In the book The Long Strider in Jehangir’s Hindustan (Speaking Tiger), Sarayu Srivatsa recalls Dom Moraes’s words. “We have only five letters that [Thomas] Coryate wrote from India. Beyond this, we have to reconstruct from available facts, reinvent his life all the time… Seriously, Sarayu, we are going to have to imagine a lot.” Moraes was speaking about the 17th century traveller from Odcombe, England — “an eccentric man” — who would travel from Somerset to India by foot to write about places that were mysterious to the West. “Master Ben, it is to the Indies that I wish to go,” he would tell the British playwright and poet, Ben Jonson. Although his ambition was fulfilled, his hope of seeing an enchanting land was often ousted by its stark reality.

Crawford Market