Chasing the Mountain of Light: Across India on the Trail of the Koh-I-Noor Diamond

Read this book in 2 days...beautifully written. Rushby keeps the reader engaged and provides the most intresting descriptions of places, sounds and smells as he journey's across India. Inspires you to follow the route! For those studing Duleep Singh or the Panjab, this a must have for your collection.

Rushby follows the legend(s) of the Koh-i-Noor diamond (the title's "Mountain of Light") as well as the history of Indian and Middle Eastern gem trading in this entertaining book. Like all good travel books, a unifying theme, once found, is seldom respected slavishly, so someone expecting a diligent history of the diamond itself and its travels would be better served by the Encyclopedia Brittanica. For others who wish to see an unusual side of the Indian subcontinent and its history, Rushby's an affable and able guide.

Simply, beautifully written, takes you THERE...I've been to India, many of those places he's written about, and he recreates them on the page like a stereographic synaesthetic pop-up from the page. Made me laugh really hard, too, unexpectedly. Full of sights, sounds, history-in-living color, intrigue and mystery. An ideal read for armchair backpackers and yogis, and for anyone without an armchair, for that matter.

This is not a book about diamonds. Instead it is the chronicle of a wonderful offbeat trip through India tracing the path that the Koh-i-noor diamond may have followed.The author is that rarest and most estimable kind of travel writer who acts as the reader's eyes and ears. When Rushby describes a scene you see it, hear it, smell it and feel it. When he describes a conversation he captures the person's speech patterns, their personal idiosyncrasies, and makes them come alive. Unlike many other current travel writers, Rushby does not waste your time with pages about himself and his personal problems or his reactions to the people and places he visits. Instead, he gives you enough data so that you can make up your own mind about the poeple and places he describes. And what fascinating places they are! Southern Indian haunts of small time diamond smugglers, the ruined palaces of Mughal emperors, the studies of eccentric professors, the shabby apartments of claiments to the wealth of deposed rajas. All these are there and more, as the author moves through a series of cheap hotels via questionable transport of the sort that the reader loves to hear about but is glad not to have to actually use.This book reminded me a lot of Eric Hansen's Motoring with Mohammed, another of my favorite travel books. It's a definite "must read" for any serious armchair traveller!

I bought this book to learn about more about the Koh-i-Noor and I found a much more interesting story in the despcriptions of India before partition and the gardens and architecture of the Mughals. At the start it's a bit on the 'ho hum, another traveling around India on the cheap' but once Rushby gets to Gujarat and beyond it's teriffic.