In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India – Edward Luce
India is poised to become one of the world’s three largest economies in the next generation and to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2032. Well before then India’s incipient nuclear deterrent will have acquired intercontinental range and air, sea and land capabilities. India’s volatile relationship with its nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan, may prove to be the source of the world’s next major conflict. And if you call anyone- from your bank to rail enquiries- your query may well be dealt with by a graduate in Gujarat. Any way one looks at it, India’s fate matters. Edward Luce, one of the most incisive and talented journalists of his generation, assesses the forces that are forging the new nation. Cutting through the miasma that still clouds thinking about India, this extraordinarily accomplished book takes the measure of a society that is struggling to come to grips with modernity. Drawing on historical research, existing literature and his own unparalleled access as the New Delhi-based, South Asia correspondent of the FT, this is a book that will enthral as well as educate and will remain the definitive book on the country for many years.
Fanny Parkes, who lived in India between 1822 and 1846, was the ideal travel writer – courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her delightful journal traces her journey from prim memsahib, married to a minor civil servant of the Raj, to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture. Fanny is fascinated by everything, from the trial of the thugs and the efficacy of opium on headaches to the adorning of a Hindu bride. To read her is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India – the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the more eccentric White Mughals who fell in love with India and did their best, like Fanny, to build bridges across cultures.
Very little has gone right in Nithya’s young life. So, when a proposal from a young, handsome NRI comes along, her mother jumps at the opportunity and packs her daughter off to the US with her perfect groom.
His greatest passion is the M CC – the Malgudi Cricket Club – which he founds together with his friends: his greatest day is when the examinations are over and school breaks up – a time for revelry and cheerful riotousness. But the innocent and impulsive Swami lands in trouble when he is carried away by the more serious unrest of India in 1930. Somehow he gets himself expelled from two schools in succession, and when things have gone quite out of hand he is forced to run away from home …This is far more than a simple narrative of Swami’s adventures – charming and entertaining as they are. By the delicate sympathetically observed, the author establishes for us the child’s world as the child himself sees it: and beyond, the adult community he will one day belong to – in Swami’s case, the town of Malgudi, which provides the setting of almost all Narayan’s later novels.
Outwardly, Malini is a contented, sixty-something grandmother with a loving family and everything a person could wish for. But Malini has lived her entire life with a secret confined to the deepest recesses of her heart.
Memories and Such 