The Holder of the World Quotes

“If all is equal in the eye of Brahma as the Hindus say, if Allah is all-seeing and all merciful as you say, then who has committed atrocities on the children, the women, the old people? Who has poisoned the hearts of men?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Duty! Duty, judgement! I have heard enough of duty. And of judgement. You cloak your lust for vengeance and for gold and diamonds in the noble words of duty and judgement and protection and sacrifice. But it is the weakest and the poorest and the most innocent who suffer, who sacrifice, whose every minute of every day is obedience to duty.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“The blame lies with anyone who confuses protection with power.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“She finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he’s allowed to play a note. It’s not just the reaction that says How dare you know? It’s something deeper: How dare you presume to say you know?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“He understood something about firangi arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn’t think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the “Zentoos,” meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“It would seem that Gabriel enjoyed the favours a white man felt his due in an Asian culture. Where he traveled, he planted his seed.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“You set aggressive men on a course of unstructured competition, and they soon become desperate men in unscrupulous battle.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“What we’re seeing is progressive derangement. God-fearing, land-starved, profit-seeking Welsh and English and Scottish and Irish second sons, jilted by primogeniture, sexually repressed , passion denying, furtively engaging the favours of native women, girls, and boys, all unfolding in the midst of septic heat, rain, disease, squalor, and savage beasts, while being waited on, cooked for, fanned, massaged by servants a thousand times more loyal, submissive, and poorly paid than any in the world, in the middle of the biggest real estate boom, jewel auction and drug emporium of the past five hundred years. No wonder they went a little crazy.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Money: hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money. Finger-to-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-pieces-of-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writers, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers, saviours, visionaries, criminals; all in pursuit of money, money, money.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“They had not come to India in order to breed and colonize, or even to convert. They were here to plunder, to enrich themselves.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“I know the heart of womenkind, and none do willingly yield their lives.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“If God can speak through a bee sting, why cannot He speak through the ghost of life-loving Rebecca?”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“My life has gotten just a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just discontinuous overload.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Self-pity, unaccountability and hypocrisy were recast as virtues and renamed forgiveness, solidarity and tolerance.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Whose victory? What led to battle?
But Mr. Abraham forecloses on questions. “These people used to build them all the time only.”
These people?
Meaning Muslims and Hindus. Meaning heathens. Mr. Abraham, Christian child of a different intrusion, draws me with a new alacrity toward the cemetery crammed with sunken tombstones.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World

“Time will become as famous as place. There will be time-tourists sitting around saying, “Yeah, but have you ever been to April fourth? Man!”
My life has gotten just a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just discontinuous overload.”
― Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World