The author’s lucid and sure hold on the storyline should appeal to many readers beyond these shores who may not be familiar with the intricacies of the constitutional crisis here in 1975 as well as to those Australians who may not have applied the same lucid critique (rather than criticism) to the earlier crisis in India the self-same year. It is worthwhile to be reminded of the deeper, subtler reasons for India’s amazing stability in the midst of crisis. In a world where diplomats seem to be falling down on the job of warning governments of rumbles at ground level far away from the urban round of National Day Receptions (Iran and Argentina spring readily to mind) it is a relief to find a high commissioner (albeit a one­time foreign correspondent and writer of some repute) clearly with sensitive antennae out, receiving correct signals from the older verities and vibrations mentally stored in long-established ‘patterns of consciousness’ in Indian civilisation. All too many journalists, especially English and American, travel through India too fast on the Bombay–New Delhi–Calcutta network, forgetting the South, which is often the tail which wags the dog despite the enormous populations of the Northern States reflected percentage-wise in the Log Sabha (the House of the People), and ready to sum up a plural society virtually of twenty-two language and cultural traditions, comprising eight of the world’s major religions, built up like sedimentary rock over at least 5,000 years of known history, in half a page of Western print. It is therefore refreshing to see the personal insights injected lightly and with deftness between the more solid reflections – and it was Gough Whitlam who despatched Bruce Grant as High Commissioner to India because of, among other qualities, his ‘contemplative cast of mind’.

From the first few pages, one is made aware that there is an unusual bent of mind at work, ready to let the feel, the Indian ‘rasa’, mood or flavour as in a juice, to colour his rational mind with the gift of intuition, a quality much prized in India’s Vedic period by those rishis who retired to the forests to think out how society should be ordered. Would that we were able as voters to enforce the same period of withdrawal upon our own politicians – to the forests of Tasmania or amid the jarrah giants of this state before they rushed into the debating chamber.

At least Bruce Grant had some inkling of why India could harness such a mature balance despite its emerging engagement in -style parliamentary democracy. The first paragraphs in his garden, his beautiful awareness of Indian light, sound, the very air, set the tone to his rapport with Indian thought. The very oldness of their civilisation, having survived so many historical vicissitudes of equally traumatic bombardment, gave Indians the chance to take the long view unlike Australians shocked by the sudden onslaughts on their own younger experiments in emerging from out of the self-same colonial clouding of constitutional issues.

To follow through the twists and turns of both protagonists seeking power could have been heavy going. Yet without seeming plan or construction, Bruce Grant takes us with clarity and disciplined development through the unfolding dramas. It is almost as though he had taken the auspicious Hindu sign of the swastika, that most Aryan of symbols seen all over India as a sign that logic is not necessarily linear or deductive like that based upon the Greek line of thought, but may be approached by the broken arms reaching out into space but bound to the central bindu or point of truth where they intersect. Truth indeed to the Indian is many-sided.

So it is that we are taken out on many side journeys into India via the Himalayan border States (and all the ins-and­outs of the Great Game of politics in relation to Big Sister to the south); via the official visit of Sir John Kerr, the first of its kind to a number of South Asian countries of an Australian ‘head of state’ (and all the niceties of the minutiae of diplomacy that incurred), a reflection on ‘how Australia was still feeling its way towards the symbols and sentiments that make up a national style, the shorthand of international relations by which countries readily recognize each other’.

The pervasive poverty of India and the material wealth of Australia, though so diagrammatically opposite, seem almost to be the obverse sides of the same coin so that with the flashes of masterly writing style and the poetic insight of this felicity, one begins to sense that both nations could play a useful and complementary part in the Indian Ocean area, something as yet not perceived by many Australians.

And then, like the pull of an angler, we are brought back to the point in question. As Grant approaches the central problems of parliamentary democracy in a complex world where, to quote an American economist – frank enough to declare the truth – ‘there aren’t any answers any more’, both the crises faced by India and Australia seem to become clearer by their very juxtaposition. For all Australians who propose to visit India (as well as politicians dealing with India), it is worth reading Chapter VI first. To understand that ‘the authority of the Hindu priest is outside the corridors of power’ is, one feels, a very perceptive understanding of what India is about at levels far away from Government in New Delhi. Brahmin morality (as apart from caste superiority) has always been above that of the raja, the warrior, even Moghul king emperors, some of whom in fact sought out the true holy men/gurus to be told the truths that court people never dared tell them. And that despite being Muslim, such is the Indian synthesis.

In this way, temporal power is kept in a tight framework.’ At a time when a fellow journalist, Neville Mawell, was writing off Indian democracy for all time in a long article in The Times, at least Australia had a diplomat willing to seek out the more obscure sources of India’s tenacity through the millennia to survive with tolerance and with its identity intact. It is for this reason that I find the beginning sections of this book more demanding of thought even than the main drama played out in counter­point across several thousand nautical miles of Indian Ocean. From the small, insignificant matters of nationhood felt as Australia’s representative in India, we are led out in sudden flashes of reflection to think of how Australia, so much younger, certainly in the sense of its white-man’s history, will find its own proper Australian-ness (is especially wry in relation to the fuddy-duddy niceties of Whitehall’s ancient officialese). As Australia’s society becomes even more plural, telescoping into decades what India has had the luxury of absorbing in great aeons of time, many new migrants are in our midst who never experienced the traumas of 1975. It is a matter of concern how people achieve that sense of belonging, of self-image as Australians, a strength apart from the turmoil of politics and cynicism with politicians.

The soul of Australia is still emerging. Grant’s sensitive interpretation of India’s dilemmas gives clarity to those of our own. At a time when a new generation of Australians is beginning to search out a reorientation to geographic realities, such a contribution to the debate is very welcome – and eminently readable.

An afterthought. What a sad reflection of academic cutbacks and political shortsightedness that, at such a pregnant time in international affairs and Australia’s emerging important role in the Asian-Pacific arena, South Asian and South-east Asian studies have taken such a bashing in our institutions of higher learning. At every point in his book, one senses that Bruce Grant is well aware that Indian officials know more, and take a civilised, tolerant view of their ocean neighbour when in difficulties than that encountered in reverse. Yet where are public servants as well as politicians to learn the salient points of the important cultures that surround and bridge this vital ocean area?

Does a Russian submarine have to limp into Fremantle Harbour, rather than 18,000 American sailors in the next six months to alert Canberra about our needs to understand our near neighbours’ cultures and attitudes of mind?