He hasn’t written about the country a great deal, but Dalrymple appears to have made quite a few visits to India. On a recent trip he saw undeniable progress in Calcutta, and writes, in the new edition of the New English Review, of the inevitable nostalgia that even positive change produces:
A difficult lesson to learn and to accept, emotionally if not intellectually, is that there is rarely gain in society entirely without loss. That is surely one of the reasons why nostalgia is so common a response to the passage of time: it is not only lost youth that is regretted, but a lost world, at least in some or other of its aspects.
That was an absolutely beautiful article.
I’m Jewish so the bit in it about India’s former Jewish community was facinating for me.
Thank you