This week, I’m reading Indian. History: David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. It’s extraordinarily well-written and full of answers to questions that you didn’t know you had. I had never heard of Haileybury, for example. That was the training school that the East India Company set up in 1806; it ran for about fifty years, before the merit system was introduced. Fiction: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This lively novel, centtered on a policeman in Mumbai, Sartaj Singh, is studded with local dialect; happily, there is a glossary. I haven’t got very far. Backround: Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide, India. It’s very fat, but then the usual DK guide covers a single city, not a massive subcontinent. I’ve also got a map of Mumbai, largely to help me navigate what I can see at Google Maps.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ On the Road Again.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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