RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

India: The Rise of an Asian Giant

Trouble and strife

William Leith on Dietmar Rothermund's account of India

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.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comments (5)   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved