Free Chasing The Monk's Shadow Fabricated By Mishi Saran Offered As Text

this unique travel book, Mishi represents the perfect global citizen to me, The idea for this book came from her ability to blend her roots with her interests, Simultaneously telling the story of Xuanzang's journey and her own, Mishi writes with honesty, humor and heart, Detailed sitelink anureviews. com/chasingth It was a great enterprise taken up, But Mishi Saran floundered. It's sorrowful to be a woman who needs protection of men or of numbers, frequently of both,

One feels sad that half of us are still haunted by the feeling that they are potential victims of men to such an extent.


Contrast with the great monk's journey couldn't be starker, liked her style Good book of a woman, who went in the footsteps of her teacher, Ancient Indians were not too keen in writing history, As a result, historians are forced to resort to annals of invaders, memoirs of visiting dignitaries and oblique references in literary sources, Xuanzang was a Chinese monk who travelled to India in the seventh century CE for collecting rare religious manuscripts on Buddhism and to train himself in debating the finer points of philosophy.
Born inCE as Chen Yi, Xuanzang was the name given by the Buddhist order at the time of his enrolment as an ascetic, He travelled for eighteen yearsCE through western China, central Asia and the length and breadth of India, He meticulously wrote down what he saw and what he thought about the land and people he encountered, Xuanzang is the reformed rendition of Hiuentsang familiar to most Indians and adopted as the Pinyin system by China in, Mishi Saran travels through the routes used by the monkyears ago and similarly notes down her own reflections of the land and people she came up with.
This journey was made in, The author is a journalist based in Hong Kong and interested in travel writing, She was born in Prayagraj but has not lived in India since the age of ten, She is a graduate in Chinese Studies and handles the language well,

The importance of Xuanzang in patching up the missing pieces of not only Indian but the entire central Asian histories also is not fully appreciated by the public.
So exact the monk had been in his directions that archeologists in each of the countries he traversed had used his pointers to fix and then dig up the old cities of the seventh century.
The author meets with archeologists in the countries she travels in who share their findings and acknowledge the Chinese monks role in defining it, Xuanzang was accustomed to his countrys meticulous records, volumes of dynastic histories and genealogies copied and recopied for posterity, He could not know that his own record, inked for the Chinese emperor, would provide modern Indian historians with one of the few sources of information about the subcontinent in that era.
His Chinese spelling and pronunciation is different from the common practice in India, but since it follows welldefined rules, scholars have no difficulty in identifying the places.


It is clear from the monks description that Buddhism was declining in India as well as in other places where it once held sway.
Xuanzang notes with mild consternation the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Buddhist texts available in the Chinese language, This was the reason he undertook the arduous journey through inaccessible mountains and deserts infested with hostile brigands, Xuanzang learned Sanskrit in India which was the ecclesiastical language of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism to which China belonged, At the same time, he studied Hinayana treatises also, so as to argue and defeat them in discourse, Futile disputes on the finer points of religion had become fairly common even in Central Asia as attested by Xuanzangs arguments with Mokshagupta at Kucha in Kyrgyzstan.
Patronage extended by royal houses was running thin, Buddhist monasteries in the western and central regions of India were already abandoned by the time Xuanzang arrived, There were few monks and certainly no eminent Buddhist teachers,

Sarans condescension on everything Indian is jarring, Having lived most of her life abroad, she looks at the country with anglicized eyes and insistently repeats the things a typical foreigner would record, such as peeling paint on building walls, vehicles that break down twice a day, potholed roads and garbage accumulated everywhere.
Even then, she remarks that somehow India held together, Somehow the garbage got collected somehow there was ginger and milk for tea somehow the rickety government buses got me to places, I had not worked out how p,. Such grudging admiration does not extend to expressing gratitude where it is legitimately due, The authors family had connections at high places that an armed guard and a security vehicle were exclusively provided for her transport in strifetorn Kashmir, Under that security canopy, she went places and faithfully records the onesided observations made by extremist elements or their sympathizers, This attitude is common in liberal authors who gleefully accept the comforts provided by the administration and then make a partisan narrative of the conflict, She mistakes Kapilvastu to be in Uttar Pradesh and excoriates the state government for the poor upkeep, Its amazing that her research could not identify the place to be a part of Nepal! On the destruction of Nalanda, she places the blame on central Asian invaders inas if history does not record their names.
Every Indian knows that it was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khalji in the preSultanate period characterized by frequent Muslim invasions,

The authors faculty of criticism and mocking disparagement is entirely suspended when she crosses the border from India to Pakistan, On every step, she is shadowed by the security establishment, harassing even the people who help her by providing accommodation, for instance, She raises no complaints about this in the book though it was published a few years after the event, The author unconditionally yields to hardline dress codes and gets selfconditioned to accept them as good for her and the whole womanhood, Later, on seeing college girls in Swat Valley with uncovered heads, she notes that they looked vulgar and their heads seemed naked p,. Saran herself takes extra care to keep those body parts commanded by Sharia to be covered fully in conformity to it without any grumble, Donning a burkha, she sensed the power of concealment, the power of only revealing what is absolutely necessary p,. In the usual liberal fashion, the author meekly surrenders to religious injunctions when they are accompanied by an implicit threat of violence otherwise,

The authors journey on the footsteps of Xuanzang was interrupted at the Uzbekistan border because the road to Afghanistan was blocked due to internal violence between the Taliban and local militias in the year.
So she directly flew to India, After completing the travels in India and Nepal she obtained a visa to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, The author could not visit any monument of her choice in the Taliban territory and was forced to travel the routes prepared by her male guide assigned by the Islamist regime.
Public transport was nonexistent and unsafe where they plied, She tried for UN aid agencies resources for travel and accommodation, but they refused to entertain her, Irritated by the lack of special consideration of the type she was familiar in India, the author makes a tirade against the agencies prompted by frustration.
She accuses corruption in the international aid agencies, Even the funds contributed by wellmeaning people gets sucked up in the great funnel of overheads and hefty staff salaries and finally only a trickle reaches the Afghans.
The UN needs to have transparency regulations, provide accounts and pay attention to the bottom line, Most importantly, the author calls for a provision to fire staff when times get tough, The aid agencies would have done better if they had at least provided a car for Sarans travel in Afghanistan!

The books title and beginnings are exciting, but the narrative gets lackadaisical once the going gets tougher.
Often the script degenerates to a plain travelogue with nothing to enhance the historical content, The author has connections to very high places and scholars, but entirely fails to capitalize on it as far as the quality of the content is concerned.
On the other hand, she has been successful in delineating the currents of identical cultural streams that unite central Asia with the Indian subcontinent, Even though separated by religion, they show similarities in the attitudes to life and the way to treat guests, The word mehman for guest is common everywhere outside China, Altogether, we reach a conclusion that the book has failed to deliver what it promised in the title,

The book is recommended,
There are some books that one wishes went on forever, for the vicarious experience offered is incredible, This is one of those, Long after the pages have been completed, the journey promises to stay in my mind,

It is now exactly a decade since Mishi Saran started on her journey to follow a monk who had himself made a journey of overmiles,centuries before her time.
Xuanzang, who I last met in my history text from school, the monk with the neat backpack,

The book hooked me right from the time the author described how she found a purpose “an Indian woman with a Chinese craze, a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession, we had the same schizophrenia, the monk and I.
It seemed logical to take the same road, "

The best journeys are those which traverse time and space in one stroke, and thats exactly what this book does, Though in many ways, it could be described as a travelogue too, that would be utterly unfair, It is very much a personal journey for the author, a search for her roots, and identity,

As Mishi Saran travels across China and Central Asia, following Xuanzangs path, her vivid prose blurs the boundaries that have been created in the modern era, and its easy to see the influence of ancient civilisations and regimes influence art, architecture, language, customs and thus life itself.
And at the edges, where its not just cultures that collide, but religions too, as they are reshaped or recast in different moulds Islam, Buddhism, Sufism

The writing style forces one to make the journey with her, and I could see that there were actually three journeys unraveling simultaneously the author, the monk, and the Buddha himself.
All of them journeys with a purpose,

And amidst all the eloquence, it has obviously been a journey that required grit and courage, . And luck, which many a time failed the author, From places where children going to school needed visas and permits, to the posturing of a few contemporary students of Buddhism, to the origins of words that are still used in common parlance, and characters which seem to leap out of history pages Ashoka, Kanishka, Chandragupta, the pages hold in them, tangential journeys for the reader.


The last part of the book, where the author gets to almost finally visit the territories crossed by Xuanzang in Afghanistan, is written a month before/, and gives us a gripping account of Afghanistan under the Taliban, with glimpses of people who have perhaps yet to find peace.
“I believed him. It was hard not to believe a man when you were standing in front of his blownup home and staring at the ruins of his life.
Whatever the story was, this was his truth, ” Unlike fiction, one cannot console the self that the person and his story are imaginary, The last part of the journey does not add a lot with respect to the purpose of the book, but

its a part that Im glad the author chose to add here.


As a reader, I could relate to the authors words in the last page “I understood less, not more, I had acquired this sadness”, and that is what makes this book one of the best Ive read, .