“The influences we have exercised”: Menon to Nehru, Aug. 22, 1954.
“far from being a help”: Menon to Nehru, May 13, 1955.
“Although I have explained it to you”: Menon to Nehru, Oct. 3, 1961.
“However irritating to Cold War America”: Henry Kissinger, World Order (London, 2014), p. 203.
45. Subbulakshmi: Opening Rosebuds
“bright copper colour”: Cited in Joep Bor, “Mamia, Ammani and other Bayadères: Europe’s Portrayal of India’s Temple Dancers,” in Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, eds., Music and Orientalism in the British Empire: 1780s–1940s (Aldershot, 2007), p. 58.
“Their dances,” the Journal des débats wrote: Clayton and Zon, eds., Music and Orientalism in the British Empire: 1780s–1940s, p. 58.
“I am Madurai Subbulakshmi”: Cited in T.J.S. George, MS: A Life in Music (New Delhi, 2004), p. 69.
“The language of her eyes”: Ibid., p. 31.
“provokingly small”: Keshav Desiraju, “MS Subbulakshmi,” unpublished manuscript (2009), p. 8.
“If you ask a rosebud”: Cited in George, MS: A Life in Music, p. 244.
“not a fragile child”: Ibid., p. 73.
“When I was small”: Ibid.
“the appellation of the devadasi”: Cited in Avanthi Meduri, “Bharatha Natyam: What Are You?,” in Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, eds., Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Middletown, CT, 2001), p. 105.
“contributed to this happy circumstance”: Cited in J. Devika, Engendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam (Hyderabad, 2007), p. 109.
“Henceforth even for a moment”: Cited in George, MS: A Life in Music, p. 281.
“an all-out putsch”: Ibid., p. 171.
“the queen of music”: Ibid., p. 101.
“She is a simple woman, and naive”: Ibid., p. 14.
“The story of Mira”: Ibid., p. 176.
“At a time when so much is said”: M. Subbulakshmi, “Foreword,” In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera, trans. with intro. by Shama Futehally (San Francisco, CA, 1994).
“I have never gone out alone”: Cited in George, MS: A Life in Music, p. 244.
46. Indira Gandhi: The Center of Everything
chhokari: Morarji Desai, in D. P. Mishra, The Post-Nehru Era: Political Memoirs (New Delhi, 1993), p. 80.
gungi gudiya: Ram Manohar Lohia, in Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London, 2007), p. 445.
“I was so sure I had nothing in me”: In Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: A Biography (London, 1997), p. 479.
“the smashing, the pulverizing”: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London, 1981), p. 412.
“Politics is the center of everything”: In Anthony J. Lukas, “She Stands Remarkably Alone,” New York Times, March 17, 1966; cited in Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 183.
“aiming at killing her”: I. K. Gujral, Matters of Discretion: An Autobiography (New Delhi, 2011), p. 85.
“refreshingly pragmatic”: J.R.D. Tata, in R. M. Lala, Beyond the Last Blue Mountain: A Life of J.R.D. Tata (New Delhi 1993), p. 277; cited in Patrick Clibbens, “The Indian Emergency: 1975–1977,” unpublished, University of Cambridge PhD thesis (2014), p. 82.
“As a child I wanted to be like Joan of Arc”: Indira Gandhi to P. N. Haksar, c. late Feb. 1966; cited in Srinath Raghavan, “Indira Gandhi: India and the World in Transition,” in Ramachandra Guha, ed., Makers of Modern Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. 223.
47. Satyajit Ray: India Without Elephants
“There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard”: In Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (London, 1989), p. 91.
“Not to have seen the cinema of Ray”: Ibid., p. 95.
“the line between poetry”: Martin Scorsese, speech at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Feb. 27, 2002; cited in Chris Inqui, “Martin Scorsese Hits DC, Hangs with the Hachet,” The GW Hatchet, March 4, 2002; available at www.gwhatchet.com/2002/03/04/martin-scorsese-hits-dc-hangs-with-the-hachet/.
“I don’t want to see a movie of peasants”: In Geoff Andrew, “Charulata: The Pinnacle of Satyajit Ray’s Art,” Aug. 20, 2014, BFI.org; available at www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/charulata-pinnacle-satyajit-ray-art.
“What is wrong with Indian films?”: Satyajit Ray, “What Is Wrong with Indian Films?,” in Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films (Calcutta, 1976), p. 24.
“It just gored me”: Satyajit Ray, Sight and Sound (Summer 1970): 116; in Bert Cardullo, Satyajit Ray: Interviews (Jackson, MS, 2007) p. 38.
“because people there want to see India”: Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p. 327.
“It’s the truth in a situation”: Satyajit Ray, interview with Sharmila Tagore, Aug. 3, 2015.
“Our mind has faculties”: Rabindranath Tagore, “East and West,” Creative Unity (London, 1922), p. 94.
“In every case the response”: Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, trans. Norman Denny (London, 1974), p. 248.
“He didn’t follow anyone”: Shyam Benegal, interview in “Satyajit Ray and I: Shyam Benegal,” Sept. 7, 2007; available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5XNVPNWcpA.
“One realizes what the Indian filmmaker”: Satyajit Ray, letter to Lester James Peries, Dec. 1958; in Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p. 106.
“would not have been possible without my script”: In Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, p. 295.
48. Charan Singh: A Common Cause
“India’s villages are the colonies”: In Ho Kwon Ping, “Revolt of the Landless Peasants,” Far Eastern Economic Review 103, no. 2 (Jan. 12, 1979), p. 53.
“Agriculture is the first condition”: Charan Singh, interview on Analysis program, Feb. 9, 1978, BBC Radio 4.
“For most of the landlords”: Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (London, 1993), p. 284.
“And in the winter nights”: Ram Dass, in Siddharth Dube, Words Like Freedom: The Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947–1997 (New Delhi, 1998), p. 45.
“[The villager] is a willing tool”: Jagdish Prasad, in P. D. Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of Their Relations Until Zamindari Abolition (Bombay, 1991), p. 228.
“under a thatched roof”: Charan Singh, Land Reforms in U.P. and the Kulaks (New Delhi, 1986), p. 1.
“in perpetuity”: In Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India (New Delhi, 2010), p. 435.
“profiteers, who fatten on famine”: Lenin, in Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (London, 2000), p. 365.
“The farmers are forgotten”: Charan Singh, in William Borders, “Farmers in India: Rally to Support Rival of Premier,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 1978, p. 3; available at http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/12/24/112830339.html?pageNumber=3.
“We had them over a barrel”: Orville Freeman, in S. P. Gupta, Nicholas Stern, and Athar Hussain, eds., Development Patterns and Institutional Structures: China and India (New Delhi, 1995), p. 78.
49. M. F. Husain: “Hindustan Is Free”
“until recently, we never disclosed”: In Madhu Jain, “M. F. Husain, B. V. Doshi Juxtapose Reality and Dreams in Their Latest Creation, Gufa,” India Today, Feb. 15, 1995.
“I don’t need any degree”: Interview with Riz Khan, “One on One,” Al Jazeera English (TV); uploaded Feb. 13, 2010, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqxUjuVPd8A.
“I know how it is to work”: In Rashda Siddiqui, In Conversation with Husain Paintings (New Delhi, 2001), p. 53.
“the widening gulf between”: Progressive Artist Group Manifesto, c. 1947, cited in Ratan Parimoo and Nalini Bhagwat, “Progressive Artists Group of Bombay: An Overview,” Art Etc: News and Views (Jan. 2012); available at www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=progressive-artists-group-of-bombay-an-overview&iid=29&articleid=800.
“It could have been conceived”: Geeta Kapur, “Modernist Myths and the Exile of Maqbool Fida Husain,” in Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed
., Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (New Delhi, 2011), p. 30.
“I had done paintings of Ramayana”: M. F. Husain, “An Artist and a Movement,” Frontline 14, no. 16 (Aug. 9–22, 1997); available at http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1416/14160820.htm.
“He is fond of the media glare”: M. F. Husain with Khalid Mohamed, Where Art Thou: An Autobiography (Mumbai, 2002), p. xxvii.
“40% your beard”: Siddiqui, In Conversation with Husain Paintings, p. 78.
“M. F. Husain: A Painter or a Butcher?”: Cited in Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Introduction,” in Ramaswamy, ed., Barefoot Across the Nation, p. 15.
“Had I been forty”: Interview with Barkha Dutt, March 3, 2010, NDTV; full transcript available at www.ndtv.com/india-news/full-transcript-of-mf-husains-interview-411979.
“A liberal tolerance”: S. K. Kaul, judgment in Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey, Delhi High Court, May 8, 2008; available at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1191397/.
50. Dhirubhai Ambani: Fins
“I’m a bigger shark”: Kokilaben D. Ambani, Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew (Mumbai, 2007), p. 55.
“almost animal instinct”: Ibid., p. 54.
“Coincidentally with disputes with Reliance”: Hamish McDonald, The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani (St. Leonards, New South Wales, 1998), p. 260.
“delicate, sensitive, understanding”: Ambani, Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew, p. 50.
“struck gold”: Ibid., p. 71.
“The faster the deal”: Ibid., p. 75.
“I needed gutsy, street-smart guys”: Ibid., p. 69.
“In their prosperity, our prosperity”: Cited in McDonald, The Polyester Prince, p. 59.
“Reliance is a triumph of trust”: Dhirubhai Ambani, acceptance speech for the Chemtech Foundation “Man of the Century” award, Mumbai, Nov. 8, 2000; available at www.dhirubhai.net/dhcmshtml/Acceptance%20Speech.pdf.
“created the case”: Cited in Saritha Rai, “A Giant So Big It’s a Proxy for India’s Economy,” New York Times, June 4, 2004; available at www.nytimes.com/2004/06/04/business/worldbusiness/04reliance.html.
“A society which condemns creators of wealth”: Ambani, Dhirubhai Ambani: The Man I Knew, p. 111.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In researching this book, I was privileged to have the guidance of many of the leading contemporary intellectuals, artists, and scholars of India. I am indebted to each of them, and to scholars in other parts of the world, for their willingness to share their knowledge and insights:
Javed Akhtar, Sunil Amrith, Shankar Bajpai, Hartosh Singh Bal, the late Chris Bayly, Gwilym Beckerlegge, Shyam Benegal, Paul Brass, Allison Busch, R. Champakalakshmi, Vikram Chandra, Supriya Chaudhuri, Carla Contractor, Anna Dallapiccola, William Dalrymple, Madhav Deshpande, Faisal Devji, Venkat Dhulipala, Sylviane Diouf, Wendy Doniger, Paul Dundas, Rachel Dwyer, Richard Eaton, Munis Faruqui, Michael Franklin, Jonardon Ganeri, B. N. Goswamy, Chandan Gowda, Nile Green, Ramachandra Guha, Shilpa Gupta, Menaka Guruswamy, Charles Hallisey, Peter Heehs, Linda Hess, Howard Hodgkin, Deborah Hutton, Ayesha Jalal, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Rishi Kapoor, Girish Karnad, Sudipta Kaviraj, Krishen Khanna, Bharti Kher, Madhav Khosla, Paul Kiparsky, Ebba Koch, Stephen Kotkin, T. M. Krishna, Nayanjot Lahiri, James Laine, Neil MacGregor, Javed Majeed, Inder Malhotra, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Rahul Mehrotra, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Shivshankar Menon, Elizabeth de Michelis, George Michell, Christopher Minkowski, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Parita Mukta, Vidya Natarajan, Joachim Nettelbeck, Patrick Olivelle, Gail Omvedt, Ken Ono, Aakar Patel, Sita Pawar, Basharat Peer, Kim Plofker, Sheldon Pollock, Srinath Raghavan, Vikram Raghavan, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Sujatha Ramadorai, U. R. Rao, Anil and Manan Relia, Andrew Robinson, Martin Roth, Emma Rothschild, Arundhati Roy, Tirthankar Roy, Aveek Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Navtej Sarna, Katherine Schofield, Amartya Sen, Alpa Shah, Mihir Sharma, David Shulman, Dayanita Singh, Harleen Singh, Kavita Singh, Tridip Suhrud, Vivan Sundaram, Deborah Swallow, Sharmila Tagore, Romila Thapar, Sankaran Valiathan, A. R. Venkatachalapathy, David Washbrook, Andrew Whitehead, Dominik Wujastyk, Yogendra Yadav, and Chitralekha Zutshi.
For expert readings of some of the essays, I owe particular thanks to Patrick Clibbens, Keshav Desiraju, Paul Dundas, Richard Eaton, Munis Faruqui, Jonardon Ganeri, Nile Green, Linda Hess, Kim Plofker, Sheldon Pollock, and Dominik Wujastyk.
This book began in a conversation with Jane Ellison, then commissioning editor at BBC Radio 4, about the need to make India’s history come alive for a wider audience. The project passed into Mohit Bakaya’s excellent hands, and the radio and podcast versions of the book grew in detailed exchanges with my editors, Hugh Levinson and Martin Smith. The fifty programs took shape not just in the studio, but over the course of thousands of miles of travel across India with the producers, Mark Savage (who made twenty-five of them), Martin Williams, and Jeremy Grange. Liz Jaynes handled the digital and Web platforms for the series. I thank all at the BBC for their staunch commitment to what was an ambitious, and often difficult, series to make.
At Penguin Random House UK, I thank my superb editor, Simon Winder, for helping me expand and deepen the project, and his team—Andrew Barker, Maria Bedford, Richard Duguid, Jane Robertson, and Cecilia Stein—for turning the complicated elements of this project into a beautiful book. Special thanks to Cecilia Mackay, who researched and hunted down photographs and other images.
At Penguin Random House India, I thank Meru Gokhale and her predecessor, Chiki Sarkar, for wholeheartedly embracing this book. In the United States, Alex Star at Farrar, Straus and Giroux made subtle and helpful suggestions on a number of chapters. And Nandini Mehta, my editor and wise counselor over many years, offered valuable comments on all fifty of the essays.
It was a stroke of fortune that Alex Blasdel, a former editor at Caravan magazine in India, joined me on the project in January 2015. Astonishingly gifted as an editor, he’s been much more than that to me over the course of writing this book. Intellectual interlocutor and comrade, thoughtful shaper of meaning, always sharp-eyed, he set a high and chastening bar. I am immensely grateful for his rigor, sensitivity, and judgment.
To Manu Pillai, a historian and writer in his own right, I also owe special thanks. He was involved with the project from its inception with the BBC, and proved to be a stellar researcher, producing detailed briefs and reading several of the draft essays.
I thank my agent Gill Coleridge for her patience, faith, and advice over many years, and her colleague Cara Jones for managing the various strands of the project. In New York, Amanda Urban has been uncommonly generous with her advice and support.
Several young scholars provided research assistance and briefs at different stages of the project, and I thank Aditya Balasubramanian, Chinmay Borkar, Lola Guyot, Swapna Kona Nayudu, Sudhir Selvaraj, and Unnati Tripathi.
For help with photographs, my thanks to Ashish Anand and Kishore Singh at the Delhi Art Gallery; Sheetal Mallar, Raghu Rai, Dayanita Singh, and Navina and Vivan Sundaram.
My thanks to Talvin Singh, who composed the music for the radio and podcasts series and whose rhythms are still running in my head.
I thank all my colleagues and students at the King’s India Institute for making it a lively, open place of intellectual inquiry. At King’s College London, thanks also to Keith Hoggart, former vice principal; to former principal Rick Trainor; and to current principal and president, Ed Byrne, for their unstinting support. I am also grateful to Gautam Thapar for his generosity in creating my Avantha Chair at the India Institute, and for his steadfast belief in our work. One goal of the India Institute, when established in 2012, was to bring scholarship on India to a wider audience across the world—a goal I hope this book will further.
Mary Richardson Boo has watched over this project with sustaining anxiety; I hope that may now give way to some relief. My gratitude to my sisters, and particularly to Asha Sarabhai for her perceptive, always encouraging presence.
I owe one person most of all: Katherine
Boo, fiercest mind and heart I will ever know.
INDEX
The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Aag (Fire) (film)
Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad
Abbasid Caliphate
Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad
Abu’l Fazl
Abyssinia (Ethiopia)
Academy Awards
Acharanga Sutra
Aden
Adi Granth
Adil Shah
Adi Shankara (Shankaracharya)
Adivasis
Advaita Vedanta
Afghanistan
Africa
African Americans
Afzal Khan
Agra
Agra College
ahimsa (nonviolence)
Ahmedabad
Ahmednagar
Ajanta cave paintings
Ajmer
Akbar (Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar)
Akbarnama (Book of Akbar)
Akhtar, Javed
Alam Ara (film)
al-Biruni
Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke of Russia
Alexander the Great
“Alien, The” (film script)
Aligarh Muslim University
Allahabad
Allende, Salvador
All-India Muslim Conference
All India Radio
All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference
Almatti Dam
Ambani, Anil
Ambani, Dhirubhai
Ambani, Mukesh
Ambedkar, Bhimrao
American Cinematographer
Amritsar
Amritsar (Golden Temple) assault (1984)
Amritsar (Jallianwala Bagh) massacre (1919)
Amuktamalyada (The Woman Who Gives a Garland Already Worn) (Krishnadevaraya)
Anderson, Perry
Anderson, Wes
Andheri East (Mumbai)
Andhra Pradesh
anekantavada (many-sidedness)
Incarnations Page 52