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An Indian Summer: a personal experience of India
James Cameron's personal experience of India.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
13 people are currently reading
173 people want to read
About the author
James Cameron
12 books9 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
James Cameron was born in London in 1911. After leaving school he worked as an office boy for the Weekly News. He worked for newspapers in Dundee and Glasgow before joining the Daily Express in 1940.
Cameron witnessed atom bomb tests in 1946. Shocked by what he saw he became a strong opponent of the possession of these weapons and later helped form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
In 1950 Tom Hopkinson sent Cameron and Bert Hardy to report on the Korean War for the Picture Post. While in Korea the two men produced three illustrated stories for Picture Post. This included the landing of General Douglas MacArthur and his troops at Inchon. Cameron also wrote a piece about the way that the South Koreans were treating their political prisoners. Edward G. Hulton, the owner of the magazine, considered the article to be "communist propaganda" and Hopkinson was forced to resign.
Cameron covered world events for the Daily Chronicle (1952-60). He also wrote several books including Men of Our Time (1963), Witness in Vietnam (1966) his autobiography, Point of Departure (1967) and Cameron Country (1984). James Cameron died in 1985.
James Cameron was born in London in 1911. After leaving school he worked as an office boy for the Weekly News. He worked for newspapers in Dundee and Glasgow before joining the Daily Express in 1940.
Cameron witnessed atom bomb tests in 1946. Shocked by what he saw he became a strong opponent of the possession of these weapons and later helped form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
In 1950 Tom Hopkinson sent Cameron and Bert Hardy to report on the Korean War for the Picture Post. While in Korea the two men produced three illustrated stories for Picture Post. This included the landing of General Douglas MacArthur and his troops at Inchon. Cameron also wrote a piece about the way that the South Koreans were treating their political prisoners. Edward G. Hulton, the owner of the magazine, considered the article to be "communist propaganda" and Hopkinson was forced to resign.
Cameron covered world events for the Daily Chronicle (1952-60). He also wrote several books including Men of Our Time (1963), Witness in Vietnam (1966) his autobiography, Point of Departure (1967) and Cameron Country (1984). James Cameron died in 1985.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 9, 2023
**3.6 stars**
I shall try to narrow down many complicated and contradictory thoughts on this one. The writing itself is splendid and in a (good) way will remind you of Shantaram if it was written by Ruskin Bond. But it is also tremendously disorganised; Cameron seems unsure of what he wanted this book to be: a travelogue, a memoir, documented incidents of Indian history or a sort of psychological evaluation. Amidst all this confusion, I understand now why this book never found a larger audience than it should have, despite its readability.
This book will, however, serve as an excellent introduction to post-independence India to a layman. And despite his fair share of tactless imposing, some of the things Cameron has shown here have a pretty unique point of perspective on them; he stays honest to himself and never mollifies or justifies anything he doesn't want to. Yet, simultaneously, his constant 'talk' about his love-hate relationship with India gets pretty tiresome after a while.
I may read again someday when I shall have ample time to spare to dive into the nostalgia of the 70s and around.
#1 of sxc-library-100-books-challenge
I shall try to narrow down many complicated and contradictory thoughts on this one. The writing itself is splendid and in a (good) way will remind you of Shantaram if it was written by Ruskin Bond. But it is also tremendously disorganised; Cameron seems unsure of what he wanted this book to be: a travelogue, a memoir, documented incidents of Indian history or a sort of psychological evaluation. Amidst all this confusion, I understand now why this book never found a larger audience than it should have, despite its readability.
This book will, however, serve as an excellent introduction to post-independence India to a layman. And despite his fair share of tactless imposing, some of the things Cameron has shown here have a pretty unique point of perspective on them; he stays honest to himself and never mollifies or justifies anything he doesn't want to. Yet, simultaneously, his constant 'talk' about his love-hate relationship with India gets pretty tiresome after a while.
I may read again someday when I shall have ample time to spare to dive into the nostalgia of the 70s and around.
#1 of sxc-library-100-books-challenge
July 5, 2016
This book is part-travelogue and part-memoir of a journalist, James Cameron, who is unrelated to the famous filmmaker. The book is set in 1970s' India. It moves forward in a slightly nonlinear fashion going back and forth between Cameron's earlier visits to India and self-contemplation.
Reading this book was an absolute pleasure. I read this book like a snail just to enjoy the beautiful language. Almost poetic in some instances. The book makes fair and honest observations about India and its history. His thoughts and experiences provide a deep insight into the Indian psyche in 1970s. All in all a classic book full of rich language, witty and insightful reflections, it made me smile and reflect at each turn of the page.
Reading this book was an absolute pleasure. I read this book like a snail just to enjoy the beautiful language. Almost poetic in some instances. The book makes fair and honest observations about India and its history. His thoughts and experiences provide a deep insight into the Indian psyche in 1970s. All in all a classic book full of rich language, witty and insightful reflections, it made me smile and reflect at each turn of the page.
March 15, 2015
Cameron, a journalist, returns to India after a lifetime as a foreign correspondent, now married to an Indian. He recalls his past there as well as India’s past and present, and along the way muses about life and death and everything else. Then he gets into a serious car collision and finds that he needs an artificial heart.
A rich book, filled with truly deep thoughts and stunningly honest self-assessments about fear and dying as well as the human condition: “I am not afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the night, and I am afraid of the night only because it does not complete the finished day but announces the new one, which would almost certainly be as inadequate as the one before.” He has some very perspicacious remarks about Indian politics and culture, and offers some reasonable explanations of why India works the way it does. As insightful as these comments are, they’re not the main point. It’s not so much a book about coming to an understanding of India but how it is possible to both love and hate that maddening country without fully understanding.
A rich book, filled with truly deep thoughts and stunningly honest self-assessments about fear and dying as well as the human condition: “I am not afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the night, and I am afraid of the night only because it does not complete the finished day but announces the new one, which would almost certainly be as inadequate as the one before.” He has some very perspicacious remarks about Indian politics and culture, and offers some reasonable explanations of why India works the way it does. As insightful as these comments are, they’re not the main point. It’s not so much a book about coming to an understanding of India but how it is possible to both love and hate that maddening country without fully understanding.
July 17, 2020
Cameron writes: ‘Why do I come, I wonder; why am I here? For twenty-five years I have been asking, at this first fatigued moment in the steaming heat of the Indian dawn, this first encounter with the opaque evasive velvet official eyes – why must I return to this tormented, confused, corrupt, futile and exasperating place as though I loved it, as though I needed it, as though I had to be forever reminded of its hopelessness and the splendor of its sorrow? Yet if I ask this question, why then, when I am not there, do I miss it so? Each time I arrive my heart so quickly sinks, yet each time I leave India I know there I something of me I have left behind …… There is no sense to it….. I was briefly seized by the sudden unreasonable happiness that comes to me with the steamy touch of India in the early hours..’
This book was first published by MacMillan in 1974, three years after he set foot in India, seeking to pen his description of a country which had long held a fascination for him. By 1971 while he was travelling to the heart of India, he was blissfully married to his third wife, an Indian woman, Moni, to whom the book is dedicated.
The book, which Cameron publicizes as the only one he wished to be remembered by, begins and ends with a ghastly car accident he had whilst being the passenger in a jeep. His getaway from death was almost out of this world. His resultant intermission of convalescence was extensive and intricate. Nevertheless, at the end of it, he produced this radiant description of India emerging from the 1960s in a decade of yet more uncertainty and cross border turbulence. India does, by definition, provide a rich and diverse set of opportunities for any writer to benefit from and write about. Cameron was fully aware of what lay in wait for him. But this book which captures so brilliantly the sights and smells of India focuses, like much of Cameron’s work, on the people and their diversity.
When the British first came to India they really did not have any idea that they would stay so long; that their humble entrance into an exotic and distant subcontinent in search of merchandize would become a galloping invasion that would, over a period of some hundred years, convert India into an Empire, and crown Victoria an Empress.
And then, after that, they would continue to rule for another three-quarters of a century before the great-grandson of that tubby 39-year-old Empress would be the chosen man to initiate a particularly vicious partition,
The British ruled, rather made themselves responsible for the destiny of 300 million Indians, one-fifth of humanity, and they did it in a diverse variety of ways. They were in turn tyrants and dictators, benevolent masters, superiors, rulers, and some genuinely sympathetic and loyal friends. And when it became imminent, before the bubble burst, they connived to grant independence.
But the fact, the sheer fact that so many, several generations of the English (2000 members of the ICS, 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army, 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian army) were at a time in control of a sub-continent growing more unsettled and unruly at each point, naturally calls for a special relationship between Indians and the British.
It is that relationship Cameron writes about. "Half of me," says Cameron, "is in India still." His involvement with the movement for independence, its leaders and with subsequent events comes through powerfully.
It was this peculiar involvement that made so many British liberals sympathize with Indian self-rule at a time when it was downright unfashionable, if not considered traitorous, to do so. With people like Alan Octavian Hume - the first President of the Indian National Congress - C.F. Andrews and Annie Besant choosing to favor Indian Independence, even the British establishment could not remain unsympathetic.
Writing of India in the seventies and not touching on Communism would be unimaginable. Cameron follows suit. ‘As far as I know,’ writes Cameron, ‘there has never been any really Indian thinking on Communism.’ He is, by and large, right. Indian communists have mouthed what they have learnt from the Soviets and the Chinese, without bothering to find out whether these facts fit India. However, there was one Indian who tried to combine Marxist thought with Indian reality - M.N. Roy. Unfortunately, he was too far ahead of his time and expelled from the communist movement as a revisionist heretic. What is more, unlike Mao, circumstances did not favour him and he died vainly trying to start a movement - the "Radical Humanists" - which could incorporate the "humanity" he felt Marxism lacked and which the Indian context demanded. He; at least, had begun to understand Gandhi. "If I were a Chinese I would most certainly be a communist," writes Cameron,' "If I were a Czech I would certainly not be. And if I were an Indian?" Cameron is unable to answer his own question. In effect, what he is telling us is that in India political labels taken from the West are meaningless. Jargon like "Left," "Right," "progressive," "fascist" have no place in India and those who use these words don't really know their own country.
Kolkatan’s of today might cringe and snip at the way he describes the city. He writes: ‘The urban awfulness of Calcutta has become a cliché of such dimensions that one flinches from even trying to say more about it, with such lasting and eloquent disgust has every aspect of this appalling place been described since Kipling called it ‘the city of dreadful night.’
And further: ‘The inhuman cruelty of Calcutta defiles the normal language of odium…. Its paradoxes are a platitude….. In Calcutta most people are debris, and only too clearly know that they will never be anything else. ….India is a country of beggars; nowhere but in Calcutta is there beggary of such a ubiquitous, various, ever-present and inescapable kind.’
This book displays that Cameron’s writing outdoes journalism. He has covered some of the significant occurrences of the last century and analyzed them. In the richness of time, episodes and scrutiny have been derivative. What have really counted are the people of this fabulous nation. It is an amazing account, bedecked with rushes of occurrences about the victuals, customs and topography of one of the world’s most fascinating countries.
This book was first published by MacMillan in 1974, three years after he set foot in India, seeking to pen his description of a country which had long held a fascination for him. By 1971 while he was travelling to the heart of India, he was blissfully married to his third wife, an Indian woman, Moni, to whom the book is dedicated.
The book, which Cameron publicizes as the only one he wished to be remembered by, begins and ends with a ghastly car accident he had whilst being the passenger in a jeep. His getaway from death was almost out of this world. His resultant intermission of convalescence was extensive and intricate. Nevertheless, at the end of it, he produced this radiant description of India emerging from the 1960s in a decade of yet more uncertainty and cross border turbulence. India does, by definition, provide a rich and diverse set of opportunities for any writer to benefit from and write about. Cameron was fully aware of what lay in wait for him. But this book which captures so brilliantly the sights and smells of India focuses, like much of Cameron’s work, on the people and their diversity.
When the British first came to India they really did not have any idea that they would stay so long; that their humble entrance into an exotic and distant subcontinent in search of merchandize would become a galloping invasion that would, over a period of some hundred years, convert India into an Empire, and crown Victoria an Empress.
And then, after that, they would continue to rule for another three-quarters of a century before the great-grandson of that tubby 39-year-old Empress would be the chosen man to initiate a particularly vicious partition,
The British ruled, rather made themselves responsible for the destiny of 300 million Indians, one-fifth of humanity, and they did it in a diverse variety of ways. They were in turn tyrants and dictators, benevolent masters, superiors, rulers, and some genuinely sympathetic and loyal friends. And when it became imminent, before the bubble burst, they connived to grant independence.
But the fact, the sheer fact that so many, several generations of the English (2000 members of the ICS, 10,000 British officers of the Indian Army, 60,000 British soldiers and 200,000 men of the Indian army) were at a time in control of a sub-continent growing more unsettled and unruly at each point, naturally calls for a special relationship between Indians and the British.
It is that relationship Cameron writes about. "Half of me," says Cameron, "is in India still." His involvement with the movement for independence, its leaders and with subsequent events comes through powerfully.
It was this peculiar involvement that made so many British liberals sympathize with Indian self-rule at a time when it was downright unfashionable, if not considered traitorous, to do so. With people like Alan Octavian Hume - the first President of the Indian National Congress - C.F. Andrews and Annie Besant choosing to favor Indian Independence, even the British establishment could not remain unsympathetic.
Writing of India in the seventies and not touching on Communism would be unimaginable. Cameron follows suit. ‘As far as I know,’ writes Cameron, ‘there has never been any really Indian thinking on Communism.’ He is, by and large, right. Indian communists have mouthed what they have learnt from the Soviets and the Chinese, without bothering to find out whether these facts fit India. However, there was one Indian who tried to combine Marxist thought with Indian reality - M.N. Roy. Unfortunately, he was too far ahead of his time and expelled from the communist movement as a revisionist heretic. What is more, unlike Mao, circumstances did not favour him and he died vainly trying to start a movement - the "Radical Humanists" - which could incorporate the "humanity" he felt Marxism lacked and which the Indian context demanded. He; at least, had begun to understand Gandhi. "If I were a Chinese I would most certainly be a communist," writes Cameron,' "If I were a Czech I would certainly not be. And if I were an Indian?" Cameron is unable to answer his own question. In effect, what he is telling us is that in India political labels taken from the West are meaningless. Jargon like "Left," "Right," "progressive," "fascist" have no place in India and those who use these words don't really know their own country.
Kolkatan’s of today might cringe and snip at the way he describes the city. He writes: ‘The urban awfulness of Calcutta has become a cliché of such dimensions that one flinches from even trying to say more about it, with such lasting and eloquent disgust has every aspect of this appalling place been described since Kipling called it ‘the city of dreadful night.’
And further: ‘The inhuman cruelty of Calcutta defiles the normal language of odium…. Its paradoxes are a platitude….. In Calcutta most people are debris, and only too clearly know that they will never be anything else. ….India is a country of beggars; nowhere but in Calcutta is there beggary of such a ubiquitous, various, ever-present and inescapable kind.’
This book displays that Cameron’s writing outdoes journalism. He has covered some of the significant occurrences of the last century and analyzed them. In the richness of time, episodes and scrutiny have been derivative. What have really counted are the people of this fabulous nation. It is an amazing account, bedecked with rushes of occurrences about the victuals, customs and topography of one of the world’s most fascinating countries.
February 9, 2015
Some interesting perceptions of India especially of Delhi and Shimla under the Raj as high-level political discussions on the country's fate were underway in the mid-1940s and some revealing but too short incisive portrayals of main players like Mr Nehru and Mr Jinnah, and of Maulana Azad, Wavell and Atlee too.... I wish he had given more focus here. Then fast forward to the country in the early 1970s and his nearly-fatal brush with the 1971 war. An interesting account no doubt but somewhat diverted....
April 13, 2019
This is a perfect snapshot in time. India is poised on the verge of several sweeping changes. Some of the stories in hindsight of course have evolved into directions the author might not have imagined. He can come across with a bit of a colonial hangover, but there is no doubt of the love and concern with which he views India and it comes through in every page of the book.
June 13, 2015
Reading 1
Possibly one of the most insightful memoir/travelogues ever written about India, James Cameron's book is a revelation. I'll have to read his other India book for some perspective before I return for a deeper read.
Possibly one of the most insightful memoir/travelogues ever written about India, James Cameron's book is a revelation. I'll have to read his other India book for some perspective before I return for a deeper read.
October 3, 2024
1972 reiste James Cameron gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Moni nach Indien. Seine Arbeit als Journalist hatte ihn schon oft in dieses Land geführt. Diesmal war es anders: die Reise war nicht nur eine berufliche und die Tatsache, dass Moni indische Wurzeln hatte, ließ in das Land aus einem anderen Blickwinkel sehen.
Es beginnt und endet mit einem schweren Unfall, der James Cameron mehrere Wochen ans Bett fesselt. Da bleibt viel Zeit zum Nachdenken. Unter anderem auch darüber, was er in und von Indien erwartet.
Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass er während seiner ersten Reisen nach Indien jünger war. Vielleicht auch daran, dass die Arbeit ihn so auf Trab gehalten hat, dass ihm vieles nicht aufgefallen ist oder vielleicht war James Cameron 1972 einfach gestresst. Was es auch war, sein Bericht hat auch mich den Eindruck gemacht, als ob er seine Zeit nicht genossen hat. Er hat gefühlt auf jeder Seite des Buchs etwas gefunden, über das er sich beklagen konnte. Manches konnte ich nachvollziehen, bei anderen Dingen ging es mir wie seiner Frau, die ihn immer wieder zur Geduld ermahnte. Fast hat er mir leid getan, da er seinen Aufenthalt so gar nicht zu genießen schien.
Das hat mir das Lesen schwer gemacht. Indien ist ein Land, zu dem ich gemischte Gefühle habe und wenn ich dann ein Buch von jemand lesen, der sich damit genauso schwertut wie ich, ist das Lesen eine eher zähe Angelegenheit.
Es beginnt und endet mit einem schweren Unfall, der James Cameron mehrere Wochen ans Bett fesselt. Da bleibt viel Zeit zum Nachdenken. Unter anderem auch darüber, was er in und von Indien erwartet.
Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass er während seiner ersten Reisen nach Indien jünger war. Vielleicht auch daran, dass die Arbeit ihn so auf Trab gehalten hat, dass ihm vieles nicht aufgefallen ist oder vielleicht war James Cameron 1972 einfach gestresst. Was es auch war, sein Bericht hat auch mich den Eindruck gemacht, als ob er seine Zeit nicht genossen hat. Er hat gefühlt auf jeder Seite des Buchs etwas gefunden, über das er sich beklagen konnte. Manches konnte ich nachvollziehen, bei anderen Dingen ging es mir wie seiner Frau, die ihn immer wieder zur Geduld ermahnte. Fast hat er mir leid getan, da er seinen Aufenthalt so gar nicht zu genießen schien.
Das hat mir das Lesen schwer gemacht. Indien ist ein Land, zu dem ich gemischte Gefühle habe und wenn ich dann ein Buch von jemand lesen, der sich damit genauso schwertut wie ich, ist das Lesen eine eher zähe Angelegenheit.
October 23, 2018
Cameron holds a mirror for people living in India to see themselves and reflect on their surroundings to which everyone becomes inured and gives a short shrift locally. As he states, "Indians ... picking their way through the muck with a skilfully intuitive indifference, since they do not see it .... by criticising the West they are justifying the East."
The author's tongue-in-cheek witticisms stand out simply because he observes and depicts traits that we tend to overlook, or treat as sacred cows. Cameron's observation on Arjuna's dialogue with Krishna warrants this explanation, "It is as though a Sandhurst battalion commander should have discovered that his jeep is being driven by St. Francis of Assisi"!
The last chapters deviated from the story of the subcontinent to the author's personal health issues and the reading became a bit tedious. Overall, Four Stars for sure!
The author's tongue-in-cheek witticisms stand out simply because he observes and depicts traits that we tend to overlook, or treat as sacred cows. Cameron's observation on Arjuna's dialogue with Krishna warrants this explanation, "It is as though a Sandhurst battalion commander should have discovered that his jeep is being driven by St. Francis of Assisi"!
The last chapters deviated from the story of the subcontinent to the author's personal health issues and the reading became a bit tedious. Overall, Four Stars for sure!
September 15, 2018
I had never read about India the way I did in this book. I had never heard of this book either. It's one of those books you can come across only in the travel section of a used bookstore.
Cameron writes about his multiple travels of India, mainly in the 70s and his first assignment to India before Indian independence. His deep understanding of the Indian character ('psyche' if you will) comes out in a mix of admiration, humour, sarcasm, self-deprecation and pure dry wit.
He occasionally goes into flashbacks of his assignments in the Korean war and his travels across the world, at one point contrasting the exactness of Japan's bullet trains with the casual attitude of Indian trains.
An easy read, for the not easily offended ones. Recommended read for all.
Cameron writes about his multiple travels of India, mainly in the 70s and his first assignment to India before Indian independence. His deep understanding of the Indian character ('psyche' if you will) comes out in a mix of admiration, humour, sarcasm, self-deprecation and pure dry wit.
He occasionally goes into flashbacks of his assignments in the Korean war and his travels across the world, at one point contrasting the exactness of Japan's bullet trains with the casual attitude of Indian trains.
An easy read, for the not easily offended ones. Recommended read for all.
November 2, 2024
A memoir by prominent British journalist James Cameron partly about a period he spent in India with his Indian wife in 1971, partly his recollections of previous experience in India and concluding with an account of his time back in hospital in England after a serious road accident at the border with East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh) on a visit to see the impact of the war, especially on fleeing refugees.
Apart from the latter section, there is no clear narrative and the book is a series of well-written but normally unrelated experiences, recollections and observations of India. Four stars is a little generous, I think.
Apart from the latter section, there is no clear narrative and the book is a series of well-written but normally unrelated experiences, recollections and observations of India. Four stars is a little generous, I think.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 4, 2019
The best compliment any reader can give a book is to say, "I wish it had been longer..." For me, the time period was so fascinating in India's history and yet the author, though having spent many years in India, does not tell us quite enough. What he DOES say is interesting and informative. Just, well, wish it had been longer
August 30, 2016
Cameron is a journalist who has spent most of his professional life reporting from India. He marries an Indian woman. The book records his reflections on the last summer he spends in India (and I believe also the first they are married?). At the end of this he goes to report on a civil war and is seriously injured in a road accident.
The book looks back partly nostalgically at how things were during the British Raj, but also shows signs of forward reflection about how the continent is flourishing (or merely changing) under its own rule.
It's an interesting book because of the way it manages to get inside the everyday Indian way of life. He will always be an outsider, but at the same time he has the insiders perspective as well.
Well written and very interesting.
The book looks back partly nostalgically at how things were during the British Raj, but also shows signs of forward reflection about how the continent is flourishing (or merely changing) under its own rule.
It's an interesting book because of the way it manages to get inside the everyday Indian way of life. He will always be an outsider, but at the same time he has the insiders perspective as well.
Well written and very interesting.
April 5, 2017
Very enjoyable account of the English writer, newly married to an Indian woman, moves to this land that he once knew well before. He sees how much it has changes.
July 18, 2016
beautifully written
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews