A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

by Norman Lewis

Book Overview

An account of the seminal British travel writer's journeys through India. Lewis avoids the easy pleasures of traveling through the hill-forts of Rajasthan, visiting palace hotels and the Taj Mahal.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805019596
• ISBN13: 9780805019599
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

city and the mountain

The population of India is approaching 1 billion. Of that enormous number over 50 million are tribal people. In the big cities modernity has made a considerable impact, the further you get away from the city though the less modern the world seems, and in the mountain regions the tribes live much the same way they have for thousands of years. Norman Lewis begins his journey in the city of Patna, which is in the Bihar region of central India. From there he begins to travel further and further away from the densely populated centers. In the rural lands of Bihar the age old caste system which keeps every person in their place selfishly allocating privilege and profit only to the upper castes has begun to meet with a significant challenge from the lower castes who have recently begun to violently assert themselves. Traditional government as well as the police force in this region and in many others is corrupt and people have taken the law into their own hands. Women , especially lower caste women, are especially vulnerable in these conditions and are treated like property or in some cases worse. In India a female child is less valued than a male child because female children must be married off in expensive wedding ceremonies and provided with dowries. Arranged marriage is still the rule in many places and atrocities committed against women, including infanticide, enslavement, and murder, are so often in the newspapers that they are treated like commonplace occurrences, the police rarely interefere or are simply bought off by the highest bidder. It is not surprising that given these dire realities Lewis heads for the hills and mountain regions of Orissa to search for the unspoilt tribes. Lewis takes Ranjan as a guide. Ranjan, a Brahmin, shares Lewis' interest in primitive peoples. Once in the mountains the modern world is only a bad memory, for there in the unspoilt forests are tribes living in harmony with nature and each other. Each tribe has distinct characteristics which enthuse both Lewis and Ranjan. One tribe permits promiscuity among teenagers who live together in dormitories, another forbids the wearing of clothes, but in virtually all of the tribes women are seen to be equals to the men. In fact in one tribe which traditionally marries off young men to older women it is the women who are in charge. Ranjan as Lewis has suspected all along is in love with a Sarjput girl that he met on a previous trip to the region. Their romance unfolds amid rituals and dances and celebrations. The joy and freedom of these tribal peoples is a sobering and sharp and welcome contrast to the violent strife ridden world left behind. Lewis (and Ranjan) are excellent guides and the friendship of these two like minded individuals gives the book its personal charm.

A God in the Stones

Norman Lewis, the doyen of travel writers, deliberately strays from the beaten path in modern India in order to discover what is left of the indigenous tribal communities - the ones overlooked by the same crass commercialism which is gathering up the rest of the undeveloped world into the same dustbin. His excursions into the backwoods of provincial India are part of an overriding quest, no less quixotic, for the remains of so-called primitive societies still clinging to their unique claims on a piece of land, a language, or a ritual tradition that has been theirs for as long as human memory can recall. His writing is scintillating, his tone elegiac. A Goddess in the Stones is yet another installment in Lewis's reclamation of the world from the heedless destruction of modernity.