Trouble and strife | 4 June 2008

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.