Ever since Herodotus reported that it was home to gold-digging ants, travelers have been intrigued by India in all its beguiling complexity. This superb anthology gives us some of the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that has been written about the world?s second most populous nation over the past two centuries.

From Mark Twain?s puzzled fascination with Indian castes and customs, to Allen Ginsberg?s awe at the country?s spiritual and natural splendors, or from J. R. Ackerley?s delightful recollections of his visits with an eccentric gay Maharajah, to Gore Vidal?s unforgettable scene in his novel Creation, in which his character finally meets the Buddha and is bewildered?all twenty-five selections in India in Mind reveal a place that evokes, in the traveler, reactions ranging from fear and perplexity to astonishment and wonder. Edited and with an introduction and chapter notes by the award-winning novelist Pankaj Mishra, India in Mind is a marvel of sympathy, sensitivity, and perception, not to mention outstanding writing.

"Superbly written, frank, and revealing both of themselves and of the bit of India they internalized..." booklist

Anyone who is enthralled by India — or who loves fine writing — will delight in this compendium of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by 25 of the country's most astute observers.

Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, which won the Los Angeles Times?s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement.

J. R. Ackerley, from Hindoo Holiday

Paul Bowles, “Notes Mailed at Nagercoil”

Bruce Chatwin, “Shamdev: The Wolf-Boy”

Robyn Davidson, from Desert Places

E. M. Forster, from Abinger Harvest

Allen Ginsberg, from Indian Journals

Hermann Hesse, from “Childhood of the Magician”

Pico Iyer, from Abandon

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Two More Under the Indian Sun”

Rudyard Kiplin, from Kim

Claude Lévi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques

André Malraux, from Anti-Memoirs

Peter Matthiessen, from The Snow Leopard

W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer’s Notebook

Ved Mehta, from Portrait of India

Jan Morris, “Mrs. Gupta Never Rang”

V. S. Naipaul, from An Area of Darkness

George Orwell, “Shootining an Elephant”

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from The Scent of India

Octavio Paz, from A Tale of Two Gardens

Alan Ross, from Blindfold Games

Paul Scott, from The Jewel in the Crown

Paul Theroux, from The Great Railway Bazaar

Mark Twain, from Following the Equator

Gore Vidal, from Creation