Book Review: India from Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

‘India from Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond’

By Shashi Tharoor

Penguin

This is my first read from Shashi Tharoor’s. There are many books written on India, all from different viewpoints and capturing India’s different phases in history or different shades of life, but this book “India: from midnight to the millennium and beyond”, has its own honorable place. It is the story of India’s history, from 15 August 1947 onwards. It tells how Nehru took our nation forward with his socialism which in the end reached us to the verge of near bankruptcy in 1991. It covers policies and autocracy of Indira Gandhi and the terror of Emergency. In a way it covers the whole Nehru-Gandhi dynasty till the time of Sonia Gandhi. Along with the political leadership, the pages cover issues like economy, communalism and secularism (Hindus standpoint Vs Muslim appeasing politics in India), a big chapter on NRIs and expatriation (this chapter is an absolute delight to read), the politics of castes and reservations, and what not. The book is exhaustive and amazing to read. The only downside is that if someone like me has lived in India always, one already knows the nitty-gritty of our political system and national saga. As such Shashi Tharoor’s learned opinion and sharp representation of facts make the book still going through with delight. And for outsiders and foreigners, his sensible explanation really helps. 

I have typewritten some portions from the book. I regret errors if any. Have not given any titles to the paragraphs, but topics are evident. Just some snapshots taken from the first half of the book:  

Successive Indian govts permitted the retention of Muslim Personal Law separate from the country’s civil code and even financed Haj pilgrimages to Mecca. Two of India’s first five Presidents were Muslims, as were innumerable cabinet ministers, ambassadors, generals and supreme court justices. (P xxvi)

To them, an independent India, freed after nearly a thousand years of alien rule (first Muslim, then British), and rid of a sizeable portion of its Muslim population by Partition, had an obligation to assert its own identity, one that would be triumphantly and indigenously Hindu. They are not fundamentalist in any meaningful sense of the term, since Hinduism is uniquely a religion without fundamentals: there is no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Sunday, no single Hindu holy book, and indeed no such thing as Hindu heresy. (P xxvi)

The negative side of the ledger is easily listed: economic exploitation (often undisguised looting of everything from minerals to jewels); stunting of indigenous industry (symbolized by the deliberate barbarity with which, on at least two occasions, the British ordered the thumbs of whole communities of Indian weavers chopped off so that they couldn’t compete with the producers of Lancashire); the creation of a landless peasantry (through archy of Zamindars created by the British to maintain rural order); and general poverty, hunger, and underdevelopment. (P14)

A builder’s daughter from Torino, without a college degree, with no experience of Indian life beyond the rarefied realms of the prime minister’s residence, fiercely protective of her privacy, so reserved and unsmiling in public that she has been unkindly dubbed “the Turin shroud,” leading a billion Indians at the head of the world’s most complex, rambunctious, and violent democracy? (P 26)

Rajiv had barely begun to grow into the role when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she had herself primed for narrow partisan purposes. In 1977 the Congress Party had been ousted in Punjab by the Sikh Akali Dal Party, an ally of Janata; Mrs. Gandhi typically decided to undermine them from the quarter they least expected, by opponents even more Sikh than the Akalis. So she encouraged (and reportedly even financed) the extreme fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. (P 37)

Above all, as a Hindu, I belong to the only major religion in the world that doesn’t claim to be the only true religion. (P 57)

An uncle of mine put it ironically, “In my parent’s time, during the nationalist movement, they were encouraged by Gandhi and Nehru to reject caste; we dropped our caste-driven surnames and declared caste a social evil. As a result, when I grew up, I was unaware of caste; it was an irrelevance at school, at work, in my social contacts; the last thing I thought about was the caste of someone I met. Now, in my children’s generation, the wheel has come full circle. Caste is suddenly all-important again. Your caste determines your opportunities, your prospects, your promotions. You can’t go forward unless you are a Backward.” (P 111)

The attitude of an expatriate to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity. (P 143)

A wonderful book which I recommend to all. 

- Rahul