Over centuries, maharajas and magicians, palaces and palanquins, elephants and erotica, dynasties and deserts, temples and tigers, poetry and poverty, snake charmers and spices—all have been instantly associated with India and have been the enduring reference points for this country.
This is an extraordinary book and the author, Atul Gawande, is an extraordinary surgeon, one sensitive to pain, but more importantly, to history. In my review of one of his earlier books, Complications (a collection of essays previously published in the New Yorker), for The Book Review
Aviewing of Kailash and Manasarovar: A Quest Beyond the Himalaya quite easily leads one to agree with Deb Mukharji that of all the elements of nature, perhaps the strongest influence on the human psyche has been exercised by mountains’ (p. 34). I use the word ‘viewing’ quite deliberately because it is Mukharji’s amazing photographs that enliven his interesting text. Together, both are ample testimony of the author’s empathy for the high reaches and lonely spaces of the Himalaya. A former civil servant by profession but a mountaineer and photographer by instinct and passion, the author describes in meticulous detail the fascination of the Kailash and Manas region over millennia. Kailash, he writes, ‘is where convictions remain suspended, myths endure and sparks of understanding illuminate reason’ (p. 245).
This book is a monograph on the architecture of Centre for Development Studies designed by architect Laurie Baker. The Centre for Development Studies is regarded as a masterpiece of Laurie Baker and this book offers a documentation of the project. The project is compiled in the book in the
form of many photographs and drawings of various buildings of CDS.
Cultural contacts between India and Southeast Asia were effectively broken with the coming of colonialism to Asia. British, French and Dutch colonial ambitions divided up Southeast Asia and the administration of their areas was kept entirely separate.
The glory of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was often associated with the phrase ‘The sun never sets on the British empire’. It was a statement of pride and celebration and the book under review by leaving the second half of the phrase has raised questions about historical continuities and contemporary relations of global power.