The Idea of India
by Sunil Khilnani
Buy on Amazon"Our appreciation of the importance of India can only increase in light of current events in Asia and after the revelations about India's nuclear capabilities. This study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this the world's largest democracy. Do the old ideas, or idea, of India still hold true - especially now that the country is in the hands of a very different kind of leadership? Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?". "In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.
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"Yes. So my next book, Khilnani’s The Idea of India , is a very intellectual book, written to mark the 50th anniversary of independence. It’s a Nehruvian book, with the idea of the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim, the urban cities and the countryside and whether the idea is sustainable. Nehru was a socialist, really Fabian society, Labour party, with a kind of keeping-it-all-together secularism. I think India has proved that it is. The traditions of agitation and peaceful process are all still strong. I mean, this is a summary of the intellectual process of development. It is shorter, not the whole history, a selective book. You can read it in a day. No. This is an argument rather than a big history. It is a single line of thought. If you read one short book on India then this is it. Khilnani is an academic with a PhD from Cambridge and he teaches at Johns Hopkins. He is writing a big biography of Nehru. He is a westernised Indian intellectual and this is a kind of argument about Indian identity."
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