As in the blind men and the elephant story, there are various ways of ‘doing’ India. Each author comes with her own vision. None is perfect and none wrong. Misra has written a Mandir (Masjid?)/ Mandal account of what makes India so complex and yet so vibrant. Thus she puts at the front the Dalit and lower-caste movements for dignity, led by Periyar and Ambedkar, even as Gandhi was busy insisting that entry to temples for his beloved Harijans needed unanimous approval of the caste Hindus.
Misra blends together the story of a move towards a liberal modernity with its values of equality and democracy with the tensions caused by the revival/reform movements in Hinduism and Islam as well as the struggle for inclusion by lower castes and Dalits.
The narrative moves most of the time straight down the 150 years from 1857 to today. There are eight chapters. In her first, Tropical Gothic, Misra follows the post-colonial fashion, sneering at British attempts to measure and describe Indian society by census-taking. Ever since Michel Foucault taught the post-colonials that all knowledge serves power and hence is dangerous, they have come down on all measurements, especially the census, as if had the British never tried to define and describe castes no one would have ever realised that Hindu society was caste-ridden—no Mandal, no Mayawati, no Laloo! But then, historians have their fashions.
The next two chapters cover the reform/revival movements in both Hinduism and Islam and the limited reforms introduced by the British which politicised the communal divide. But half the book is long chapters on Gandhi (Spinning the Nation), the Partition (A House Divided), Nehru (The Last Viceroy) and Indira Gandhi (Flames), which cover the waterfront as far as 20th-century history is concerned. The chapter on Gandhi goes in my view into far too much detail about his life in South Africa etc which is only remotely relevant. Same with the chapter on Nehru and Indira. Without this needless padding, the book could have been a hundred pages shorter.
Like the rest, the chapter on the Masjid /Mandal issue is a portmanteau treatment of the many issues in the ’90s. A hurried epilogue brings in globalisation and the various Indian successes of recent years. There are a hundred pages of notes, bibliography, index, etc. The photographs include several which are like film posters in garish colours, and quite amusing. There are five maps at the front of the book, two about caste divisions as per the 1931 Census, and languages of India. In the latter, we have Maithili and even Bihari as languages but not Bhojpuri or Konkani. Urdu has no place in the map either in India or Pakistan.
Overall, I find the book a great opportunity missed. Misra has been persuaded—wrongly, in my view—by her publishers that serious history does not sell; so she has had to ‘tart’ it up. This detracts from what she has to say because in the middle of a serious narrative pop up the ‘interesting’ bits which are distracting. This has made the book overlong. It is neither like Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, a sober, readable analysis, nor is it like William Dalrymple’s The Last Moghul, which can tell amusing stories without distracting from the flow of serious narrative. Because the overlapping themes of Western modernity, movements that sought to gain dignity for many people and religious divisions which tore the subcontinent apart, not just in 1947 but again in 1971 (with Bangladesh splitting from Pakistan) and continue to haunt India are very important. Misra is to be praised in trying to focus a history on these themes, but is to be commiserated with for being misled by her publishers.
