India - The Sunday Times World Library

India - The Sunday Times World Library (1963) by Joe David Brown – The Sunday Times
ISBN: None
Condition: Good

India, 1963. A country of staggering scale, ancient civilisations, enormous cities, remote villages, newly built industries, crowded railways, sacred rivers, political ambition and enough history to make most national timelines look suspiciously underdeveloped.

Published by The Sunday Times as part of its World Library series, Joe David Brown’s India sets out to explain one of the largest, most populous and most culturally complicated countries on Earth in one substantial illustrated volume.

Which is optimistic.

But admirably so.

This is India only sixteen years after independence from British rule in 1947.

The scars of Partition were still recent.

Millions of people had been displaced.

India and Pakistan had already fought over Kashmir.

Jawaharlal Nehru was still Prime Minister.

And the country was engaged in one of the most ambitious nation-building projects of the twentieth century.

The task was not exactly modest.

A vast population.

Hundreds of languages and dialects.

Deep religious diversity.

Enormous regional differences.

Poverty on a scale difficult for many Western readers to comprehend.

And, on top of all that, the requirement to make parliamentary democracy work across the whole thing.

Most committees struggle to organise refreshments.

India organised elections involving hundreds of millions of people.

By 1963, the young republic had already committed itself to economic planning, major industrial development, scientific education and huge infrastructure projects.

Steel mills were built.

Dams rose across rivers.

Universities expanded.

New factories appeared.

And Nehru famously regarded large dams and industrial projects as symbols of modern India.

This naturally delighted mid-century photographers.

Nothing said “progress” quite like concrete.

Preferably lots of concrete.

With a tiny human being standing beside it for scale.

India in the early 1960s was balancing tradition and modernity in a particularly dramatic way.

You might find a bullock cart travelling along a road towards a brand-new industrial plant.

A village following agricultural rhythms that had existed for generations while, elsewhere, Indian scientists were developing nuclear research and space ambitions.

Temples thousands of years old stood within growing modern cities.

The old and the new were not replacing one another neatly.

They were simply carrying on simultaneously.

This is one of the reasons the photographs in a book like this are so fascinating today.

What was ordinary in 1963 has become historical.

Cars.

Buses.

Trains.

Shop signs.

Clothing.

Street markets.

Factories.

Office interiors.

Even an unremarkable railway platform can now absorb several minutes of careful inspection.

Vintage books perform this trick wonderfully.

The publisher carefully photographs the Taj Mahal.

Sixty years later somebody is studying the taxi parked beside it.

The Taj Mahal, after all, is still there.

The taxi probably isn’t.

Delhi provides one of the great contrasts.

Old Delhi, with its tangled streets, markets and Mughal architecture, existed alongside New Delhi, the imperial administrative capital designed during British rule and inherited by the independent state.

Few cities offer a more literal demonstration of history piling itself on top of history.

Empires arrive.

Empires depart.

Government offices remain inconveniently large.

Then there is Bombay—today Mumbai—already one of India’s great commercial cities.

Calcutta, now Kolkata, remained a major cultural and industrial centre.

Madras, now Chennai, represented another important regional world entirely.

The modern reader is therefore immediately reminded that even the names on the map have changed.

This was India before Gurgaon became Gurugram.

Before Bangalore became Bengaluru.

Before Bombay became Mumbai.

Before many of the modern skylines existed.

If you enjoy old maps, there is plenty here to keep you occupied.

The railways naturally deserve attention.

India inherited one of the world’s largest railway systems from the British and proceeded to make it even more central to national life.

For a country of such enormous distances, trains were—and remain—indispensable.

In 1963, railway travel could involve steam locomotives, crowded platforms, long-distance journeys and the sort of luggage arrangements that suggest the phrase “travelling light” had not yet been universally embraced.

From the perspective of British railway history, there is also something faintly ironic about the scale.

Britain built much of India’s railway system during the imperial period.

India kept a vast national railway.

Britain later spent several decades arguing about its own.

History has a sense of humour.

Religion and spirituality naturally form another huge part of the picture.

Hinduism.

Islam.

Sikhism.

Christianity.

Buddhism.

Jainism.

And numerous local traditions.

India’s religious landscape is so complex that any sentence beginning “Indians believe...” should immediately be treated with suspicion.

The diversity is immense.

Pilgrimage sites, festivals, temples, mosques, shrines and rituals appear throughout Indian life, and the Time-Life-style photographic approach to such subjects was inevitably irresistible.

The River Ganges—or Ganga—occupies a special place.

To millions of Hindus it is sacred.

To geographers it is one of the great river systems of Asia.

To engineers it is water, irrigation and power.

To photographers it is almost impossible to point a camera at without producing something dramatic.

India has many such places where geography, religion and history refuse to remain separate.

Varanasi is a city.

It is also a pilgrimage centre.

It is also one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements.

And it is also somewhere that has caused generations of foreign writers to reach desperately for adjectives.

The Taj Mahal presents a similar problem.

It is so famous that describing it without sounding like a tourist brochure becomes almost impossible.

White marble.

Perfect symmetry.

Mughal architecture.

One of the world’s most recognisable buildings.

And proof that grief, sufficient wealth and an enormous workforce can result in something more durable than most modern property developments.

Agriculture dominates much of the book because agriculture dominated the lives of most Indians.

In the early 1960s India was still overwhelmingly rural.

Millions of people depended directly on farming.

Monsoon rains could determine prosperity or hardship.

Food production was a major political concern.

The Green Revolution, which would dramatically increase agricultural productivity in parts of India, was only just beginning to take shape.

So this is a country on the edge of another enormous transformation.

Again, there is no hindsight.

The book cannot tell you which agricultural programmes will succeed.

It cannot skip forward to India’s later economic liberalisation.

It cannot mention the software industry, outsourced call centres or Bangalore becoming internationally synonymous with technology.

None of that has happened yet.

This is India before the next sixty years.

And that makes the book considerably more interesting now than when it was simply current.

The political background is equally fascinating.

Nehru’s India pursued a policy of non-alignment during the Cold War, attempting not to become simply another piece on either the American or Soviet side of the global chessboard.

That did not mean international politics left India alone.

In 1962, only the year before this book appeared, India had fought a brief but serious border war with China.

So the country’s strategic position in 1963 was far from settled.

Pakistan remained a major rival.

China had demonstrated the seriousness of disputed Himalayan borders.

The United States and Soviet Union were both interested in India’s direction.

And India itself was determined to remain independent of the major Cold War blocs.

It was geopolitics conducted on a very large map.

The cultural material is equally rich.

Dance.

Music.

Cinema.

Literature.

Architecture.

Textiles.

Crafts.

And regional traditions differing enormously from one part of the country to another.

Indian cinema was already a huge industry by the early 1960s, although the international shorthand “Bollywood” had not yet come to dominate foreign perceptions.

Indian films had stars, songs, spectacle and audiences counted in millions long before streaming services decided subtitles were fashionable.

Food, meanwhile, deserves an entire library of its own.

Calling something “Indian food” is a little like calling all European cuisine “European food”.

The difference between dishes from Punjab, Bengal, Gujarat, Kerala, Tamil Nadu or Hyderabad can be enormous.

Rice in one region.

Wheat in another.

Vegetarian traditions.

Seafood.

Meat dishes.

Spices used in radically different ways.

Regional breads.

Sweets.

Pickles.

And enough variation to make the average British 1960s understanding of “curry” look somewhat heroic.

Naturally, British readers of 1963 were increasingly encountering Indian food through migration and changing post-war society.

The relationship between Britain and India was itself being transformed.

Britain had ruled India within living memory.

Now India was independent, and migration from the subcontinent was reshaping British cities.

That makes a British-published volume from this period especially interesting.

It sits at the point where India was moving from being viewed primarily through the imperial past towards being understood as a major independent country in its own right.

Old habits of description did not vanish overnight.

Books from this period therefore reveal not only India, but also how Britain was learning to talk about India after empire.

That historical perspective can be as revealing as the subject itself.

Joe David Brown brings the confident explanatory style expected of the Sunday Times World Library.

The world is complicated.

The editor has allocated a volume.

Everything will therefore be fine.

There is something rather wonderful about old reference publishing.

No scrolling.

No algorithm.

No “related content”.

No advert suddenly appearing between two paragraphs about the Mughal Empire.

If you want to know what happens next, you turn the page.

And, astonishingly, the page remains exactly where it was left.

Battery life is effectively unlimited.

The book itself also belongs to the era when owning reference works was a visible sign of seriousness.

A shelf containing India, Germany, Mexico, Italy and Britain creates the impression that the owner has thoroughly investigated civilisation.

Nobody can see how many pages you actually read.

This is one of the advantages of physical books.

A globe helps.

A slightly worn leather chair improves the effect further.

For today’s reader, India operates on several levels at once: Indian history, decolonisation, post-war politics, geography, religion, social history and vintage photography.

It captures a country shortly after independence, before the huge population growth, urbanisation, economic liberalisation and technological development that would reshape modern India.

Many of the cities pictured here are now vastly larger.

Roads have changed.

Industries have changed.

Political figures have come and gone.

Modern India has become a major global economic and technological power.

Yet ancient temples remain.

Pilgrims still travel.

Monsoons still matter.

And trains still move enormous numbers of people across distances that make British railway journeys look rather modest.

Obviously, this is not a modern guide to India.

Do not rely on it for visa information.

Do not assume hotel recommendations survive.

Do not quote its population figures as current.

And if it tells you somewhere is a quiet town, perhaps check a recent satellite image before booking.

But as a portrait of India at the beginning of the 1960s, it is superbly evocative.

Condition: Good. A vintage copy showing the normal signs of age and previous ownership expected from a book published in 1963, but remaining in good overall condition and perfectly suitable for reading, collecting or displaying somewhere prominent while giving the impression that you intend to spend the evening considering post-colonial economic development.

A fascinating addition to a collection of Indian history, British Empire and Commonwealth material, vintage geography, Sunday Times World Library volumes, Asian history or mid-century photography.

Also ideal for anyone wishing to cross the Indian subcontinent without vaccinations, visas, delayed trains or discovering that the phrase “just down the road” apparently means another 180 miles.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where the Raj is over, the maps are ageing gracefully, and the only thing overcrowded is probably the bookshelf.

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