India is always the elephant, you know, moving slowly. They’re educating their people much better. So there are these two models of development, and at the moment the Chinese are pulling ahead. But there’s a much smaller proportion of the population who are doing this.

India is a culture in which huge swathes of the workforce are illiterate and so on, yet you’ve got this small, super-clever, over-well-educated, incredibly ambitious middle class who are doing the pernickety bits – the software, the fancy finance, the high-value stuff. The Chinese model is, in a sense, a sort of mass manufacturing – everyone’s making car parks and industrial things. Well, he makes comparison with China, where there is a completely different model of development. He touches on the IT explosion in India, but he’s not convinced it’s the answer to all their problems, is that right? I don’t really understand money but he explained it to me most lucidly, more so than any other book. Luce was the Financial Times correspondent, married to an Indian, and really got under the skin of the place, really travelled. If there is a businessman going to India who wants to get a hang of the economics of the country in an accessible form, this is the book, no question. Like Partition, this story has been much told, but Edward Luce’s account is authoritative, balanced, sensible and enjoyable. The next book you’ve recommended is based more recently, Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods. For a woman who was, what, two years out of college, it’s an enormous achievement.

Although you are obviously dealing with an epic turning-point in history, the path to it is so tortuous it doesn’t naturally lend itself to narrative history, yet she’s managed to do it. There were long periods of meetings, missions … it makes for quite clumpy reading. Most of the books on Partition are pretty heavy going. So Tunzleman tells her narrative history by foregrounding the personalities of the people involved.Įxactly. It’s not terribly clear whether their love was consummated at the time, although most people tend to believe that it probably was consummated at some point later. To have it ending with India’s first independent prime minister falling in love with the wife of the last viceroy – it’s an utterly amazing and extraordinary story. Because she does two things at once: she’s telling the love story of Mountbatten and Nehru – this extraordinary love triangle at the close of British India – and the extraordinary end to 300 years of what was often extremely violent imperial conquest. She certainly didn’t get her hands on the material she would most have liked, the love letters between Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. I don’t think she had particular access to any brand-new material. Many people have tried to tell it before, but this is far and away the best book I’ve read on Partition. Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire Foreign Policy & International Relations.

William dalrymple books in hindi