New Book:
The Idea of India
By Sunil Khilnani
Published by Farrar Straus Giroux - 1999

Contrary to India's nationalist myths, enamoured of immemorial 'village republics', pre-colonial history little prepared it for modern democracy. Nor was democracy a gift of the departing British. Democracy was established after a profound historical rupture -- the experience, at once humiliating and enabling, of colonialism, which made it impossible for Indians to regard their own past as a sufficient resource for facing the future and condemned them, in struggling against the subtle knots of the foreigner's Raj, to struggle also against themselves. But it also incited them to imagine new possibilities: of being a nation, of possessing their own state, and of doing so on their own terms in a world of other states. By gradually raising the edifice of a state whose sovereign powers stretched across the vast Indian landscape, the British made politics the unavoidable terrain on which Indians would have to learn to act.

In pre-colonial India, power was not embodied in the concept of a state, whether republican or absolutist. Across the subcontinent, varied economies and cultures were matched by an assortment of political arrangements. They were nothing like the static 'oriental despotism' conjured up by colonial and Marxist historians: deliberative and consultative forms of politics did exist, but there was no protracted historical struggle to install institutions of representative government, nor (despite a hardly passive rural or urban poor) did large-scale popular movements act to curb the powers of rulers. Most importantly, before the gradual British acquisition of most of India's territory no single imperium had ever ruled the whole, immense subcontinental triangle. India's social order successfully curbed and blunted the ambitions of political power, and made it extraordinarily resistant to political moulding.

Read more:
http://nyti.ms/INnmR2

Review:
In an era that abounds with superficial books on South Asia, Khilnani’s is an insightful and sensitive book, though perhaps somewhat out of sync (and this is not a criticism) with the contemporary Indian urban middle-class mood, which delights in denigrating all things perceived as “Nehruvian”; some of the other reviewers have categorized Khilnani as part of the “old school” of Indian historiographers, vaguely dismissed as “leftists”or “Nehruvians”; nothing could be further from the truth: while the book displays an empathy with Nehru’s idea of India, it is far too sophisticated to accept that conception as anything more than one of a number of competing ideas, albeit one that has exercised great power over many in the country’s urban elite. Hindutva is another such idea of India, and Khilnani offers a nuanced appraisal, far removed from both the fascistic infatuations of the right and the unthinking denunciations of those on the Indian left. Finally: the book is particularly useful on Indira Gandhi, and Khilnani persuasively links her “mass democratisation” of the late 1960′s and 70′s to the rise of both the saffron parties and the lower-caste mobilizations of the last fifteen years, though the most intellectually stimulating chapter remains the one on the architecture of the colonial city, conceptualized by Khilnani as, among others, the site where colonialism was acted out, the site, in other words, of the Indian’s subjection.

Image:
Title: A New Map of Hindoostan, From the Latest Authorities - 1806
Map Maker: John Cary
Place / Date: London / 1806

Detailed map of the region bounded by the Bay of Bengal, Birmah, Tibet, Cabul and Persia, with a large inset of Ceylon.

Colored by regions. Shows towns, roads, rivers, lakes, islands, etc. Very detailed. An excellent large format map from Cary's Universal Atlas

Images/Descriptions provided by www.RareMaps.com -- Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.