Imperial Way
In 82 attention-holding illustrations, McCurry shows people, stations and landscapes that he and Theroux saw while traveling in a succession of 11 trains from northwestern Pakistan, through northern India, to the southeastern corner of Bangladesh, with side trips to Simla and Darjeeling. A few of these photographs may become a permanent part of our visual heritage; others display aspects of the subcontinent that can be enjoyed less expensively and hazardously by armchair than by actual travel. The captions identify but tend to trivialize the images. Theroux's brief text is on a level with the prose one finds in National Geographic, where it originally appeared in 1984
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Paul Theroux has been here before and has described it memorably in The Great Railway Bazaar. On his revisit, he began in Peshawar, up near the Khyber Pass, full of Afghan refugees and guerrilla warriors; journeyed through Islamabad and Lahore to India and Simla, the Himalayan foothill town of Kipling's stories; through New Delhi and then Agra where the Taj Mahal stands; through the high-country tea plantations of Darjeeling; on to Calcutta; and finally into flooded Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal.
Theroux describes a present day India at once as lovely and forbidding as in The Jewel In The Crown and A Passage To India. The Imperial Way comes to life with Theroux's prose and Steve McCurry's superb, prize-winning photographs. |
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