ramachandra guha india after gandhi review

Yet Hindus and Muslims do dine in one another’s homes, and they play on the same cricket teams. And the consequences - vicious religious rioting, scars on both India’s landscape and her people - are all too visible.

A visitor to the world’s second most populous country can, without much effort, witness nasty and sectarian politicking in New Delhi or Mumbai. One of the achievements of Ramachandra Guha’s deeply felt new history is that the author remains acutely aware of both the truths and falsehoods contained in Jinnah’s remark. They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations.” To say that India is riven by myriad factions and castes and, more fundamentally, divided between two religions is to describe a particularly vicious curse. As Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Indian leader of the Muslim League, said ruefully in a 1940 speech, seven years before he founded Pakistan: “The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literature. This statement, equal parts plea and diagnosis, only begins to describe the challenge confronting modern-day India. If even the heart is divided into four parts can you expect us Indians to divide ourselves into less than 400?” the country where faction was invented before the zero.

Late in “A Suitable Boy,” Vikram Seth’s fictional panorama of early 1950s India, the difficult but decent politician Mahesh Kapoor receives advice from an underling: “We should think above divisions, splits, cliques!.

Ramachandra guha india after gandhi review