The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow.

If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history – only an account of itself.

She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.

In Indian culture, the woman of the house – the embodiment of the family’s honor – treasures her gold jewelry both as her soundest asset and as the symbol of her status.

Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.

Nehru, speaking of his country’s dreams, said: ‘Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.’ It.

It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians – especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.

The obscurantist and atavistic state that Narendra Modi’s BJP wants to create would look nothing like the one that made India the scientific superpower of the ancient age. It is enough to make one shed a tear. One can only hope that there are no peahens around.

Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.