Run Into a Tangerine Lately?

Mackintosh Smith’s honest robust humour, dedicated detective work, above all, knowledge of Arabic and enthusiasm for Islam and the spiritual athletes of the time who “locked auras in combat”, in their spiritual jam sessions, rescues him from the painful Disneyworld-type awe of Western backpackers. The language of the book is seductive. There are puns — the Delhi Press Club becomes the Hall of a Thousand Columnists — and there is profundity — “the Cavemen’s cave is part of a system that runs deep under the Islamic world and far beyond the borders of travel”. There is also the occasional declaration of manifesto where the essential and true majesty of the descendant of the Zamorin ruler of Calicut is contrasted with plastic reign of Bush and Blair.

The author’s English-ness is refreshingly down to earth. Trying to lure his traveling companion and illustrator Martin Yeoman away from the beauty of Safdarjung’s Tomb to far less glorious Sultanate debris, he says, “oh that’s only real Brighton Pavilion stuff.”

Yet tracking IB in India becomes a story of disappointments. The Thousand Column Hall where Battutah met the Sultan, in his time a fountainhead of empire, is now a cassocky stone-strewn public lavatory. The mystic al-Ghari, Battutah’s spiritual guide, who IB encountered near Nizamuddin’s shrine lived in a “cave”, but the author finds only a knotty tangle of alleys. He had thought Aligarh would be full of stern, bearded scholars poring over Islamic texts, instead he finds Irfan Habib’s bookshelves presided over by a picture of the “slit-eyed” Lenin. And this is a nuisance because the author has no time for modern India. He dismisses the Delhi “twitterati”, makes throwaway statements about the Hindu right and caricatures clueless autoricksaw drivers and farting tour guides with little curiosity about modern region or character.

The richness of this book lies in Mackintosh Smith’s upto-the-eyebrows immersion in Battutah, the expert weaving in and out between text and reality and an impressive perseverance in locating IB’s places and people. Thankfully, he never does find the levitating yogi. As a result the travelogue emerges as much as an exploration of extraordinary mind as of “magical” place.