Some thoughts on India

Some thoughts on British India from the book 'White Mughals' by William Dalrymple

So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign invaders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed. The Great Mughals, as one historian memorably observed, arrived in India from central Asia in the 16th century as ‘ruddy men in boots’; they left it 4 centuries later ‘pale persons in petticoats’.
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At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the 18th century british of the India idea of cleaning hair with materials other than soap.
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Deferential and enquiring the British might have been, but according to Abdul Lateef they had a lot to learn from the Persians in terms of personal hygiene, as well as in matters of high culture. Shustari was particularly horrified by what the British did to their hair, ‘shaving their beards, twisting their hair into pony-tails, and worst of all, using a white powder to make their hair look white.’ Not content with these enormities, ‘neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state’.
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And now some, more contemporary thoughts on India

The respected Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that while he had ‘understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time’, he ‘came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago’. As his taxi crawled through the streets, he saw around him ‘people eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People. People. People.’
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In India you do not cast your vote; you vote your caste – V. N. Gadgil, Congress politician, 1995