OT: Your last major trip?
Ramachandra Guha: In the spring I travelled through three states of the
OT: Did research for Savaging the Civilized, your biography of Verrier Elwin, lead you to interesting places?
Ramachandra Guha: Elwin travelled continuously for 30 years, so I could not possibly have been everywhere he had. But I did track down his first wife in the upper Narmada valley. Another place the Elwin trail led me to was a lovely hilltop monastery in Devon, where the monks had preserved many of his letters.
OT: Does the Elwin connection make you partial to Bastar?
Ramachandra Guha: Elwin knew Bastar, in the 1940s, as an oasis of beauty and peace; when I visited it six decades later, it was the centre of a civil war between Maoist revolutionaries and a vigilante group promoted by the state government. Travel is often a case of leisure and pleasure; but here, an exposure to a new place instead brought me face to face with the tragedy of the Indian tribals, victimised and brutalised in their own land.
OT: You grew up in Dehradun. What was Dehra like in those days?
Ramachandra Guha: And how do you find it now? The Dehradun of my boyhood had rice fields, litchi orchards and sal forests; the new capital of Uttarakhand now has government buildings, three-star hotels and car showrooms, rivalling one another for their ugliness.
OT: Your most memorable holiday?
Ramachandra Guha: A week’s drive, c. 1977, from Dehradun to Gangotri and back, with a friend called Sanjay (Junior) Chatterjee, whose father was a forest officer, courtesy whom we halted each night at a rest house with views, and with access to fresh fish from the Bhagirathi flowing beneath us. Without the father’s knowledge, we also rubbed ourselves some grass from the cannabis growing along the riverbanks!
OT: The one thing (or several) you always travel with?
Ramachandra Guha: I travel with a machine for my sleep apnea; several inhalers for my asthma; a big box of pills for cholesterol, hypothyroid, etc; and a mat for my back exercises. That I can still travel is a consequence of the fact that I do not (yet?) suffer from AIDS or cancer.
OT: Your favourite travel books?
Ramachandra Guha: I like my travel books to have some serious history and politics, as in Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Travels with a Tangerine, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, Patrick Symes’s Chasing Ché and V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South.
OT: Any meal which you had while travelling which was especially memorable?
Ramachandra Guha: A 42-item vegetarian meal in the Admaru Mutt, adjacent to the great old Krishna temple in Udupi.
OT: Is there a travel book in you somewhere?
Ramachandra Guha: Perhaps, if I live long enough, I might write a memoir of my journeys through the states and union territories of the Republic of India.
(Ramachandra Guha is the author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.)
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