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For someone with almost no knowledge of India, this book was an extremely engaging introduction to the "functioning anarchy" that is India. I picked up this book on a lark. One of the best books I've read recently. Edward Luce focuses on the problems of modern India, its burdensome bureaucracy, endemic corruption, outbreaks of religious conflicts, the stubborn legacy of castes, but only as the backdrop to India's remarkable rise as a global power. I only have a passing interest in India. I read a few pages and I was hooked.
Makes for a dull read. The stories are not particularly interesting and the characters walk around as cliches. Yes, you can learn about the "big picture" details of modern India through this mediocre book, but why wade through connect-the-dot tedium by an outsider and not read someone like Fareed Zakaria instead. The entire book reads like a hybrid of a fluffy, meandering journalistic piece and merely competent research.
Only issue is with the rapid pace of events in India, I hope the author comes up with a new edition within the next 5 years or so. It is written by a westerner, but manages to be in-depth enough to please those in the know about India as well as keep those who are coming new to India happy. This is an excellent book which gives a birds-eye view of India in motion. It strikes close to the right balance between gloom at the myriad problems besetting India and the great enthusiasm and energy with which Indians are at work readying their country for greatness.
Luce's contribution is a holistic view of India that is insightful, well informed, and investigative. And Luce, an Oxford scholar, makes the argument that it is in America's interest to promote better ties with India as a way of counterbalancing China's emerging dominance in the global economy. One of the books about India that I've really enjoyed reading is Edward Luce's "In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India." One point Luce, a foreign correspondent in India for the Financial Times, makes very clear is that India has bypassed the industrial revolution by advancing directly from an agriculture economy to technology. In this volume the reader gets a good look at India's untapped potential and what India needs to do to insure its future growth. Luce stresses, even if change continues to move at its current slow pace, India still will become an extremely important player in the 21st Century -- in spite of the gods.By Gunjan BaglaAuthor of Doing Business in 21st Century India Luce also correctly points out that one of India's greatest challenges is that it is governed by a multi-party coalition which breeds both inefficiency and corruption. Luce does a good job of telling you where India is today and how it got there but he does not choose to speculate on India's future.
Basham, the British classical historian, wrote his still widely admired book The Wonder That Was India in 1954, he tried to persuade his American publishers to make a minor alteration in the title. Luce shares the following anecdotal gem to support his case that Indian culture has an unparalleled thread of continuity: "When A.L. He asserts that if India is to achieve this desired state, the following four constraints must be overcome: (1) 300 million impoverished citizens, (2) environmental degradation, (3) HIV-AIDS epidemic, and (4) challenges to liberal democracy.Luce's recommendations to overcome these problems are specific and helpful, if at times a bit overbearing. Naipaul's prescient observation that India has a "million mutinies now," Luce forcefully raises the palimpsest argument for pluralism.But as hinted at in the book's title and discussed in detail in a chapter titled "The Imaginary Horse: The Continuing Threat of Hindu Nationalism," Luce is anxious that the pentimento theory is gaining currency. Do tradition and modernity coexist like a grandparent and grandchild in an extended family.
And then there was the weighty title written in the past tense. In Europe the past is the past. Isn't this what the Hindu fundamentalists rally around when they wave their saffron flags and their Shiva-inspired tridents. While I have read most of the books that I've purchased, Basham's book has remained pristinely unread on my bookshelf. He does tell us some interesting things.
India as pentimento has Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena supremo, menacing minorities with dreams of a "Hindustan of Hindus" that would bring "Islam in this country down to its knees."Luce rejects Thackeray's sectarian vision. In Spite of the Gods stirs the reader out of sleepy indifference about the dreams and nightmares of the palimpsest that is India--living at once in the past, present, and future. He does not mince words. Echoing V.S. Basham wrote an academic tome titled The Wonder That Was India. Doubleday, January, 2007. Luce, who is a reporter for the Financial Times, is unabashedly a future-oriented Indophile; he makes clear that he would like to see India's trajectory toward superpower status continue. Page after page is filled with quote-worthy insight.
The careful reader is rewarded by questions that these insights raise. It is about the inefficiency of government. For example, Luce notes that "in India the modern lifestyle is just another layer on the country's ancient palimpsest. However, they are presented in the context of the book's overall premise that India is a wonder because of her many religions, her dozen-plus languages, her thousands of dialects which merge as a kind of dialectic within and between cities and villages.
Wondering About India: Palimpsest or Pentimento.RAJESH C. A scan of his chapter titles suggests that modern India is an aggregation of its diverse, multi-layered past: "Global and Medieval," "The Burra Sahibs," "Battles of the Righteous," "Long Live the Sycophants," "Many Crescents," and "A Triangular Dance." The most forceful argument for the past living in the present is made in the penultimate chapter--"New India, Old India: The Many-Layered Character of Indian Modernity." This is the only chapter where the now commonplace observations of call centers and software sectors are discussed. One of his fellow passengers is a 10-year-old Sikh boy who cheerfully and sleeplessly implores Luce, "Tell me some interesting things." This is a good frame of mind for all of Luce's readers-cum-companions on his journey through modern India. $[.].Decades ago A.L. Professor Basham said that in India's case the `was' should be changed to `is,' since the country's civilizational story was unbroken." The publishers were unmoved by the professor's argument.Happily, Luce's readers will be moved by the lively writing and provocative arguments in In Spite of the Gods.
OZA, Jun 12, 2007In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce. Simply put, is India's post-Independence democracy vanishing into some imagined Hindutva past. My way of belonging to that community was to acquire the books that those scholars wrote and read. In part, I was intimidated by its size (568 pages). But page after page of statistically supported prescription begins to take on the feel of a hectoring doctor who doesn't appreciate that the patient is in control of her own destiny.
At first the prescriptive approach is refreshingly candid and concrete. 383 pages. Those in the Indian government (and especially those members of the BJP party out of government) might consider In Spite of the Gods a harangue. Is it like those layered canvases where earlier images show through as the top layer of the painting becomes transparent with age. Luce supports his arguments with a mix of meticulous journalistic reporting, personal anecdote, and reference to well-accepted (at least in the West) scholarship.The closing chapter illustrates how this book of advocacy journalism works.
He relates a night journey in the first-class cabin of an Indian train. Or witness Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism. Or experience Akbar's ecumenical Islam.If the metaphor of palimpsest hides more than it illuminates, is India instead a pentimento. Corruption is the only possible explanation."The harangue is spiced with pithy quotes: "In Africa poverty is a tragedy, in India it is a scandal;" "It is time for India's VIPs to follow the people who get no pay for no work;" "India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity;" "The 21st century is India's to lose."But just as the reader tires of the smart statistics and the smart-aleck quotes, Luce delivers a brilliantly personal closing story. But in India, the past is in many ways also the future."But is India a palimpsest, a layering of old, religious ways onto the new. Indeed, Luce repeatedly compares India unfavorably to China, repeating the following mantra: "The problem is neither money nor technology.
I happened across a pristine copy in a second-hand bookshop near the University of Chicago, where Indologists were doing first-class scholarship about the Indian subcontinent. He takes issue with powerful Hindu politicians who seek to maintain the centuries-old status quo and remain in control by manipulating the illiterate masses (quite often low-caste Hindus or Muslims). How far below the hip-hop-happening surface of agnostic call centers does one need to scratch to discover Aryans galloping on horseback to their Hindu homeland. Every time that I have lifted the book off of its shelf, I've groaned at its heft and silently complained, "But my India is a wonder."Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India is an antidote to books that suggest that the vitality of Indian civilization expired sometime between the Mughal Period and British Imperialism. Most Europeans tend to think of modernity as the triumph of a secular way of life: church attendance gradually dwindles and religion becomes a minority pastime confined to worshipers' private lives.
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