"It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a depressive's exaggeration, or a far-away colonial's exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts - of law and freedom and wide human association - which give men self-awareness and strength, the accidents which have brought us to the point where we can in a way meet William Howard Russell, even in those 'impressions made on my senses by the externals of things', not with equality - time cannot be bent in that way - but with something like lucidity."
"To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside saw the one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community, every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups."
"Always in India this feeling of a crowd, of vehicles and services stretched to their limit: the trains and the aeroplanes never frequent enough, the roads never wide enough, always needing two or three or four more lanes. The overloaded trucks were often as close together as the wagons of a goods train; and sometimes - it seemed to depend on the mood or local need of drivers - cars and carts came in the wrong direction. Hooters and horns, from scooters and cars and trucks, sounded all the time, seldom angrily. The effect was more that of celebration, as with a wedding procession."
"The idea of an Indian community - in effect, a continental idea of our Indian identity - made sense only when the community was very small, a minority, and isolated."
"Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege."
"To be tormented by a mother-in-law was part of a woman's testing, part, almost, of growing up."
"He said that the love of the communal life stemmed from the life in the joint or extended family: that was full of life, of a constant crowd, and shifting, passionate relationships between the various groups or sections of an extended family."
"What keeps haunting me all the time is the feeling that I am doomed to rise no more than I have risen, Even in this job I have been like a ship's ladder. The sea rises, the ship rises, and the ladder rises with it. But the ladder cannot rise on its own. I cannot be independent of my employer and rise in life."
"To read of events in India before the coming of the British is like reading of many pieces of unfinished business; it is to read of a condition of flux, of things partly done and then partly undone, matters more properly the subject of annals rather than narrative history, which works best when it deals with great things being built up or pulled down."
"Hindu parents were not supposed to question what was being done to their daughters after they had been married. It wasn't that they didn't know; they were not supposed to question. They would, nowadays."
"The poison of the cobra is in his tongue alone. The poison of the brahmin is from head to foot."
"The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. And - though the circumstances were fortuitous - when the British ceased to rule, the city began to die."
"... he said the way he saw professional qualifications was like this: B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. - Bullshit, More Shit, and Piled High and Deep."
"In India, where most people lived in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs - air, water, space for stretching out - but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as maker or doers."
"In India, the beggars asked for small change. In Pakistan, they asked for a rupee."
