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Foot-Loose in India
Gordon Sinclair
*Foot-Loose in India* (1932) was the first book by Gordon Sinclair, the Toronto Star reporter who became one of Canada's most famous—and most theatrical—journalists. Sent on an Asian tour, he spent four months roaming India and turned the trip into a breezy, wisecracking travelogue of bazaars, holy men, snake charmers, and the Khyber frontier. It was a runaway best-seller at home: the first printing reportedly sold out on its release day. The book is pure interwar adventure journalism—vivid, self-dramatizing, and written to entertain rather than to inform with precision. Read today it doubles as a specimen of the era's breezy, sometimes condescending Western gaze on colonial India, best enjoyed with that context firmly in mind.
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The author
Gordon Sinclair (1900–1984) was a Toronto Star reporter turned radio and television personality, remembered in Canada for his blunt showman's persona and, decades later, for his 1973 broadcast editorial "The Americans." In the 1930s he built a national reputation on globe-trotting adventure reportage.
The book
His debut, Foot-Loose in India, distills a four-month 1932 tour into a fast, anecdotal travelogue aimed squarely at armchair adventurers. It sold spectacularly in Canada and launched a career of similar travel books.
How it has aged
Two cautions frame a modern reading. First, Sinclair's reporting was dogged by credibility questions throughout his career—colleagues and readers doubted he had witnessed everything he described, and the Star at one point assigned another reporter to check his frontier stories—so the book is best read as entertainment, not documentary. Second, like much interwar Western travel writing about colonial India, it carries the casual condescension of its moment. Its energy is genuine; its accuracy and attitudes are period-bound.
For more context
Compare with the more searching India writing of the era—E. M. Forster's A Passage to India—and read Sinclair's later travel books to see the formula repeat.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gordon Sinclair
- Year
- 1932
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Travel & Exploration
- Location
- Colorado
Places