India: The Rough Guide (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

INTRODUCTION The home of one of the world's oldest civilizations, and several of the world's great religions, India has been changing and re-shaping itself for as long as anywhere on earth, forever producing new forms of culture and absorbing new influences. Visiting the subcontinent, you'll see spectacular carved temples and gleaming marble palaces, lonely Himalayan lamaseries and far-flung dusty villages where council meetings are held under the shade of a banyan tree, plodding camels, holy cows, snake charmers and wild-haired sadhus: you'll also find a dynamic state racing towards the twenty-first century. The boundaries of modern India, fixed less than fifty years ago, are merely the latest in a four-thousand-year sequence of redefinitions that have produced one of the most heterogenous societies in the world. The land where the Buddha lived and preached, and where the Moghul Muslims erected the Taj Mahal, has recreated itself as both a majority Hindu nation and the world's largest secular democracy, home to almost one thousand million people.

Many first-time visitors cannot see past the grinding poverty of the country's most disadvantaged citizens. Others expect a timeless ascetic wonderland and are indignant to find that materialism has its place here too. Still more find themselves intimidated by what may seem, initially, an incomprehensible and bewildering continent.

This book sets out, chapter by chapter, to guide you through the states, cities and towns of India, offering historical, architectural and cultural information to enrich your trip, whether you intend to travel for a few weeks or several months. The guide's intention is to spare you the mistakes and anti-climaxes that can spoil the best-laid plans, and to direct you towards off-beat delights as well as world-famous landmarks. Each chapter covers a specific state or region, starting off by introducing its major sights, surveying its history, and summarizing its major travel routes. In each town we've detailed the best places to stay and eat, reviewing palace hotels of faded grandeur alongside inexpensive lodges and simple pilgrim guesthouses, and Mughlai restaurants next to village food stalls. We haven't set out to list the cheapest options everywhere, because here, as anywhere else, the cheapest can easily be the worst. As well as providing detailed accounts of all the major sights, we provide the information you need to search out performing arts, enjoy Indian cinema, explore ashrams and religious centres, and get swept away by the fervour of the great festivals.

The best Indian itineraries are the simplest. To imagine that there is some set list of places you must go, or things you must see, is a sure way to make your trip self-defeating. You couldn't see everything in one expedition, even if you spent a year trying. Far better then, to concentrate on one or two specific regions, and above all, to be flexible. Although it requires a deliberate change of pace to venture away from the cities, rural India has its own very distinct pleasures. In fact, while Indian cities are undoubtedly adrenalin-fuelled, upbeat places, it is possible - and certainly less stressful - to travel for months around the subcontinent and rarely have to set foot in one.

The Basics section, at the beginning of this book, provides an overview of the practical aspects of travelling in India. To put it simply, it's not as difficult as you may imagine, or may be told. Some travellers impose an exhausting sequence of long-distance journeys and other privations upon themselves that no Indian would dream of attempting, and then wonder why they're not enjoying their trip. Although becoming overtired is an almost inevitable part of travelling around India, getting ill - despite the interminable tales of Delhi-belly and associated hardships so proudly told by a certain type of India bore - certainly isn't. If you give yourself time to rest there's no reason why you should pick up anything worse than a headache. Food is generally extremely good, especially in south India, famed for its creative vegetarian cuisine; water can be bought in bottles, just like anywhere else in the world, and there are plenty of comfortable, inexpensive places to stay. Though the sheer size of the country means that travel is seldom straightforward, the extensive road, rail and air links ensure that few destinations are inaccessible, and fares are invariably cheap. Furthermore, the widespread use of English makes communication easy for the majority of Western visitors. Journeys may be long - a four-hour bus ride is normal, and travelling constantly for thirty hours not uncommon - but they can provide some of the very best moments of a trip: punctuated with frequent food stops and memorable encounters, and passing through an everchanging landscape. For long hauls, much the best way to go is by train; with computerized booking now established almost everywhere, the Indian rail network is as efficient as almost any in the world. Rail journeys also offer the chance to meet other travellers and Indians from all walks of life, and a constant stream of activity as chai-wallahs, peanut-sellers, musicians, astrologers and mendicants wander through the carriages. The travel details in each chapter will help you decide on the most convenient transport, show you the best way to book tickets, and save a great deal of time and frustration.

Finally, the Contexts at the end of the book draw together the many facets of Indian life and culture discussed throughout the Guide, including summaries of the subcontinent's history and manifold religions, and overviews of Indian music and issues affecting women. We also recommend further reading to enjoy before you go and as you travel.

Where to go

The subcontinent's most-travelled circuit, combining spectacular monuments with the flat arid landscape that for many people is archetypally Indian, is the so-called "Golden Triangle" in the north - Delhi itself, the capital, and within easy reach of it Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, and the Pink City of Rajasthan, Jaipur. Rajasthan is probably the single most popular state with travellers, who are drawn by its desert scenery, and the romantic Rajput past epitomized by the forts of Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, and the medieval palaces of Udaipur and Bundi.

North of Delhi stretch the mighty Himalayas. Kashmir was, until the escalation of tensions in the 1980s, the most touristed region of the mountains; see p.000 for why this book does not include a chapter on the state. We do, however, include very detailed accounts of the other Indian Himalayan regions, which partly as a result of government policy are rapidly developing their facilities for visitors. Both Himachal Pradesh - where Dharamsala is the home of a Tibetan community that includes the Dalai Lama himself - and Uttar Pradesh - where the glacial source of the sacred River Ganges has attracted pilgrims for over a thousand years - offer magnificent trekking, while deeper in the mountains, Ladakh and Sikkim are scattered with remote Buddhist monasteries.

East of Delhi, the River Ganges meanders through some of India's most densely populated regions to reach the extraordinary holy Hindu city of Varanasi (also known as Benares), where to witness the daily rituals of life and death focused around the waterfront ghats (bathing places) is to glimpse the continuing practice of India's most ancient religious traditions. Further east still is the great city of Calcutta, the capital until early this century of the British Raj, and now a vibrant centre of Bengali culture that also epitomizes contemporary India's most pressing problems, poverty and over-population.

Heading south from Calcutta along the coast, you come first to Orissa, where Puri's Jagannath Temple is the scene of one of India's greatest festivals, and the temple at Konarak has re-emerged from beneath the sands to re-state its claims as one of the most fabulous achievements of the medieval stonemasons. Tamil Nadu, further south, has its own tradition of magnificent architecture, with towering gopura gateways dominating towns whose thriving temple complexes are still the focus of everyday life. Of them all, Madurai, in the far south, is the most stunning, but you could spend months wandering between the sacred sites of the Cauvery Delta and the fragrant Nilgiri Hills, draped in the tea terraces that have become the hallmark of south Indian landscapes. Kerala, near the southernmost tip of the subcontinent on the western coast, is India at its most tropical, and relaxed, with lush backwaters teeming with simple wooden craft of all shapes and sizes, and red-roofed towns and villages all but invisible between the verdant canopy of palm trees. Further up the coast is Goa, the former Portuguese colony whose 100km-coastline is fringed with beaches to suit all tastes and budgets, from upmarket package tourists to zonked-out ravers, and whose towns hold whitewashed Christian churches that might have been transplanted from Europe.

Some of India's most memorable monuments lie far inland, on long-forgotten trading routes across the heart of the peninsula - the abandoned city of Vijayanagar (or Hampi) in Karnataka, whose ruins are scattered across a primeval boulder-strewn landscape; the painted and sculpted Buddhist caves of Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra; the deserted temples of Khajuraho and palaces of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. Finally, there's much-maligned Mumbai, an ungainly beast that has been the major focus of the nationwide drift to the big cities. Centre of the country's formidable popular movie industry, it reels along on an undeniable energy that, after a few days of acclimatization, can prove compelling.

As we've said, however, to appreciate your travels to the full you'll need to conserve your energies. On a long trip, it makes sense to pause and rest a while every few weeks. Certain places have fulfilled that function for generations. Dotted across the continent are the Victorian hill stations, resorts designed to escape the summer heat, created by the British towards the end of the last century wherever a suitable stretch of hills stood conveniently close to the workaday cities of the plains. Within the last thirty years, a network of "alternative" hang-outs for young budget travellers has also developed. These are often places where a tourist infrastructure had already been created, such as the beach resort of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, which is also the site of some of India's earliest surviving experiments in temple architecture, or Hampi, mentioned above, or Manali, a former hill station in Himachal Pradesh. Elsewhere, the presence of sand and sea is enough, as with many of the beaches of Goa, or Kovalam or Varkala in Kerala. In recent years, growing numbers of travellers have also been exploring the Andaman Islands, a remote tropical atoll around 1000km east of Tamil Nadu in the Bay of Bengal, whose clear waters have some of the most abundant marine life in the world.

Focussing purely on the subcontinent's touristic highlights, it is easy to gain the impression of an India little changed since Kipling's times. Clichs may well come to life on every other corner, but they are increasingly anachronisms in a country much more prosaic than many first-time visitors expect. India has modernized at a bewildering pace over the past two decades. This has made life a lot easier for the middle classes, but it has also made the country a far less 'exotic' destination than it used to be for foreign travellers, and the country's commercialism, poverty, pollution and disorder can get the better of even the most ardent devotee of India at some point. Yet for all this, India remains an utterly compelling place to travel, possessing an uncanny power to overwhelm, astonish, exasperate, delight, and transform everyone who goes there.