The Idea of India - Softcover

Khilnani, Sunil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143032461 ISBN 13: 9780143032465

Publisher: PENGUIN INDIA, 2004

Synopsis

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About this title

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?

About the Author:

Sunil Khilnani is the author of Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives and Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France. He is the Avantha Professor and Director of the India Institute at King’s College London and a visiting professor at Princeton University. He is married to the writer Katherine Boo.

About this edition

• Publisher: PENGUIN INDIA
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0143032461
• ISBN 13: 9780143032465
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 263