MegasthenesA 4th century BC ambassador from Greece

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

India has long been a fabled land from a Western standpoint. European chroniclers, for instance, left lavish accounts of the brutalities of the Mughal rulers and the wealth and splendour of Southern kingdoms. Marco Polo in his Travels tells of kings and great riches.

The line of Western travellers and writers in India is one that stretches back as far as the 4th century BC, when a Greek ambassador to the country, one Megasthenes, undertook a tour of the country and left a detailed account of his visit. The book that he wrote, the Indica, was the first authentic and connected description of India by a foreign traveller and was an important work, even if its narrative was clouded somewhat by the inclusion of many fabulous tales that the credulous Megasthenes mistook for fact. He wrote, for instance, of a cyclopean people, and of a race of men whose feet were so grotesquely huge that they could be used as shelter from the sun. Another of his reports concerned men who lived on odours instead of food and drink, a tale just as tall as the rest, yet which has a smack of credibility about it as you wander down crowded streets in bazaars such those of Paharganj in New Delhi, where the air is heavy with the odour of fruit and sweetmeats, spicy foodstuffs, parathas and samosas fizzing in vats of hot oil. The eyes feast on the mouth-watering variety of it all, the nostrils gorge themselves on fulsome promises of flavour. Had a man tapped me on the shoulder as I wandered through those narrow lanes and byways around my guesthouse and whispered to me of a "certain mouthless people, a gentle folk, who live round the source of the Ganges and sustain themselves by means of vapours from roasted meats and odours of fruit and flowers", I may well have been as credulous as Megasthenes had been.