Joanna Lumley's India - 2of3 - FC torrent

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There are highs and lows for Joanna Lumley as she travels from the intensity of Mumbai to palace-strewn Rajasthan. She’s on an emotional high when she spots a photo of her uncle in the Times of India building (he was once editor), but she’s literally among the clouds when she’s taken 54 floors up what, when it’s finished, will be the highest residential building in the world. “It’ll be a big fat column of billionaires,” she says bluntly.

However, she’s brought down to earth by the plight of the Dalit caste – the untouchables. They are still considered the lowest of the low in India and the distressing story of a young Dalit man’s murder shocks her to the core.

Commendably, Lumley eschews the usual tourist trail and instead gets a taste for camel’s milk, marvels at Ellora – an extraordinary temple carved out of a rock face – and spends a rather fabulous night in a former maharajah’s palace that was transformed into an opulent Udaipur hotel after Rajasthan’s wealthy princes were stripped of their powers by Indira Gandhi.
SUMMARY

Joanna meets the Maharaja of Dungarpur who shows her around his lakeside palace, and a Dalit community in Gujarat, considered to be India's lowest caste. Braving the roads of Mumbai, Joanna takes a ride in the city's only all-female taxi company and visits the Times of India, where her uncle was editor of the paper in the 1930s and 40s. She then overcomes her fear of heights to explore the World One Tower, soon to be Mumbai's tallest luxury residential building.