The slogan of the Golden Chariot train tour is ‘many worlds, one voyage’, but ‘India for the nervous’ would be better. This locomotive, modelled on similar trains touring Rajasthan and the Deccan Peninsula, takes you on a hectic, intriguing but cosseted nine-day whistlestop tour of the neglected landscape and temples of the southern province of Karnataka, from Bangalore via Mysore into the mini state of Goa and back again. You witness the poverty, dirt and disease that coexist with the burgeoning economy and richly varied culture of the world’s largest democracy from the air-conditioned comfort of a train that has two dining cars, a spa and business centre, and individual cabins with en-suite bathrooms and flatscreen TVs.

There’s shepherd’s pie, gazpacho and pasta on the menu alongside vegetarian southern Indian specialities, Pink Panther films amid the Bollywood DVDs endlessly looping on the TV channels. Some might find the disparity jarring. Me? Having finally admitted to myself that I’m a tourist, not a traveller, it suited me fine. Besides, it’s impossible to insulate yourself totally against the jangling, heady reality of India. It forces its way in.

The experience begins on Monday after a comfortable night at the Leela Palace, Kempinski, with a bus journey – the first of many, as ancient Indian dynasties somehow failed to site their temples near railway stations (joke) – round Bangalore while the Golden Chariot discharges its last load of guests. For a first-timer, this city provides an ideal, accelerated introduction to the subcontinent. The hub of India’s IT industry is cluttered with clamour and people and the two-stroke roar of the ubiquitous motor rickshaws.

Turn your eyes from the ugly skyscrapers on the horizon, though, and you notice you are outside the magnificent wooden palace of the 18th-century Muslim king of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, scourge of the British. Nearby is a wedge of Bangalore’s original fortifications, a bus station with wheeled stalls piled high with fruit and aromatic street food, a cow nosing through garbage outside a computer showroom, and an open-air urinal. The sensory overload continues: the day is a blur. I remember a temple dedicated to Nandi, the bull ridden by Shiva; the Lalbagh botanical garden with a 3,000-million-year-old rock formation and a tree planted in 1962 by Queen Elizabeth: the bogglingly vast Krishna temple, and four identical, massive government buildings in the Soviet brutalist style.

Nothing will surprise me about India after this, I think. But then we arrive late in the evening at the purple-liveried train, which has its own dedicated platform, full of cameras and lights and musicians making an atonal racket. Smiling hostesses in saris drape garlands round our necks and uniformed attendants in turbans press cold drinks and damp towels into our hands. There are passengers from all over Europe, and also Indian couples and families from Delhi, Chicago and Epsom.

I’m shown to a carefully designed cabin with two beds and a fold-down bunk, by an attendant who will sleep outside in the corridor and who asks me what time he should wake me with a cup of tea. (A stab of post-colonial guilt prevents me ever availing myself of this offer.) In the restaurant car, waiters hover and dart like dragonflies: everyone is anxious that you should be happy, that you should be impressed with the Golden Chariot and with India in general. The train pulls out while I’m eating a vegetarian thali so fragrant and richly spiced it almost has me swearing off meat for good. Five hours later, I’m woken by a rattle of hangers in my wardrobe as we jolt to a halt in Mysore.