India After Gandhi

When I think about Indian history I think about our struggle for independence, Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar, etc. and I think about partition. I have never known or read anything about post Indian independence or about India's growth. So when 2 years ago I heard Ramchandra Guha talk about his book "India After Gandhi" I knew I wanted to read that book. Other contenders to this book were some Shashi Tharoor titles, but I knew for sure that Tharoor is a Congress loyalist and the titles seemed to be about modern India. So I decided to wait on his titles and instead went with Guha's book. I had no idea that I had hit a bull's eye with this choice. The author says that for Indian historians, India's history ends at partition and independence. When I read that line, I remembered all the books that I had read, even those by British authors. None of them went beyond independence. Maybe a play on Gandhi's assassination. But that's about it. So, hopefully this book will teach me everything that I don't know.

For starters it does talk about all the British leaders, including Winston Churchill who believed that India with it's huge diversity and poverty would not be able to survive as a single nation post independence. To some extent that was proven true by the horrific incidences during partition. Inspite of all our diversity, poverty and other problems we have survived, we have thrived. As the author rightly says, we are an exception to the rule.