If you gaze into the swimming pool of the Taj Holiday Village in northern Goa, you can see the future. It was there that a voice cried out: “Hey you, wanna play?” Who, me? “Yes, you. We’re a man short.”

A pod of students from Mumbai was playing water volleyball as the sun sank behind the palms into the Arabian sea. I swam over to meet the face of modern India: he was wearing Brad Pitt shades, a Colgate smile and an almost visible ring of confidence. Young, handsome and ready to own the century.

“That’s your position,” he ordered, as he biffed the ball in an arc towards the sun and let rip with the students’ catchphrase: “The war is on!” Colgate man and his rich, educated friends are the new India, the coming land. But there are also many millions who live in the Darkness, as the writer Aravind Adiga called the great swathes of India’s rural poverty in his award-winning novel The White Tiger. Much of the country still lives in the past, struggling to travel out of the Darkness and into the light fittings and advanced plumbing choices of economic progress. To understand that journey, take the train, in particular one such as the Golden Chariot.

Off the smart hotel track, India is a land full of life, much of it bacterial and injurious to western digestive systems. As for the roads, they could pothole you to death. The Golden Chariot, by contrast, is a new, luxurious train that will take you into the heart of the Darkness in the comfort of excellent cuisine and clean cotton sheets.

The journey begins in Bangalore, boom city of the southern state of Karnataka. At 8pm on a sultry night we arrived at the Yeshwantpur station to find an endless blue train with air conditioning (windows without glass), a separate compartment for disabled people (next to the one for luggage) and about 1,000 tattered travellers packed to the ceilings. That’s a traditional Indian train best left to backpackers and the brave. The Golden Chariot chugged into view soon after. Though it stretches to 18 carriages, it takes only 88 passengers, accommodated in twin-berth cabins, each with its own television, desk and compact shower and loo. It’s not the Orient-Express, but there’s a bar carriage and two dining cars where the chef conjures up superb Indian meals and slightly less convincing western fare in a kitchen a good deal smaller than Gordon Ramsay’s ego.

To linger over a cocktail or savour a four-course meal as a foreign landscape rolls by is redolent of the days when travel meant trunks with brass hasps and ladies with parasols. It has allure, a city of grand palaces and cool gardens.

The romance of train travel these days collides with sightseeing prescriptions and modern railway timetables. Occasionally it gets stuck. Having arrived in Mysore in the middle of the night, we breakfasted the next day to a panorama of the station platform and motionless freight wagons on the neighbouring track. There we were, with our white napkins and silver spoons, while outside the window an itinerant family cooked up breakfast on the ground. That’s India, land of contrasts.

In many ways this was to be the pattern of our days: moonlit journeys by train, exploration by day. From Mysore we drove two hours through landscape of bullock-tilled fields until we turned off and bumped along a track for an overnight stay at the Kabini game reserve. Tigers still roam here, and if you’re very lucky you may see one come down to the lake at dawn or dusk to drink. We saw elephants, gaurs (wild cattle), langurs (monkeys) and a Malabar giant squirrel.

The most endangered species we found was sitting on a verandah back at camp. Colonel (if he isn’t, he ought to be) John Wakefield is 93 and has spent most of his life in India. As we sat in the humid gloom, he dispensed tales of old tiger hunts, and gin and tonics so lethal they killed mosquitos at 50 paces.

Empires have risen and fallen here for 2,000 years or more. The indigenous people resisted the incursion of Islamic forces, and later the British, for longer than in the north and have left behind some stunning monuments.

Deep in the Darkness, at the town of Hassan, old men, gap-toothed and lost-limbed, begged by the road. Tiny women were weathered and worn by years of carrying home water in the baking sun.

Yet nearby is the monumental Jain temple of Shravanabelagola. Some Jains renounce worldly goods, eat only vegetables that grow above ground and go around unclothed. That these naked vegetarians constructed a megalithic temple atop a rock hill 700 steps high says a lot about the power of religion. So, too, do the incredible carvings of the temples at Belur and Halebid.

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