Chasing The Monks Shadow by Mishi Saran

Chasing The Monks Shadow Reviews

• 
  John

  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 travel 1400 years ago; she presents that from a sort of reconstructed omniscient point-of-view as though the reader were present during the trek. However... by the time she arrives in India, the present-day story becomes one of an upper-class 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...
  
  
• 
  Sajith Kumar

  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 in 600 CE 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 years (627 – 645 CE) 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 ‘Hiuen-tsang’ familiar to most Indians and adopted as the Pinyin system by China in 1958. Mishi Saran travels through the routes used by the monk 1400 years ago and similarly notes down her own reflections of the land and people she came up with. This journey was made in 2000-01. 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 monk’s role in defining it. Xuanzang was accustomed to his country’s 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 well-defined rules, scholars have no difficulty in identifying the places.
  
  It is clear from the monk’s 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 Xuanzang’s 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.
  
  Saran’s 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.217). Such grudging admiration does not extend to expressing gratitude where it is legitimately due. The author’s family had connections at high places that an armed guard and a security vehicle were exclusively provided for her transport in strife-torn Kashmir. Under that security canopy, she went places and faithfully records the one-sided 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. It’s 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’ in 1197 as if history does not record their names. Every Indian knows that it was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khalji in the pre-Sultanate period characterized by frequent Muslim invasions.
  
  The author’s 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 self-conditioned 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.365). 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.371). In the usual liberal fashion, the author meekly surrenders to religious injunctions when they are accompanied by an implicit threat of violence otherwise.
  
  The author’s 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 2000. 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 non-existent 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 well-meaning 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 Saran’s travel in Afghanistan!
  
  The book’s 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.
  
• 
  Leanne

  After re-reading 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 childhood--the 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!
• 
  Neha

  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 travelogue(but 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.
• 
  Anuradha Goyal

  Detailed Review -
  https://www.anureviews.com/chasing-th...
• 
  Manu

  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 over 10000 miles, 14 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 that’s 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 Xuanzang’s 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 9/11, 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 blown-up 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 it’s a part that I’m glad the author chose to add here.
  
  As a reader, I could relate to the author’s 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 I’ve read.
• 
  Kedar Kulkarni

  Xuanzang pronounced Shwezang in the Chinese was an incredible monk and mishi Saran the author does a decent job catching up with him as she travel through china and the Indian subcontinent.The books style is a travel memoir with the travel being, following the footsteps of this monk he walked, she takes every possible vehicle imaginable.I would have liked a little more walking for some reason, and a little less personal anecdotes and more quotations from Xuanzang's original text.There is also one factual error where he apparently walked and impossible distance in two days.I think she said 300 kms or 600 li should be more like 60 kms even that seems a stretch clarifications from the author would be nice.The history part and detail, fleshing out, and connections made do impress, but only rarely, when ms Saran is not obsessed with her own personal travel dilemmas.Along with the map of her journey the places list along with the time period ruler and dates would have been an addition I would have really appreciated.Having said that the book does delight in parts and her care for the journey and passion for the scholarship and history at hand comes through.But there is too much tired cliched writing about her personal life that could have been left out.That narrative layer bogs the book down a bit and the cliched personal history to her relationship to the monks seems a far stretch the spiritual confusions or clarifications seem inane and did not interest me.Well to conclude glad she took the trip and shared her insights with utmost sincerity!! Cheers on that account!!
  Chasing the Monk's Shadow
• 
  Vamshi Krishna

  Mishi Saran traces the enthralling journey of the most famous historian xuangxang after 800 years of his monumental travel to the medivial India.The Mesmer hangs in the atmosphere while reading this book; the reader is filled with a nostalgia, something unknown that one longed for previously, but forgotten as the times passed, is forced to enter the reader's memory while scrolling these pages. the reader somehow finds himself in the enlightening journey, with xuanxuang,and the joy of travel.One of the best written travel books,it has managed to make an impact in my life..A must-read for travel lovers!
  
• 
  Pramod Pant

  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.
• 
  Biogeek

  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.
• 
  Shreya.Booked

  A difficult book in terms of the language, but if you can handle that, then it's a very interesting read.
• 
  Alex

  Such a fascinating idea, both in concept and execution. Wish I could travel the world like this as well.
• 
  Jaya

  liked her style...
• 
  Anuradha Miraji

  Good book of a woman, who went in the footsteps of her teacher.