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The Idea of India
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Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.04
EAN: 9780374525910
ISBN: 0374525919
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 1999-06-04
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Reviews:
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The key book on India in the postnuclear era, with a new Introduction by the author.Our appreciation of the importance of India can only increase in light of the recent revelations of its nuclear capabilities. Sunil Khilnani's exciting, timely study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this, the world's largest democracy. Throughout his penetrating, provocative work, he illuminates this fundamental issue: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Indian politics:subtle,sophisticated & articulate analysis
Comment: I believe that this is one of the most intelligent and articulate books on Indian politics ever written. Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics at Cambridge, brings unyielding subtlety and sophistication in a book which well matches the complexity and contradictions of Indian politics. He artfully demonstrates and corrects such simplistic and prevalent misconceptions as surrounding the nature and origins of India's early state-led industrialization or the nature of its democracy.A somewhat longish extract will illustrate the subtleties of various concepts that the author elegantly develops in this magnificient work: QUOTE In India, democracy has had to function in a society of peculiar complexity where many different temporal and historical plans coexist. Indian continues to be a predominantly agrarian society, whose people are not indifferent to religion, and where the individual does not have a strong political or social presence. But towering over that society today is the state. This state is far from supremely effective: it regulalry fails to protect its citizens against physical violence, it does not provide them with welfare, and it has not fulfilled its extensive ambitions to transform Indian society. Yet it is today at the very centre of the Indian political imagination. Until little over a century ago, the social order of caste had made the state largely redundant...The past fifty years have trenchantly displayed the powers of the state and of the idea of democracy to reconstitute the antique social identities of India - caste and religion - and to force them to face and enter politics.
UNQUOTE If you have wondered why so many books have failed to effectively unravel and interpret the intricacies of political evolution of this entity called India, Khilnani's analysis will be a welcome eye opener.
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Summary: Hard work
Comment: A big let down this one. Sunil Khilnani is clearly the sort of tiresome know-all NRI who writes about India with only academic knowledge: he knows nothing of the real India, and his writing comes from book-learning not observation. You get the feeling he is trying to jump on the Indian-writing-in-English bandwaggon, but is just not up to the job. And his writing is dead on the page. Don't believe the blurbs on the cover: this one is really hard work.
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Summary: Cliched!
Comment: The title of the book is very inviting but, unfortunately, the author doesn't prove equal to the challenge of the subject. Mainly, he reiterates ideas of the colonialist-leftist school of Indian history.
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Summary: A Macaulayite view of India
Comment: This book will not provide any insight into India, but perhaps it will do so into the mindset of the Macaulayite Indian who is completely cut off from his tradition and is trying to make sense of things about him using Western categories. It takes us nowhere understanding the idea of India.
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Summary: A sensitive and nuanced appraisal
Comment: In an era that abounds with superficial books on South Asia, Khilnani's is an insightful and sensitive book, though perhaps somewhat out of sync (and this is not a criticism) with the contemporary Indian urban middle-class mood, which delights in denigrating all things perceived as "Nehruvian"; some of the other reviewers have categorized Khilnani as part of the "old school" of Indian historiographers, vaguely dismissed as "leftists"or "Nehruvians"; nothing could be further from the truth: while the book displays an empathy with Nehru's idea of India, it is far too sophisticated to accept that conception as anything more than one of a number of competing ideas, albeit one that has exercised great power over many in the country's urban elite. Hindutva is another such idea of India, and Khilnani offers a nuanced appraisal, far removed from both the fascistic infatuations of the right and the unthinking denunciations of those on the Indian left. Finally: the book is particularly useful on Indira Gandhi, and Khilnani persuasively links her "mass democratisation" of the late 1960's and 70's to the rise of both the saffron parties and the lower-caste mobilizations of the last fifteen years, though the most intellectually stimulating chapter remains the one on the architecture of the colonial city, conceptualized by Khilnani as, among others, the site where colonialism was acted out, the site, in other words, of the Indian's subjection.
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