Title: India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy

Author: Ramachandra Guha

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Pub. Date: July 2007

ISBN-13: 9780060198817

Pages: 893pp

The Synopsis

After reading one of the best history books I’ve ever picked up, The Search for Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence, and subsequent review, I wanted to supplement my knowledge of other countries visited on the upcoming Cal Poly business study tour in the Summer of 2008. So, in essence, what I was looking for was a Search for Modern India. I didn’t find the title, hoping that Spence somehow had two PhD’s, one in Chinese history, and the other in Indian history, but what I did find was India After Ghandi, the next best thing.

The book is arranged in somewhat chronological order and also by topic. The time frame of this book is from the early 1940’s until the present day. The book begins with a Ghandi and his political influence at the time. Of course, the book is about India after Ghandi, so the Gandiji is not in the story for long, as he is assassinated within the first chapter. What follows the first chapter is an amazing tale of India and its struggles with unity. The country, as quoted by Sir John Strachey who spent many years in the subcontinent,

is not and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.

The major sources of conflict throughout Indian history until the present day are: caste, language, religion, class, and gender. Even today, we still see fighting and terrorism, as reported in the news of bomb blasts in Srinagar. With such a wide variety of strictly-held values, how could such a country comprised of over 150 princely states form the united India we see today? This book answers that question.

The Analysis

There were many noticeable differences between the previous history book I read on China and this book on India. The first noticeable difference was the breadth of topics covered in the book. While the Search for Modern China covered the history since the 1600’s to the present day, India After Gandhi takes a different approach and covers a plethora of topics in just an almost 70 year span from 1940’s to the present day. While I would’ve expected a detailed, elaborate analysis, much of the book is just ’straight fact’ with little analysis or predictions for missing historical pieces. For example, we know from the interviews seen in The Dying Fields, that the motivations for farmers killing themselves is from debt and an inability to barter their crops for BT cotton. However, even in 2007, the author cannot account for this and simply explains it as,

“In many cases [the farmers] took this extreme step because of an inability to pay off debts accumulated over the years–debts owed to banks, cooperatives, or private moneylenders. But indebtedness had also been a pervasive feature of rural life; why, now, did it lead so often to this tragic outcome [of suicide]? No systematic studies exist yet to answer this question, but some preliminary speculation might be in order… the suicides among farmers are perhaps related to the rapidity of social change.

Social change? I felt that this was often Guha’s answer to many questions that I wondered about. Spence did a much better job of analyzing the historical documents and sources to produce a well laid out picture of the events in motion.

Another noteable (and unwelcome) change when reading this book versus Spence’s book was the difficulty I had in reading this book. Spence does a very nice job of helping those who don’t know anything about Chinese culture or history with some basic background or understanding. There were many maps, pictures, figures, tables, historical data, and quotes to not only back up his points but also to provide clarity to his points. Guha has no such thing. While Guha does a great job of quoting several historical figures and laying chapter topics out in such an organized fashion, I still found it very difficult to follow the geography and cultural values, since they were never really explained but merely mentioned. If I were Indian (which I am not), then I would find these values to be self-evident, but unfortunately, that was not the case. Few maps and graphics were provided to help me understand the location of these events. For example, the section about the border disputes between China and India should have been accompanied by several battlefield maps, as military operations are naturally displayed in such a way, but Guha provided no such help in this area and made the book almost entirely unreadable for me when complex information such as wars, political campaigns, and chronologies needed to be communicated.

The Conclusion

While I did have a hard time following Guha, I do have to applaud him on such a wide coverage of topics. The chapter titles reveal much about his coverage of topics, such as in Part V: A History of Events: Rights, Riots, Rulers, Riches, A People’s Entertainments, Why India Survives. ‘A People’s Entertainments’? That’s right, Guha even talks about Bollywood. ‘What do Indians do when the are not working or fighting or raising a family? The short answer to this question is that most of them go to the movies.’ While the book has its flaws and isn’t quite as enjoyable to read as Spence’s The Search for Modern China, I still learned a great deal about historical India, the culture, modern India, its relationships with China, and most of all, how to understand India and its people.