Go Gujarat!

I made a trip to India a couple of years ago to collect the material I needed to write about one of the burial precincts in Great Burial Places - the European cemeteries at Surat in Gujarat State. I then hired a car and driver and spent three weeks travelling around Gujarat, a part of India that tourists rarely visit. Of the 800+ princely states that I wrote about in A History of the Indian Princely States, now available as an e-book on this website, over 350 were located in Gujarat.

In most places I stayed in the palaces of the erstwhile maharajas, which are now boutique hotels. Gujarat is packed with history and fascinating places, the people are friendly (they don’t see many foreigners), the festivals are mind-blowing explosions of noise and colour, the food is great and everything is amazingly inexpensive. If you want a great travel experience off the beaten track and without fellow travellers, try Gujarat.

Another great burial precinct in Kolkata.

History buffs visiting Kolkata can find many historic graves outside the South Park Street Cemetery. The city’s original churches and their graveyards, notably St. John’s churchyard, are the last resting places of the city’s pioneers, including Job Charnock, who founded Calcutta in 1690.