After the publication of his 1999 book Amriika, Toronto-based writer M.G. Vassanji was asked by his publisher what he intended to do next. He told her, “I am going home.” By “home” he meant Kenya, the country of his birth. The explanation he provided on his website, however, suggested a more complicated state of affairs. “Books set in Kenya,” he wrote, “especially those made into movies or TV serials for Masterpiece Theatre, glorifying the English aristocracy in Kenya, hardly mention the presence of Indians who played an important role in the growth of Nairobi, the building of the railway and the politics of the country.” In evoking the idea of one “home”, it seems Vassanji was in fact harking back to another, namely India.

Born in Kenya in 1950 and raised in Tanzania, Vassanji had never been to India, a land made familiar to him through his grandparents’ tales. Scholars such as Emmanuel S. Nelson, however, postulate that people of the Indian diaspora share a diasporic consciousness generated by a complex network of historical connections, spiritual affinities and unifying racial memories. This is perhaps why the Canadian author experienced an instant and inexplicable sense of “deep communion” on his very first India trip sometime in early 1993.

Out of this trip and the many that followed has emerged the novelist’s first book of non-fiction, A Place Within: Rediscovering India. Part journalism, part travelogue, part personal journey, the book traverses Delhi, Calcutta, Bhubaneswar, Shimla, Amritsar, Mumbai and parts of Gujarat and Kerala — in short, everywhere in the country that the writer travelled over the past 15 years. The idea of a writer trawling an ancient land has an eternal appeal, each bringing his own special quality to the enterprise —

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