India Discovery Guide

India offers an unmatched density of history, faith and everyday life: Mughal monuments, Himalayan foothills, Kerala's backwaters and desert forts, each region distinct enough to read as a separate country, with festivals like Diwali and Holi transforming whole cities for days.

The main travel issue

Its scale makes any single itinerary a compromise, and the comfortable months are the crowded ones. November to February suits Delhi, Rajasthan and the Golden Triangle but is peak for both crowds and prices, while March to June brings intense heat across most of the country.

The solution

Commit to one region rather than assembling a national tour. Book the trains well ahead through the official IRCTC system, pay up a class for overnight legs, and use the increasingly cheap domestic carriers for distances rail would eat a day on. October and March sit either side of the peak with most of its weather. The British advisory covers all of Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar and Gulmarg included, with only air travel to Jammu city excepted, plus Manipur and a 10km strip along the Pakistan border.

• Delhi
• Goa
• Karnataka
• Maharashtra
• Uttar Pradesh
• Uttarakhand
• West Bengal

If you travel slowly: one region, and fewer places within it than you think. Distances are long, travel takes longer than the map suggests, and the reward is depth rather than coverage.

If you want the essentials: the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur triangle is the standard first trip and works, though it is the busiest and most hassled part of the country. Kerala is the gentler alternative for a first visit.

If you’re after local character: eat where the queue is, take a train rather than a flight for one long journey, and visit a market in the early morning. Indian trains are an experience in themselves and worth one overnight.

If you want to go past the obvious: the north-east, the Tamil temple towns, and the Himalayan states of Himachal and Uttarakhand see a fraction of the foreign visitors of the north-western circuit.

India is better understood as a set of regions with their own languages, cuisines and histories than as a single culture, and travelling within one is more rewarding than crossing several.

Language as regional identity

States were substantially redrawn on linguistic lines, and the language of a place is central to how people there identify. Script changes as you move, not only sound.

Religion practised in public

Temples, mosques, gurdwaras and churches are working places of daily observance. Festivals close cities, and the calendar differs by region and community.

Craft as employment

Handloom weaving, block printing, metalwork and pottery employ millions and are organised in regional clusters, each with its own techniques and protected designations.

Trains as national infrastructure

The railway moves tens of millions of people a day and is one of the few genuinely national institutions. The class system on board is elaborate and the experience differs completely between them.

India's most visited sites — the Taj Mahal, Jaipur's forts, Varanasi's ghats — see intense crowding, particularly during the cooler winter peak. The Taj alone takes more than five million visitors a year. Travellers wanting a quieter visit should go at opening time, in the shoulder season of October or March, or to a less-visited but equally rewarding city nearby.

Begging, particularly involving children, is a visible reality in many tourist areas. Donating to an established local charity is a more genuinely helpful response than giving money directly.

Dress modestly at religious sites of any faith — shoulders and knees covered, shoes removed where required. This is expected practice across temples, mosques and gurdwaras nationwide and most sites will refuse entry otherwise. Leather items are prohibited in some Hindu and Jain temples, which catches people out at the door with a belt or a bag.

Photography needs the same care. It is prohibited at military sites, in some border areas and inside many temple sanctums — and the advisory notes that photography, birdwatching and plane spotting can be misunderstood near military sites, government buildings, airports and railway stations.

India's enormous size means the right season depends heavily on region. Winter (November-February) is the most popular and comfortable time to visit most of the country, including Rajasthan, Delhi, and the Golden Triangle -- cooler, drier weather nationwide, though also the peak season for crowds and prices.

Summer (March-June) brings intense heat to most of the country, particularly the plains and Rajasthan's desert, where temperatures regularly exceed 40°C (104°F) -- this is instead the season to head to the Himalayan hill stations of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which stay pleasantly cool.

Monsoon season (June-September) brings heavy, often daily rain to most of the country -- generally the least practical time to visit the plains, though Kerala's backwaters and Goa's coast take on a lush, dramatically green character that has its own devoted following, at much lower prices than peak season.

Ladakh runs on a completely separate calendar -- accessible only from around May/June to September/October, when the high mountain passes are open; the rest of the year it's snowbound and largely cut off.

India is inexpensive by the standards of any Western country and the variation inside it is wide — the difference between a state in the east and Goa in season is several multiples, not a few per cent. The index below is relative to the Indian average rather than to anywhere else.

Relative cost index vs country average

Lowest — Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Haryana, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. Lower — Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab, Chandigarh. Average — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Puducherry. Higher — Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Sikkim. Highest — Goa, Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep.

Two costs that are not about prices

Medical care is the first. Facilities differ from those in Europe, specialised treatment may not be available outside major cities, and in the major cities the better option is the more expensive private care — which expects payment or insurance confirmation up front. Travel insurance covering local treatment and evacuation is not optional here.

The second is the cost of getting an itinerary wrong. India's distances are continental and its peak season is short: a trip that tries to combine the far north with the far south in a fortnight spends its budget on internal flights. Pick a region.