Vishnu

Two books on India.

• India: A History, John Keay, c. 2000, 2010. Notes here.
• Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since The Great Rebellion, Maria Misra, c. 2007 

The notes below are from Vishnu's Crowded Temple.

The first long paragraph in each chapter below is the first paragraph from the book itself. 

Chapter 1: Tropical Gothic

On 1 January 1877 Queen Victoria was made Empress of India. To mark the occasion an Imperial Assemblage was held, not in Calcutta, the first city of British India, but in the capital of the old Mughal emperors, Delhi. The preparations began a year earlier. A vast area of land a few miles north of Old Delhi was chosen and its unlucky inhabitants, thousands of villagers, were summarily evicted. In their place, in an arc stretching for over 5 miles, 8000 tents, of varying degrees of luxury, were erected. Though each encampment was carefully calibrated to reflect the precise status of its occupant, the most up-to-date sanitation had been provided for all. In this city of palanquins and marquees resided the delegations of princes, aristocrats, officials and their various retinues, which included 85,000 camp followers and their attendant animals. At 10 a.m. on the appointed day the assemblage officially began. Two hundred and fifty elephants, one hundred and fifty horses, forty-five camels, several hundred spear-bearing sepoys, armed horsemen and thousands of caparisoned bearers trooped behind the procession of over ten thousand dignitaries as it made its way towards the ceremonial amphitheater. At exactly noon, after a roar of guns and a display of firecrackers, a fanfare of six trumpeters announced the arrival of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, who, to the strains of Waner's Tannhäuser, strode across the parade ground before installing himself on a throne set atop a large elevated dais. From there he loftily surveyed the ranks of princes, nobles, gentry and other Indian worthies banked in ascending tiers before him. The seating had been arranged according to strict rules of precedence. Closest to the Viceroy were the greatest princes: the Gaekwad of Baroda, the Nizm of Hyderabad and the Maharaja of Kashmir; behind them the thirty of so slightly less important princes, and behind them the six hundred minor princelings. Next came the great aristocratic landowners and wealthy merchants, and finally the lesser gentry and other native gentlemen at the back. Once enthroned, the Viceroy mused on the 'providential' nature of the British Raj, its intention to bring 'progressive prosperity' and its place as worthy successor to the 'House of Tamerlaine' (India's erstwhile Mughal emperors), before he grandly proclaimed Queen Victoria's accession as 'Kaiser-I-Hind" (emperor of India). This was a curious Indo-Germanic sobriquet considered the least likely of all possible titles to be mispronounced by Indians.

Chapter 2: Babel-Mahal

Hindu temples in nineteenth-century South India were rather like pre-Reformation monasteris -- not merely places of worship, but axes of local economic, political and social life. The managers of these institutions were hardly mere 'churchwardens' (as the British imagined them), but petty potentates and arbiters of socail prestige: they were, literally, the temple gatekeepers, empowered to determine which castes had the right of temple entry and which were forbidden. Before teh British, temples wer often run by a surprising motley of groups and individuals. Men of quite lowly caste status often preided, sometimes even Christians and, in one case, a major Hindu temple ....

Chapter 3: Far  Pavilions

At thier most philosophical, the British saw empire as cricket. For some, cricket was the greatest gift imperialism could bestow, because it could transform 'native' into gentlemen. In 1893 this 'wicket imperialism' acquired it most promient theorist in teh shape of Aurthur Haslam, Oxford historian and wicket-keeper for the 'Oxford Eccentrics,' the first British team to tour India. Cricket's rules and culture, he insisted, were the platoni embodiment of English virtue:

 

 

Chapter 4: Spinning the Nation

 

On 15 August 1947 the Union Jack of the Raj was lowered one last time and in its place was hoisted teh Indian national ensign, a flag bearing the image of the humble spinning-wheel (chakra). for it the British saw India as a set of competing cricket teams to be marshalled into sportsmanly coexistence under the tutelage of an all-powerful umpire, the nationalists themselves favoured a more organis, hand-crafted metaphor and produced spinners of a very different kind. The notion of nation-buildign as a cottage industry ultimately found its way on to the national flag.

 

Chapter 5: A House Divided

 

... the seventh Delhi ... the traveler ... makes ready .. to evoke those of Greece, of the Renaissance, and the Moguls.

Delhi has been rebuilt seven times since its foundation in 1450 BC, surprisingly perhaps, as an old prophecy warns that anyone who builds a new city in Delhi is sure to love it. In 1911 the British began work on a new imperial capital in Delhi...

Chapter 6: The Last Viceroy

On 26 January India celebrates Republic Day with a great parade in New Delhi. It is staged on that great icon of the British Raj, Lutyen's awe-inspiring King's Way, now renamed Rajpath. Beginnings relatively modestly with a few fly-pasts and flag-hoistings, successive celebrations became increasingly elaborate, and by 1960 had blossomed into full maturity requiring a vast retinue of committees, planners and organizers and lasting over two-and-a-half hours.

 

Chapter 7: Flames

 

In 1975 the most successful Indian film of all time -- Sholay (Flames) -- was released. Despte its vast expense it was, initially, a flop. A grizzly revenge drama, heavily influenced by Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and through that by the Japanese classic Seven Samurai, Sholay was a chappati western It tells the story of Baldevd Singh, a powerful village boss or thakur and sometime police officer, who, over the course of a decade pursues a vicious bandit chief, Gabbar Singh, who, not satisfied with terrorizing the local village, has massacred the landlord's entire family and lopped off the arms of the unfortunate thakur for good measure. Realizing that the official forces of the state are literally armless in the face of this anarchic violence, the landlord enlists the assistance of two petty criminals whose intelligence and resourcefulness he had encountered while a policeman. After  a series of hair-raising encounters with the villain, including a famous episode where the heroine is forced to dance on broken glass to save the life of her love, the anti-heroes eventually being nemesis upon the terrifying bandit.

Chapter 8: Leveling the Temple

BJP -- wiki.

On 25 September 1990 a pilgrimage began from the ancient temple city of Somnath in Gujarat. The pilgrim caravan was an untidy assemblage of trucks, scooters, buses and lorries festooned with marigolds and bedecked with huge images of Ram -- the mythical king of the Ramayana -- images of fearsome lions and the Hindu mantra Om. Others bore the more mundane emblem of the recently formed Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a fetching lotus flower. Accompanying these unlikely 'chariots' was a motley collection of pilgrims; these included young people in yellow bandanas waiving lotus-emblazoned orange banners, hordes of cheering old ladies proclaiming themselves The Lord Ram Birth Festival Assembly,' and dozens of. youths dressed-up as heroes from the Ramayana and the Mahabhrata. In their wake marched a bizarre escort of young men in simian costumes, in emulation of Rams' famous monkey army, and brandishing swords and trishuls (tridents). But the centrepiece of the spectacle was a rather humdrum vehicle - a DCM-Toyota truck -- bearing a far less exotic occupant - a portly BJP politician of advanced years, L. K. Advani. The grille of this truck-cum-chariot bore the legend 'From Somnath to Ayodha,' and some of the banners exhorted this unlikely avatar of Ram to build a great temple. 

Epilogue, or Divine Developments

On 18 September 2006 students at the prestigious Ahmedabad Indian Institute of Managment were presented with a curious case study. The subject of the presentation wasthe remarkable metamorphhosis of an industry many had dubbed a lumbering white elephant into a mode of managerial efficiency and commercial élan, a transformation, moreover, masterminded by a CEO of world-class business acuity, What made the presentation curious was that the company in question was not some private-sector high-tech software giant but the Indian Railways -- the largest state-owned business in the world. More remarkable still was the identity of the corporate wizard who had engineered this management miracle, for it was none other than Laloo Prasad Yadav, sometime chief minister of Bihar, scourge of Brahmanhood and political showman extraordinaire. In 2004 Laloo, armed with a valuable cache of parliamentary seats and thus considerable leverage ...