Jesting Pilate, a travelogue across six countries ought to have been a very dated book considering how much the world it describes has changed in the hundred years since it was first published, but I found many parts of it, especially about India to be surprisingly relevant for 2025.

Huxley's observations about India made me laugh, frown and shake my head at some of his broad and rather simplistic generalisations, but much of the time I found myself nodding in agreement for little seems to have changed. He wryly observes how Macaulay-educated Indians aspire to little more than safe clerical jobs, and empathises that while bulls and cows are protected from direct killing, they are often subject to neglect and animal cruelty. His observations on cleanliness and hygiene in India with philosophical asides to the views of Tolstoy and Voltaire on work and life, made me cringe with shame about the veracity of his statements which are sadly relevant to the country even today, despite all the development and overall prosperity and improved quality of living. Huxley is perhaps right to some extent when he declares that spirituality is the cause of India's problems, saying 'A little less spirituality, and the Indians would now be free— free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions'. One presumes that he is referring to the religious practices of the crowds thronging the temples and rivers and not about the Indian spiritual texts, considering how he would later go on to study Vedanta and give lectures on it. While ancient India was obviously part of a sophisticated civilisation as can be seen from the magnificent temples and the depth of knowledge in the Sanskrit texts of yore, it is painful to agree with the author who implied a hundred years ago that many Indians could do with a few lessons in the basics of civilised behaviour.

Huxley does not spare the Western world either, placidly noting how 'in modern America the Rome of Cato and the Rome of Heliogabalus co-exist and flourish with an unprecedented vitality'. He calls the Hollywood films of his time as depicting stories of a 'crude, immature, childish world' and 'a grotesquely garbled account of our civilisation' and suggests an interesting view that the West in his time was not 'materialistic enough' and such materialism that is 'a preoccupation with the actual world in which we live' is desirable, even admirable.

His concluding note has some of the most beautiful paragraphs that I ever read in a travel book:
"if travel brings a conviction of human diversity, it brings an equally strong conviction of human unity. It inculcates tolerance, but it also shows what are the limits of possible toleration. Religions and moral codes, forms of government and of society are almost endlessly varied, and each has a right to its separate existence. But a oneness underlies this diversity. All men, whatever their beliefs, their habits, their way of life, have a sense of values. And the values are everywhere and in all kinds of society broadly the same. Goodness, beauty, wisdom and knowledge, with the human possessors of these qualities, the human creators of things and thoughts endowed with them, have always and everywhere been honoured."

Despite a few colonial affectations (which sound more amusing than elitist considering the time period he belonged to), Huxley comes across as a witty, erudite and decent Englishman not unlike the novelist Wilkie Collins who envisioned Indians empowering themselves to reclaim their legacy in his fiction. Huxley describes the poet Sarojini Naidu as combining 'in the most remarkable way great intellectual power with charm, sweetness with courageous energy, a wide culture with originality, and earnestness with humour', a description that could be equally applied, most of the time, to his own tone of voice in this enjoyable and thought-provoking book.