Books

Engaging post-independence historyIndia after Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha; Picador; Price: Rs.695; 771 ppBy all accounts Bangalore-based Ramchandra Guha is not your genial neighbourhood type of sociologist/ historian. Indeed it is tempting to dismiss him as an intellectual poseur. Invariably engaged as he is in high thinking even if not simple living, it‚s difficult to catch the eye of a gaze perpetually focused on the middle distance. If you dare address him to solicit a penetrative socio-economic insight (as writers of this publication have on several occasions), a curt dismissal is the likely outcome. But though Guha seems a Bollywood-style stereotype, there‚s no denying he is an intellectual heavyweight in a society in which the real McCoy is hard to find. With half a dozen well-researched tomes listed as published work, he is a genuine scholar. And if his previous books were somewhat esoteric and peripheral, with India After Gandhi ‚ the comprehensive first ever history of post-independence India ‚ Guha has moved from the margins of the country‚s intellectual mainstream to the centre.The chief merit of Guha‚s latest oeuvre is its sweeping ambition. To a busy society engaged for the past six decades with nation building and consolidation, in which epochal events have followed each other with bewildering speed and newspaper headlines screaming a new calamity or catastrophe every day, India After Gandhi offers an invaluable chronology of the milestone events that have shaped post-independence India, which against all expectation has not only survived in tacta, but has begun to sup at high table with the developed nations of the industrial world. Following a prologue entitled ‚ËœUnnatural Nation‚ which recounts numerous doomsday predictions which prophesied the improbability of the myriad races, communities, castes and tribes of the subcontinent surviving as a nation, this riveting chronicle of our times is intelligently split into six parts, each chronologically spanning approximately a decade. In turn each part or book is divided into thematic chapters detailing the history of each epoch. Thus Part One entitled ‚ËœPicking up the pieces‚ details the pains of Partition, the assassination of the Mahatma and the amalgamation of 500 princely states into the Union of India even as the first, untried government of free India successfully absorbed and rehabilitated the over 8 million embittered refugees crossing over from the recklessly drawn borders of the twin sister nation of Pakistan. Coterminously from all this trauma emerged the seminal Constitution of India (“perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated in Philadelphia in 1787”), a novel charter of a secular nation state determined to practice liberty, equality and fraternity. Book Two is a history of Nehruvian India. Beginning with the first general election of 1952 described as the “biggest gamble in history” because newly independent India became perhaps the first society in world history to move “straight into universal adult suffrage”, Part Two covers the evolution of the non-alignment policy, the redrawing of boundaries within the country with the promulgation of linguistic states, the against-all-odds success of the Green Revolution, and…