—the young, bright, good looking American couple with ‘freshly minted PhDs from Harvard’—set off on a road journey from Austria to India in the summer of 1956, and graduated to develop a life-long passion and devotion to the study of India in their life together. In the decades to follow, both of them acquired a legendary status of original thinkers, creative writers, warm, generous and caring teachers and intellectuals at the University of Chicago where they taught for almost four decades. They rightly tell us at the very outset that ‘Destination India becomes a trope for our academic career, for the 50 years we spent researching, theorizing, writing, and teaching about India. Our book tells the story of getting there and of being there’ (p. xiii). The first essay titled ‘Travel Notes from Salzburg to Peshawar’ is a careful account recorded on a daily basis as they drove the distance of 5000 miles in a 107 inch wheelbase Land Rover from London to Jaipur. This short travelogue of about two months describes their sense of excitement and adventure in an alien landscape. This journey to the ‘East of Suez’ crossing western Asia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and into India is not without every day risks, fears and anxieties of driving through the dusty, bumpy and uncertain roads and borders of the countries on the way. It is a fabulous political ethnography of the places and people visited, and the fascinating account of diverse, different and at times strange encounters with the people of this part of the world. It is here that one finds both of them learning to understand cultures and people of far off places.
It is instructive to read in this book how they planned their international road journey so very meticulously taking into account the needs of the time since there was neither an internet nor the Google map to assist during those days. It takes tremendous courage and grit to undertake such an adventure at a young age of 26 and 29 that Susanne and Lloyd were at that time. However, for them, ‘such a trip is an enormously rewarding experience for the strong of limb and stout of heart… The fact that everything is new and strange and possibly threatening creates a chronic underlying strain, a fear of the unknown which one must learn to live with. Such a trip is a calculated risk’ (p. 9–10), they tell us. The diary reflects their notes taking habit en route to their destination under very inconvenient conditions. It is worth quoting a few lines from it.
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