Book description
All the best armchair travellers are sceptics. Those of the fourteenth
century were no exception: for them, there were lies, damned lies, and
Ibn Battutah's India. Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier
as a young scholar of law; over the course of the thirty years that
followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco and China.
Here Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan's journey --
the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of his Indian career as a judge
and a hermit, courtier and prisoner, ambassador and castaway. From the
plains of Hindustan to the plateaux of the Deccan and the lost ports of
Malabar, the author reveals an India far off the beaten path of Taj and
Raj. Ibn Battutah left India on a snake, stripped to his underpants by
pirates; but he took away a treasure of tales as rich as any in the
history of travel. Back home they said the treasure was a fake.
Mackintosh-Smith proves the sceptics wrong. India is a jewel in the
turban of the Prince of Travellers. Here it is, glittering, grotesque
but genuine, a fitting ornament for his 700th birthday. Tim
Mackintosh-Smith's first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, won
the 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award and is now
regarded as a classic of Arabian description. His two books on Ibn
Battutah's adventures in the old Islamic world and in India, Travels
with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, were received to
huge critical acclaim. His journeys in search of Ibn Battutah have also
been turned into a major BBC television series that has fascinated
viewers round the globe. For the past twenty-five years his home has
been the Yemeni capital San'a, where he lives in a tower-house on top of
the ancient Sabaean city and next door to the modern donkey market.
