Why travel? Some of the writers here pause and reflect on this question and on what makes a real traveller. At the end of his odyssey across China and Tibet, Vikram Seth confesses he has not made the grade: My drive to arrive is too strong. At many points in this journey, impatience had displaced enjoyment. He might have been unburdening himself to Bill Aitken, perhaps in a disused steam engine going nowhere. In another extract, as Aitken waits for a bus stranded on a mud flat in a boat, he reflects, sitting on that sandy shore as the twilight deepened, a profound air of beatitude settled on both mind and body. At such moments, you know exactly what eternity feels like. Had I been in a less contented frame of mind and cursed the lateness of the connecting bus, the moment would have been lost.

From Heaven Lake is probably Vikram Seth's finest book, and I felt grateful to the editor of this anthology for ignoring his own rules and including a piece largely about Kathmandu in a volume devoted to Indian Journeys. Aitken is represented by a characteristically eccentric extract which for a few pages is a para-per-place saga of travel before it becomes a lovingly arcane paean to the lost world of steam engines.

Many of the pieces are linked by a sense of loss, nostalgia, and the fear of loss. Amit Chaudhuri returns to a Bombay he knew, a comic book idyll, and finds that the small orange flags on the slums are the markers of a foreign country he cannot recognise. Namita Gokhale, in a poignant piece, returns to her old house, Primrose in Nainital; it is now Prem Lodge, the flower beds are covered with concrete. The sweet little hill town she knew can only be recovered if the fog blots out the oily lake and piles of refuse. P. Sainath and Royina Grewal describe villages, waterfalls and forests in Orissa and along the Narmada that will soon become memories, or already have, imprisoned under sheets of water. Charlie Pye-Smith visits the Armenian graveyard in Calcutta: it is easier now to find Indian-Armenians inside graves rather than outside them. Dom Moraes and M. J. Akbar witness tribal worlds becoming a memory before their very eyes: The girls who had come off the mountains with hibiscus in their hair had replaced it with plastic flowers acquired from a stall.

This is a casually violent India too. A chilling list of missing Japanese tourists stares out from a hotel wall in Banaras. In Bihar, skulls are found in gunny bags in the railway station. In a bed of zinnias in Pantnagar university are the red smears of the brains of dead Purbia protestors, gunned down by the police. Phoolan Devi is repeatedly raped and kills in return. The overwhelming violence of the Sikh riots, the demolished Babri Masjid, and the Bangladesh war loom over the them all. The India in this book is scary, saddening, auto-combusting. Travelling through this country does not seem a picnic.

For Aitken, travel is a spiritual quest. To many of the other writers here, the quest is documentary. They do not pause to ask philosophical questions; they get on with the business of recording, then analysing: impressions, names, places. I imagine the prototypical author of this bookbulging-eyed, antenna-eared and hundred-headed as a traveller who, before setting out, bones up on the place and people, then plunges, whether into the world of the widows of Vrindavan or the adivasis of Chotanagpur. All day this traveller hungrily consumes whatever information, impressions, sensations the local community and place afford. Then finally in solitude, she takes out a big note book or perhaps a laptop and records it all.

This monster author is usually liberal, English-educated and anxious. The irascible incorrectness of Julia Maitland in the 19th Century, to whom Hindoo music is less tuneful than a chimney sweepers clatter on May-day is not for the modern Marco. The new observer of alien cultures is ever conscious of political correctness, careful not to ridicule, vigilant, compassionate. This can effectively rule out both offensiveness and originality. Several of the extracts in this book have a numbing uniformity of tone: I wake up. The market place is bubbling and seething outside my room. I step out to have a cup of hot sweet chai ... The tense is always the present, the chai is always sweet, the bazaar is always bustling with endearing innocents.

But memorable pieces dominate: Jan Morriss' exuberant essay on Darjeeling, Bruce Chatwin's ironic take on Mrs. Gandhi, and Sarayu Ahuja's delightful portrait of a Madras Mami mourning the loss of brahmincal privilege are among them. You can scarcely wait till the bookshop opens so you can read the rest of their books. Ultimately the writers who score are not just travellers but those who travel with the eyes of their imagination open, and write as novelists. These are the people who could also have written just sitting quietly in their rooms.

ANURADHA ROY

The Penguin Book of Indian

Journeys, Edited by Dom Moraes, Viking, p. 369, Rs. 395.