Through the Looking-Glass

India! Down the ages, travellers of every description, monks and missiona­ries, traders and merchants, poets and novelists; soldiers and administrators, plenipotentiaries and proconsuls have sought to describe something of the beauty and the pity, the squalor and the splen­dour of this country. They have tried to capture on paper its scents and its smells; its grandeur and infinite variety; its endless contradictions; its harsh lights and shadows; its bizarreness, where savage barbarities and cruelties or overwhelming callousness to suffering coexist with extra­ordinary tenderness towards all sentient beings; its crushing poverty; the subtlety of its philosophy, the panoply of its gor­geously caprisoned personalities, all of which makes it the ‘most extraordinary country that the sun visits on its round’ (Mark Twain).