num_pages: 430
description: A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India's past and present from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks the Romans the Chinese Arabs Africans Europeans and Americans - everyone really except for Indians themselves - came to imagine India. His account of the engagement between foreigners and India spans the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire. It features among many others Thomas the Apostle the Chinese monk Xuanzang Marco Polo Ibn Battuta Vasco da Gama Babur Clive of India several Victorian pornographers Mark Twain EM Forster Allen Ginsberg the Beatles and Steve Jobs. Interspersed between these tales is the story of Sam Miller's own 25-year-long love affair with India. The result is a spellbinding 2500-year-long journey through Indian history culture and society in the company of an author who informs educates and entertains in equal measure as he travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers exposes some of their fabulous fantasies and overturns longheld stereotypes about race identity and migration. A tour de force that is at once scholarly and thought-provoking delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.
language: English
title: A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes
publisher: Penguin India