A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in Eastern India: Bihar and Orissa

(Paperback)

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Description

Not for Norman Lewis the tourist sights of Delhi and Rajasthan. His travels in India begin in the impoverished, overpopulated and corrupt state of Bihar, scene of a brutal caste war between the untouchables and higher-caste gangsters. From these violent happenings, he heads down the west coast of Bengal and into the highlands of Orissa to testify to the life of the caste-free indigenous 'tribals', who have survived here in isolation. There is much to be learned from these threatened cultures and Lewis is the perfect guide.

'Norman Lewis's best travel book, beautifully written and containing information about areas and tribes of India that I have never read elsewhere.' - Nicholas Coleridge, Literary Review

Author Bio

Norman Lewis's early childhood, recalled in Jackdaw Cake, was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from photography to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen. It was from his service in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War that his masterpiece, Naples '44, emerged. Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of non-fiction, but he regarded his life's major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled 'Genocide in Brazil , published in the Sunday Times in 1968. This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International.