Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A very intellectual book, written to mark the 50th anniversary of independence. It’s a Nehruvian book, with the idea of the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim, the urban cities and the countryside and whether the idea is sustainable. Nehru was a socialist, really Fabian society, Labour party, with a kind of keeping-it-all-together secularism. I think India has proved that these ideas are sustainable. The traditions of agitation and peaceful process are all still strong. This is a summary of the intellectual process of development.
The idea of improvement and optimism seems to run through your book choices.
Yes. So my next book, Khilnani’s The Idea of India, is a very intellectual book, written to mark the 50th anniversary of independence. It’s a Nehruvian book, with the idea of the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim, the urban cities and the countryside and whether the idea is sustainable. Nehru was a socialist, really Fabian society, Labour party, with a kind of keeping-it-all-together secularism.
And is the idea of India as modern, technocratic, egalitarian and secular sustainable?
I think India has proved that it is. The traditions of agitation and peaceful process are all still strong. I mean, this is a summary of the intellectual process of development. It is shorter, not the whole history, a selective book. You can read it in a day.
So this is different from India After Gandhi? Is it not as colourful?
No. This is an argument rather than a big history. It is a single line of thought. If you read one short book on India then this is it. Khilnani is an academic with a PhD from Cambridge and he teaches at Johns Hopkins. He is writing a big biography of Nehru. He is a westernised Indian intellectual and this is a kind of argument about Indian identity.
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Lord Meghnad Desai is a British economist and a Labour politician. He was born in Baroda, India and made a life peer as Baron Desai of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster in April 1991. He is a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, and the author of Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, a book that predicts that globalization will lead to the revival of socialism. In choosing five books on India, he marvels at the Indian people’s incredible tenacity for democracy and self-advancement since gaining independence from the British in 1947.
