A historical perspective of India

Excerpts from what promises to be a brilliant book by Ramachandran Guha.
The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got:

The hoary old man of lucent ken
Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.
'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edifice
Because of which there is colour in life; He
Would not like it to perish and fall.'


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