Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an India Village (Oxford India Paperbacks)

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This collection of memoirs recounts the author's childhood experiences in the quiet and supine India of villages. The Indian village in the first half of the last century was not a fairy tale world, as numerous accounts of human misery set against its backdrop have testified over the years, but it was still a world where a child could run across a green meadow studded with palm trees, dreaming of catching the end of a huge rainbow spanning the sky. Set in Sankhari, the author's village by the sea in Orissa, the reminiscences are imbued with a childlike sense of wonder: the dreaded butcher thus turns out to be messenger from a goddess, while a princely exterior hides a hapless vagrant. Chasing the Rainbow is a homage to a way of life that was until recently so real. This book will not only appeal to readers nostalgic for a bygone world, but will also serve as an invaluable record of village life in early twentieth-century India.