The Idea of India

"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."