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While everyone raves about the Taj, how many people have heard about Vijayanagara?

I have a feeling that we are all going to be sick of Clintoniana by the time this column appears. We will know the American president's views on everything from nuclear arms to the Taj Mahal and if anyone expresses scepticism about his seeming omniscience, his publicists will rush to inform us how well he has trained for this five-day Bharat darshan, the books and papers he has absorbed before coming here and so on.

Having already got an early dose of all this, I ventured to ask just what book it was that President Clinton had been prescribed. The answer was Stanley Wolpert's A Brief History of India. This, to be honest, might not have been the best thing to read. I won't quibble with Wolpert's academic qualifications which are undoubtedly formidable. Nor do I hesitate because he has a reputation for a slight pro-Pakistan bias (natural in a biographer of Mohammed Ali Jinnah). It is good for us to see ourselves from another perspective.

No, my chief objection to Wolpert's books, all that I have read, is that he tends to drag a bit. I get the impression (purely subjective) that he begins well but ends by getting a bit bored with his work. So, had I been asked to recommend a work, what might I have chosen? One of the first that comes to mind is India: A Nation In Turmoil by R Gopal Krishnan (RGK for short). Not because it is complimentary about India (he is, if anything, far harsher than Wolpert) but because it is both interesting and readable.

Let me confess to a bias at this point: RGK is, like me, a journalist and a man from my own neck of the woods -- Cochin in Kerala. I make this admission openly because it is also, to my mind, one of the strong points about the book. Most books about India are written by people from North India or by men who think they know India after visiting the North alone. Even the history books are written from this perspective.

Come to think of it, how many times have you read that Mohammed Ghori conquered India after defeating Prithviraj Chauhan? But the fact is that the battle at Tarain settled the fate of nothing more than Delhi and the Punjab. And while everyone raves about the Taj and insist on every foreign dignitary visiting a tomb, how many people have heard about Vijayanagara? (It has been ignored to such an extent that one exasperated historian called his book on the subject The Forgotten Empire.)

RGK's book offers a South Indian's perspective of India, but a South Indian who has spent a substantial part of his life in other parts of the country and has been enriched by the exposure. Those experiences have not, however, mellowed him so much that he becomes mushy. RGK is perfectly capable of calling a spade a spade, or even a bloody shovel if need be.

On the vexed issue of language, RGK damns the North Indian lobby for trying to push Hindi down South India's throat. In almost the same breath he damns those who think that English must be retained as a link. His language of choice would be Sanskrit, though he sadly notes that English has replaced the most ancient of languages as the devabhasha of our day.

RGK doesn't stick to the tried and tested themes of language politics. He points out that discrimination extends to other fields as well. There are, he points out, very few Hindustani musicians who display any kind of respect for Carnatic music. And, he continues, aren't even those names a display of bias? If Hindustan is synonymous with India, why is only the music of North India referred to as Hindustani? Is Carnatic music somehow an alien body of work?

RGK also picked up on the implicit racism of Delhi-based journalists when Deve Gowda became prime minister soon after Narasimha Rao. He noted that many reporters commented that the lungi brigade had taken over. But no South Indian had ever said anything silly about a kurta-pyjama platoon in all the long years when South Indiašs interests were routinely ignored.

There is much more of course, including some brilliant work on water and environmental issues which should be made mandatory reading for all politicians. I do not agree with everything that RGK has written, but it was provocative in the best sense of the word. His book has forced me to think. When it comes to documented history of the last fifty years, there are few better books.

T V R Shenoy