Westerners come into constant contact with modern India, often without realising it and by no means just via those famous call centres. Even when the goods they buy are labelled “Made in China”, the billing and lading may well have been handled by Indian backroom offices. Yet Western ideas of India remain dominated by the exotic and the ancient, the caparisoned elephants and temples, the brilliant saris and fragrant spices. The emergence of India as a fast-paced, dynamic, knowledge-led society is also masked, to many visitors, by shantytown squalor that can still be found in many places and the acute, immemorial poverty they encounter in the countryside.

The Western difficulty in knowing quite what to make of India today is the mirror image of the debates that Indians have with each other. These do not want for passion or sincerity. One thing has not changed: Indians are their country’s most vociferous critics.

When a series of bomb blasts ripped through commuter trains in Bombay last month, killing 183 and seriously injuring around 500 more, the teeming city of 18 million earned the world’s admiration for its display of community spirit, the swift response of its emergency services and, not least, that there were no reprisals against Muslims or any other group that might have been thought or rumoured to be the perpetrators. Indians were majestic in this moderation. This attitude must be maintained.

Bombay is a living, growing contradiction. The metropolis combines the dynamism of a fast-growing financial hub and the glitz of India’s ever more successful film industry, together with civic disorganisation bordering on neglect that, even in a city that provides a third of India’s tax revenues, leaves half its housing without proper sanitation. India in its extraordinary diversity is exhilarating, exasperating and baffling all at once; socially pluralistic and yet caste-ridden, inventive yet conservative.

Exhilaration is increasingly the note. The interventionist ideologies and bureaucratic obstructions of the post-independence “permit Raj” are not yet history, but they are in retreat, elbowed out by entrepreneurs at ease in the global economy, by the emergence of an increasingly sophisticated middle class, and by increasing decentralisation of the economy as India’s states compete with each other for private foreign investment.

Edward Luce’s brilliantly observant book, In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India, serialised by The Times yesterday and Monday, reveals many Indias. He profiles young leaders of the wired-up, confident, rapidly modernising India that turns out a million engineering graduates a year and is building world-class biotech and information industries. He explores the reasons why 300 million Indians still subsist on less than $1 a day — and the frustrations and rigidities with which India’s modernising forces must contend. But, unlike China, India does let 100 schools of thought contend; and while that diversity can sometimes appear untidy, even anarchic, it cer-tainly does breed success.