Reviews for The Idea of India

The average rating for The Idea of India based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-09 00:00:00 Laurie Maclennan Wow, It took me 13 months to read this book. I knew very little about the book's context and about the ideas explored when I started reading the book (partly because of the allure of the title and partly because It was among the 25 Popular Penguins). During the first 12 months I read the first half of the book, plodding slowly, 2-3 pages once in a while, with a deliberate exercise of will-power, littering the book with marginalia and exclamation marks - amazed at the language and the torrent of ideas and information. Then, unintentionally, the book was gradually put aside and lost among a growing tide of must-read books. Meanwhile, I read many other books dealing with the same subject matter and discussing many of the same questions, familiarizing myself to some extent with the numerous arguments. Today I picked up Khilnani again to read a few more pages to get a move on (I hate half-completed books on my shelf) and to my surprise, all the plodding was gone and I breezed through the rest of the book. No more was it an incomprehensible lecture which I should try and capture as much of as I can, it was now a pleasant conversation with enough interesting back-and-forths from both sides that notes and such became unnecessary. The book became more memorable and the reading experience actually improved with this loss of awe. This is the first mid-book transition for me in which the tone and texture of the book, along with my entire attitude towards it shifts so rapidly. Makes me wonder how much is missed by reading a well written and popular book first without taking the trouble to study the subject first - most of the richness that informed the author in his writing is lost on the reader by the author's attempt to make the book more readable. It is a necessary tragedy. (Unless the reader takes it on himself to alleviate the collateral damage). Is it? P.S. About the book itself, it is a very poetic and well written exploration of the question of Indian Identity. While Khilnani doesn't offer much in the form of new theories on what this definition should be, he very evocatively sets forth the many identities that have and continue to define the vast nation. The discussion on Nehru and Gandhi is exceptional in their clarity and the unreserved take on Hindutva deserves to be read with great attention. The last chapter rises to a poetic crescendo with Khilnani offering his own conceptions on how these various identities should be interpreted and accepted. The stunning bibliographic essay which lists close to 200 odd books is a treasure trove and has given me an enormous and intimidating list of books that should be explored.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-02 00:00:00 William Reeb Today's newspaper had this news of a disabled man being abused at a multiplex (verbally with snide remarks) for not standing up during national anthem. Yes, our Supreme Court has this weird obsession towards assertion of patriotism in inappropriate places. Like Amartya Sen rightly expressed: "Indian identity is a combination of internal pluralism and external receptivity", and efforts to homogenize by coercion leads to perversions like this. The idea of India has been contested and validated over time, and now, we are more interested and invested in who we want to be in this world than who we are. Still, after 20 years of publication, Khilnani's trenchant analysis on this open, often revised idea of India is germane to our society in many ways. Sunil Khilnani is an erudite scholar, and it is often reflected in his writing. On levels that it poses strict competition to Veronica Roth in finding jargons for Divergent factions. And language of this book is a bit baroque, if I may use words of his lexicon. Many things were rhetoric and repetitive in that narrative, well, they were hidden so deep in his elegant prose that they rarely came up as irritants. Though written during the time of disillusionment following Nehruvian socialism and emergence of Third Front in politics, it would be wrong to consider this book as rapporteur of things that has happened till then or as an irrelevant journal in light of events happened thereafter. For, the arguments in this book are coherently articulated along the long history of India as a civilization than a nation state. I have mixed feelings towards this book and obvious disagreements, and a consolidated review is rightly beyond my capacity. Still would love to mention one portion that I enjoyed most -Indian modernity through architectural history of imperial capital. New Delhi was designed in hexagonal grids with housing segments distanced from central acropolis in descending gradient of 'rank', concreting the exclusive tendencies of Indian society. I found this precedence extremely helpful in understanding Gandhian economy and self-determination in villages against Ambedkar's strong distaste for the same. Gandhi renounced colonial idea of city for village cosmology of Ashrams with his sartorial humility as 'half naked fakir' against British imperial pomp. To him, simple Indian occupation of departed English designs didn't represent true freedom, and Gandhi advocated villages as sanctuary for civilizational powers through democratic dialogue. To Ambedkar, one who had first-hand experience of superstitious oppression, villages were beyond redemption and nothing but a sink of narrow mindedness and communalism. Nehru on the other hand was more pragmatic in his approach to modernity, where he drew a distinction between inauthentic modernity, represented by colonial city and genuine modernity, that India should be rational not to reject. Khilnani further illustrates this with development of city of Chandigarh, and its intended International appeal by renouncement of both colonial imagery and nationalist monuments in design. Well, the city never achieved the cosmopolitanism it craved for, and it's something for us readers to contemplate on. And story of Bombay, the foremost modern city of India, construes a centripetal narrative towards parochialism from its cosmopolitan past. Khilnani has a wonderful take on Shiv Sena's narrow efforts to annex and distribute the benefits of modernity to one closed community against Bombay's congestion which make it impossible for rich to flee the poor or any other selectivity to sustain in first place. Bombay might not be as cosmopolitan now as we can observe in Manto's pre-independence stories, but it still isn't that communal like author feared it would be 20 years back, which to me, is a silver lining. In this extremely difficult job of consolidating an Idea of India, this reader, like author, also finds solace in tourism board poster caption that paraphrase Tagore, "India is a state of mind". 'One way of defining diversity for India, is to say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he said, "Singular at the top and plural at the bottom".' Khilnani hyphenates this quote by A.K. Ramanujan into his idea of India's nationalism, which is plural equally at top as well as bottom, like a 'dothi' with endless folds (Hear, hear!).