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“... Strachey argued that the Raj was bad for Britain and the British. In Inglorious Empire, Shashi Tharoor argues, with equal passion, that it was much worse for India and the Indians. In 1700, when the British were mere traders clinging on to a few coastal toeholds, the Emperor Aurangzeb ruled over a country that accounted for a quarter of the ...”

“... it needs at the very least to get rid of its dynasty. The magic has gone. But are modernisers like Shashi Tharoor and others capable of formulating a different vision for India? At the moment it looks unlikely. Elsewhere regional parties continue to rule the roost. In three Indian states – Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad – parties built by popular ...”

“... and religious questions that it raises are given new, contemporary meanings. In 1989, the diplomat Shashi Tharoor retold the Mahabharata as The Great Indian Novel, in which the heroes are recast as thinly veiled forms of Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and others. (The hero Karna, who, in the Sanskrit version, slices off the armour that grows on his body and ...”

“... made when asked what he thought of Western civilisation: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ Shashi Tharoor is having a dig at historicism when he says, in The Great Indian Novel, ‘India is not an underdeveloped country. It is a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay.’) Chakrabarty has given us a vocabulary with which to speak of ...”