Word: maharaja
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that tests (even by today's liberal definitions) the limits of conventional fiction. Half A Life (Knopf; 211 pages), the latest hybrid, begins in colonial India with a droll anecdote. The son of a Brahmin family marries a low-caste woman and forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor landowners. Unwelcome at home and in danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring W. Somerset Maugham is impressed by this bogus act of mystical piety...
...London in the 1950s where Willie, a reluctant academic, has been sent to a second-rate college on scholarship. He is baffled by the wider world. He expected the city to have a storybook magnificence. Instead, he finds Buckingham Palace disappointing. "He thought the maharaja's palace in his own state was far grander," writes Naipaul, "and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the Kings and Queens of England were impostors." London's doors do not open easily. Attempts to contact his famous namesake are all met with the same brief note: "Dear Willie...
...count an estimated 1 billion people by hand? And more importantly, when there are some 7,000 recognized castes and 300 million deities being worshiped throughout the country, how do you know exactly who those people are? Muslim or Hindu? Eunuch or transsexual? Maharaja or beggar? Check the appropriate box on your form, please...