
In 1895/6 the sixty-year-old Mark Twain set off on a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts from a publishing company bankruptcy, notes from which a year later became his final travel book Following the Equator. Two years later he wrote, ` How I did loathe that journey around the world! except the sea-part & India.` Although he was only in India for just over two of the twelve months, his exploits & observations there take up forty per cent of the book-and by common consent are by far the best & liveliest part of it. In The Indian Equator the Mark Twain travel trilogist Ian Strathcarron, his wife & photographer Gillian & his factota Sita follow in his mentor`s footsteps, train tracks & boat wakes tracing the route that Twain, his wife Livy, his daughter Clara, his manager Smythe & his bearer Satan took as they crisscrossed the sub-continent. Leaving from the Bombay that was & the Mumbai that is, both writers follow the lecture circuit of old India--including what is now Pakistan--across the plains & cities of the north up to the peaks of the Himalayas by way of Baroda, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Benares/ Varanasi, Calcutta/ Kolkata, Darjeeling, Lahore & Rawalpindi. Staying in the same Raj clubs, travelling down the same train lines, meeting the high & mighty & the downtrodden & destitute, Twain & Strathcarron are absorbed by an India that then was & now is `not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic`; a rapidly changing yet still deeply traditional society where `a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers & many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night`. Mark Twain loved the India of 1896; like his trilogist, he would love it still.