Roderick Matthews
‘The Collateral Damage of Progress’
Makers of Modern India
By Ramachandra Guha
Harvard University Press 500pp £25.95 order from our bookshop
The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
By Siddhartha Deb
Viking 253pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Despite the received wisdom that almost any observation about India is as true as it is false, the pile of books attempting to ‘explain’ the country grows ever higher. But if generalisations about India are too big and specifics too small, what is left for a writer to write?
In Makers of Modern India, historian Ramachandra Guha has chosen to represent the country through a composite thought-map, taking quotations from eminent Indians on a variety of key issues, such as language, economics, gender relations, religious tolerance and civil governance. This does not tell us what India is currently like, but it does make clear what her finest minds wanted her to be. Guha maintains that great political thoughts appear at the birth of nations, at times of national crisis, and when political systems change. India has experienced all three of these epochal moments relatively recently, and the book records the effects they have had on nineteen writers, mostly politicians, who lived through them.
Guha has only supplied about a fifth of the text himself, much of it in the form of biographical notes, and he makes little attempt to analyse, criticise or expand the selected passages. His chosen authors are left
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw