If anybody knows about modern India, it’s Dietmar Rothermund. He’s the Professor Emeritus of South Asian history at the University of Heidelberg. He is, as he puts it himself, ‘a witness who has watched India for nearly half a century’. He first visited the place in 1960, and managed to interview Jalaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, twice. ‘I am convinced that India has a great future,’ he says. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
In contrast to Rothermund, I knew virtually nothing about modern India until I opened his book. I’d seen the Attenborough film, with Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. I’d read other bits and pieces about Gandhi, and remembered a few facts, principally that he’d slept in the same bed as underage girls in order to test his resolve when it came to celibacy. I knew that India was full of call centres. In fact, while I was reading this book, I answered the phone several times to Indian voices, wondering if I was interested in this or that. I also knew that, on a flat map, India looks much smaller than it actually is. It looks about twice the size of Spain, whereas in fact it’s more like the bottom half of South America.
So if anyone is qualified to quibble with Rothermund about his conviction that India has a great future, it’s not me. But still, after reading this book, which is a meticulous historian’s collection of facts, backed by a lifetime’s work, I feel the need to quibble. To me, India does not look like a country with a great future. It looks like an enormous country always on the verge of enormous trouble. If the facts in Rothermund’s book are anything to go by, India seems to be a place of almost unparalleled volatility.
Where can I start? Well, let’s look at some first impressions. India has been a democratic, independent nation since 1950, when Nehru became Prime Minister. Before this, it was run by the British government, and before that by the British East India Company, and before that by tribal leaders called Mughals. In other words, India’s history took a sharp turn when the Brits arrived, at first to milk it of resources, and then, later, to modernise it, for good or ill, along paternalistic lines. And clearly, India has never come close to getting over this.
Comments
kannan srinivasan
March 13th, 2010 7:31pmSurely the question is not whether Mr Leith is nice about India, but whether he is right.
Isn't it an extraordinary thing that India has so many poor and this doesn't seem to bother the sort of Indians who might read the Spectator; nor for that matter, the foreigners who visit India on holiday or to make money?
Isn't it odd that India cant seem to have any cordial relationship with her neighbours?
Perhaps like Leith I know nothing about India, save that I'm Indian and have lived there most of my life.
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Rachel Lopez
November 13th, 2008 8:21amWhat a pointless review. I learnt nothing about the book from Mr Leith, and apart from a few statistics and facts, it appears Mr Leith didn't bother to learn much about India either.
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Joy Morones
October 10th, 2008 10:18pmIndia's economy is like so much of the 3rd world which has its sell by date.
Don't you remember the call centres in the UK that were taken over by India, especially the banks and then lo and behold some minion in India sold the account numbers to his third cousin or whatever and yes, the shit hit the fan. The Brits were already cheesed off that the Indian call centres meant that their money was a world away, but some banks rushed to assure their customers that when they spoke to an employee, then it would be someone in the UK.
India is a con and will go up in a blue light just like the rest of the world in the past few days.
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Roopa
June 19th, 2008 9:41amWilliam Leith writes "I knew virtually nothing about modern India until I opened his book" and yet he has the audacity to write a pessimistic article on India based on the negatives. Gone are the colonial days Mr Leith - I am afraid to tell you the truth but compared to the problems in the UK and given the population in both UK and India -in summary India is doing a lot better - of course it has its problems but we don't try and tell the world what to do and how to live. We live by our own rules.
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Gareth Mitchell
June 14th, 2008 1:09amWhat's the point in getting someone so ignorant to review a book, a reviewer who spends half of the review boasting about how he doesn't know what he's talking about?
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Dr. Gautam Sen
June 10th, 2008 10:34amUnlike most Indians, simultaneously insecure and desperately self-important, I concluded decades ago that the average white Briton was deeply indifferent towards them. All the pap about multiculturalism, Gandhi,actress Shilpa Shetty, etc. is merely intended to humour the restless natives. Supposedly significant novelists like Paul Scott cheerfully ignore elementary facts in their novels and give Bengali names from the east to characters from northern India. Asian family members in British soaps are randomly bestowed both Mulsim and Hindu names, insulting any sense of integrity in their identity.
William Leith reviews Rothermund in the same vein, proudly announcing his lack of knowledge and interest in India. I was enlightened to learn that India's nuclear programme was a joint venture with Russia and that the US rather than China sponsored Pakistan's Islamic WMD though the former certainly looked the other way in its typical pursuit of immediate gratifications. I could go on, but why provoke even more contempt, to which, thankfully, one has become accustomed!!
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