by V.N. Datta

The king who liquidated his American empire
GENERALLY speaking, political history has ceased to be a study of kings and statesmen and wars as people want to learn about the “likes of themselves”.

Prize the man who spells profit
Reviewed by Kuldip Kalia
Personnel Management for Executives by K.K. Chaudhuri. Himalaya Publishing, Mumbai. Pages 190. Rs 250.

How VHP turned Vivekananda into a militant Hindu
Reviewed by Bhupinder Chaudhry
Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism edited by William Radice. Oxford University Press, Delhi. Pages x+299. Rs 475.

The tale of ‘White Nigger’, et al
Reviewed by Kuldip Dhiman
Indian Traffic by Parama Roy. Vistaar Publications, New Delhi. Pages 236. Rs 225.

by V.N. Datta
The king who liquidated his American empire

GENERALLY speaking, political history has ceased to be a study of kings and statesmen and wars as people want to learn about the “likes of themselves”. Marx gave a great impetus to the study of peasantry and working class which had led to a spate of books during the past 50 years. Thus, the biography-of-“great men” approach to the writing of history has been relegated to the background. But still sovereigns, statesmen and outstanding leaders, who have influenced the course of history, continue to fascinate and evoke great interest among biographers and the reading public.

Despite the compilation of a dozen volumes of bibliography on him, a larger volume of literature has appeared on Napoleon than on any other individual during the past 20 years. History has a special concern with the abnormal and the deviant. The story of George III still continues to arouse much interest not only because of the many changes which took place in his time and which turned the course of history, but also because of his personality which has eluded clear understanding of historians.

Christopher Hibbert’s “George III: A Personal History” (Viking, pages 433, £ 20), is the first modern study to attempt a synthesis of all facets of George’s life as king, politician-patron of arts and sciences, husband and father. Though this work of immense scholarship and lucid exposition owes much to John Brooke’s 1972 biography, it stands on its own because of its clarity and thoroughness. The author has shown a psychological insight in understanding the complex personality of George III and has also provided a new perspective on his role as a constitutional monarch.

George III had a very unhappy childhood. He lived a lonely life, completely cut off from any company of his liking. On the contrary, he was surrounded by dour, high-minded old men who tended to curb his independent thinking. He became an introvert, morose and cynical. He grew up as a shy, diffident man, not capable of small talk and with no taste for fashionable life. He preferred to lead a solitary life, enclosed within his own self, discontented, disenchanted and completely indifferent to what was happening around him. It is now clear that his tutor, to whom he showed due deference, was a man of impeccable Whig principles but hampered by limited imagination and a tendency to nurse petty jealousies.

There is perhaps no British monarch who has aroused such bitter hatred both in England and the USA as George III did. Much literature has appeared on him. He has been subjected to an incisive analysis by Sir Herbert Butterfield, Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge, in his famous work “George III and the Historian”. In the 1920s the mayor of Chicago declared that he had never met “this king George, but should the fellow ever turn up in his city, he would beat him in his snoot”.

George III started off badly with the Americans who never forgave him for his outrageous acts which brought great suffering on them. According to the Declaration of American Independence, he had “plundered the seas, ravaged the coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people”. He was responsible for “works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages”.

Despite the efforts of some of the leading historians to retrieve his reputation, George III continues to provoke outrage and loathing in every patriotic American breast. And the sympathetic portrait on the screen presented recently in the film “The Madness of King George” has not mended matters. British Whig historians too have castigated him as an unconstitutional monster who inflicted deep and emotional injuries which no other modern English king has done.

Sir Lewis Namier, the doyen of the British historians, in his classic work “The Structure of Politics at the Succession of George III”, which has enriched historiography by the use of what came to be known later as the Namier method, endeavoured to rehabilitate George’s reputation. The process of rehabilitation is still on, and one can argue that Christopher Hibbert has accomplished a task which is still unfinished. History continues to be an unending dialogue with the past. Ironically, George III would have fared better in a different era than the one in which he lived and ruled.

After William Pitt became Prime Minister in 1784, the Whigs went into wilderness until his death in 1806. They blamed the king for their bad luck in a famous resolution which said, “The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished”. This self-induced fear so blinded the party leaders that even after politics had moved on in the 1790s from the aristocrats’ tussles with the crown to the aristocrats’ fear of popular rule, the Whigs continued to revile George III as the father of British despotism.

Hibbert has shown that George III was not the sort of man he is usually cast in traditional historiography. This is not to exonerate him from his responsibility in creating serious constitutional problems. There is no doubt that the dismissal of the Fox-North coalition was a case of crass arbitrariness; he overstretched his constitutional prerogative in 1783 and refused to listen to wiser counsel.

Hating Charles Fox and his supporters with an intensity that he seemed to reserve only for them, he hatched a plot with William Pitt and Lord Temple to topple the government. They used as the means the East India Company Reform Bill, which the House of Commons had passed with a comfortable majority. The Whigs never realised that they were threatened with danger. They did not know that Lord Temple was circulating a letter among the Lords against them which stated that anyone who supported the Bill would henceforth be treated as the king’s enemy.

When the Duke of Portland, the titular head of the Whigs, heard rumours of a conspiracy to topple the government, he confronted the king in his closet, but George III fixed his “glassy stare” and refused to reply. Fox was confident that the king was only bluffing and would not in any case pull down the ministry until he watched his own Bill defeated in the Lords on December 17. George did not even wait for 24 hours before dispatching his officers to retrieve the seals of state from Fox and North. The author describes it as the defining moment of George III’s relations with the opposition. After that there was no turning back. The gulf widened, and one political crisis followed another which vitiated the political atmosphere.

The dismissal of the ministry became a subject of a serious controversy. Supporters of the king argued that it had become necessary to rescue the country from the corruption of the Whigs.

The divergence between George III’s good intentions and his actions as revealed in 1783 were the hallmark of his life. A kind husband, Queen Charlotte ended up loathing him. A caring father, his 15 children grew up to be misfits. His proclamation against immorality and vice provoked derisive laughter in high society, and his obstruction of the abolition of slave trade prolonged it for 30 years.

Hibbert has produced a fine biography, which has treated the subject with sympathetic comprehension and sophistication.

Eliot: outing of a bawdy poet
by Shelley Walia

AT a time when T.S. Eliot’s reputation as a poet is undergoing a reassessment owing to the recent charge against him by Anthony Julius in his book “T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form” of anti-semitism, a collection of 50 poems has now appeared under the title “Inventions of the March Hare”. Eliot had considered them “not worth publishing” in a letter written to John Quinn just before his death in which he emphasised: “You will find a great many sets of verse which have never been printed and which I am sure you will agree never ought to be printed, and in putting them into your hands, I beg you fervently that they never are printed.”

Taken from a notebook that was presented in 1922 to John Quinn, Eliot’s chief patron, who had insisted on paying $ 140 for it, they were lost to the world for over 50 years, only to be revealed in 1968 that the notebook had been purchased by the New York Public Library in 1958 as part of the Berg Collection. Bought in 1909, the notebook stayed with Eliot till 1919 and contained his jottings on his travels through Oxford, London and Paris, along with some of the first drafts of his more famous poems. It consists of 72 pages, 12 of which were found missing, but which were later found in Ezra Pound papers held in the Beinecke Library at Yale, with Pound’s note: “T.S.E. Chancons Ithyphallique”.

The debate on whether to publish the poems has ended with Eliot’s widow Valerie Eliot’s decision to have the poems published by Faber. The publication under the editorship of Christopher Ricks, with its battery of allusions, comparisons and conjectures, enables the Eliot scholar to turn back to the origin of his work and reassess him.

The ribald verses cover a range of subjects from city life, its squalor and its charms to love and its unlikelihood. They are marked by an eye for social nuance and an ear for both affectation and affection. This early work embracing both satire and comedy will be of great interest to poetry lovers everywhere, and has already caused more hilarity and curiosity than indignation or acrimony.

Christopher Ricks, one of the great editors of our time, in his lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, before the publication of the book, made it obvious that he is essentially a supporter of Eliot though he has kept out of the recent debate on the charges of anti-semitism against Eliot in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement sparked off by Julius’s book. He had with him James Wood and Bernard Bergonzi who are of the view that Eliot is not anti-semitic since his use of the dramatic monologue conveys the character’s point of view and not necessarily his own.

Tom Paulin and novelist Frederic Raphael do not agree with them and their case against Eliot is further strengthened with the publication of these poems. The pro-Eliot camp is aware that the “King Bolo” poems, especially the one with these lines, “The only doctor in his town/Was a bastard Jew named Benney.../And Benney filled Columbo’s prick/With Muratic Acid” are not going to help their case.

But Eliot’s wife Valerie would not have any of the poems suppressed or censored. And thus the Eliot lovers now have a feast of poems written 90 years ago which are a blend of serious and lewd limerick-like shorter poems that remove any view that held Eliot as a serious academic poet. Christopher Ricks, the best known Eliot critic today, is of the firm opinion that he is right in including the bawdy poems, though only in four appendices, as otherwise they would have attracted excessive attention.

Undoubtedly more has been made of the poems about the “jolly tinker... with his four and twenty inches hanging to his knees” or the stanza on Colombo: “Now when they were three weeks at sea/Colombo he grew rooty/He took his cock in both his hands/And swore it was a beauty.

“The cabin boy appeared on deck/And scampered up the mast-o/Colombo grasped him by the balls/And buggered him in the ass-o.”

The decision to include these poems in the volume would be debated in times to come, but Ricks provides an explanation: “The reason for not including them would be that Eliot tore these pages out, and that in their ribaldry and sexual explicitness they will attract a lot of attention and divert people from the essential nature of the book. Those are genuine reasons.” The reasons on the other side, feels Ricks, are stronger: in the long run, it is much better to have them in, since they would in due course sink into relative insignificance as indeed they have. To not have them in, on the other hand, would result in making them very prominent, and that would have been a misrepresentation.

Eric Griffiths feels that the book is like “holding a long-lost map to a treasure trove” written by a revolutionary poet who to a large extent “invented our contemporary ears and minds” and edited by a man whose nature of language informs, shapes and enlivens every page. Though it consists of his early poems, some of which are bawdy, there are conspicuous signs of the genius in them. They share the many turns of cadence, phrase and thought with the many poems we are familiar with: “the corner of the street”, “withered leaves”, “yellow evening flung across the panes”, “vacant lost” are some examples.

Or lines from the new poem “Embarquement pour Cythere” resound with the Eliot we are all too familiar with: “It’s utterly illogical/ Out making such a start, indeed/ And thinking that we must return.

“Oh no! why should we not proceed/(As long as a cigarette will burn/When you light it as the evening star)/To porcelain land, what avatar/Where blue-delft-romancer is the law.”

Or, take the opening stanza of “Interlude in a Bar”: “Across the room the shifting smoke/Settles around the forms that pass/Pass through or clog the brain;/Across the floors that soak/The dregs from broken glass.”

No one could miss the Prufrockian undertones. Again, in many of these newly discovered poems Eliot remains obsessed with growing old. In “Opera” which was written when he was 21, he says, “I felt like the ghost of youth/At the undertakers’ ball.” Also at the end of “In the Department Store” Eliot writes, “man’s life is powerless and brief and dark. It is not possible for me to make her happy”. As Griffith says, “A writer is as old not as he feels, but as his language feels, for an artist like Eliot whose heart was in his work, poetry itself intones with Prufrock ‘I grow old ... I grow old’....”

Reading his new poems I can see how Eliot at the outset of his career as a poet had tried to “jog the lyrical needle out of the groove it was stuck in”. Though human nature had changed around 1911, as argued by Virginia Woolf, nothing much happened to verse until Eliot came along.

And in the masterly handling of his poems, Ricks has given us a wealth of details about the sources and debts to those who wrote before Eliot which the poet was always conscious of. Rick’s editorial annotations which cover 200 pages, with a further 100 pages of appendices make the book a record of literary history, apart from showing how Eliot sweated over his poems in order to get the right word or the right shifts of mood.

Self-dissatisfaction and a patience that became all too painful could not deter the poet in Eliot to create rhythms so dense and tenuous that it is difficult to imagine any other modern poet working with such intensity.

The importance of this volume lies in showing the evolution of Eliot’s art from the poems he published in Harvard Advocate to those in his debut volume, “Prufrock and Other Observations”. “If we’re going to learn about Eliot’s extraordinary achievement in modernising himself on his own” (to quote the wonderful tribute by Pound), Ricks argues, “this is where we’re going to have to look. Eliot’s is the most surprising arrival ever of our great poets. The sheer authority, the total possession of means, are absolutely there from the first poem in his first volume.”

Many would still criticise Eliot for these poems which cover only 52 pages of a book that runs into a sizeable 400 pages, but one could agree with Hugh Haughton who declared that “Eliot, the Wordsworth or Tennyson of our era, has become a modern ‘classic’, and must suffer the fate of the classic — to be demolished and avoided for a while, in order to be resurrected in another guise”.

How VHP turned Vivekananda into a militant Hindu
by Bhupinder Chaudhry

Those to whom religion is a trade are forced to become narrow and mischievous by their introduction into religion and competitive fighting and selfish method of the world. The real dharma was doing good to others. Injuring others is sin... Loving others is virtue, hating others is sin. — Vivekananda

THE last decade of the present millennium is witnessing a two-pronged strategy of the communal forces to gain social legitimacy. In social and political field, it is to pick up religious symbols for mass mobilisation and in the intellectual domain, the strategy is to derive legitimacy by using social and religious ideas of social reformers such as Vivekananda. The communally charged atmosphere after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the commemoration of the centenary of Vivekananda’s celebrated address to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, necessiated a fresh look at socio-religious ideas of Vivekananda. The efforts of some scholars in this direction have produced the book under review.

The 14 essays deal with the teachings of Vivekananda in the context of the changing conditions under the British state structure. Tapan Raychaudhuri in his elaborate essay on Vivekananda’s construction of Hinduism has focused on his concept of modernisation and his reading of the monistic doctrine of Vedanta. Falsifying the western concept of modernisation based on infrastructural development, Vivekananda emphasised reforms in its socio-religious and educational dimensions as important features of modernisation.

Hindu fundamentalists are trying to co-opt Vivekananda for wider acceptance of their ideological doctrine through misrepresentation of his religious ideas. What makes him vulnerable to this design is his defence of the orthodox practices of Hinduism and giving a strong Hindu orientation of the Ramakrishna Mission, a creation of Vivekananda. A slight twist of his ideas, no doubt, can project him as a propounder of militant Hinduism. He believed that the Vedas, which formed the core of his religious ideas, contained the timeless truth which formed the basis of all religions. Hence, all religions had to be accepted as true and not merely to be tolerated. The author has carefully analysed the Swami’s speeches at the World Parliament of Religions where he emphasised the eternal truth of all religious opinions which can by no standard be called militant Hinduism.

Ramakrishna mission, the author argues, was to work for the welfare of the poor and he refused to recognise any religion which was not concerned with ending the miseries of the poor. The eradication of the miseries of the poor, in his belief, was possible only through modernisation of society, which necessitated eradication of illiteracy, modern education and efforts to create mass conciousness. Hindu revivalism, for sure, is averse to such an objective.

Vivekananda, however, strove to change the existing conditions. His near rejection of other social reformers’ approach and his reluctance to attack the authority of dominant groups in the caste hierarchy did not pose any threat to the Brahmanical order. In the context of colonialism, the state more or less remained indifferent to the struggle between the dominant and dominated social groups. This resulted in a better organisation of resistance movements in colonial India. Not identifying himself with this process has facilitated his cooption by the Hindu fundamentalists.

Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta in her article on reconstructing Hinduism on a world platform, places the ideas of Vivekananda and others at the World Parliament of Religions in the context of rising nationalism in India. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the debate on the nature of Hinduism heated up. Evangelical missionary’s attempt to denigrate Hinduism provoked orientalists. The origin of Hinduism was traced to ancient times and many worked overtime to establish the superiority of Hinduism over other religions. Growing nationalism, thus, acquired a Hindu tilt where a reconstruction of a distinctive Hindu identity became the main agenda.

Validation of Hinduism, for Vivekananda, became the basis of his representation of Hinduism in the USA. His disinterest in issues like the pathetic condition of child widows and his opposition to the assertion that Indian child widows were ill-treated in the World Parliament of Religions should be seen in this frame. In an age of rising nationalism sticking to mythological ideals rather than dealing with reality, was his method while lecturing in the USA.

The 19th century, on the one hand, witnessed an expansion of the colonial political power and on the other, it provided space for missionaries to strike their roots in Indian soil. The questioning of Hindu religious practices and its basic philosophy by the missionaries led to the formation of liberal as well as orthodox factions within Hinduism. Harish Chandra, an orthodox Brahmin from Kashi, the citadel of orthodoxy, took up the challenge of the missionaries and a debate ensued. Idol worship, the central point of the debate, was considered by liberal reformers and missionaries as a stumbling block in the way of Hinduism acquiring a modern image. Ram Mohan Roy and later the Arya Samaj opposed idol worship on the ground of heterogeneity and lack of one source of authority. The defence of idol worship by orthodox Hindu individuals and organisations such as the Dharma Sabha was premised on the antiquity of the practice. The argument of heterogeneity was countered with the belief that worshipping several gods and godesses was a path to ultimate truth.

The transformation of India into a modern nation state was accompanied by the regeneration and revitalisation of Hinduism. An attempt was made to identify the specific components of Hinduism as a civilisation with its own eternal and binding essences of race and culture. Hence, defining Hindu heritage could not escape the concepts of nation, caste and race. Some repudiated caste and stressed their faith in race considering it a greater cementing force among Hindus, essential to create a modern nation. Such a paradigm was deeply flawed as it excluded non-Hindus and refused to recognise the internal contradictions between the depressed and the dominant social groups.

Vivekananda, on the other hand, extended support to the Brahmanical order believing that caste had a place in the lives of “modern” Hindus and it could work as a national moral code offering guidelines for the nation’s uplift. Power sharing with the depressed classes essential to set up an egalitarian society was completely missing.

Vivekananda’s attempt to address the social questions such as education and “seva” (service) to humanity has been attributed by British scholars to the influence of the West. It has been argued that Hinduism does not preach the duty of service whereas it is an important component of the teachings of Christianity. However, it is not difficult to trace the roots of the social philosophy propounded by Vivekananda. In Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta, god can be noticed in every human being, so service of man is no less than worshipping God. This was applied on social problems only in the 19th century by Vivekananda.

The book on religious ideas of Vivekananda is an important contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of religion in Indian society and polity. It is an illuminating and important addition to the corpus of knowledge on the subject.

Prize the man who spells profit
by Kuldip Kalia

IS there a proven method for planning manpower requirement? How to select the right kind of persons? How to train them to carry out assignments which are related to advanced and sophisticated technology? How to measure the performance? Why and how should they be disciplined?

These and many other questions pose a challenge to the skill of those who are in charge of personnel management. The book under review deals with the topic comprehensively, particularly focussing attention on concepts, issues and practices. Case studies are employed to clearly lay out the techniques.

Undoubtedly, men, money, machine and material are the primary concerns for carrying out the objectives of any organisation. Among these, manpower is of prime importance because it is the resource through which other resources are deployed and exploited. Organisational culture has to be developed in order to integrate man, task and the organisation. Thus the technical (ability to use techniques, procedures), human (ability to motivate and communicate), conceptual (ability to plan and integrate the organisation’s understand activities) and skills are the basic ingredients of management.

Within the framework of managerial functions, manpower has always been the central theme. Not only does it involve the evaluation of existing employees but also forecasting future requirement. It has to ensure availability of the right kind of people at the right time and place. Any shortage, which is likely to result from retirement, resignation, promotion, transfer or expansion, has to be tackled effectively. Demand (quantitative or qualitative) can also be determined by trend analysis and job analysis.

Keeping in view the short-and long-term needs and objectives of the organisation, the process of recruitment is perhaps the first step in manpower planning. Recruitment policy, framed after an agreement between the management and the trade union, decides the source, internal or external, of recruitment. Both have advantages and disadvantages but a right kind of matching process is always better. The author has remarkably spelt out the interview process indicating “i” (introduce), “n” (never ask closed questions), “t” (task profile or achievement), “e” (educational background and subject knowledge), “r” (responsibility and risk-taking ability), “v” (verify if there is any gap), “i” (interest and hobbies), “e” (evaluate strength and weakness), “w” (willingness and reason for interest in the job), which can serve as guidelines for persons involved in conducting interview. Also helpful is adopting a scientific procedure for selecting the right kind of persons.

A comparatively recent concept is human resource development which must be viewed as an investment because a well-planned and meticulously designed programme and integrated strategy certainly increases the level of commitment and finally result in better achievement of the organisation’s goals. It is a process where the matching of the hard (structure, system and strategy) and the soft (staff, skill and style) options is done, which makes the workers identify themselves with the task and the organisation. In other words, it aims at the development of human resources and the organisation. Therefore on-the-job training is never perceived as a paid holiday but better understood as a means of development. Then comes the stage of analysis, expansion of responsibility and liberalisation of managerial jobs, energising and activating the organisation.

An appraisal of performance involves a comparison of the desired and actual performance leading to fixing future expectations. Whether all jobs are measureable or not has always been a subject of hot discussion but ignoring the basic fact that such an attempt (job measurement) is primarily a process of inspiring the individual for better performance is universally accepted. There was a time when performance appraisal was simply considered as the basis for salary increase, financial incentives and promotion but now it is also being increasingly used for the development of employees and thus turning the subjective attitude into an objective approach (making it at regular intervals). However, it is an irony that performance appraisal often leads to a performance decline rather than improvement.

Recognition of work, fair treatment, security of service, welfare facilities, providing living wages and benefits, and handling of grievances are said to be the factors responsible for better discipline and creating a healthy industrial atmosphere. On the other hand, any unresolved grievance, wrong assignment, bad service conditions, misjudgement in promotion and transfer often affect work behaviour. However in no case should any kind of indiscipline be tolerated but at the same time, it needs “handling with care” because workers are always “assets” and should never be seen as undesirable.

In certain conditions, counselling can be effective in inculcating discipline. Rapport-building, love, care, trust and treating with dignity are the words which need the attention of the management because it is the manpower which determines the success or failure of any organisation.

There is also a warning for those who treat or give the personnel manager or his department a low status in the organisation and never see their role as a significant contribution to the organisation.

The tale of ‘White Nigger’, et al
by Kuldip Dhiman

It is believed that Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the star of the Indian Renaissance, had two homes: In one everything was Indian except Raja Ram Mohan Roy; in the other everything was western except Raja Ram Mohan Roy!

Parama Roy’s “Indian Traffic” is a study of similar East-West intercourse. This “traffic” is not one-sided; there are scores of Europeans who went “native”. All this results in ambivalence “that undergrinds the procedure of colonial mimicry, produces simultaneous and incommensurable effects, destabilising English and Indian identities as part of the same operation.” How does one come to terms with two diverse cultures and yet manage to strike a golden mean? Roy concerns herself not only with the continual interaction between the peoples of two vastly diverse cultures and regions, but also brings in her scope the fusion or “mimicry” between Hindus and Muslims, males and females, bourgeoisie and the elite. It is about the blurring edges of cultural icons in colonial and post-colonial India and their effort to learn and adapt to a new culture. “What I propose to consider here,” the author writes, “are not so much the volatile effects of the mimicry that generates the ‘not quite black’ not quite white’ subject of colonialism but the range of other, relatively untheorised prospects and identity formations beyond the bounds of male anglicisation that emerge in colonial and post-colonial South Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries...”

Roy begins with the exploits of the famous adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton who in the 19th century very successfully managed to pass off for a Hindu and later as a Muslim. He adapted himself so well to the Orient that his colleagues used to call him the White Nigger. Aided by his linguistic skills (he knew “Hindostani, Guzaratee”, Persian, “Maharattee, Sindhee, Punjaubee”, Arabic, Telugu, Pushtu,Turkish, and Armenian) and the art of disguise, he even managed to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, quite an unbelievable feat for a non-Muslim.

When the early colonisers came here, they must have found India and its people totally backward. It was a time when Britain was at the height of its military power. It was going through the industrial revolution; its navy was the best in the world. And Britain was poised to become a world power.

“India, on the other hand, was politically disunited, culturally rather unchanging, and seemingly unprepared for the impact of the West. The Mughal empire had disintegrated after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. India was an arena for a political struggle among the Mughal successors, Persian adventurers such as Nadir Shah, Afghan leaders such as Ahmad Shah, and Hindu states such as the Marathas and the Sikhs and Rajputs. India, as a whole, was strange and incomprehensible — a fable of spice, silk, indigo and the ‘glowing gems’.”

In their time, the Mughals themselves had to go through the process of cross-cultural intermingling. They brought their religion, language and customs along with them. And just as the British, they must have found the country and its people “impossible to comprehend”.

Roy’s canvas includes, among others, Rudyard Kipling and his oriental stories, Margaret Nobel alias Sister Nivedita and her experience with spiritualism, Swami Vivekananda’s relationship with his guru Swami Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Sarojini Naidu and her poetry and politics. The book ends with case of film star Nargis who played the role of Radha in “Mother India”, and then, as they say life imitates art, she married her Hindu co-star Sunil Dutt. The study could have included Bishop Reginald Heber, writer Robert Southey, Lord William Cavendish Bentick, Sir Charles Metcalfe, Sir Thomas Munro, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Annie Besant and others like Motilal Nehru, Maulana Azad and Jinnah, all of them tried in their own way to absorb the best elements of diverse cultural influences.

Although it is informative, “Indian Traffic” reads like a university text-book or a research paper rather than a book. The subject matter is great but the handling is pedantic and dull. In fact, you feel you are listening to a lecture. For instance, in the chapter “Discovering India, Imaging Thuggee” Roy writes: “This chapter has three sections, with significant amounts of overlap. The first examines the official records of the Thugee and Dacoity Department....” This type of spoonfeeding that the reader is subjected to throughout the book, is a trifle irritating. The longish introduction says everything the author has to say, so much so that when you read the rest of the book, you feel you have read it before.