A Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes by Sam Miller

Author:Sam Miller [Miller, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351186212
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven: In which the Author discovers the true meaning of the acronym ‘BBC’, gets caught up in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, and reveals the Indian identity of Captain Nemo

ON THAT FIRST trip to India, more than a quarter of a century ago, my future mother-in-law drew up my travel itinerary. She sent me, tout seul, on a long, daytime train journey — where I was repeatedly asked by fellow passengers about my marital status and my income — to the city of Aurangabad and the nearby Ellora Caves. I did not, at the time, believe in guidebooks, and had a Romantic dream, as others had had before me, of experiencing India in an unmediated manner. And so, one chill morning in early 1988, soon after dawn, I wandered into the Kailash Temple at Ellora, quite unprepared for what I was about to see. It appeared to be a large stone temple built against the side of a hill, with a high outer wall, a courtyard around the temple, and, everywhere, rock-cut friezes with hundreds of carvings of writhing and flamboyant gods. And then I realised that I was seeing a mirage of sorts. The temple was not a building at all. It was what had been left behind by an excavation. Huge quantities of rock had been removed, but not a single bit of stone had been brought in. Each carving was a part of the same single enormous rock, as was each roof finial, each balustrade, even the stone bridge that linked the gateway to the main shrine. Just as Michelangelo had imagined his David in a block of marble, so the architects of Ellora had imagined a great temple in a rocky hillside. I struggled for words to describe something quite as discombobulating as the Kailash Temple. Twenty years on, I revisited Ellora to write, of all things, a guidebook; and managed to crush every hyperbolic cliché — stunning, unbelievable, extraordinary, remarkable — into a few sentences. Perhaps I should just have admitted that I was lost for words.

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