"Moment by moment there is a smell, a colour, a sense which is India." So wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini in this book which is the diary of a visit to India with fellow-writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante in 1961. An incredibly compressed statement of the imagination, it describes Pasolini's restless inner voyage towards a civilization which he finds both repellent and fascinating. Pasolini's India is both tender and barbaric, magical and squalid, weighed down with traditions in decline, and yet vibrant with colour and life. It is the same vibrancy which he expressed in his films, novels, essays and poems. In this book he offers us a vision, not a documentary, of our world in the past and in the future, a vision permeated by a special, bitter-sweet scent—the scent of India.