A place within

rediscovering India

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Last edited by MARC Bot
November 29, 2023 | History

A place within

rediscovering India

  • 3.0 (1 rating) ·
  • 5 Want to read
  • 1 Have read

From inside front cover: Part travelogue and description, part history and meditation, and above all a quest for a lost homeland, A Place Within begins with diary entries from Vassanji's very first wide-eyed trip to India in 1993, then moves on to accounts from his subsequent and obsessive revisits. An intimate chronicle filled with fantastic stories and unforgettable characters, [it] is rich with images of bustling city streets and contrasting Indian landscapes, from the southern tip of India to the Himalayan foothills, from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. Here, too, are the amazing histories of Delhi, Shimla, Gujarat, and Kerala, and of Vassanji's own family, members of an ancient sect that draws on both Hunduism and Islam.

Publish Date
Publisher
Doubleday Canada
Language
English
Pages
455

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Place Within
Place Within: Rediscovering India
2009, Doubleday Canada
in English
Cover of: A place within
A place within: rediscovering India
November 4, 2008, Doubleday Canada
Hardcover in English

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Book Details


Table of Contents

Introduction. ix
The First Visit. 1
This is India. Where is it?. 3
Delhi: The Burden of History. 43
Enigmas to Uncover. 45
The Sultan and the Sufi. 65
They Walked with Loud Lamentations. 79
The City of the Poets: Old Delhi. 99
Punjabi Delhi. 129
Postscript: Night Thougts, Delhi. 147
Shimla: A Spell in the Mountains. 153
The Sahib’s Resort in the Hills. 155
Waning Days in the Hills: Recalling Love, Art, and Politics. 187
Excursion to the Plains: The Old House in Amritsar. 203
Bombay Getaway: The Distant Uncle and the Bohra Rebel. 215
Postscript: Shimla Revisited. 229
Gujarat: Down Ancestral Roads, Fearfully. 233
These Moon-Faced Ones. 235
In the City of Sandalwood. 251
The Road to Champaner. 273
One Holy Man … Three Contending Shrines. 293
Uneasy City: Ahmedabad. 307
Road to Road: The Places We Came From. 337
End of the Road. 363
More Road-to-Road: Gujarati Fragments. 381
Kerala: The Goddess’s Footprints. 387
The Malabar Coast. 389
To Finish: Back on the Himalayan Foothills. 421
Select Glossary. 425
Bibliography. 427
Sources and Credits. 435
Acknowledgements. 439

Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. 427-433).
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House Canada.

Published in
[Toronto, Canada]
Genre
Biography, Biographies
Copyright Date
2008

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
C813' .54
Library of Congress
G 155. I4 V37 2008, G155.I4 V37 2008, PR9199.3.V388 Z46 2008
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
PS 8593. A87 Z47 2008

Contributors

Book Designer
CS Richardson
Jacket Design
CS Richardson
Jacket Photo
Walter Crump
Jacket Photo
Panoramic Images
Map Design and Cartography
Adam Hilborn

The Physical Object

Format
Hardcover
Pagination
xvii, 440 p. : b&w photos, map
Number of pages
455
Dimensions
21.1 x 15 x 3.3 centimeters
Weight
640 grams

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL23181318M
Internet Archive
placewithinredis0000vass
ISBN 10
0385661789
ISBN 13
9780385661782
LCCN
2009286600
OCLC/WorldCat
243916536
Library Thing
7601418
Canadian National Library Archive
C2008-904864-4
Goodreads
2800172

Excerpts

I would be asked if I planned to visit my ancestral village; I would say no. I did not even know then what my ancestral village or villages were, though I did not tell them this; for me, India was the ancestral homeland, the village, if you will. If I needed more detail, then a visit to Gujarat would suffice, where they spoke my language. But India for now was one single continuous experience, twenty-eight days in duration, seven thousand miles long, travelled mostly on land, eyes wide open.
Page 3, added by Alex Voytek.

First paragraph

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON / OPDS | Wikipedia citation
November 29, 2023 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
December 26, 2022 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
November 15, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 23, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
May 14, 2009 Created by ImportBot Imported from Library of Congress MARC record