In many ways, the India of today bears a strong resemblance to the condition of Britain in the early nineteenth century, when the rising imperial power, whose reputation abroad struck awe into lesser peoples, had, at home, set in movement great rural-urban migrations, evicting people in large numbers from settled ways of life and sending them to fetid city slums, there to make their own accommodation with the forces of capital. At that time, too, Britain had seen the growth of an assertive middle class, which also demanded its place in the sun. So India today is represented, not by its excluded and impoverished majority, but by the showy lifestyle of a middle class which fills the malls and hypermarkets of the cities, seeking the meaning of life in a technology of its own creation. And beneath the hymns of praise to commodities, the voice of the dispossessed has been stilled, as the unemployed noiselessly sweep the fallen bougainvillea blossoms from the terrace, self-effacingly serve whisky and cocktails, silently swab marble floors, quietly open doors and unsmilingly sit behind the wheel of cars, conveying their betters to the superior destinations of power.