Book description
What makes India a nation? What has held its many disparate societies
with their diverse, sometimes conflicting, narratives together for more
than sixty years? What has allowed India to sustain its commitment to
the democratic process, given its location in a region that is largely
undemocratic? In this magisterial analysis of the last five hundred
years of Indian history, Meghnad Desai looks at India's colonial past,
its struggle for independence and its many contemporary conundrums, to
discover answers to the questions that have confronted India-watchers
for decades. Rejecting much received wisdom, including narratives
fashioned by India's ruling establishment, Meghnad Desai goes back to
the beginnings of the East-West encounter at the end of the fifteenth
century and tracks its impact on the cultures and politics of the
present day. Through a series of 'Counterfactual Boxes' Meghnad Desai
analyses the accepted defining moments of India's past and suggests
alternative courses that history could so easily have taken. Meghnad
Desai draws on a wealth of sources to illuminate India's journey to the
twenty-first century. Whether it is an examination of British
parliamentary debates on the question of India's independence, or the
liberalization of the economy after decades of licence-permit raj, or
the state's complicity in the Gujarat riots, Meghnad Desai's original,
occasionally iconoclastic, approach to seemingly settled arguments makes
The Rediscovery of India a path-breaking and comprehensive account of
India's past and present.
