The Imperial Way

In 82 attention-holding illustrations, McCurry shows people, stations and landscapes that he and Theroux saw while traveling in a succession of 11 trains from northwestern Pakistan, through northern India, to the southeastern corner of Bangladesh, with side trips to Simla and Darjeeling. A few of these photographs may become a permanent part of our visual heritage; others display aspects of the subcontinent that can be enjoyed less expensively and hazardously by armchair than by actual travel. The captions identify but tend to trivialize the images. Theroux's brief text is on a level with the prose one finds in National Geographic, where it originally appeared in 1984. November 19