Ramachandran the Naga secessionist leader Angami Zapu Phizo the socialist activist Jayaprakash Narayan. There are vivid sketches of the major ‘provincial’ leaders whose province was as large as a European country: the Kashmiri rebel-turned-ruler Sheikh Abdullah the Tamil film actor-turned-politician M.G. Guha gives fresh insights on the lives and public careers of those longserving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Moving between history and biography, the story of modern India is peopled with extraordinary characters.
Once, the Western world looked upon India with a mixture of pity and contempt now, it looks upon India with fear and admiration. But he writes also of the factors and processes that have kept the country together (and kept it democratic), defying numerous prophets of doom who believed that its poverty and heterogeneity would force India to break up or come under autocratic rule. Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free India. While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it is also the most interesting. This remarkable book tells the full story-the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories-of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country.
0 kommentar(er)
