Hindoo Holiday

By J.R. Ackerley
Introduction by Eliot Weinberger

In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of his court. Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

His humour is the humour of pity and love. He is an artist of the understanding.
— V. S. Pritchett

Hindoo Holiday sweeps the reader into a Firbankian world of total absurdity, in which the wildest fantasies of superstition and of sexual variety and experiment are the daily routines of the palace.
— Stuart Hampshire

One of those books of rare occurrence which stands upon a superior and totally distinct plane of artistic achievement . . . It is a work of high literary skill and very delicate aesthetic perception and it deals with a character and a milieu which are novel and radiantly delightful. What more, in an imperfect world, has one the right to expect?
— Evelyn Waugh

Also see:

My Father and Myself By J.R. Ackerley Introduction by W.H. Auden Ackerley's pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man.

My Dog Tulip By J.R. Ackerley Introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Ackerley has written a book that is a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness abiding at the heart of all relationships.

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