Customer Reviews

Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India

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"India is a harsh mistress," Paul William Roberts admits in the amazing Empire of the Soul. "She seems to appreciate individual sacrifice so little. Yet she has never wanted for lovers." Roberts went searching for the "Truth" in India in the seventies and nineties, and instead discovered a land of paradox and extremes. His personal spiritual journey takes him to the ashrams and caves of holy men, the hippy community of Goa, and a millionaire drug dealer's hashish fields on India's border with China. Roberts pokes fun at "credit-card ascetics"--Westerners in Indian garb who look like they have American Express cards tucked away somewhere: "Don't renounce the world without it." Yet Oxford-educated Roberts himself spent a year following guru Sathya Sai Baba in Puttaparthi, who would become a lifelong influence. "Freaks look less freakish in India," Roberts writes. "Once you have seen a thousand naked sadhus running toward the Ganges River covered with ash from the cremation grounds, dreadlocks daubed with cow dung, nails driven through their tongues, you're hardly going to be upset about a guy with shoulder-length hair and a beard who wears beads and flower shirts." On the offbeat way he meets such figures as the fraudulent sex guru Bhagwan Rajneesh, George Harrison, Mother Teresa, and "The King of the Untouchables," who amassed a fortune doing a job no high-caste Brahmin would touch with a ten-foot pole: burning the corpses of the dead. Roberts rants fluently on topics ranging from the British Raj to the Vedic hymns. Whether in the slums of Calcutta or the crumbling palaces of maharajas, he turns his tragicomical eye inward to explore this religion-soaked realm. By turns hellish and divine, India is experienced for us by a modern literary mystic who has found his surrogate spiritual home; the reader is just along for the ride, but what a wild one it is. . . . --John M. Edwards

This book is interesting reading because the author is forthright and humorous.Since he writes about two eras, one in 1975 and the next in 1992, we do get to compare the changes in the spiritual world.I am surprised at his devotion to Sathya Baba to such a high degree in 1975 byt somehow did not try to pursue for the next 17 years.Some of his observations are platitudinous.Like many of the travel writers,including Paul Theroux,he also stays in very poor hotels paying 50 cents rent and then complains about cockroaches and lizards.And then he stays in the Taj Hotel and keeps drinking tea which at Taj costs more than 50 cents per cup!There are several inconsistent statements as well as contradictory ones. Even though he claims to be a great lover of India,some of his statements are not credible.In every conversation with the Indians,there is an air of elitist posture. William Dalrymple is a much better travel writer who searches more into the meaning of India.

India is a country that evokes very strong emotions. On any brief visit, one is enraged by the filth, the decay, the disorganization, not to speak of the heat and the dust. But when one has lived there for some time, a strange magic starts to work. It is like the seductive charm of a beautiful gypsy woman in rags! What secrets lie buried in her chest?

India is more than a palimpsest. It is as if each layer were alive and continually changing right before your eyes. How does one write about such a land without a stereotypical juxtaposition of the old and the new? How does one communicate the horror and debasement that has entered the soul of urban India and still be able to speak of the ancient springwells of its culture?

Well the task may appear impossible but it can be done as shown in this magnificent book by Paul William Roberts, a British-Canadian writer. Recounting several journeys made over an eighteen-year period, Roberts is able to draw a powerful pictu! re of India with its smells and sounds, bazaars and chai-shops, bug-infested cheap hotels and rationed electricity, gurus and drug-runners, penuried ex-rajas and movie-stars, country roads and camel rides, ashrams and whore-houses. But these are just the props for his marvellous gifts of story-telling.

It is a very moving book which also manages to be funny and profound. Through his experiences he is not only able to describe the moods of the many Indias, he also paints the soul of the West. This book is not analytical like the travel books of Naipaul; for Roberts the story is told through suggestion and a torrent of feelings. In linear discourse, the same drama in the sky will be thunder to the blind and lightning to the deaf, but Roberts is able to capture in one sweep the many dimensions of his experience. This method literally transports us to India; we become his fellow-travellers.

The journeys are peopled by fascinating characters: A seven-foot tall German ta! ntrik in loin-cloth; a 300-pound woman who actually cooks h! er lunch on a pressure-stove in a crammed bus; sex-crazed followers of Rajneesh; old aristocracy reduced to penury; hippies in Goa; the dom raja of the burning ghats of Benaras.

Although the book has its gurus, the maharaja, the hippies and the movie-stars, it does not deal with hackneyed themes. Roberts brings a rare perception to his experience so that we are brought face to face with the universals of the human condition.

Returning from India on his most recent trip, Roberts evokes an emotion familiar to expatriate Indians and others who have lived there for any length of time: ``As the plane left the ground, rising up over the central plains of India, heading out over Rajasthan, I gazed down at the fast-disappearing features of the land. The thousands of tiny villages; the mountains; the rivers; the jungles; the deserts; the temples; the great holy cities; and all these people---I was leaving them all yet again. On the headphones an Urdu ghazal singer was wailing o! ut the Oriental version of country music: Whatever he sang about, it had to involve broken hearts, broken dreams. I felt the bittersweet ache of love inside, too; felt my heart swelling up---as if wanting to embrace the whole world. India: I couldn't live with her, and I couldn't live without her.''

It is a remarkable book, one of the great travel books of our times. Not only does it evoke the mystique of India, it does so with great aplomb and style.

It is the perfect book to read this year, the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. Written with great zest and sympathy, it shows why the attraction of India is something more than a longing for a homeland. India may be an infuriating place but there is magic in its rhythms!

I have just finished reading this book for the second time and I enjoyed it even more.

This work provides an insightful look into a very complex part of the world and manages to convey the spiritual and physical journeys of the author in an interesting manner. I feel the book provides enough historical and religous background information to enhance the reader's understanding without being excessive or dull.

This is not quite a pure travel book and not quite a pure spiritual book, but I think readers of each type will find enough to enjoy here.

Roberts absolute tenacity regarding his subjects and complete dedication to every word he writes ensures readers feel themselves present in every encounter and experience. Availing himself full range of expression to write and live as cynic, mystic, adventurer, good friend, and seeker, Roberts takes us on strolls through the beautiful, humor-filled, and the bazarre. His concept of displaying in this work varying perspectives between two different trips to India that are seperated by decades of time as well as personal growth offers readers great awareness of the country and more so the man writing of it.

This is a unique book. Racy, interesting and yet profound in some ways. Being an Indian, I have always been fascinated by how non-Indians view India. This book did not disappoint.

It tells you vivid tales about spiritual India - many which even I dare not believe but can not dismiss either. Paul William Robert's account has a ring of sincerity and authenticity. Somehow we don't always realise what an interesting and unique place our country is. Things that we take to be ordinary, every-day happenings show up as unique through PWR's account. Is India really that strange?

The book is difficult to put down, if you are interested or puzzled by India. And if you were born in India but live abroad, consider buying it as a gift for your children. Trust me, they will not be disappointed. This book may not show the complete picture, but it does show a very important part of the picture. That too, with honesty and some sympathy.

This book really varies in subject matter and in the author’s perspective. A lot of that is due to the nature of the book: half based on India in the 1970s and half based on India in the 1990s. But I think it is also due to the author having a lot of ideas and impressions he wants to communicate, but none of them able to entirely stand on their own. The book has a remarkable beginning with the author’s account of the time he spent in Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram in the 1970s. I found it extremely moving and very well written. My hope was that the book would continue on similar themes, but instead it took a nosedive toward drugs and sex and tales of conspicuous consumption. These can certainly be engaging at times, but at other times Paul William Roberts comes off as a little pompous or at least lacking in integrity. Over and over he finds himself in situations where people are being dominated and denied dignity. After chronicling all the gruesome inhumanity of the scene in detail, he think distances himself from it and attempts to present himself as the detached observer, bearing witness to others’ pain. You don’t stumble into the backrooms of seedy bars where young girls are sexually enslaved by accident. The book hits its lowest point in an odd chapter where the author goes to visit Mother Teresa. He more or less attacks the woman, interrogating her over the sincerity of her actions. Though an interesting subject and one perhaps worth discussing, I failed to see what the point was of literally confronting the woman. It came off as petty name dropping and an attempt to show the reader how fearless the author is – but the nature of the attack was unjustified. In the chapter he goes on to glorify a wealthy owner of a private social club in Calcutta, clearly implying that this man’s life choices were of a higher moral standard than Mother Teresa’s. Did I miss something in this chapter, or does it strike others as strange and tactless? I am curious to know what others think. This all sounds quite bad. It has to be said that Roberts is continually engaging and entertaining and even when I was questioning his subject matter, his writing ability never wavered. Sathya Sai Baba reappears twice more in this book – once in the middle and again at the end. We are told very little in the first of these (and I suspect that is because the author had nothing of value to say) and I was fairly let down by the second. In my opinion, this book revolved around Baba and his apparent grip on the author’s life. Roberts says as much. That being the case, I was left wanting more about Baba and how his presence affected the author twenty years after their first interactions.

I started off thinking this was brilliant, read bits of the Rajneesh chapter in the bookshop, and was well into the book by bedtime. The first half is all rather good. Then came the break and suddenly I find myself wondering about it all.
There are some quite appalling factual errors that undermine all confidence in the author. The worst is that he mistakes a very different prayer though well known for the Gayatri mantra not once but three times.....a little like a student of Christianity mistaking the Apostle's Creed for the Lord's Prayer and that from someone who claims to have studied sanskrit at Benares University.
At another point he claims ignorance of a story he has told himself in great detail in a previous chapter. His Hindu philosophy is sketchy and seems pulled from other books.
The set pieces in the second half become rather trite and the dialogue farcical as the book descends into poor travel writing from a poor travel journalist.
Thinking back from the end it can all be seen as a tall tale. Likeable yes, funny quite often, but remakably without substance.
For the hippie travel stuff you would be better served by "A Season in Heaven", and for India travel William Dalrymple and Mark Tully are great straight bats.

I have traveled extensivly throughout the wolrd, yet I am still struck by the force which my time in India altered my perception of mankind. Roberts is able to convincingly convey the embodiment of this diverse culture and the effect that it can have on visitors from western culture. I must read for travelers contemplating a trip to India.

This is the third book by author Roberts which I have read, and as with his other works, it does not disappoint. He has a remarkable talent for writing about the places he visits, not only from a travelers perspective, but is also able to delve into the psychology of the peoples he writes about. His historical vignettes coupled with his ability to describe current events makes his books a joy to read. I can hardly wait for the next one on Iraq to be published.