Patchwork quilt

This new book on Indias recent history examines how India got its peculiar form of modernity.

AS India celebrates 60 years of independence, a timely history examines the forces that now drive this economic powerhouse. Stereotypes about India not so much abound as keep multiplying. In popular imagination, India has gone, over time, from being the land of exoticism and mysticism to the back office of the world to most recently the rising economic superpower whose dizzying rate of growth is second only to Chinas and which will, along with China, redraw the geopolitical map of the world by the middle of the 21st century.

These are all misleadingly reductive summations of a country that, now celebrating its 60th anniversary of independence from British rule, is simply too various and too complex to lend itself to such shorthands. It is, as Ramachandra Guha persuasively argues in his recent book India After Gandhi: The History of the Worlds Largest Democracy (Macmillan, 2007), no small triumph that India, as well as its democracy, not merely exists at all but continues to thrive. India will go on, Guha quotes novelist R.K. Narayan telling V.S. Naipaul in the 1960s, and exactly how it does, and how it possibly will, have become the subjects of a clutch of recent books including Maria Misras Vishnus Crowded Temple.

Misra, who teaches modern history at Oxford, has undertaken an ambitious project. She attempts to telescope more than 150 years of Indias history into this book and tries to show, as she tells us in its closing pages, how India has developed its peculiar form of modernity, the most striking feature of which is its highly atomised, fragmented and diverse citizenry. It seems clear that one of the things that underscores the idea of India as a nation is its tradition of pluralism and diversity. Misra is not the first to make a case for this. In his illuminating collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Allen Lane, 2005), Amartya Sen has eloquently described how the countrys long tradition of argument, public debate and intellectual pluralism is central to the notion of India and Indianness.

This may not seem immediately obvious if one were to look at the long history of sectarian violence that has convulsed India. First, there was the bloodbath that accompanied the birth pangs of India or, more precisely, the birth pangs of the two nation states of India and Pakistan. At least 180,000 people died in what Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, called one of the greatest administrative operations in history; train tracks were covered with corpses and whole trainloads of people butchered. Misra is good with the details of this chilling, pervasive violence and brings alive the scale of the carnage in those months.

More recently, there have been anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the communal riots in Mumbai in1992 and 1993, which then triggered the serial bombings that killed 257 people in Indias financial and entertainment nerve centre. Kashmir continues to be an unresolved battlefield; and right-wing Hindu nationalists presided over a pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.

Indias colonial history (the British had often encouraged sectarian conflicts, playing one community off against the other) and post-colonial experience show how the countrys democracy has repeatedly come under assault, how its secular fabric has been threatened time and again to be ripped apart. In spite of that, Misra reveals how India has drawn sustenance from its diversity and plurality.

At the heart of her book are the sections on the two men seen as central to the story of modern India: Mahatma Gandhi, the most prominent leader of the nationalist movement and known as the father of the nation, and his protege, Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to become Indias first Prime Minister. Misra is unfairly harsh on Gandhi, seeing him as idiosyncratic, traditionalist and with a gift for combining political shrewdness with a sense of self-promotion and opportunism.

She has unmixed admiration for Nehru, who she sees as the opposite of Gandhi in many ways: He differed from Gandhi in the most important question of the age: modernity. While Gandhi romanticised the Indian past, both real and imagined, Nehru was in love with the future. Gandhi decried the Raj as the harbinger of modernity, while for Nehru it was the detested heart of the ancient regime. Nehru was a technophile, a religious agnostic, cosmopolitan in his tastes and an instinctive internationalist; the Mahatma was the opposite.

The template of pluralism that is the key to Indias enduring democracy, Misra argues, was conceptualised and laid out by Nehru. And she sees that and the foresight and vision that implies as his biggest contribution. Nehrus goal was to make a virtue of Indias variety by creating the worlds first self-consciously multicultural modern nation state.

Misra is weak on two aspects of Indias cultural life that have glued together for decades people from utterly different social classes and with different cultures, mother tongues and cuisines: mainstream Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, and cricket. Bollywood is the worlds largest film industry and its popularity and reach are unrivalled by anything else in India bar cricket. Cricket is the only team game at which India is any good and it infuses as much of a sense of national identity and pride in the urban middle-class professional as the farmer living beneath the poverty line. These are the two things that the tiny metropolitan elite the biggest beneficiary of Indias economic boom and the 70 per cent of the population that lives in grinding poverty in the countrys rural hinterland have in common; they comprise their only shared language. The movies and cricket are strong, critical threads that make India the patchwork quilt that it is.