The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia Book

India as a giant spiritual supermarket! Sarah Macdonald peruses the aisles and samples the product. Jainism here, Judaism there, Hindus, Parsis, Buddhists, Sufis and Christians she samples all their wares. And the book is just about as superficial as it sounds. It is not about these religions (although Sarah does try for some depth) but about her experiences of them with some rather wacky people. Both the 'magical' gurus and the hippie-types who sit at their feet and swoon.

Sarah, like the adventuresome Australian she is, backpacks to India, has a crap time, leaves but meets an ugly old soothsayer who tells her she will come back to India and find lurrrrve. And eleven years later she comes back with her boyfriend. He works in broadcasting and is always off covering the latest insurrection and massacre with the high point being Afghanistan. So to fill in the time she becomes a spiritual tourist shopping for the 'truth'.

Now this is the interesting part. She really does see India as it seems to be, a society of great contrasts. Whether it is between rich and poor, or the religions, the languages or the cultures everyone (apart from those involved in insurrections and massacres) meaning the ordinary people, just rub along together.

She goes to ashrams, temples, 'coffee shops' in Nepal and other places of worship and attempts to learn the path about who we are and where we are going. There isn't any universal path to be found, everyone has to make their own, or not bother (me, the apatheist). Quite a lot of these spiritual homes charge a lot of money for imposing fairly punishing regimes on Westerners who would seek the truth. Religion is quite an industry in India.

One of the funniest parts of the book is detailing the various people she meets. I would never have guessed that the stonedest least spiritual tourists around are the Israelis who are considerably less precious than the sort of hippie type travellers she meets in the Hindu ashrams (think Shantaram).

The most fanatical people are the Parsis, known as Zoroastrians in Iran, who are the most exclusive of exclusive types in the world. No one can convert and no child that doesn't have both parents from the Parsee community is accepted. The group she met saw the preservation of that exclusivity as the most important part of their culture and are willing to accept the problems of inbreeding that results from this. Their other preoccupation is breeding vultures - pollution seems to be killing them off - so that their dead can be eaten by them in their traditional funeral rites.

The book took me about six months to read. I just couldn't get into it. I kept it next to the stove in the kitchen and read a few pages when I had to stir something and as it went on it got more interesting. It helps that the author can write well. It helps that she has a very strong, somewhat bolshy, opinionated personality, very Australian, and it was more Sarah MacDonald, the author, who sucked me. I wanted to know what she would do next much more than I cared about 'the next'.

So three and a half stars rounded up to four because Sarah is just the sort of person you'd love to go out to lunch with and amid the chatter she would tell you about how these a-mazing people she met in India are coming to stay and would you like to meet them? How about dinner... Oh yes, you think, I'll bring a couple of bottles.