The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters

by William Dalrymple

Winter wheat gives way to drooping sunflowers; dust-devils circle; melon beds tangle amid the sand-flats of the scrub. Turning right off the tarmac road and across a level crossing, you pass for miles and miles along narrowing dirt tracks. The settlements grow poorer; the camel thorn closes in. The colour drains away, but for the odd flash of red sari as a woman winds her way to a well.

As the Moghul Emperor Babur noted in his diary soon after he had conquered the subcontinent in the early sixteenth century, ‘In India everything is done differently from the rest of the world. Nothing will ever change this.’ India will choose what it wants from the rest of the world; but its unique and deeply conservative culture is not going to go down without a struggle.

Check out this quote.