After a 15-year effort, a French teampresents exotic treasures hidden in palaces.

By Madhu Jain

Photographs: ANNE GARDE
Text: SYLVIE RAULET
PHILLIP WILSON/TIMELESS BOOKS
PAGES: 295/PRICE: Rs 3,000

At first glance this may look like yet another coffee-table book about the India of maharajas: wide-eyed, star-struck and all gloss and glitter. But this is a crafty look at the foibles and extravagant whims of the erstwhile rulers which can be seen in both the architecture of their palaces as well as what lies within them.

What Anne Garde and Sylvie Raulet have focused upon are the attempts by the latter-day Kubla Khans to recreate bits of Europe in their palaces -- best exemplified by the Kapurthala palace, a Versailles clone on a smaller scale. In 1902, the Maharaja of Kapurthala gave his civil engineer photographs of the Versailles palace and asked him to replicate it, right down to the gargoyles.

Some of the maharajas, like the one at Kapurthala, had exquisite taste (Sevres porcelain, Gobelins tapestries, the finest crystal). Yeswant Rao Holkar of Indore brought in Bauhaus aesthetics and even works of modern artists like Brancusi and Duchamp. But many of them, as the available-light photographs show, had execrable taste. Kitsch is the most polite word to describe them. Like Ali Baba's caves, some of the palaces were like warehouses with the downright ugly next to the sublimely aesthetic. An example of a kitsch heaven on earth is the bed made for the Maharaja of Bahawalpur: a watercolour by Christofle has four "life-size bronze figures painted in flesh colours" on each corner of the bed; and as the maharaja stipulated, each one of them represents a different type -- Spanish, Italian, Parisian and Greek. The bed had a music box with eight tunes.

What also makes this book different, other than the obvious fact that it is royal India seen through a French lens, is, of course, the accounts of the country it carries. Rousselet's observations in L'Inde des Rajahs in 1870 are perceptive. "Generally these wonders are piled up indiscriminately ... the owner regards them simply as a collection of valuable curiosities calculated to give visitors from the provinces an exalted idea of his position, while he himself is happy to use a nice Indian bedroom in the corner of his palace."

However, it's the raison d'être of the book which may account for its deliciously ironic look at the India of the maharajas. Cristalleries Baccarat was among those who helped finance the project of tracking European taste. Hence, the zooming in on the fabulous crystal found in the palaces. The maharajas' fixation for jewellery, getting their fabulous gems reset by Cartier, is also brought out well.

Garde's photographs are superb, the long hard years of work show, making this book as revealing as it is beautiful.

BOOKS: TECHNOBRAT
Techno-babble

A weak attempt at scanning the lingo of IIT graduates.

By Arnab Neil Sengupta

By RUKNMINI BHAYA NAIR with RAMNIK BAJAJ and A MEATTLE
HARPERCOLLINS
PAGES: 313/PRICE: Rs 395

Until the MBA arrived on the scene, the IIT graduate was king. From the day he or she cracked the joint entrance exam, the IIT student commanded the awe of neighbours and close relatives. A degree from one of the five IITs was the passport to a well-paying job, great prospects abroad and, for some, a decent dowry to boot. IIT students had, meanwhile, also developed their own special culture, complete with lingo and attitude, which they passed down.

Technobrat is an attempt to "hold a mirror up to the hidden nature of the engineer". The results are mixed. True, the success stories of IIT graduates are legion and they now constitute the cream of the Indian diaspora, but isn't it rather late in the day to home in on the peculiarities of decades-old IIT culture?

There is no denying that the book marks a courageous, possibly first attempt, to put the IIT student under a psychological microscope. But not many alumni would agree that the IIT under-graduate mindset suddenly merits a serious psychological study let alone an interactive one. The results, whatever their worth to students of sociology, are unlikely to impress lay readers .

What Technobrat lacks is a clear focus. Which is only to be expected from any starry-eyed attempt at seeking answers to such profound topics from among a mass of ambition-filled, hormone-drenched undergraduates, who find little time to read anything beyond Popov's Strength of Materials .

Nair has chosen the words Tvashtri and Ribhu to describe IIT students both of which refer to the Rig Veda gods of skill and craftsmanship. The irony is, few aspire to labels. The interesting story of the modern IITian really begins with his graduation from the institute -- when he either goes on to found the Spic-Macay or become the CEO of Mckinsey & Co. Technobrat stops just before that.

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