In an era when travel has become frictionless and travel writing has grown thin, three writers — Paul Theroux, Amitav Ghosh, and William Dalrymple — remind us that a journey is not a route but a form of inquiry. Each, in his own way, treated the ordinary world — a railway carriage, a village conversation, a crumbling tomb — as evidence of something larger: the social arrangements, historical currents, and human connections that give a place its meaning. Their methods, taken together, suggest that the distance between literature and anthropology is smaller than we imagine, and that the most imp