The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani Hamish Hamilton 263pp, £17.99 in UK
Sunil Khilnani, a native of Delhi who was educated at Cambridge and now teaches politics at the University of London, has written a masterful historical analysis of democracy in India since the achievement of independence on August 15th fifty years ago.
Considering the vastness of his country and its population (nearly one billion, second in size only to China's), the inaugural chaos of partition from Pakistan, perennial economic crises and the baleful influence of India's dictatorial neighbours, one marvels that Indian democracy has flourished. For its early establishment and hardy endurance, Khilnani justly gives credit to one man above all others: Jawaharlal Nehru.
Though Khilnani writes scornfully of the "train-spotting way" of the bureaucratic administrators of the British Raj, "mapping, tabulating and classifying the territory and people that gradually came into their possession", he acknowledges that these methods imposed a certain order, even if it was only superficial and the motives were explorative.
"What made possible the self-invention of a national community," he points out, "was the fact of alien conquest and colonial subjection. It was the British interest in determining geographical boundaries that by an Act of Parliament in 1899 converted `India' from the name of a cultural region into a precise, pink territory. But to the British, that was all it was."
He concedes, however, that some imperial bequests have helped to hold his independent country together during its experimental early years - the parliamentary system, the law (Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian political leaders had their legal training in London), the civil service, a single currency and, perhaps most important, the language. Whatever their antipathy to their foreign former rulers, Indians have found it convenient to use the English language for official and commercial communication between the subcontinent's many disparate regions of polyglot incoherence.
Nehru (Harrow, Cambridge) was a linguistic charmer of heroic political persuasiveness. While it took more than two years of impassioned debate in the Constituent Assembly to concoct the complex Constitution, with its 400 articles, promulgated on January 26th 1950, he himself should be credited with enacting the most important reform. According to Khilnani, Nehru "successfully quarantined national politics from religious demands".
He "fully recognised the depth and plurality of religious beliefs in India," but supported "the spate of legislation after independence on matters such as the abolition of untouch ability, the removal of caste restrictions on entry to temples, the ending of interdictions on inter-caste marriage, the prohibition of polygamy, and the recognition that women had equal rights of inheritance."
Khilnani is interesting on the subjects of urbanisation and high-tech industralisation. "India's cities," he observes, "are hinges between its vast population spread across the countryside and the hectic tides of the global economy."
As in many other countries that were formerly predominantly agricultural, in India in the past fifty years there has been mass migration from rural areas to the cities. India now has more than 200 cities with a population of 100,000 each, as well as some grossly overcrowded megalopolises. Bombay, for example, has a population density of 17,000 per square kilometre, fourteen times higher than London's.
Indians realise that multinational companies can threaten India's sense of national identity. India needs investment from abroad but has to beware of political strings and cultural pollution. Nehru is cited again, as an exemplar of cautious pragmatism. During the coldest days of the Cold War, he was able to procure economic assistance from both the United States and the Soviet Union and maintained policies that were nationalistic and inclined toward Keynesianism rather than communism.
Political scientists sometimes strain to make their didactic tracts colourfully literary, and Sunil Khilnani slings metaphors around with prodigal abandon. Be prepared for occasional bewilderment: "a twilight world of spectacular impotence", "a bridge head of effervescent liberty", "scattered seeds of future tension", "India's large-scale cultural trajectories". He uses the word trajectory as extravagantly as the manufacturers of golf balls. But he decently refrains from mentioning the smells of curry, incense and faulty drains. For these omissions, lovers of India, including me, must be grateful.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic