MANY OF THE PLACES I WRITE ABOUT IN THIS BOOK HAVE BEEN known by different names at different points in time. As a rule, I have used the names that correspond to the period I am writing about—to cite a few examples, I use Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Poona, and Rangoon when I am discussing the colonial period and the early decades after independence; I switch to Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, and Yangon, respectively, when I am talking about more recent history, as those names were formally changed in the 1990s. I adopt a similar strategy when it comes to country names: for example, I use Ceylon and Malaya when discussing the colonial period, and Sri Lanka and Malaysia when writing about the post-independence era.
For clarity I have transliterated words from South Asian languages in a way that reflects common practice in the region rather than employing the formal diacritical marks favored by scholars of South Asian languages.