India is a land of extremes. It has shed its traditional image to become a world superpower and embraced the latest technology while retaining ancient religious practices, and now gleaming skyscrapers form the backdrop to squalid shanty towns.

In Vishnu's Crowded Temple, Maria Misra presents a radical new interpretation of India's history since the 1857 rebellion. She shows how India's old philosophies of hierarchy and privilege coexist with modern concepts of equality and democracy, and she dissects the attempts of others to deal with these contradictions - from the baroque fantasies of the British Raj to the traditional ideals of Gandhi, and from Nehru's planned paradise to the cyber world of the nation's new business elite. Told with wit and penetrating intelligence, this is the extraordinary history of the curious collision between ancient culture, colonialism and modernity that has formed today's India.

Content - List of Illustrations, Acknowledgements, Maps, Introduction,      1 Tropical Gothic, 2 Babel-Mahal, 3 Far Pavilions, 4 Spinning the Nation,  5 A House Divided, 6 The Last Viceroy, 7 Flames, 8 Levelling the Temple, Epilogue, or Divine Developments, Glossary, Sources and Bibliography,  Index