India

The deadline for this review was 15 August, India’s Independence Day, freedom at midnight in 1947 for India and Pakistan (whose independence is celebrated on 14 August). The British euphemistically called it a ‘transfer of power’. The subsequent division was termed Partition, an anodyne definition of the act of severing ...

For a book that began as a tweet, Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India has had a remarkable journey, taking its best-selling author on a world tour, both to the centre of Empire in the United Kingdom, and its outpost in Australia. A career diplomat who retired as under-secretary general at the ...

There is currently a very appealing trend in publishing with books about cities written by creative writers: fiction writers, novelists, and essayists. In Australia we have had the Cities Series from NewSouth Publishing: personal, writerly books that capture the spirit of our capital cities (and Alice Springs) and take us along pathways, with the idiosyncratic accompaniment of a local who is also a writer.

In recent years there have also been books of this type on Indian cities, including Mumbai and Delhi. This fascinating genre can carry along with it many different aspects of mythmaking; of history; of the daily movements and habits of the author. They aren’t travel guides, more like reflections on quotidian matters. Most of them necessarily also spin around an idea of what home is.

Continuously inhabited since at least the sixth century, Delhi is fabled to be the city that was built seven times and razed to the ground seven times. Some believe the word Delhi comes from dehali or threshold, and the city is seen as the gateway to the Great Indian Gangetic plains. In 1912 the British moved their colonial seat of power from Calcutta to New Delhi, which also became the capital of independent India and celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year. It seems apt, then, in 2012, to read about the older Delhi that lies and lurks behind the shining veneer of India’s National Capital Territory, a Delhi that the rising Asian power seems eager to forget and obliterate.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the loosely related jihadi Islamist terrorist attacks that followed in a dozen countries, have left the world more afraid than ever of Islam. Modern terrorism is not the only factor. The West has long had a problem with Islam. This perception dates back a full millennium to a time when Europe was in its dark ages and Islamic civilisation was blossoming. From the beginning, Western anxiety about Islam has been based on almost total ignorance. Well before there was any substantial contact between Europeans and Muslims, Islam was an imagined ‘other’ automatically cast as the opposite of everything that the ‘Christian West’ claimed as its legacy.

Of Sadhus and Spinners: Australian Encounters with India has been assembled by several of the stalwarts of this particular cultural exchange, all based in Australian or Indian universities. Bruce Bennett and Santosh Sareen have played leading roles over the last two or three decades in establishing Australian Studies in India, most notably through the Indian Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Foreign travellers in India face four inevitable questions. ‘What is your good name?’ is usually followed in rapid succession by ‘Where are you coming from?’(meaning from which country), ‘Are you married?’ and, finally, ‘What is your religion?’. Backpacking through India twenty years ago, the first three questions presented few problems. My name was easy, Australia was recognised as a cricket-playing country, and I was young enough for my lack of a wife to be passed over as a matter of only mild embarrassment. The fourth question however, proved tricky. Usually, I gave the technically correct answer that I had been baptised into the Anglican Church – a reply that generally satisfied my interlocutors and not infrequently led into rambling, good-natured discussions about the similarities between the world’s great faiths. Once, I ventured a more honest response. ‘I am an atheist,’ I told a couple of friendly young Indian men on a long train journey. ‘I do not believe in any God.’ Their shock was palpable. It was not so much my spiritual deficit that appalled them as my arrogance. How could anyone have the audacity to declare that God did not exist? Our conversation never recovered. In response to all future interrogations, I retreated to my dissembling line about Christianity. The experience did not shake my disbelief, but it did serve to engender a greater respect for the question. Religion, I belatedly realised, is an important matter.

For the untutored Western reader this exuberant and clever novel about the histrionics of twentieth-century Indian politics invites comparison with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But this is a mistake. Tharoor covers similar territory to Rushdie, and gives voice to the same virulent distaste for the late Mrs Gandhi, but his book couldn’t be more different.

At a time when one is reading of Cabinet decisions to cut many of the remaining constitutional links with Britain (Premiers’ Conference, June), thus moving Australia closer to national sovereignty, it is timely to be reminded of events only just over the contemporary horizon which could be said to have matured this nation into quickening the pace towards that independence of British dominion – no matter how tenuous politically, yet still incipiently present in the Statute Books and by Privy Council.