India: A Portrait - An Intimate Biography of 1.2 Billion People by Patrick French Allen Lane, HK$375
'He is a strange and charming creature ... I don't feel at all certain what feelings there are in his odd Indian head,' John Maynard Keynes wrote about his passion for an Indian lover at Cambridge, Bimla Sarkar, in a letter to another male lover, painter Duncan Grant.
Though said in the context of his longing for the exotic Sarkar, the words of Keynes - whose first book was titled Indian Currency and Finance - in a way encapsulate the enduring intellectual pursuit of British scholars to get into the alien Indian mind, an attraction once fashioned by colonial curiosity and now driven by nostalgia.
For Patrick French, who comes from this long line of Brit Indophiles, there's more to it than a gratifying connection to past glory. Understanding how India works gives him a handle on the future.
With its overlap of extreme wealth and poverty, educated and the ignorant, kindness and cruelty, competing ideologies and the rapid social change, India 'may be the world's default setting for the future', writes French in his new book India: A Portrait - An Intimate Biography of 1.2 billion People.
A Portrait is a breathless account of a nation on the move, as the clich?about India goes these days. To understand just where it is going, French puts today's India into perspective with a whistle-stop account of the country's post-independence politics, the statist philosophy that dictated its economy for most of this period, and a vivid study of the underpinnings of Indian society, which even as it changes at some levels remains rooted in a distant past.