Epigraph: "Please believe that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body [...] has started coming apart at the seams"
-Rushdie, Midnights Children
'Sareen and Sengupta talk about Alfred Deakin's impeccable colonial idiom, engaging with India in his twin texts Irrigated India: an Australian View of India and Ceylon, Their Irrigation and Agriculture (1893) and Temple and Tomb in India (1893). In dreaming and wombing the Australian Federation into being, Deakin found himself in a Saleem Sinaiesque self-nation equation. It is thus that he chose to visit India in 1890, in the wake of the decade of his deep engagement with the Federation movement, in order to nurture his dream of the Australian nation.' (Editor's abstract)