An Indian Summer (A Personal Experience of India)

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About the Author

James Cameron started his lifelong career in journalism in Dundee in 1928. After leaving Scotland he travelled widely as a foreign correspondent in almost every part of the world. working for Picture Post and the ill-fated News Chronicle before becoming a freelance.

He won the Granada Journalist of the Year Award and Foreign Correspondent of the Decade Award for his journalism and he moved on to television journalism in the 1970s.

James Cameron, who wrote several other books including Point of Departure died in 1985. The Observer said of his work: 'There are very few journalists capable of the precise combination of topicality experience and controlled indignation which make up his best pieces.' The Times writing about An Indian Summer described it as 'The dairy of a year in the life of a sharp and sensitive man spent in various Indian settings ... Delightful pages that evoke everything of the odd pattern of human behaviour under the Indian sun'. The Times of India was equally complimentary: 'Few foreigners are so well qualified to write a book on India ... It is no exaggeration to say that he is in love with this vast complex confusing and often tormenting country.'

Foreword

This was originally conceived more than three years ago as a book about India which I have known and perversely loved for a long time. I had a feeling even then that there had been more than enough books about India.

By the time I began, however, I was married to an Indian; it produced a wholly new dimension to the job and dispelled my doubts. It is in the book that 'if I were to seek pride in India now it would in a tiny way be part of my pride; if there were to be disappointment and regret I must now share that regret, and in some oblique way accept its responsibility'.

In this book I have said things which may sound critical, wounding, even angry. In expiation I can say that I have been as bitter about many societies, including my own. I do not mean to be hurtful to a warm and generous people who have never been other than kind to me; wherein I have seen things cruel and hostile it is because they are cruel and hostile to India itself. Only now, after twenty- five years of knowing India, can I make the presumption of claiming a small share both in its rare joys and its frequent sorrows.

But of course that last Indian Summer was not allowed to be enough. The Bangladesh episode intervened, Foolishly, perhaps, I went up to pry; I was badly injured on the Border. I spent a long time in hospitals in London, where a pretty full and exacting life at last caught up with me and sent me into the strange realms of profound heart-surgery and the strangely changed world that follows it.

There are after all two meanings to An Indian Summer, and by and by for me they merged into one.

This is why I dedicate this book to an Indian.