India: The Rough Guide, Second Edition (2nd ed) [Paperback]

David Abram (Author), Harriet Podger (Author), Devdan Sen (Author), Gareth John Williams (Author)

Book Description

Series: 2nd ed | Publication Date: January 1, 1997

This practical guide contains information on many types of accommodation in India, and gives details of where to go and what to see. It also includes tabulated train, bus and air travel information.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...a wonderful source of insight into every aspect of Indian travel and the complexities of Indian culture. -- The Melbourne Age, Australia

An excellent, general guide. -- The Times, London, UK

As a comprehensive source of information the Rough Guide to India is hard to beat. -- Daily Telegraph, London, UK

Excellent all-rounder. -- The Observer, 19 March 2000, London, UK

Excellent...highly rated. -- Financial Times, London, UK

The bible for any visitor...contains more practical information than any other guide. -- CondŽ Nast Traveler, USA

Way ahead of its rival, Lonely Planet, in scope and erudition. -- Conde Nast Traveler, October 1999, USA --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Where to go

The subcontinent's most-travelled circuit, combining spectacular monuments with the flat arid landscape that for many people is archetypally Indian, is the so-called "Golden Triangle" in the north - Delhi itself, the capital, and within easy reach of it Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, and the Pink City of Rajasthan, Jaipur. Rajasthan is probably the single most popular state with travellers, who are drawn by its desert scenery, and the romantic Rajput past epitomized by the forts of Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, and the medieval palaces of Udaipur and Bundi.

North of Delhi stretch the mighty Himalayas. Kashmir was, until the escalation of tensions in the 1980s, the most touristed region of the mountains; see p.000 for why this book does not include a chapter on the state. We do, however, include very detailed accounts of the other Indian Himalayan regions, which partly as a result of government policy are rapidly developing their facilities for visitors. Both Himachal Pradesh - where Dharamsala is the home of a Tibetan community that includes the Dalai Lama himself - and Uttar Pradesh - where the glacial source of the sacred River Ganges has attracted pilgrims for over a thousand years - offer magnificent trekking, while deeper in the mountains, Ladakh and Sikkim are scattered with remote Buddhist monasteries.

East of Delhi, the River Ganges meanders through some of India's most densely populated regions to reach the extraordinary holy Hindu city of Varanasi (also known as Benares), where to witness the daily rituals of life and death focused around the waterfront ghats (bathing places) is to glimpse the continuing practice of India's most ancient religious traditions. Further east still is the great city of Calcutta, the capital until early this century of the British Raj, and now a vibrant centre of Bengali culture that also epitomizes contemporary India's most pressing problems, poverty and over-population.

Heading south from Calcutta along the coast, you come first to Orissa, where Puri's Jagannath Temple is the scene of one of India's greatest festivals, and the temple at Konarak has re-emerged from beneath the sands to re-state its claims as one of the most fabulous achievements of the medieval stonemasons. Tamil Nadu, further south, has its own tradition of magnificent architecture, with towering gopura gateways dominating towns whose thriving temple complexes are still the focus of everyday life. Of them all, Madurai, in the far south, is the most stunning, but you could spend months wandering between the sacred sites of the Cauvery Delta and the fragrant Nilgiri Hills, draped in the tea terraces that have become the hallmark of south Indian landscapes. Kerala, near the southernmost tip of the subcontinent on the western coast, is India at its most tropical, and relaxed, with lush backwaters teeming with simple wooden craft of all shapes and sizes, and red-roofed towns and villages all but invisible between the verdant canopy of palm trees. Further up the coast is Goa, the former Portuguese colony whose 100km-coastline is fringed with beaches to suit all tastes and budgets, from upmarket package tourists to zonked-out ravers, and whose towns hold whitewashed Christian churches that might have been transplanted from Europe.

Some of India's most memorable monuments lie far inland, on long-forgotten trading routes across the heart of the peninsula - the abandoned city of Vijayanagar (or Hampi) in Karnataka, whose ruins are scattered across a primeval boulder-strewn landscape; the painted and sculpted Buddhist caves of Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra; the deserted temples of Khajuraho and palaces of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. Finally, there's much-maligned Mumbai, an ungainly beast that has been the major focus of the nationwide drift to the big cities. Centre of the country's formidable popular movie industry, it reels along on an undeniable energy that, after a few days of acclimatization, can prove compelling.

As we've said, however, to appreciate your travels to the full you'll need to conserve your energies. On a long trip, it makes sense to pause and rest a while every few weeks. Certain places have fulfilled that function for generations. Dotted across the continent are the Victorian hill stations, resorts designed to escape the summer heat, created by the British towards the end of the last century wherever a suitable stretch of hills stood conveniently close to the workaday cities of the plains. Within the last thirty years, a network of "alternative" hang-outs for young budget travellers has also developed. These are often places where a tourist infrastructure had already been created, such as the beach resort of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu, which is also the site of some of India's earliest surviving experiments in temple architecture, or Hampi, mentioned above, or Manali, a former hill station in Himachal Pradesh. Elsewhere, the presence of sand and sea is enough, as with many of the beaches of Goa, or Kovalam or Varkala in Kerala. In recent years, growing numbers of travellers have also been exploring the Andaman Islands, a remote tropical atoll around 1000km east of Tamil Nadu in the Bay of Bengal, whose clear waters have some of the most abundant marine life in the world.

Focussing purely on the subcontinent's touristic highlights, it is easy to gain the impression of an India little changed since Kipling's times. Clichs may well come to life on every other corner, but they are increasingly anachronisms in a country much more prosaic than many first-time visitors expect. India has modernized at a bewildering pace over the past two decades. This has made life a lot easier for the middle classes, but it has also made the country a far less 'exotic' destination than it used to be for foreign travellers, and the country's commercialism, poverty, pollution and disorder can get the better of even the most ardent devotee of India at some point. Yet for all this, India remains an utterly compelling place to travel, possessing an uncanny power to overwhelm, astonish, exasperate, delight, and transform everyone who goes there. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1312 pages
• Publisher: Rough Guides; 2 edition (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1858282004
• ISBN-13: 978-1858282008
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #669,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rough Guide to India, June 20, 2000

By 

Ian A. Inman (http://drink.to/beefy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough Guide to India (3rd Edition) (Paperback)

Rough Guide to India is a concise, comprehensive and informative source of information for people planning a trip to the sub-continent. On reading the parts relevant to my own plans, I found it to give just the right amount of information and not the oversaturation I found with, say, one of the Lonely Planet books. Two areas I looked at in more detail in the book for this review were Ladakh and Varanasi. I felt that the Rough Guide book said what need to be said about both areas, but in half as many words and without getting too heavy, for want of a better word. For both locations, it only took me about ten minutes to get a decent overview, where to go and where to stay (let's face it, when you are travelling or on the road, you really only want to have a quick glance, so you know what you are doing), whilst it took me half an hour to get the same information from Lonely Planet. The former made you feel the places were worth the effort to get there, whilst in the latter case, you had lost interest after a few minutes.

Maps are also easy to understand and not overly complicated, another big plus. The Rough Guide's information was also right up to date, another big plus. Highly recommended and in my view, the best India guide available.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars thorough,useful,engaging, and INDISPENSIBLE, September 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: India: The Rough Guide, Second Edition (2nd ed) (Paperback)

When my friend and I, two Americans of Indian descent took off for the Mother Land, we took two guides-The Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. When we realized we had packed too much stuff for the sort of advertures we sought, we ditched almost all our luggage and the Lonely Planet. Two years later, on my second trip, I once again went through shelves full of guides and picked up Ed.2 of the Rough Guide. Needless to say, I give it the highest recommendation. This guide was indispensible.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As someone returning to India..., February 15, 2003

By 

bookjunkiereviews (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rough Guide to India (Paperback)

I have a different perspective on this book than a "regular tourist". I was looking for the following -
a) a reasonably clear overview of each city or historical site, when it was built, and by whom, and why it is of importance to tourists and to India
b) reasonable detail for cities, outside of the usual tourist attractions
c) some attractions/ towns not listed in most tourist books.

I was checking the sections on West Bengal and Orissa in particular (having lived and travelled in both states). I used those sections to compare between this guide (the 1999 edition) and Lonely Planet etc. For my purposes, Rough Guide was the most helpful - in describing places, in offering different ways to get around (with notes on how safe it is for women etc), in evaluating the historical and/or tourist appeal of places, and so forth. I think I fell for this guide when I noticed the level of detail it had on eating places and places of worship in a residential area in South Calcutta (not to mention a critique of the Pipli handicraft industry).

The little vignettes on getting around in a Hindu holy site (and in temples, where allowed in) were also quite interesting. I have never been one to make pilgrimages, but if I wanted to do so, this would be useful to have along. The history section was surprisingly thorough and balanced - and I learned new things not covered in Indian history textbooks in school.

Is this book perfect? Of course not. But a guidebook generally cannot cater to all tastes equally. For me (a non-tourist but an NRI returning home), it did quite well (even though Jammu & Kashmir were omitted but Ladakh was included). It sparked in me the determination to visit Madhya Pradesh (one of the few states I have never visited) and parts of the Northeast. I would love to see a Rough Guide or the equivalent that focuses more on Eastern and North-eastern India, but until this, this works fine.