Hindoo
Holiday : An Indian Journal (New York Review of Books
Classics)
by J.
R. Ackerley, Eliot Weinberger (Introduction)
In
the 1920s, the young J.R. Ackerley spent several months in India
as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian
principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's
fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the
odd shambling day-to-day life of his court. Hindoo Holiday is an
intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place,
and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel
literature.
"One of those books of rare occurrence which stands upon a
superior and totally distinct plane of artistic achievement...It
is a work of high literary skill and very delicate aesthetic
perception and it deals with characters and a milieu which are
novel and radiantly delightful. What more, in an imperfect world,
has one the right to expect?" -- Evelyn Waugh
"Hindoo Holiday sweeps the reader into a Firbankian world of
total absurdity, in which the wildest fantasies of superstition
and of sexual variety and experiment are the daily routines of the
palace." -- Stuart Hampshire
