Reviews for An Indian summer

The average rating for An Indian summer based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-06-18 00:00:00 Michael Thomas This book is part-travelogue and part-memoir of a journalist, James Cameron, who is unrelated to the famous filmmaker. The book is set in 1970s' India. It moves forward in a slightly nonlinear fashion going back and forth between Cameron's earlier visits to India and self-contemplation. Reading this book was an absolute pleasure. I read this book like a snail just to enjoy the beautiful language. Almost poetic in some instances. The book makes fair and honest observations about India and its history. His thoughts and experiences provide a deep insight into the Indian psyche in 1970s. All in all a classic book full of rich language, witty and insightful reflections, it made me smile and reflect at each turn of the page.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-07-17 00:00:00 Jill Padilla Cameron writes: ‘Why do I come, I wonder; why am I here? For twenty-five years I have been asking, at this first fatigued moment in the steaming heat of the Indian dawn, this first encounter with the opaque evasive velvet official eyes – why must I return to this tormented, confused, corrupt, futile and exasperating place as though I loved it, as though I needed it, as though I had to be forever reminded of its hopelessness and the splendor of its sorrow? Yet if I ask this question, why then, when I am not there, do I miss it so? Each time I arrive my heart so quickly sinks, yet each time I leave India I know there I something of me I have left behind …… There is no sense to it….. I was briefly seized by the sudden unreasonable happiness that comes to me with the steamy touch of India in the early hours..’ This book was first published by MacMillan in 1974, three years after he set foot in India, seeking to pen his description of a country which had long held a fascination for him. By 1971 while he was travelling to the heart of India, he was blissfully married to his third wife, an Indian woman, Moni, to whom the book is dedicated. The book, which Cameron publicizes as the only one he wished to be remembered by, begins and ends with a ghastly car accident he had whilst being the passenger in a jeep. His getaway from death was almost out of this world. His resultant intermission of convalescence was extensive and intricate. Nevertheless, at the end of it, he produced this radiant description of India emerging from the 1960s in a decade of yet more uncertainty and cross border turbulence. India does, by definition, provide a rich and diverse set of opportunities for any writer to benefit from and write about. Cameron was fully aware of what lay in wait for him. But this book which captures so brilliantly the sights and smells of India focuses, like much of Cameron’s work, on the people and their diversity. When the British first came to India they really did not have any idea that they would stay so long; that their humble entrance into an exotic and distant subcontinent in search of merchandize would become a galloping invasion that would, over a period of some hundred years, convert India into an Empire, and crown Victoria an Empress. And then, after that, they would continue to rule for another three-quarters of a century before the great-grandson of that tubby 39-year-old Empress would be the chosen man to initiate a particularly vicious partition, The British ruled, rather made themselves responsible for the destiny of 300 million Indians, one-fifth of humanity, and they did it in a diverse variety of ways. They were in turn tyrants and dictators, benevolent masters, superiors, rulers, and some genuinely sympathetic and loyal friends. And when it became imminent, before the bubble burst, they connived to grant independence. But the fact, the sheer fact that so many, several generations of the English (2000 members of the ICS, 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army, 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian army) were at a time in control of a sub-continent growing more unsettled and unruly at each point, naturally calls for a special relationship between Indians and the British. It is that relationship Cameron writes about. "Half of me," says Cameron, "is in India still." His involvement with the movement for independence, its leaders and with subsequent events comes through powerfully. It was this peculiar involvement that made so many British liberals sympathize with Indian self-rule at a time when it was downright unfashionable, if not considered traitorous, to do so. With people like Alan Octavian Hume - the first President of the Indian National Congress - C.F. Andrews and Annie Besant choosing to favor Indian Independence, even the British establishment could not remain unsympathetic. Writing of India in the seventies and not touching on Communism would be unimaginable. Cameron follows suit. ‘As far as I know,’ writes Cameron, ‘there has never been any really Indian thinking on Communism.’ He is, by and large, right. Indian communists have mouthed what they have learnt from the Soviets and the Chinese, without bothering to find out whether these facts fit India. However, there was one Indian who tried to combine Marxist thought with Indian reality - M.N. Roy. Unfortunately, he was too far ahead of his time and expelled from the communist movement as a revisionist heretic. What is more, unlike Mao, circumstances did not favour him and he died vainly trying to start a movement - the "Radical Humanists" - which could incorporate the "humanity" he felt Marxism lacked and which the Indian context demanded. He; at least, had begun to understand Gandhi. "If I were a Chinese I would most certainly be a communist," writes Cameron,' "If I were a Czech I would certainly not be. And if I were an Indian?" Cameron is unable to answer his own question. In effect, what he is telling us is that in India political labels taken from the West are meaningless. Jargon like "Left," "Right," "progressive," "fascist" have no place in India and those who use these words don't really know their own country. Kolkatan’s of today might cringe and snip at the way he describes the city. He writes: ‘The urban awfulness of Calcutta has become a cliché of such dimensions that one flinches from even trying to say more about it, with such lasting and eloquent disgust has every aspect of this appalling place been described since Kipling called it ‘the city of dreadful night.’ And further: ‘The inhuman cruelty of Calcutta defiles the normal language of odium…. Its paradoxes are a platitude….. In Calcutta most people are debris, and only too clearly know that they will never be anything else. ….India is a country of beggars; nowhere but in Calcutta is there beggary of such a ubiquitous, various, ever-present and inescapable kind.’ This book displays that Cameron’s writing outdoes journalism. He has covered some of the significant occurrences of the last century and analyzed them. In the richness of time, episodes and scrutiny have been derivative. What have really counted are the people of this fabulous nation. It is an amazing account, bedecked with rushes of occurrences about the victuals, customs and topography of one of the world’s most fascinating countries.