This is probably a more critical question for the near future than the one Jaffrelot poses for India. In fact, a surprising omission from a seminar on patterns of Indian and Chinese consumption, at least in the humble view of this reader, is a paper comparing Indian and Chinese consumption trends. Is there a likely political crisis in China’s communists tamping down on mass consumption? That’s something Jaffrelot’s first-rate research can perhaps address.

March Past
The story of the Archaeological Survey of India’s early years is only beginning to be told in all its human and intellectual drama. This lavish coffee-table book (A Vision of Splendour by Gerda Theuns-de Boer, Mapin) picks up the task through the career of Jean Philippe Vogel, a Dutch scholar who joined the ASI in 1901 as the superintendent for the Punjab, Baluchistan and Ajmer Circle. The book tracks his travels around the country for a decade, and especially riveting are the accounts of his excavations, most notably of the Buddhist Gandhara sites.
But what makes the book come alive are over a hundred old photographs of the ASI (above, Jama Masjid, Agra) from the Kern Institute in Leiden in the Netherlands. As the author ties up Vogel’s work with that of men like John Marshall, it emphasises the often little acknowledged contribution of Indians of the early ASI. A lovely book that explains a little more of how India found itself.