Flashing with heat and drowned by monsoons, with intoxicating colours and smells, India, to the European mind, has long defined the exotic. “Characteristics grow more vivid beneath the Indian sky,” EM Forster wrote in A Passage to India, his taut novel set in India at the end of the Raj.
Of course, the Miss Questeds and Mrs Moores of the novel, who took their tea in the shade of neem trees and toddy palms, are long gone. This August, 60 years will have passed since Gandhi’s passive resistance movement achieved India’s independence from the crumbling British empire.
Yet the captivation with the Subcontinent has endured: from the hippies who flocked to Goa in the 1960s, to the package holidaymakers who followed in the mid-1980s, and the top-end tourists of the 2000s who indulge in ayurveda in Kerala or Mughlai cuisine in the opulent former palaces of Rajasthan, now “heritage hotels”.
In 2007, tourism is both India’s largest foreign-exchange earner and, importantly, a significant boost to coffers from domestic sources as the country’s expanding middle class are able to travel around their country more frequently – whether they are on pilgrimage, on business trips or visiting luxury hotels.
“In 2005,” says Arvind Sharma, of trendspotter Leo Burnett and Arc, “some 390 million Indians were on the move for business travel, visiting family and friends and pilgrimages. That’s a 13 per cent growth in the number of trips within the country within two years.”
Taj, a subsidiary of Indian superbrand Tata, is ahead of the curve in the hotel market. In the 1970s and 1980s the group pioneered the first of the palace hotels, buying them from royals in the Princely States of Rajasthan.
They also brought the first resort complexes to Goa. In the 1990s they brought business hotels to major Indian cities; and today, with their Ginger Hotels mid-range proposition, they have their eyes trained on the Indian middle-class pilgrimage market.
Pilgrimage is an essential practice in Hinduism, considered one of the chief methods of achieving self-realisation and bliss. The notion of sacred journeying within India is encapsulated in the expression “tirthayatra”, which translates as “journeying to a sacred place”.
The major Hindu sites alone would take a lifetime to explore, from the holy river Ganges in Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, the holy city of the god Shiva, to Kanniyakumari at the very southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula, where pilgrims gather on the rocks at the foot of the Kumari Amman virgin goddess temple. Spiritual tourism, of course, is also a huge draw for the non-domestic traveller. Tourists from across the globe come to India to seek meaning in their lives – whether that be by following in the footsteps of the Buddha in the foothills of the Himalayas or taking yogic and ayurvedic breaks in Goa and Kerala.
Temple tours are also a hit with visiting non-Indians. The holy cities of Bhubaneswar, Konark and Puri in central-eastern India are gaining in popularity, and latterly, Hampi in Karnataka, with its 14th-century temple ruins set in a rocky landscape, is mooted to become one of the hot travel destinations of the next five years.
Yet spirituality is just one draw card. You might choose an adventure tour in Himachal Pradesh, a city break in Delhi or a shopping session in Mumbai. Then there’s the enormous variety of wildlife tours and eco lodges in India’s 70 national parks and 400 wildlife sanctuaries. Luxury train trips attract ever more visitors, and the latest trend is medical tourism, with increasing numbers of Westerners choosing to pay for private medical services in India.
James Jayasundera of Ampersand Travel predicts that “rural tourism will be the next huge thing, especially where there is some kind of local character, such as handicrafts, heritage weaving or pottery. Villages within travelling distance of the bigger tourist destinations – Agra, Delhi, Rajasthan – in particular.”
“Development after independence was slow,” says Jaideep Bhatia, a hotel manager. “It was through Delhi to Agra for the Taj Mahal, or Goa for students. But now it’s almost impossible to define the Indian holiday, or holidaymaker. There are even tours for Indians running from Delhi that advertise hippy-spotting in Goa – almost full circle, isn’t it?”
