India: Facing the Twenty-First Century (The Essential Asia)

Sometime early in the twenty-first century India will overtake China as the most populous nation in the world. For all its size and importance, India is a relatively unknown nation to the rest of the world, trapped in its own self-absorption, suspicious of the outside world, unwilling to interact as a nation among nations. Torn by racial violence and conflict, impoverished, ardent, mystical, religious, exciting, dangerous, and powerful - India is all of these things and more. Barbara Crossette gives us a brilliant short introduction to the world's largest democracy. In Part I, she looks at the inner self and tries to draw some general conclusions for the uninitiated on the nature of Indian myth and psychology. Part II deals with daily realities - the violence of contemporary Indian society, problems of ethnicity, caste, and religion, the plight of children, bureaucracy in sports, the darshan effect, and the growing power of the secular middle class. Part III treats politics: the problems of political history and self-definition, India and its neighbors, and the relationship between the United States and India. An afterword looks, tenuously and tentatively, toward India's hope for the future.

India "seems bent on self-destruction," opines Crossette, a research associate at Columbia University's Southern Asian Institute and a New York Times senior editor who until 1991 was a correspondent in New Delhi. Staggering corruption at all levels; millions of indentured child laborers; the widespread murder of wives by husbands; deepening poverty among a vast, illiterate majority left out of technocrats' economic plans: these are among the problems that, according to Crossette, could derail the world's largest democracy. India, she reports, is becoming increasingly undemocratic--the thousands of Indians arrested without charge or trial being just one of the human rights abuses. Crossette faults the dynasty led by Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, as well as the country's apolitical new middle class, for India's slide into inefficiency, regional strife and corruption. She commends the proliferation of grass-roots activist movements but her compelling report offers few solutions.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Crossette, former New York Times correspondent for India, has produced an insightful, stimulating, and provocative study on that country. Arranging her book in three sections, she first provides an overview of the Indian psyche, then analyzes the present situation, and concludes with projections for the future. Incorporating both her own experience and interviews she conducted while in India, she also quotes extensively from a wide range of both Indian and Western authors who recently have written on India. The book is a definite purchase for any library concerned with contemporary India. Novak, in contrast, presents an unstructured account that is far more an extended diatribe over countless cups of tea. Unlike Crossette, who is not afraid to call a spade a spade, Novak declares Bangladesh to be heaven on earth. Problems of poverty (in one of the poorest nations in the world), treatment of women, lack of educational facilities, medical services, and infrastructure are simply irrelevant to his discussion. Factual errors further diminish the usefulness of this volume. Although we badly need books on Bangladesh, libraries may safely pass this one by.
- Donald Clay Johnson, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., Minneapolis
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.