Book review: A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes, by Sam Miller

by Sam Miller
Penguin
4 stars
Victoria Burrows

The third book by journalist and writer Sam Miller is an impressively researched and thoroughly entertaining exploration of how India has been portrayed by foreigners through the millennia.

Accounts stretch back to 500BC when Scylax, a Greek seafarer, returned from a scouting trip down the Indus River with tales of the Enotikoitoi, or ear sleepers, whose ears were so big and pendulous they could curl them around their bodies as sleeping bags.

Some of today's depictions, while less fanciful, are equally questionable: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who said the seven months he spent in India in the 1970s had a big impact on his work, provided his biographer with the sweeping generalisation that Indian villagers had never learned to think rationally and that they "don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead".

Miller has a formidable knowledge of Indian history. In A Strange Kind of Paradise, he combines wide-ranging historical research with amusing personal anecdotes in 15 whimsically titled chapters, such as, "In which the Author hears of tales of 'Muslim devils', learns the Latin for 'sperm-swallowing eunuch', and reveals the sexual secrets of the good ladies of Kannauj".

Between chapters are "Intermissions" in which Miller reflects on his own relationship with India - married to a Parsi, he has lived in India for 20 years.