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,
I give up! Even though I purchased both the hardcover, and ebook, at various times, halfway through I've admitted I'm forcing myself to go on.
So, no more. DNF it is.
Honestly, I was never much interested in her handling of the monk's historical travelyears ago she presents that from a sort of reconstructed omniscient pointofview as though the reader were present during the trek.
However by the time she arrives in India, the presentday story becomes one of an upperclass dilletante project, Moreover, she seemed to be condescendingly "interpreting" Indian culture for western readers,
The writing itself is fine, and I give her credit for finishing the project, But, that's just not enough, On to the next TBR item, . .
In the seventh century AD, the Chinese monk Xuanzang set off on an epic journey to India to study Buddhist philosophy from the Indian masters.
Traveling along the Silk Road, braving brigands and blizzards, Xuanzang finally reached India, where his spiritual quest took him to Buddhist holy places and monasteries throughout the subcontinent.
Fourteen hundred years later, Mishi Saran follows in Xuanzang's footsteps to the fabled oasis cities of China and Central Asia, and the Buddhist sites and nowvanished kingdoms in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that Xuanzang wrote about.
Traveling seamlessly back and forth in time between the seventh century and the twentyfirst, Saran uncovers the past with consummate skill even as she brings alive the present through her vivid and engaging descriptions of people and places.
A riveting mix of lively reportage, high adventure, historical inquiry and personal memoir, this delightfully written book is a pathbreaking travelogue.
liked her style Detailed sitelink anureviews. com/chasingth I was looking forward to read this book after reading its description, but disappointed after completing it, Hats off to the author for taking such an adventurous long journey, There are some parts of book which was interesting, but most of the book was kind of boring, I felt like some things are missing even though author tried to include Xuanzang's and her own travel experience,
This is my first traveloguebut I have gone through a fare share of travel blogs and documentaries and may be my expectation was different which made it less interesting for me.
After rereading Richard Bernstein's "In the footsteps" travelogue of the monk recently and hating it as much the second time as the first time I read it, I was delighted to discover that Mishi Saran had written her own book to trace the travels of the great Chinese translator and monk Xuanzang.
This book was everything Bernstein's was not, She is fluent in the language and very respectful of the people she encounters along the way, A good sport and a free spirit, she leaves her life in Hong Kong and travels overland from Xian to India along the Silk Road.
The book was published by Penguin India, Books from India always have a familar smell that I can't put my finger on but I like, It might remind me of books from my childhoodthe paper and the fonts Also hand sewn, So, my reading was really enjoyable on multiple levels, The maps were good and the storytelling fun and positive, Not to be missed! Good book of a woman, who went in the footsteps of her teacher, With 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, .