The Big India Book




Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi


As his travels around India made him more comfortable with the terrain, Fa-Hien’s accounts, written in the fourth century AD, move from the general to the particular. The focus shifts from the need to describe and convey the sharp foreignness of the place to his own interest in the way the teachings of the Buddha had spread and were conveyed among the people.

Writing six centuries later, Alberuni starts, famously, with a question about how to record history — from hearsay (unreliable, but inevitable), or as an eyewitness (privy to only a small part of the story, possibly biased, but invaluable). If the early Chinese travellers to India functioned as eyewitnesses, offering snapshots of a region in flux, Alberuni’s aim was to explore the Hindu mind, and traditions of what might be called Indian thought.



To that end, he laid down certain prescriptions: learn the local languages, be aware that “the Indian scribes are careless” and do not blindly trust local histories, acknowledge your own biases and the fact that a “depreciation of foreigners” will cut both ways — the traveller does it as much as the local inhabitants might. Perhaps his most important dictum — which Alberuni, however, often felt free to ignore — was to “relate without criticising”, to offer an account without judgment.

In the annals of contemporary Indian travelogues, those who set out to write the big book on India do so at their own risk. V S Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now are classic examples of the “eyewitness” school of writing — the reportage will be honest, the observer’s prejudices recorded with scrupulous thoroughness. These accounts are usually controversial, and necessarily thought-provoking; Naipaul’s India books have been the pebble in the mattress for all future inquirers, who must measure their responses to him (and to the country) against the nature of the discomfort he causes.

Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi is a monumentally ambitious work, compressing decades of history into a relatively small framework, but offering an overview rather than an argument. Sunil Khilnani, Edward Luce and Amartya Sen blend the two schools, and their books extend the tradition of arguing over what really drives India, and what forms the many and varied ideas of the country.

Patrick French’s recently released India: A Portrait is very much a book of its times. A brief summary: the first section is a swift, abridged history of modern India, which includes a telling look at the persistence of inheritance in modern politics. French explores wealth next, moving from the successes and contradictions of the booming new economy to its failures and abscesses, as in his account of a man forced into literal chains in a quarry in Mysore, or his economic analysis of the failures that lie behind and fuel Maoist insurgencies. The third section explores the rise of the generation of Dalits after Ambedkar, modern-day crime and corruption, via the murder of Aarushi Talwar, and the complexities of Muslim religious law, with Pakistan offering a contrasting story.

As with most well-researched India books, French’s “intimate biography of 1.2 billion people” offers a wealth of unforgettable anecdotes. Brahmins with their sacred threads bend to touch the feet of a Dalit woman chief minister, an expert on genetics unravels the mysteries of India’s caste system, and a vivid gallery of politicians, businessmen, entrepreneurial farmers and eccentrics march through the pages of the book. This year will see several big India books, from Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s exploration of Generation X to Siddhartha Deb’s attempt to explore the invisible, unmapped nation. And French’s book, optimistic despite his awareness, after decades of visiting and living in the country, of India’s many areas of darkness, will remain one of the most engaging and useful works of its kind.

Any big India book today has to pay obeisance at the shrine of the much-told story of economic growth (the malls, the software companies, the new millionaires); the stone quarries are beginning to become as emblematic as the trope of an earlier age about children in carpet factories. No India book today can ignore either the slow emergence of the Dalit community, or the spread of Maoist thought; and the wise travel writer or old India hand will avoid the Kumbh Mela in favour of a visit to Deoband seminaries.

French is perhaps better equipped to make sense of the new stereotypes than most, and he also exemplifies another truth about the new wave of writings on India. With Rana Dasgupta researching what promises to be a seminal Delhi biography, and writers like Deb, French or Basharat Peer setting up new excavations into the past, the story of India is no longer being written by its academics and scholars. The generation after Romila Thapar and Bipin Chandra seems to have abdicated that role, passing the torch on to journalists, writers and open-minded travellers of the French persuasion.

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