India After Gandhi: A Random Review

I finally managed to read Ram Guha’s much talked about book: India After Gandhi. Since reviewing books is not exactly my forte, I have deliberately attempted a random review rather than a full-blown examination of book. That task must be left in the hands of more capable bloggers.

a) Guha writes well. His prose is precise, his words are carefully chosen and he has written a book which is definitely ‘’readable.”

b) Despite the enormity of the task, Guha has managed to cover almost all important events of the last 60 years. Considering how colorful India’s history has been, this is by no means an ordinary achievement.

c) It is quite clear that Guha greatly admires Nehru. We are all entitled to our biases and Guha certainly cannot be grudged his. However, his portrayal of Nehru goes beyond admiration and his book sometimes reads almost as a hagiography of Nehru. If Guha is to be believed, the entire credit for India’s secular democracy should go to Nehru. (with a passing nod to Gandhi, Patel and Ambedkar.) And if Nehru did anything wrong (his Himalayan blunder for one), others should be blamed. It is never entirely Nehru’s fault even though he ruled this country virtually unchallenged. The first section of book has been appropriately titled Nehru’s India; in Guha’s view, one suspects, India is still Nehru’s India!

d) While Guha has covered almost all important events, the detailing is uneven. While a great deal of space is devoted to the Indo-china war of 1962, the equally important war of 1965 is dismissed in a few pages.

e) Guha claims he has worked for five years on the book. For all the energy he has ostensibly devoted to writing the book, it lacks insight and understanding. Most of it reads like a bland retelling of history without any attempt to actually educate the reader. To give one example, while the period before 1980 held some interest for me and filled some gaps in my knowledge, the period after that is covered in the most perfunctory manner. I cannot recall one single thing which was unknown to me in Guha’s history of the eighties and nineties. Considering the fact that Guha devoted almost 250 pages to this period, it is a damming indictment of his inability to write anything better than Times of India regurgitated. I frequently found myself skipping paragraphs and then entire pages. I don’t like leaving books half unread and that is almost the only reason why I completed it.

f) Guha’s book abounds in clichés–the obvious. There is absolutely nothing new. Same old truisms about how India survives because of democracy, secularism e.t.c. We have heard it so many times before. If that’s all Guha wants to say then why bother writing a 750 page book?

In conclusion, a deeply unsatisfying book; an entirely pedestrian effort. I acknowledge that it can serve as a useful starting point for someone who may not know anything about India but for anyone with more than a passing interest in modern Indian history, the book offers nothing. Even allowing for the fact that it attempts to capture 60 years of Indian history, one cannot help but conclude that Guha lacks the scholarship to write a book of this nature. It’s not as if he is a bad writer; he simply doesn’t know enough! No one expects him to do a Naipaul, but most certainly one expected Guha to attempt something better than the James Hardly Chase (1) style of history writing. (Without the sex as the dictator helpfully added.)

Guha is a delightful chronicler of cricketing history. He should stick to that!

1. Perhaps, comparing Guha to Chase is unfair. Khushwant Singh would be a more appropriate comparison. But when Singh wrote a serious historical book–he wrote a scholarly masterpiece. His two volume book, The history of Sikhs , is a wonderful read.