Reviews and Essays

While relishing the solitude of a dingy Himalayan hovel and the effects of urine therapy during the mid-1990s, Manchan Magan received unexpected news from his hip older brother. A soonto-launch Irish television channel had commissioned the siblings to create a programme in Gaelic on the marvels of India. The needs of Magan's friend, Tara, a gay teenager recovering from leprosy, made it difficult for him to set off on his filmmaking journey--the adolescent, encouraged by Magan to come out of the closet, had been shunned by his family--but the author delivers him into the hands of a transgender hijra community in Delhi; and, as Tara reads Buffy the Vampire Slayer books and experiments with drugs, activism and prostitution, the brothers hunt for material in the tourist hotspots--Rajasthan, Delhi, Varanasi.

Choosing subjects for purely "sensationalist" reasons, as Magan acknowledges, might be problematic. But this does not prevent him from painting a hackneyed picture of India, one that is composed of maharajas, scorpions, leopards, immortal yogis and Muslims who hate Hinduism. Star Trek "should be required watching before setting foot in India", he quips. Magan has a keen eye for the hypocrisies of elite urban India and artfully evokes the "fevered serenity" of the Himalayas; but he spells the city of Bhopal without an "h" and tells us that a "lakh", an Indian numerical expression meaning 100,000, is equal to 10,000. These mistakes aren't surprising. Magan hasn't learnt conversational Hindi and relies on guides and drivers as translators; his subjects who don't speak English fluently seem cartoonish and say things like "next goodest". They are merely a launchpad for the writer's tiresome discussions on the irrevocable differences between India and Europe, Hinduism or Gandhi. Euro-American backpackers and hippies, on the other hand, are given more weight, presented not as insolent tokers but as Blakean pioneers who are like stitches "knitting the two hemispheres closer together".

Fortunately, Manchan's Travels concludes on a less naive note. Tara ends up a "freak show" at a conference on gender in Seattle and is steered towards a porn ring by an American academic. Mangan might not be able to reconcile the potential pitfalls of documentary representation and missionary work, but his readers are forced to.