"India-lite" is how one old India hand described Bangalore to me. Slighting, perhaps, but Bangalore provides a gentle introduction to a country which, for all its leaps forward as a major world economy, still has the capacity to shock even the sturdy visitor with its extraordinary sights and - let’s say it like it is - even more extraordinary smells.

By contrast with rural Rajasthan or the slums of Calcutta, much of Bangalore - with its leafy avenues, colonial architecture and remarkably Western malls and coffee shops - can seem like the West.

Bangalore is very much the new India: all IT giants, biotech research institutes and bold entrepreneurs like VJ Mallya, whose Kingfisher empire is based here. But we don’t go to India to hang out in Starbucks - and the perfect way to steer through all the Western modernity of which Bangalore’s yuppies are so proud, is with Fiona Caulfield’s excellent Love Bangalore guide.

Handcrafted in beautifully soft paper and a silk cover, it’s such a lovely looking thing that you don’t have the usual tourist’s embarrassment at walking around with a guidebook in your hand.

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• Bangalore: by Jorge Monedero

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Caulfield is an Australian who fell in love with the city, and her book is a pretty flawless introduction to all things Bangalore - not least shopping, from the rough and ready delights of the KR City Market to the cool boutiques gathered in Raintree, a fine, Raj-era bungalow that is also home to Bangalore’s branch of Anokhi, perfect for beach clothes, scarves and prezzies.

It was Nehru who presciently called Bangalore (or Bengaluru, as it is now known locally) “the city of India’s future”. For more than a century it has been a byword for modernity throughout Asia.

As part of the princely state of nearby Mysore during the British Raj - headed up by a succession of especially forward-thinking maharajas – it was the first city in Asia to get electricity, back in the 1900s, while the Indian Institute of Science, founded at the same time by one of the great Tata dynasty of industrialists, formed the foundation of Bangalore’s emergence as a science and technology centre.

Plus the British also made Bangalore a major governmental and military centre - and what a popular posting it must have been, given that its altitude makes it the most temperate city in India, not to menion its reputation as "the Garden City".

Bangalore is still leafy in comparison to other Indian cities, and while its bustling expansion has seen some fine old avenues uprooted, a rickshaw drive around the vast Lal Bagh botanicals gardens or a stroll around the beautiful Cubbon Park or a potter around the beautiful grounds of the splendid old Taj West End hotel, give the visitor an idea of what the city must have been like back in the day.

Indeed, it is often easy to imagine the British Raj here. As a young subaltern Winston Churchill used to put up at the West End; across the road in the Bangalore Turf Club, they still have an unpaid mess bill of his (for 13 rupees).

There are those old churches, so redolent of empire, which look like they’ve been transported from a London suburb, from the Catholic St Mary’s to the Church of Scotland’s St Andrews. And perhaps oddest and most nostalgic of all Raj-era monuments, there is Bangalore Castle - built in the 19th century by the Maharaja of Mysore and inspired, as becomes gloriously, dottily, immediately apparent when you behold it, by the home of "our own dear Queen" in Windsor.

Odd it may be, but Bangalore Castle is well worth a visit. The current Maharaja - like many of the scions of erstwhile ruling houses - is a local politician, a role he combines with a spot of fashion design.

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