Readings on India

Treść źródłowa

Around my trip to India I did some not-very-systematic reading, and had pretty good luck. All of these books were worth reading and helpful in different ways: Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (expanded second edition, 2021). Anderson’s range of erudition is impressive–I read this book after finishing his latest, Disputing Disaster, a deep dive into the historiography of the First World War–and he packs a lot of information into his short, polemical account of Indian politics. The book’s aim is to destabilize what he calls the mainstream narrative of India’s liberal intelligentsia: the celebration of a stable, secular, multicultural democracy. He re-examines key episodes in India’s independence struggle and early history to emphasize the enduring roles of religion, caste and social division. Rukmini S., Whole Numbers And Half Truths: What Data Can And Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (2022). This book by a data journalist is written to explain India to Indians, not to explain India to foreigners, which makes it more useful and interesting. Some background knowledge is required–you need to know what scheduled tribes are, things like that–but it is clearly written and informative, covering topics from crime to marriage to diet. Her mode is patient, careful explication, going as far as the facts allow and no further. Nevertheless she aims her darts to puncture some of the same liberal illusions targeted by Anderson, broadly arguing that India is fundamentally a conservative society where caste, class and religion are dominant concerns, not a primarily secular one organized …