OT Your last major trip
Ramachandra Guha In the spring I travelled through three states of the Northeast &mdash Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. The beauty of the countryside and the sufferings of the people both moved me greatly.
OT Did research for Savaging the Civilized, your biography of Verrier Elwin, lead you to interesting places
Ramachandra Guha Elwin travelled continuously for 30 years, so I could not possibly have been everywhere he had. But I did track down his first wife in the upper Narmada valley. Another place the Elwin trail led me to was a lovely hilltop monastery in Devon, where the monks had preserved many of his letters.
OT Does the Elwin connection make you partial to Bastar
Ramachandra Guha Elwin knew Bastar, in the 1940s, as an oasis of beauty and peace when I visited it six decades later, it was the centre of a civil war between Maoist revolutionaries and a vigilante group promoted by the state government. Travel is often a case of leisure and pleasure but here, an exposure to a new place instead brought me face to face with the tragedy of the Indian tribals, victimised and brutalised in their own land.
OT You grew up in Dehradun. What was Dehra like in those days
Ramachandra Guha And how do you find it now The Dehradun of my boyhood had rice fields, litchi orchards and sal forests the new capital of Uttarakhand now has government buildings, three-star hotels and car showrooms, rivalling one another for their ugliness.
OT Your most memorable holiday
Ramachandra Guha A week&rsquos drive, c. 1977, from Dehradun to Gangotri and back, with a friend called Sanjay (Junior) Chatterjee, whose father was a forest officer, courtesy whom we halted each night at a rest house with views, and with access to fresh fish from the Bhagirathi flowing beneath us. Without the father&rsquos knowledge, we also rubbed ourselves some grass from the cannabis growing along the riverbanks
OT The one thing (or several) you always travel with
Ramachandra Guha I travel with a machine for my sleep apnea several inhalers for my asthma a big box of pills for cholesterol, hypothyroid, etc and a mat for my back exercises. That I can still travel is a consequence of the fact that I do not (yet) suffer from AIDS or cancer.
OT Your favourite travel books
Ramachandra Guha I like my travel books to have some serious history and politics, as in Tim Mackintosh-Smith&rsquos Travels with a Tangerine, Amitav Ghosh&rsquos In an Antique Land, Patrick Symes&rsquos Chasing Ché and V.S. Naipaul&rsquos A Turn in the South.
OT Any meal which you had while travelling which was especially memorable
Ramachandra Guha A 42-item vegetarian meal in the Admaru Mutt, adjacent to the great old Krishna temple in Udupi.
OT Is there a travel book in you somewhere
Ramachandra Guha Perhaps, if I live long enough, I might write a memoir of my journeys through the states and union territories of the Republic of India.
(Ramachandra Guha is the author of India After Gandhi The History of the World&rsquos Largest Democracy.)