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In Spite of the Gods

The Strange Rise of Modern India
1. GLOBAL AND MEDIEVAL
India’s Schizophrenic Economy


Its stupendous population consists of farm laborers. India is one vast farm—one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. Think of the above facts: and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897 (1)


It took a long time. But finally in the late 1990s India started to build roads that could get you from A to B at something better than a canter. Until then, India’s most significant highway was the Grand Trunk Road that bisects the country from north to south. Laid at various stages by the late medieval Mughal dynasty, then upgraded and extended by the British in the nineteenth century and popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim, most of the “GT Road,” as it is known, got acquainted with asphalt only after independence. But it is a single lane and one can rarely exceed an average of thirty miles an hour. So the relative novelty of IndiaR ... read full excerpt from In Spite of the Gods ebook