Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 13
 A failure of any empathy for someone similarly thwarted October 23, 2002
Stephen O. Murray (San Francisco, CA USA)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Mostly bereft of scenery or any notice of local lifeways, hardly a travel book at all, Hindoo Holiday strikes me as being a vicious portrait of his host and benefactor, a maharajah who, like Ackerley, was on the self-defeating quest for the devotion of an Ideal Friend, and, like Ackerley, looking in all the wrong places for love. Ackerley's book is condescending to Indians in the colonial British manner that was abhorrent to Foster both in his time in India and in his masterpiece A Passage to India, Hindoo Holiday is notable for a lack of empathy on Ackerley's part, but, then, in his entire oeuvre, it is only the irritations and heartbreaks of his surrogates that matter. Ackerley was far too solipsistic to be a novelist.
 An odd mix May 17, 2002
Jay Dickson (Portland, OR)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
E. M. Forster, whom Ackerley emulated in going to India in the 20s to work as private secretary for a maharajah, has a character in A PASSAGE TO INDIA named Miss Derek, who is private secretary to a rani and who "regarded the entire peninsula as if it were a comic opera." That basically describes the attitude Ackerley adopts in HINDOO HOLIDAY, which treats an indian princely styate as if it were wildly wacky. No doubt that might have been true to Ackerley when he visited in the 20s, but this book's humor has worn somewhat over the years and seems at times a bit condescending. What has remained interesting and vital are Ackerley's observations about Indian (particularly Hindu) customs and manners, and his deft sensitivity and understatement in his portrayal of the maharajah's (and his own) homoerotic desires: Ackerley's keen observational intelligence, fortunately, outweighs the dated cross-cultural comic aspects of the narrative. While this isn;t nearly at the level of one of his later works like MY FATHER AND MYSELF, it's an intriguing read for anyone interested in India during the raj or early 20th-century homosexuality.
Point, please January 29, 2002
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'm a great admirer of Ackerley's writing, and this book is beautifully written, but I failed to get the point. That could be my fault, but since in his other writing he made his points forcefully I suspect that maybe there isn't one to Hindoo Holiday.
 Fascinating holiday in one class-ridden society from another March 21, 2001
darragh o'donoghue (dublin, ireland)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Ackerley's (very artfully constructed) journal does many things. It offers an informative, basic guide to an Indian culture - its religious rites, observances, symbols etc; etiquette; social system - holding surprisingly strong under the Raj.It mixes tacit admiration for the expressive beauty of that culture with equally tacit horror for its repressive absurdities. It compares this society, favourably, with the sterile and racist Raj. It offers a sublimely funny comedy of social manners, full of characters from all castes and social positions, who are generally eccentric and/or sympathetic, all related in an elliptical comic style reminiscent of contemporaries Waugh and Powell, with the occasional unWaugh-like burst of rapture. For me, however, the book is most fascinating as a mystery story-cum-psychological study of the author himself - co-existing with the 'objective' observations is an exultant gay desire and lingering, mostly repressed trauma from the Great War that speak volumes about his motives for leaving decadent England for India, and explain the author's abiding interest in the country's taboos and restrictions.
Really About India January 18, 2001
Hemant Sareen (India)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
The first thing I should carp about (and that will be the last time I do about this book)is that it has never been recommended to me by friends or at the university by my teachers. The reason could be the the rather candid and matter-of-fact approach of Ackerly to homosexuality (belonged to the circle of friends including Forster and Auden):I should have guessed immediately because the locale is 'Chokrapur' whose American counterpart would be 'Ladsville'! One is left wondering if there was no persecution of people with different sexual orientation, after all, as its widely believed and is true, the British Victorian attitude were responsible(the British enforced out-lawing of homosexuality still persists in the Indian penal code) for casting a pall of repression over an otherwise liberated and taboo-proof(especially in matters relating to sex)Indian social order? Apparently not, for Ackerly carries on and there is nothing furtive about the advances:its all grown up and consent based.The other point that should be brought up and very few readings have thrown up, is that India's cliched image about being a land of diversity(thats true here, for the Indians Ackerly comes across are of all types), colour, and paegent is totally ignored.No monuments are praised here, nor is the culture sung about:For a change here is a book about the Indian people and the Indian attitudes and psyche. Ackerly seems totally unaware of the cultural difference.He just faithfully logs the absurdities of a group of people without any prejudice and judgement. If one has read 'A Passage To India'(EM Forster), which incidentally is as empathatic towards the Indian people, tends to cast the characters into an heroic mould and makes them very rounded in the attempt to compensate(rather over-) for the contemporary British view of their subject people, one would find it refreshing and indeed intriguing that some one could empathize so deeply with another people and be so impervious to notions of difference and all the baggage British took along as luggage when they visited their colonial cousins. Ackerly carries no 'White Man's Burden' thus giving the book such a contemporary feel to it. like his pen and ink drawings, his portraits are laconic but truly convey the character of their subjects. This is truly a book about real India, that is often missed out in glossy publications about the glorious monuments, or the patronising tomes about the Indian-way of life.This should be a must-read for anyone trying to understand India or pretends to be an Indophile.The patriots in India and the ultra-patriots in saffron policing the indian culture today should be ashamed for not having read the book and equally ashamed if they have, for then they have not understood much about their past.
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