While everyone raves about the Taj, how many people have heard about Vijayanagara?
I have a feeling that we are all going to be sick of Clintoniana by the time this column appears. We will know the American president’s views on everything from nuclear arms to the Taj Mahal and if anyone expresses scepticism about his seeming omniscience, his publicists will rush to inform us how well he has trained for this five-day Bharat darshan, the books and papers he has absorbed before coming here and so on. Having already got an early dose of all this, I ventured to ask just what book it was that President Clinton had been prescribed. The answer was Stanley Wolpert’s A Brief History of India. This, to be honest, might not have been the best thing to read. I won’t quibble with Wolpert’s academic qualifications which are undoubtedly formidable. Nor do I hesitate because he has a reputation for a slight pro-Pakistan bias (natural in a biographer of Mohammed Ali Jinnah). It is good for us to see ourselves from another perspective. No, my chief objection to Wolpert’s books, all tha
