Preface
I first visited India in 1982 with my then new wife, who had been born and brought up in Calcutta. She lived there for the first 14 years of her life, until her parents came ‘home’ in about 1970. I fell in love with the country immediately and totally. By the time the trip which this piece describes took place, on the very verge of the pandemic, I had spent a total of nine months there, on a series of profoundly immersive three-week visits several of which in due course included our children, who all came to share the same enthusiasm.
As I knew it would be, our 2020 trip was our last together, and I have not felt the inclination to return since Tessa’s death in early 2022. Although on that visit we spent most of our time in Gujarat, we had beforehand converged with various old friends on the Nagaur Sufi music festival in Rajasthan, an experience for which I had prepared by reading a little into this deeply sympathetic and syncretic branch of the great and often misunderstood religion of Islam. The tolerant and inclusive nature of Sufism makes a nonsense, as so much else does too, of Narendra Modi’s divisive and discriminatory Hindu nationalist politics. Maybe we India-lovers will soon be like those beached prep school masters who were unable to visit Greece when it was ruled by the Colonels in the 1970s. In India as elsewhere, there is limited cause for optimism.