Background

India defeats most of those who try either to understand or to change it. Part of the difficulty of trying to understand it is the legacy of past writing. The more you read, the more you must doubt the very possibility of taking a genuinely objective view of the country. There is a curious unchangingness about the sub-continent; even visually it seems to look as it has always been portrayed. The eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings of Daniell or Chinnery convey impressions of an India almost completely familiar to one who comes to it a hundred or more years later. Does it really change so little? Or are our perceptions conditioned? Such questions come particularly to mind in relation to India’s population. Consider the following quotation:

Before I quit the subject of

Delhi

, I will answer by anticipation a question which I am sensible you wish to ask, namely, what is the extent of the population of that city, and the number of its respectable inhabitants, as compared with the capital of

France

? When I consider that

Paris

consists of three or four cities piled upon one another, all of them containing numerous apartments, filled, for the most part, from top to bottom; that the streets are thronged with men and women, on foot and horseback; with carts, chaises, and coaches; and that there are very few large squares, courts, or gardens; reflecting, I say, upon all these facts,

Paris

appears to me the nursery of the world, and I can scarcely persuade myself that

Delhi

contains an equal number of people.