India Exposed: The Subcontinent A?Z - Hardcover

Clive Limpkin is a photojournalist who spent thirty five years in Fleet Street as a staff photographer with the Daily Express, Sketch, The Sun and Daily Mail. In 1972, his book, The Battle of Bogside (Penguin), which pictures three years of fighting in Northern Ireland, won the Robert Capa Gold Medal from Life magazine for "superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad." He was also a feature writer before becoming Travel Editor at A La Carte magazine. Since leaving Fleet Street, he has concentrated on travel photography and writing.

Following a visit, retired photojournalist Limpkin was so taken with India that he spent three years "crisscrossing the subcontinent, seeing the best and enough of the worst." This is his roundup, a know-it-all's travelogue with bright, crisp photographs, conversational anecdotes, rich first-hand accounts, and guide-book style stats. Limpkin moves alphabetically through those things that left the greatest impression on him, providing idiosyncratic commentary, and is at his best when exposing the comic side of this complicated nation: his entry on "Overload," for example, beautifully and wryly captures the daily reality of mopeds stacked high with people and goods, workers loading sacks of goods on their shoulders and head, and overflowing trains snaking through the countryside. Less impressive are short-sighted entries on everything from British rule and independence (with no mention of Gandhi) to Hinduism (dismissing the way for life 800 million-plus adherents in two broad sentences) to marriages (focusing on the "repellent practice" of dowries) to some of India's most tragic and complex contemporary problems: underage labor, poverty, opposition of women, sustaining the holy city of Varansi. For all the volume's beauty and some genuinely enjoyable entries, readers are likely to find Limpkin's account far more subjective-and disagreeable-than its author seems to realize.
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