But he didn't. Kremmer returned to live in Delhi with his extended Hindu family-by-marriage for a further five years. Then in 2004, he undertook a yatra, or pilgrimage, travelling the length and breadth of India to try to make sense of the previous decade. And it's that yatra that shapes Inhaling the Mahatma.

The third in Kremmer's Asian trilogy - a series of narratives in which he sets out to examine Asian societies through the prism of religion, history and personal experience - it's a noisy, vibrant, ambitious portrait of India at the crossroads. Tracking down the country's major political figures, along with a colourful cast of bit players, Kremmer charts the turbulence and triumphs of the decade and a half during which India threw off Mahatma Gandhi's socialist vision and hurtled headlong into the cyber age.

Like his internationally acclaimed best-seller on Afghanistan, The Carpet Wars, which was published in 20 countries, Inhaling the Mahatma owes much of its potency to the way it entwines the personal with the political, the past with the present. Even its title resonates with a dualism reflecting its ambitions to take the pulse of Gandhi's contested legacy.

Its kaleidoscopic perspective seems to embody the spirit of the Hindi word gul - used to describe yesterday and tomorrow. In Kremmer's view, 'to tell the Indian story you have to take the long view. It's only when you look at the state of the country in 1947 and then look at what it is in 2007, you see the enormous achievements that it has made'.

Kremmer says he's not suggesting that the country 'is going to walk away from its enormously contested history into some IT nirvana'. The western perspective on India is either 'frivolous or depressing - that it's a thrusting economy, or mired in immoveable prejudice, violence and poverty'.

'There's no way I want to whitewash India,' he says. 'India is going to have entrenched poverty a century from now. But you can't get past the fact that the Indian Renaissance is the single most important geopolitical development since the rise of Europe and America. It's on that scale. In the next 10 years alone, 15 million jobs are estimated to go to India from western economies, and that's a conservative estimate. They're going to change our lives in this century, and before that happens we need to get an idea about their culture, their religion, their history, why they are the way they are.'

For much of his life Kremmer has been on a mission to understand Asia's intricate history and unravel its forgotten stories. He wrote The Carpet Wars and The Bamboo Palace, his definitive book about the fate of Laos' royal family, while living in India, where he admits that for much of the time he tried to wall himself off from its complexities: 'I had this overwhelming image of India as a dysfunctional anarchy.'

But along with the privileges of marrying into Delhi's distinguished Bahadur clan - in the process acquiring celebrated cookery writer and actress Madhur Jaffrey as an aunt-in-law - was the obligation to come to terms with the contradictory political beliefs within his new Hindu family. 'I was having a very bad experience of Hindu nationalism at that time, and yet my father-in-law voted for them. I had no option but to listen rather than judge.'

Indeed, part of what drives his narrative is the quest to look deep into the nature of the often violent Hindu nationalism that coloured his early experiences of India, and dominated headlines in the 90s.

'I saw it as very important, because the way India went through that is actually a model of how a good democracy, a good republic, can act as a clearing house for these issues. And I think India has succeeded because the Indian conversation is inherently democratic, from every family right up to the highest levels of power.'

In many ways, he says, the Indian experience in recent years dramatically illustrates the challenges faced by the rest of the world in an era of nationalism, where religion is often used as a mask for national political ambitions. 'From al-Qaeda through to the Balkans, you have this fraudulent politics of religion, which falsely suggests that religion is dominant in all our personalities and in all our lives. But it was only by experiencing those things on the ground in India that I could come to a genuine appreciation of the society which, perhaps more than any other, faced such a direct challenge from sectarian politics, and absorbed it in a way that didn't lead to a civil war.'

Yet what makes Inhaling the Mahatma so compelling is his wry account of his seduction by what he calls India's 'contagious spirituality' and his gradual realisation that India's chaos 'is actually the flip side of its openness and tolerance'.

'Ultimately, what India taught me is that which is encapsulated in the words of Gandhi [which form the book's epigraph], 'that one has to dare to believe' - that it takes courage to actually believe in anything, that doubt can sometimes just be a form of cowardice. And I would say to people, one must dare to believe in India itself, because we could spend this whole century dwelling on India's inadequacies, and fail to understand its successes.'