Little of that surfaced here-which is appropriate when considering the grand grievances of Nixon. It was interesting how in the Nixon biography I recently read much was made about how Nixon felt Nehru and Indira Gandhi looked down upon him, a grocer's son. Nehru apparently once confessed to Andre Malraux that his greatest challenge was creating and maintaining a secular state in a religious country. I pondered concepts like communalism all week and made comparisons with other places, other history. My chief response was a desire to read more both by Nehru as well as about him.

I feel as if I was simultaneously dazzled and lost. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive.

My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. Massively researched and elegantly written, this is the work of a major scholar at the height of his powers, a brilliant and definitive history of what is possibly the most important, occasionally the most exasperating, and certainly the most interesting country in the world. This tenth anniversary edition, published to coincide with seventy years of India’s independence, is revised and expanded to bring the narrative up to the present. Guha includes vivid sketches of the major “provincial” leaders, but also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known Indians-peasants, tribals, women, workers, and Untouchables. Moving between history and biography, this story provides fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those legendary and long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

Taking full advantage of the dramatic details of the protests and conflicts that helped shape the nation, politically, socially, and economically, Ramachandra Guha writes of the factors and processes that have kept the country together, and kept it democratic, defying the numerous prophets of doom. Told in lucid and beautiful prose, the story of India’s wild ride toward and since Independence is a riveting one. From one of the subcontinent’s most important and controversial writers comes this definitive history of post-Partition India, now revised and updated with extensive new material

India after gandhi by ramachandra guha