India

History Today

INDIA, The land of contrasts, presents no greater contrast than this: in a land rich in history there is a dearth of native historians, particularly those willing to tackle big subjects. Few academic historians are ready to explain how modern India emerged. Nor do they write biographies of prominent Indians. Even scarcer are large format illustrated books of popular history.

Indian historians appear to worry that they might ruffle too many feathers, and there is every reason to sympathize with this fear. A couple of years ago, an American academic James Laine wrote a biography of Shivaji, the seventeenth century Maratha king. Some modern day Shivaji followers were so outraged by certain passages in the book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, that the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute where Laine had carried out the research was attacked. Oxford University Press withdrew the book from India where it was banned.

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India Today

A FOUR-YEAR wait for a car, no kissing on screen and no drinking without a permit. In the third decade of freedom, India was a land of scarcity, prohibitions and controls.

The Sixties in the West were a decade of revolution, mini-skirts and the Beatles. In India it was a decade when you were constantly told what you could not do and when, for a while, it seemed the very idea of India might not work.

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India Today

THE 1960s in the west were a decade of revolution, the mini skirts and the Beatles. In India it was a decade when you were constantly told what you could not do and, when for a time, it seemed the very idea of India might not work.

The decade began very promisingly with seemingly impossible dreams fulfilled.

In August 1960 K. Asif finally released Mughal-e-Azam, fifteen years after he had started making the movie. A year later the Indian Army marched into Goa and ejected the Portuguese.

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Tehelka Website

IN VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, a Sikh returns to India having lived many years abroad. When he arrives in Bombay, he sits down among his suitcases and begins to cry. “He had forgotten what Indian poverty was like,” writes Naipaul. “It is an Indian story, in its arrangement of figure and properties, its melodrama, its pathos.”

I have been reminded of this in recent weeks after my Bollywood — A History was published in India by Roli Books. Like the Sikh, I have felt like crying not because I have forgotten Indian poverty but because I had forgotten how very curious Indian critics can be, and how very different from British ones.

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Mail on Sunday

ON 15 August 1947 as the Union Flag was pulled down from Delhi’s Red Fort and the new Indian flag unfurled, Duff Cooper, then British ambassador in Paris, recorded in his diary his pain and sadness. “A grand thing has come to an end and its last day should be one of mourning. Nor do I personally believe that the new regime will bring good to the peoples of India.”

Guha does not mention Cooper in his history of India since independence, but he has many other quotations from prominent Britons, most notably Churchill, which record the firm conviction of the departing British that the new Indian state would fail. Indians could not possible run this huge country without British help.

Certainly in the early years of independent India not many would have given much chance of the new born state reaching 60, which it will in August.

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