Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah (The Hungry Student) - Hardcover

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

3.81

182 ratings by Goodreads

9780719562259: Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah (The Hungry Student)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719562252 ISBN 13: 9780719562259

Publisher: John Murray, 2005

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Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Travels with a Tangerine introduced the modern world to Ibn Battutah, 'Prince of Travellers'. Now they take to the road together once more for the next leg of Ibn Battutah's travels -- the great subcontinent of India.

Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law. He returned nearly thirty years later having visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. To many contemporaries his tales were received as Munchausian fantasies -- and it was India that stretched his readers' credulity beyond the limit.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith traces in situ the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of Ibn Battutah's Indian career -- as judge and hermit, courtier and prisoner, ambassador and castaway. Over the course of his journey he also finds a dead Muslim posing as a Hindu deity, Jesus popping up in the pulpit of a mosque, and the rotten tooth of a mad sultan being revered as a saint.

Ibn Battutah left India 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. What Mackintosh-Smith returns with proves the sceptics wrong: India is the jewel in the Prince of Travellers' turban.

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Review:

This is his first venture into India but he comes upon the scene like a breath of fresh air. (Charles Allen)

Were he to jump on a camel for his second volume in the great traveller's footsteps ... he would surely be the Burton of his day (Praise for previous works The Spectator)

Mackintosh-Smith has all the assets a travel writer needs: erudition without pretension; rather subversive good humour without relentless jokiness; and a descriptive eye capable of sketching complex detail in a few telling lines of ink (Praise for previous work, The Daily Telegraph)

A deft use of language, anecdote, scholarship and a daunting appreciation for all that is wonderful and absurd in the world. Esoteric, raunchy, hilarious, erudite and transporting, The Hall of a Thousand Columns is a marvellous traveller's tale like no other. I sense that Ibn Battutah has finally met his match. (Eric Hansen)

Tim Mackintosh-Smith has recreated, with enviable intimacy and elegance, the extraordinary life and times of the greatest traveller of pre-modern times. (Pankaj Mishra, author of The Romantics and)

As a writer and traveller Tim Mackintosh-Smith has two great gifts: he slips effortlessly between the past and the present, and he takes us with him. This is his first venture into India but he comes upon the scene like a breath of fresh air. (Charles Allen)

Part travel book, part biography, part detective story, this is a gripping read and a fitting testament to the Prince of Travellers. (Wanderlust)

'A rich texture of multiple perception . . . Beneath this funny, cultured, humane and highly idiosyncratic travelogue there is a darkly tragic theme. For interwoven with the real-time journey of Mackintosh-Smith through India is an enquiry into the nature of Islam in India' (Barnaby Rogerson, Literary Review)

Tim's aim is to sift tangible history from magical reality . . . Mackintosh-Smith proves the sceptics wrong: India is the Jewel in the Prince of Travellers' turban (The Nehru Centre)

A first-rate travel book, enlivened by the author's erudition, subtle humour, and sheer enthusiasm for his subject (Traveller)

Book Description:

Brilliant travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith returns to the footsteps of Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah to reveal the rich tales of an India far off the beaten track of Taj and Raj

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