The Idea of India [Hardcover]

Sunil Khilnani (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1998

Published to coincide with India's 50th anniversary of independence, this text examines modern Indian history, as well as politics, culture and identity, and should therefore serve as an introduction to modern Indian history.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Khilnani (politics, Univ. of London) offers a penetrating analysis of the spread of democracy to ever more diverse segments of the Indian body politic. Juxtaposed to this trend is the breakup of the Congress Party's hegemony and the subsequent growth of regional political parties. With the ebbing of congressional power and the elimination of its Socialist economic constraints, the Indian economy has embraced greater growth as the number of Indians living below the poverty line diminishes. Khilnani attributes much of this growth to India's cities, which emerge as paradoxical points of exclusion and economic dynamism when compared with rural India. In the process, national identity has in Khilnani's vision been subsumed by regional political focuses, urban and rural divisions, and greater religious identification. Hence, India's future will necessitate the continuance of a viable democracy sustaining the economic, cultural, and social diversity of the subcontinent. The author skillfully draws out the ironies and paradoxes of Indian history with a subtle, illuminating prose. For informed readers.?John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ. Lib., Mt. Pleasant
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A profound meditation on the meaning and significance of India, which, Khilnani (Politics/Univ. of London) argues, has a far wider relevance than it is conventional to suppose. The relevance comes in part, of course, from the fact that India is the most populous democracy in the world and that it, unlike most of the countries that became independent in the postwar period, remained a democracy, with the exception of a 22- month ``emergency'' imposed by Indira Gandhi. This is curious, because there was little in India's history to prepare it for democracy, and its independence caused the fearful bloodletting of Partition, when Pakistan broke away. Khilnani calls Partition ``the unspeakable sadness at the heart of the idea of India,'' which raises the question of whether it was a division of one territory between two nations or peoples, or the breaking of one civilization into two territories. He believes that the survival of democracy is largely attributable to Nehru's exemplary adherence to democratic and parliamentary procedures during his long ascendency from 1947 to 1964 and that democracy has now ``irreversibly entered the Indian political imagination.'' But the understanding of democracy has changed. Government have become more centralized and powerful, the stakes have become much higher, the studious secularism and religious tolerance of the earlier period have become more tenuous, and violence has grown. Democracy has come to mean adherence to the electoral process. In his most perceptive essays, Khilnani explores this new conception and what it now means to be an Indian. His analysis of the economy is less satisfactory and fails to give a sense of where India is going since it shook off what was called ``the Hindu rate of growth,'' and whether, amid all the other roiling issues, economic rationality can prevail. An intelligent, well-written. and original contribution to the analysis of a country that, perhaps because it has been a good deal less troublesome than China, has received disproportionately less attention. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 263 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374174172
• ISBN-13: 978-0374174170
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,137,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sensitive and nuanced appraisal, August 11, 2000

By 

Umair Ahmed Muhajir "http://qalandari.blogspo... (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Idea of India (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Essays on Modern India, July 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Idea of India (Hardcover)

These thoughtful and well-written essays explore some of the major trends in modern Indian politics. Khilnani is especially concerned about the emergence of religion- and caste-based "identity politics" and the growing tendency of the Indian state to resort to coercive measures as a means of containing political challenges; in this regard, he treats the populism and authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi as a watershed in modern Indian politics. Everything he writes is worth pondering, though some of the essays presume a considerable knowledge of Indian history.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indian politics:subtle,sophisticated & articulate analysis, September 7, 2003

By 

Govindan Nair (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Idea of India (Hardcover)

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.