Open Wide – Before You Go
Learning about India and Pakistan
The best way that I feel I’ve prepared for my trip has been reading, hearing, listening to and about the Indian and Pakistani people and cultures. Following is a complete list in its utter incompleteness of starting places for information:
On Approaching Learning About and Travelling In India and Pakistan
Just to rethink the way you approach your travels.
Indian History and Culture
These are shamelessly taken from my HIS282 course at the University of Toronto:
A fairly good read, not at all particularly complex, good for a first go.
More detailed.
Loved the readings from this – good distribution of Hindu and Muslim thinkers – don’t know how Sikhs and others are represented as this was prepared in a course pack.
Music
This is by all means a strictly personal taste thing – the stuff I listen to and adore…
Fiction
Any good preparation involves reading fiction created by and about the inhabitants of the region you are visiting…
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The book that started it all for me. As I said in an essay, this is Novel as Nation. Read it and you read India and Pakistan. A better lesson in Indian history than any of the history books…
The rest of these books have been recommended for preparation…there are many more not listed. So far the only one I’ve read is A Passage to India, and it’s good if you have a fairly good grasp on some of the complexities of England’s rule in Britain and some of the interactions and identity changes it engendered. I wouldn’t recommend the movie as a good introduction – read Rushdie’s essay “Outside the Whale” from Imaginary Homelands for a good reason why.
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