Ask most travellers to name an Indian beach holiday, and you’ll probably get one answer: Goa. For overseas visitors, it has become shorthand for an Indian coastal escape, with its palm-fringed beaches, shacks serving fresh seafood, Portuguese-era churches and wild parties that carry on after dark. But I live in India, and I know that this familiar picture represents just a fraction of what the country’s coastline has to offer.
Stretching for nearly 7,000 miles along the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, it encompasses beaches and coastal landscapes that vary dramatically from one region to the next – and it’s about time some of them got a mention too.
