India

The premise of Kat Banyard’s Pimp State is a familiar one: sex work — a phrase the author rejects as pure euphemism — is formalised sexual exploitation, synonymous with sexual abuse and therefore both ‘a cause and a consequence of inequality between men and women’. It follows, then, that if you’re in favour of gender equality, or simply a decent human being who disapproves of sexual violence, you must oppose the sale of any and all variations of sex. If you’re not part of the solution — well, you know the rest. You don’t have to be especially interested in feminism to have heard this before. For centuries, institutions, social

The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously) translated and published back in 1883, the book has generally been associated with a series of beautiful, ancient illustrations of a couple determinedly coupling in a variety of fascinating — and often utterly improbable — positions; as essentially ‘the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga’. But there is so much more to it than that, as Wendy Doniger doggedly contends in this, her fine collection of frank, brief, clear-eyed essays. Doniger believes the Kamasutra to be not only a precious and under-appreciated part of the Sanskrit canon, but

Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India. Characteristically of Barker, the narrative of her latest book is interlaced with little jokes and haikus and sly references to contemporary language and manners. (There is even an excursion to the Camargue.) At first I found the whole enterprise repetitive and wilfully quixotic, but it is well worth persevering. Barker describes her book as ‘truly little more than the sum of its many parts’.

Since retiring from coping with new books I have found it a pleasure not to have to glance at any of them. One, however, Anne Tyler’s 20th novel A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99), was pure pleasure. A quiet family drama over four generations, set in Baltimore as usual, it was never obvious which way it was going. but patterns emerged in the end. My interest in India is matched only by my ignorance, so almost everything in Ferdinand Mount’s Tears of the Rajas (Simon & Schuster, £25) came as a surprise to me. Through the careers of various enterprising relations, he tells the story of the British in

Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I was there once in April, when the sky was cornflower blue. When Britain withdrew from India the last ‘Chogyal’, or king, battled for his country’s independence, but Mrs Ghandi won the war, and Sikkim is an Indian state now. It’s a sad story, as Andrew Duff’s subtitle suggests, but one representative of 20th-century geopolitics. This dense book — Duff’s first — places Chogyal Thondup Namgyal at the centre of the story and focuses exclusively on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Sikkim’s strategic position is crucial, particularly as