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Tim Mackintosh-Smith's Travels with a Tangerine introduced the modern world to Ibn Battutah, 'Prince of Travellers'. Now they take to the road together once more for the next leg of Ibn Battutah's travels -- the great subcontinent of India. Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law. He returned nearly thirty years later having visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. To many contemporaries his tales were received as Munchausian fantasies -- and it was India that stretched his readers' credulity beyond the limit. Tim Mackintosh-Smith traces in situ the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of Ibn Battutah's Indian career -- as judge and hermit, courtier and prisoner, ambassador and castaway. Over the course of his journey he also finds a dead Muslim posing as a Hindu deity, Jesus popping up in the pulpit of a mosque, and the rotten tooth of a mad sultan being revered as a saint. Ibn Battutah left India stripped to his underpants by pirates; but he took away a treasure of tales as rich as any in the history of travel. Back home they said the treasure was a fake. What Mackintosh-Smith returns with proves the sceptics wrong: India is the jewel in the Prince of Travellers' turban.… (more)
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What we don't get in this book is a great deal of Ibn Battutah: try as hard as he might, Mackintosh-Smith finds very few actual traces of the 14th century in modern India, and even fewer that he can link confidently to IB. He does come up with plausible solutions to a couple of minor mysteries along the way, but by and large either IB's descriptions of this part of his travels are too vague to go on, or there is simply nothing left. In Mangalore the coast has moved; elsewhere everything has been obscured by new building in the Mughal period and later.
Mackintosh-Smith titled his continuation of Tangerine Hall of a Thousand Columns because he felt that when IB came face to face with the hall he also came face to face with his destiny (p 31). As much as I liked Tangerine is wasn't able to finish Hall.