The Idea of India

Sunil Khilnani's exciting book addresses the paradoxes and ironies that have surrounded the project of inventing India—a project that has brought Indians considerable political freedom and carried their enormous democracy to the verge of being Asia's greatest free state but that has also left many of them in poverty and that is now threatened by divisive religious nationalism. Khilnani's superb historical analysis conveys modern India's energy, fluidity, and unpredictability—in its democracy and its voting patterns, in its visions of economic development, in its diverse cities and devotion to village culture, and in its current disputes over its political identity. Throughout, he provokes and illuminates this fundamental question: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?