© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 1 Writing a Book about India In India everything is done differently from the rest of the world. This will never change. — Babur (cited in Dalrymple 1998, 173) Everyone who wrote about India preferred the marvellous to the true. — Strabo 15.1.28 Hindus differ from us [Muslims] in everything which other nations have in common. — al- Biruni (Sachau 1910, 17) India is the inner state of every man. — Bill Aitken 1992, 194 Drawing aside the Curtain An outsider writing a book about India faces a formidable problem, which is even greater today than it was for Megasthenes. Centuries, indeed millennia, of familiarity, or should one rather say unfamiliarity, with India have erected a series of curtains through which it is difficult to peer clearly. As great a writer as Carlo Levi confessed that he found India ‘impossible to describe’.1 Every age has had its own picture of India, always from the vantage point of an ob- server who finds what he observes essentially alien. Yet the otherness of India exerts a pull, a fascination, which naturally results in a particularly 1. Levi 2007, 19. 5 For general queries, contact
[email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 6 Chapter 1 strong distortion of reality to fit what the observer thinks he sees, wishes to see, or believes he ought to see.