Sunday Ignorance Blogging

Along with financial crises, another important issue about which I know nothing is India. Tyler Cowen strongly recommends India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, "a truly excellent book by Ramachandra Guha, well over 800 pages and yes it will be finished." Sounds like a good introduction to the subject. Reihan Salam, however, says he picked the book up on Cowen's recommendation "And it's bad. Really, really bad."

Reihan, however, concedes that "At present, there is embarrassingly little to choose from, which is perhaps the only good reason to recommend Guha's profoundly lackluster effort." Isaac Chotiner seems to be somewhere in the middle but closer to Cowen's view. Thinking about the depths of my ignorance on this subject, I realize that I don't even have any idea what the controversial issues in a history of India might be, so I'm really lost at sea.

Comments

It's fiction of course, and Rushdie plays with the history somewhat, but if you haven't you've got to read Midnight's Children. It gives you an idea about just how much crisis there has been in India since independence, from the partition to the invasion of Bangladesh to the Long Emergency (or any of Indira Ghandi's reign, really).

Posted by Freddie | August 26, 2007 9:54 AM

A source of insight into India, for me, has come from Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul's non-fiction writings (An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now). Very good stuff, but written from an expatriate's perspective.

Posted by SGEW | August 26, 2007 10:02 AM

It's important to realize how many different languages and nationalities exist in India. It almost reminds me of the old Ottoman Empire, in that way.

Posted by stm177 | August 26, 2007 10:18 AM

Naipaul's books are excellent literature, but they ars sometimes a mix of Miss Mayo and the Friedmanesque hasty generalizations of the people he meets.

India's main problems will always be the poverty of hundreds of million amid the relative wealthy life style of a middle class numbering in the three hundred millions, the unsolvable Kashmir problem, extreme corruption, unsalvagable civilian infrastructure that does not work, and pockets of violent rebellion in the northeast. Of course, there is always the Hindu Muslim divide exacerbated by Middle Eastern oil money poring in to help the Muslims buy up large chunks of urban real estate in major cities.

Posted by gregor | August 26, 2007 10:20 AM

I'd encourage anyone to read up on the Long Emergency, which had some of the most terrible government action in recent memory-- and I'm talking the 70's, here. To pick the most visceral example, the government forced sterilization on thousands of people in the lower castes.

Posted by Freddie | August 26, 2007 10:31 AM

Naipaul's books are excellent literature, but they ar[e] sometimes a mix of Miss Mayo and the Friedmanesque hasty generalizations of the people he meets.

Ouch. Occasionally true in some of his earlier work, I'll grant you, but still ouch.

Posted by SGEW | August 26, 2007 11:12 AM

With Naipul, you have to keep in mind his support for Hinduvta that colors his work. Just about every known introduction to India carries its own baggage, but avoid overly trendy journalistic accounts like Luce's recent "In Spite of the Gods." Going to popular/mass publication journalist-written books for an introduction to a country is a bit like taking Newtonian physics: it will get you some of the basic generalizations, but once you get more in depth you realize how wrong your introduction was. One of the best such examples, Kristof and WuDunn's "China Wakes," even had its own share of major flaws and weird, disconnected points. A lot of the best stuff on India that are available in the US tend to be rather specific, technocratic or esoteric. Shashi Tharoor provides a good glimpse at particular issues, such as Indira Gandhi's political personality. Even then, you have to keep in mind he also has his own interests, having been a major Indian figure in the UN.

Posted by Reality Man | August 26, 2007 11:48 AM

I forgot to mention that Amartya Sen's stuff on India is usually worth reading.

Posted by Reality Man | August 26, 2007 11:49 AM

Right now I'm reading India: A History by Keay and was hoping to pick up a good primer on modern Indian history when I'm done. However, it appears that won't be as easy as I'd hoped.

Posted by eriks | August 26, 2007 12:05 PM

V.S. Naipaul has written some very good stuff, both as a novelist and as a polemical travel writer.

He is not, however an Indian writer, expatriate or no. Rather, he is, as Wikipedia puts it, "Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, T.C. (born August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent. Naipaul lives now in Wiltshire, England."

He's a artist of the Indian diaspora, in other words, with about as much direct knowledge of India as, say, Saul Bellow had of Israel -- not nothing, but not any of the insights or blinders of nativity.

Posted by BostonTom | August 26, 2007 12:29 PM

Full disclosure: A long time ago, my dad visited Guha's family, though Guha himself at the time was still completing his term at the Doon School, a well-known "public school"—in the English sense. (That is, an independent school.)

As you might expect from Guha's educational background, he represents the somewhat Anglicized liberal middle class that produced many of the early leaders of the Congress as well as Nehru himself. With the rise of modern nationalism among the urban Hindu middle classes (they're a major constituency of the BJP), that ideology has been mostly rejected, and people of the old school have come to be seen as quaint at best, and tainted by colonialism at worst. See, for instance, this article in the FT. But the book is definitely worth reading.

Just to note in passing, Naipul isn't an expatriate. Indeed, he spent quite a lot of time researching exactly where in Uttar Pradesh his ancestral family was from. And most anything by Amartya Sen is worth reading.

Posted by Raghav | August 26, 2007 12:49 PM

The controversial issues of modern Indian history are, in convenient bullet form:

- the partition of India and Pakistan
- Nehru's legacy, particularly import substitution, non-aligned foreign policy, and the license Raj
- Indira Gandhi's legacy, particularly the Emergency and the war with Pakistan over Bangladesh
- the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP

Freddie's suggestion to read Midnight's Children isn't a bad one.

Posted by Walt | August 26, 2007 1:35 PM

The book idolizes many controversial Indian figures, such as Nehru, and for that reason many people will dislike it. Their reasons might even be legitimate. As a work of scholarship, however, it is nonetheless first-rate and the reviews have generally reflected this.

Posted by Tyler Cowen | August 26, 2007 2:03 PM

I would recommend "An Ambassador's Journal" by the late great John Kenneth Galbraith who was appointed as US ambassador to Indian by JFK in the 60's. He witnessed the Indo-Chinese war in 1962 (which India lost) and is the first genuine India lover (unlike the call center outsourcing loving idiots like Tom Friedman). Unfortunately his term was cut short by the JFK assasination and the arrival of Lyndon Johnson who was not the best friend of India. Like all great leaders, Gandhi, Nehru, etc. remain controversial. But Nehru stressed industrialization, secularism and modernity (unike Gandhi) for which he should be remembered. Indeed, much of India's present economic boom has to do with British education system (English medium) and Nehruvian planning which stressed science and engineering over agriculture. Thus 80% of India remains poor mired in agriculture while an English educated elite (myself included) reap the rewards of "Tom Friedmanesque" globalisation!

Posted by Arun | August 26, 2007 2:53 PM

About seven years ago I was working for the ARTFL program at the U of C and did a lot of the programming work on the Digital South Asia Library.

In particular the back issues of the english language quarterly for the Indian School of Social Sciences, The Social Scientist, from 1972 to 2001, would be relevant.

And I third the nomination of The X-Men... er, Midnight's Children. It would be a good point to read Rushdie's 'Errata' (chapter 2? of Imaginary Homelands) regarding its vast provision of historical inaccuracies.

Posted by buermann | August 26, 2007 3:11 PM

Just finished reading 'The Shadow of the Great Game', by Indian diplomat and statesman Narendra Singh Sarila. This covers the whole end game of the Independence Movement, from around 1935 thru the partition of Kashmir.

It is well written, and the writer was around at Indian Independence and knew many of the principals involved (especially Mountbatten).

Surprisingly, he takes shots at many Indian Sacred Cows, such as the Congress Party, Nehru, and Ghandi (the Mahatma) himself, for many obvious (even with foresight, not hindisght) mistakes and wrong decisions.

Even more surprisingly, he chides fellow Indians for not appreciating nor relating the positive role the US played in the whole process.

This book is newly out this summer here, but was a best seller in India.

Posted by twit | August 26, 2007 3:26 PM

Independent India's history cannot be complete without a deep understanding of America's inexplicable support for Pakistani leaders of all shades and sizes, including dictaors and mass murderers, especially when it comes to choosing sides between India and its enemy on its western borders.

Posted by gregor | August 26, 2007 3:30 PM

My new rule (which I adopted after learning all about a Mormon massacre in the Israel lobby thread above) is what history you can't learn from a wiki page or a movie isn't worth learning. I mean you could spend hours and days reading history books, but life's too short to read everything you'd like to.

Go read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_India

and then go rent this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi_%28film%29

Posted by beowulf | August 26, 2007 3:51 PM

"Independent India's history cannot be complete without a deep understanding of America's inexplicable support for Pakistani leaders of all shades and sizes, including dictaors and mass murderers, especially when it comes to choosing sides between India and its enemy on its western borders.

No sir, it's not inexplicable at all. It's Realpolitik. Imperfectly practiced Realpolitik (to put it mildly), granted, but Realpolitik all the same. That might start to change soon, but that's another story.

Posted by Shawn | August 26, 2007 4:30 PM

'A Traveler's History of India' is probably the best book for a beginner: short and easy to read, pretty non-ideological, covers all the important stuff.

Posted by RC | August 26, 2007 4:56 PM

Independent India's history cannot be complete without a deep understanding of America's inexplicable support for Pakistani leaders of all shades and sizes, including dictaors and mass murderers, especially when it comes to choosing sides between India and its enemy on its western borders.

No sir, it's not inexplicable at all. It's Realpolitik. Imperfectly practiced Realpolitik (to put it mildly), granted, but Realpolitik all the same. That might start to change soon, but that's another story.

It's not just realpolitik. A lot of India's problems with Pakistan come from two sources: (1) an unwillingness to admit that the muslims had a right to their own state in the first place; and (2) stubbornness over Kashmir. Pakistan and India were never going to be best buddies, but it would have been quite possible for them to have a much better relationship had India pursued one.

Posted by Dilan Esper | August 26, 2007 5:05 PM

I have found Shashi Tharoor to be really good. It's wonkish, but I like Stephen Cohen's books as well.

India is also really, really old, so knowing about the rise of Buddhism or Chandragupta can be pretty useless in understanding modern events. Pretty much all of American History can be useful in understanding modern events because it is all more recent.

I would not recommend Rushdie, Naipaul, or really any author who made his bones by fiction. Forster is the worst. There is a small audience for fiction in India, so the works usually end up playing to Western views of India more than Indian views of themselves. Also many of the works by foreign journalists (Luce, etc. )lack depth or read as travelogues.

Wikipedia can be pretty bad about foreign and non-english subjects when much of the "wisdom of crowds" is lost by lacking crowds.

Posted by Space Monkey | August 26, 2007 5:31 PM

Seriously, if you want a decent and academic history of India, there is no better place to begin than Metcalf and Metcalf's Concise History of India.

Posted by rickm | August 26, 2007 5:32 PM

There are several popular films that offer a quick (albeit superficial) introdution to Modern Indian history. These are my favorites:

Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) starring Krishna Bhanji, better known as Ben Kingsley.

The Bollywood hit Bombay (1995). This film is set in 1992 after the destruction of the Babri Masjid and vividly details the rioting that followed. You should be able to find this on Netflix.

Deepa Mehta's Earth (1998). India's independence and Partition as seen through the eyes of an 8-year-old Parsee girl. If you have any sort of emotional attachment to the Indian subcontinent you'll probably get pretty emotional viewing this.

Posted by Lakshmi | August 26, 2007 6:26 PM

There is only way way to understand a little about Indian history: read Nehru's letters to his daughter written while he was in prison. It's a start that helps somewhat to lift the veil of mystery.

Posted by llyonnoc | August 26, 2007 6:54 PM

There is only way way to understand a little about Indian history: read Nehru's letters to his daughter written while he was in prison. It's a start that helps somewhat to lift the veil of mystery.

Posted by llyonnoc | August 26, 2007 6:54 PM

I would read* Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. Both are of Mumbai (Bombay) -- the first is non-fiction, the second is fiction.

* "would read" in the sense of "will read" -- I own both books and will read them shortly, but in all fairness I would note that I haven't read them yet.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | August 26, 2007 7:23 PM

For non-academic stuff, I might note that the BBC has put out a boatload of stuff (radio and TV) to commemorate the 60th anniversary of partition, both historical and contemporary in scope, including a modern radio dramatisation of Midnight's Children. But for most of that, you need, um, to know where to look.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | August 26, 2007 11:14 PM

For fiction, in sheer terms of breadth- everything from caste tensions in a village through provincial politics, local university politics, the economics of the shoe industry, Anglo-Indian big business in Calcutta, the status relationships among classical musicians, not to mention all the permutations of arranging suitable marriages in a caste system- I'd recommend Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy"

Posted by MikeN | August 27, 2007 2:05 AM

I don't have much to add, but I'd be wary of advice from people like Freddie and twit who can't even spell Gandhi right. It's not "Ghandi", people!!

Posted by Trevor | August 27, 2007 10:46 AM

Guha seems to represent the old left-wing Indian establishment -- think Rockefeller republican, or Orham Pamuk's family.

Since you asked, the number one controverial issue in Indian history is partition. Salam was talking about Guha's old-fashioned historiography with respect to partition.

There are at least 3 threads In India itself. First, the Congress-establishment view. Nehru as secular hero. Jinnah and the the Hindutva crowd as communalist villains.

Then there is the Hindutva version -- Jinnah as Muslim villian, Nehru as 'pseudo-secular' leader appeasing Jinnah's Muslim communalism while supressing the Hindu majority's natural rights.

And the third, which Reihan was talking about, published in Ayesha Jalal's published "Sole Spokesman" in the nineties. Jinnah wanting a decentralized federation within a united India, scotched by socialist, centralist Nehru's desire for a country he would run on his own.

There are also two different Pakistani views of partition. Fist that secular Jinnah established a secular country to allow Hindustani muslims a home free from Hindu persecution. Or that Pakistan was established as an Islamic state (not just a Muslim one).

I'm partial to Jalal's view, and the first interpretation of Pakistan.

A second contoversial issue in popular Indian historiagraphy is the impact of "dalit power" in South India, and the significant of the anti-Brahmin movements. A lot of the Indian Diaspora in America is TamBram (Tamil Brahmin), and they understandably really dislike Periyar for his supposed anti-brahmin racism.

Posted by Jinnah Periyar | August 27, 2007 1:00 PM

Guha's account is a good one for a basic overview of Indian history since 1947, although if you can track down Ayesha Jalal and Sukata Bose's "Modern South Asia" that functions as a good overview as well.

Reihan's critique is valid: Guha's is overly hagiographic of Nehru and Gandhi. But for a first overview, it's a good one. The main problem is it does not give a very thorough reading of India's independence movement and its explanation of partition is fairly skimpy.

I'd go for "Modern South Asia" if you can find it, and also read a biography of Gandhi.

Posted by ASI | August 27, 2007 1:12 PM

Also, if you want a good explanation of partition that is fairly well-balanced, both Ayesha Jalal's "The Sole Spokesman" and the recently-released "The Great Partition" by Yasmin Khan are excellent overviews.

Posted by ASI | August 27, 2007 1:15 PM