pumpkinstrokemarrow

Somewhat humbled to find out what a big and interesting place India is, with lots going in the days when I thought I took an intelligent interest in politics - but to which I must have paid very little attention at all at the time. Only the vaguest awareness of most of what Guha writes about.

Book would have been improved by the addition of some more maps. Preferably with a decent sized fold out one at the back. The publishers went for photographs - mainly of heads of important people - but clearly decided that decent provision of maps was off. Which is OK for readers who know India but not so OK for those that don't. Started off the remedy by asking Google Earth about the Vale of Kashmir. Which it did OK, but which reminded me of how much more useful to the average punter a proper artist prepared map is than an aerial photograph. Then onto the Readers' Digest atlas which had the right sort of map of India, which turned out to be rather fitter for purpose than the more detailed offering in the Britannica atlas. But what I really need is an Indian atlas with historical angles. Maybe Stanfords can do the business. In the meantime, off to Waterstones where I get a perfectly serviceable map of India from Budapest; much better than the Readers' Digest offering. It will have to do for the moment.

Inter alia, it tells me that India own the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which might be thought to be more properly a part of Burma or Malaya. Presumably Indians pushed the indigenous out during the colonial era and hung on at independence.

The good news is that India is a democracy, more or less. Clocked up twenty rather noisy but pretty much OK general elections to the Pakistani two.

Despite the fact that lots of well informed people thought that the union would never last. That it would collapse, rather in the way that the similar but smaller Burma did. Similar in the sense that neither place had ever been a country before independence and that both places had a majority group with tendencies to lord it over the minority groups. No doubt students of these matters spend lots of time comparing and contrasting India with the EC, with the US, with the USSR and with China. Perhaps India really is showing us the way forward into the 21st century. A federation of parts which are content to be different.

Guha reports that one unifying force is the huge Hindi film industry - the products of which are loved across the south Asia basin and beyond. The Pakistanis might not be very keen on Indians but they gobble up their films right enough. A useful by-product at home is that it is facilitating the spread of Hindi across the non-Hindi speaking parts of India in a way that coercion did not. Hindi might end up as their lingua-franca yet.

And there has been progress towards western morals. In the olden days a film had to have one good lady star who embodied all the proper feminine virtues and one bad lady star who was sultry and who embodied all the improper feminine virtues. The two things had to be kept separate. Nowadays, it is OK to combine the whole lot in one star. More economical of course. While the Taliban just ban the whole lot. Proper kill-joys.

The bad news is that there are plenty of racists in India, particularly but by no means exclusively of the Hindu vs. Muslim variety. A lot more than we have and apt to be a lot more violent. Riot, rape and pillage. Fire and sword. Torture.

Part of which can be seen on the map. The Muslim invaders of old grabbed, and have held onto, a large chunk of the good land.

I wonder how much of this is caused by a shortage of girls? It seems that there are 5%-10% more boys than girls - which means that the boys are either sharing or going short. The media used to make much of a similar problem in China before their economy took off.

To close on a less serious note, I find that the important road in New Delhi called Kingsway - much more important than our Kingsway or even Queensway - has been decolonialised by renaming it Rajpath. This despite path being a very old English word. Perhaps there is an Aryan root in common.