The Idea of India - Softcover

Khilnani, Sunil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374525919 ISBN 13: 9780374525910

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

The key book on India in the postnuclear era, with a new Introduction by the author.Our appreciation of the importance of India can only increase in light of the recent revelations of its nuclear capabilities. Sunil Khilnani's exciting, timely study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this, the world's largest democracy. Throughout his penetrating, provocative work, he illuminates this fundamental issue: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?

About this title

About the Author

Sunil Khilnani, born in New Delhi and educated at Cambridge University, teaches politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. The author of Arguing Revolution, he is at work on a biography of Nehru (forthcoming from FSG).

From the Inside Flap

Fifty years ago the British divided and departed from their most prized imperial possession, handing over the new Indian state to a small nationalist elite led by Jawaharlal Nehru. The new country was then driven by a belief in a political construct, the idea of India, an idea that for decades animated the citizens' efforts to unite their huge, diverse, and poor society and to transform it into a modern state fit to join the irreversible movement of world history.

Sunil Khilnani's exciting book addresses the paradoxes and ironies that have surrounded this project of inventing India--a project that has brought Indians considerable political freedom and carried their enormous democracy to the verge of being Asia's greatest free state but that has also left many of them in poverty and that is now threatened by divisive religious nationalism.

Khilnani's superb historical analysis conveys modern India's energy, fluidity, and unpredictability--in its democracy and its voting patterns, in its visions of economic development, in its diverse cities and devotion to village culture, and in its current disputes over its political identity. Throughout, he provokes and illuminates this fundamental question: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374525919
• ISBN 13: 9780374525910
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288