Dated, dated. Beautifully written, but dated. India’s problems are a product of primordial, stagnant ‘Hinduism’, which accommodates a millennium of invaders with quietism, passivity, and religious resignation. ‘Hindu culture’ is held to be a thing, a step or two above the African night, but well short of Western can-doism, the flux of modernity, of civilization, that Europe defines. I’m reading this beside Said’s Orientalism: how far we have come in only 30 years, perhaps because of Said’s seminal essay? See how scholarship matters.
But I picked up some history along the margins: the Emergency, of course, and the India-Pakistan and India-China wars, too.
This country is weirder than I could have expected. Where else do people threaten to immolate themselves in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant being held in Bangalore?
