Hall of a Thousand Columns

Mackintosh-Smith at first seems to be rather less at ease with the chaos of India than with the more orderly Islamic world he describes in Travels with a Tangerine, but ultimately the interaction between his variety of islamophile Englishness and the Hobson-Jobsonness of postcolonial India is a very fertile one. This is very much the India of R.K. Narayan, rather than that of Salman Rushdie: we are shown small-scale stories and learn about the big issues as marginal notes to the local history that Mackintosh-Smith is really interested in. He doesn't conceal the death and destruction of past or present, but he tries to put it into the context of a country where people of different faiths have mostly managed quite successfully to live show more side-by-side and learn from each other.
What we don't get in this book is a great deal of Ibn Battutah: try as hard as he might, Mackintosh-Smith finds very few actual traces of the 14th century in modern India, and even fewer that he can link confidently to IB. He does come up with plausible solutions to a couple of minor mysteries along the way, but by and large either IB's descriptions of this part of his travels are too vague to go on, or there is simply nothing left. In Mangalore the coast has moved; elsewhere everything has been obscured by new building in the Mughal period and later. show less

Following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, the year was 1333 Battutah had now traveled to Delhi, India. Some 600+ years later and Tim Mackintosh-Smith is "hot" on his heels. Smith continues Hall of a Thousand Columns with the same wit and humor found in Travels with a Tangerine. For example here's a line that made me giggle, "For a ship supposed to be leaving on her maiden voyage, she was being annoyingly coy about her virginity" (p 17).
Mackintosh-Smith titled his continuation of Tangerine Hall of a Thousand Columns because he felt that when IB came face to face with the hall he also came face to face with his destiny (p 31). As much as I liked Tangerine is wasn't able to finish Hall.

Author certainly has a way with words - puns that might be come off as "over the top" from others work brilliantly here! Terrific overview of current, and historical India, but, I'd recommend reading Tangerine first (if possible) for context.