Customer Reviews

Traveler's Key Northern India

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I have used Alistair Shearer's travelog on Northern India on two occasions and can testify to this book's value. It is unparallelled in its guide to the sacred places of Northern India. He provides the most neatly compact and well written summaries of the three great religions of the area, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islan, I have read, and does so without bias. He then carefully describes and intepretes each of the major Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim sites in the region.

He is a careful scholar, a sensitive religius intrepretor and an expert architectual critic. He gives equal weight and objectivity to each of the sites and provides such apparently "secular" sites as the Taj Mahal, Fetehpur Sikri, and Delhi"s Red Fort with the underlying religious base that they deserve. Along the way, Shearer encapsulates the historical, political and cultural developments of the Mughals, the Maharajas, Jainism, and the British presence.

I spent a month in 1998 and again in 2006 on pilgrimage of the Buddhist and Muslim sites and found Shearer's appraisal true and insightful even now. This book is over 20 years old, and India had undergone an explosive period of change, but it is written in such broad terms that time and the changes in the region are largely unaffected. Even if you never travel to these sites, the book is an armchair resource to some of the most extraordinary places on earth.