Desicritics Author: Shantanu Dutta

Book Review : Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

Shantanu Dutta — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:24:35 EDT

Pending further investigation, we have removed this article. The allegations are of a serious nature and open Desicritics for action based on copyright infringement. A final decision will be taken after we hear from the author and evaluate information from other sources.

India, the New Imperialist?

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 6 May 2009 11:31:55 EDT

The old style imperialist that we all know about used to eye a nice, prosperous piece of land and then find some means of possessing it. The means have varied from time to time; a couple of centuries ago, it would have meant sending in your army to capture that piece of land and govern it my sending in your own people. That is the most classic form and that has now fallen in to disuse. However, a modified version is in place. Here you identify a stooge who is from the local people and get him to dance in your tune as you play the music. This form is still popular and quite in vogue and here the army plays an important but supposedly subservient role. A more recent form is the economic variety of imperialism where countries subvert the economic backbone of a country to protect its own interests. This too has been in vogue in recent decades but is of course more subtle.

We in India have always considered ourselves as the victims – and so the annual breast beating rituals that occur on the 26th of January and the 15th of August. No disrespect to the freedom fighters and all those who laid down their lives for the cause. The point here is that perhaps the Indians of today – no doubt to protect the interests of Indians like myself are going about doing the same thing as the British did in their time. What did the East India Company primarily do? Trade, right? The political action that buzzed in the background was all to ensure that trade interests were always protected. We read all that in our history books – nothing new so far.

Have you imagined India in that role? Probably never. But India, plagued by an increased specter of food shortages is joining a growing band of Asian nations in eyeing the last continent left to be still eyed for trade – usually one sided trade. Weak nations with even weaker governments are willing to trade in arable land for the right prices so that we in India as well as other such emerging giants might eat well. How much land has been sold? Between 15 million to 20 million hectares, which is more than all of Germany’s farmland it seems. Many governments, either directly or through state-owned entities and public-private partnerships, are in negotiations for, or have already closed deals on, arable land leases, concessions, or purchases abroad. Is agricultural land only available in Africa? Of course not! But it is relatively speaking much easier to strike deals with governments or more accurately individuals who control government in Africa where institutional checks and balance mechanisms are weak and prices are cheaper. So the Indian government and several companies have intensified the chase for farmland abroad and even farmers from Andhra Pradesh have gone and invested in land in Kenya,

Now our patriotic sensibilities will be deeply offended at the thought of someone calling us and our motivations imperialistic for we all like to walk the high moral ground and this is perfectly understandable. But in our neighborhood at least, India is quite known the as the neighborhood king, strutting and flaunting its strength in the tiny part of the world called South India. Check out Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and what they have to say about how India throws its weight around in its immediate neighborhood. The national interest is supreme as it was then, as it is now. From trade to imperialism, India can not be faulted on not learning its lessons from the East India Company!

Book Review: Jumping over Fire

Shantanu Dutta — Tue, 5 May 2009 08:49:36 EDT

I wonder why Jumping over Fire is not as well known as The Kite Runner. Nahid Rachin in this book set partly in Iran and partly in the USA captures Iranian society in transition. The picture painted will be found to be extremely familiar to any reader who has read The Kite Runner. The Iranian part of the book is set in the last days of the Shah’s rule and the story unfolds through the eyes of Norah Ellahi, the daughter of an Iranian father and an American mother. They are part of the elitist section of Iranian society with Norah’s father working as a doctor in the hospital operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, considered one of the principal tools of the Shah’s stooge imperialism. The book certainly describes a lifestyle of the Ellahi family to which Nora and her brother Jahan belong.

The problem of identity is one that this book wrestles with and it does so at several levels. There is the question of finding your identity when half of you are Iranian and half American and society is rapidly turning rapidly anti American. There is the story of the identity of an adopted child which Norah’s brother Jahan is and the horror and the bewilderment of that discovery. there is the problem of being liberal in a society that is traditional at best and orthodox at best and rapidly becoming more so. mid way through the book , the family secretly emigrate to the USA, where they seek political asylum and another journey of identity begins for Norah and Jahan – to be identified as American when the typical American student sees Iranians as “the enemy”, especially after a group of Iranians take American embassy officials as hostages. for Jahan, the identity issue would never be resolved, and in looks more Asian and obviously Iranian than his sister, he gives up along the way and begins a reverse journey back into Iran – identifying more closely with every thing that his parents and sister had consciously abandoned and in eventually choosing to trace out and live with his birth mother

The book is also great in capturing a society in change and transition. it begins with the children living what can only be described privileged lives in the refinery town of Masjid –e –Suleiman with the barest of restrictions and deference to local culture; a contrast that the children only experience when they visit their father’s country retreat at Meigoon where the large joint family follows tradition and typical Islamic practice like the chador. But the cities largely and certainly the anglicized enclaves where the elite live are Westernized and liberated and these trips to the country side are few and far between.

All this changes of course and once the Shah and his West leaning regime falls and the and the Ayatollah Khomeini comes to power, what was till now an aberration becomes the norm. Islamic values are more strictly enforced and other traditions even if deeply Persian and anciently rooted – like Nauroz, the traditional Spring New Year and the customs and celebration associated with them are increasingly outlawed and go underground. This is some thing that Norah is happy to run away from and Jahan is only willing to embrace even though Islamic values would run counter to a long running incestuous relationship with his sister – a theme that Nahid Rachin introduces to what purpose is a mystery.

Jumping over Fire is a story with a sweeping backdrop of history that is recent and immediate, with implications for events now unfolding in the Middle East. Kite runner portrayed for us the changes in Afghanistan; this one talks about the changes in Iran; except that the Islamic society in Iran would seem relatively humane and welcomed compared to the loathing that the Taliban seemed to generally arouse.

Movie Review: Rock On - Tum ho toh... - Celebrating Frindship

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:17:35 EDT

It was one of the new Airbus 320 planes that Air India has begun to introduce on its domestic routes. I tried on the in flight entertainment for the sheer experience of it. For long, I have been used to carrying my own entertainment on board in the form of a book. I tuned into a video channel. The Farhan Akhtar film Rock On was showing. In fact it was about the end when the band Magick is getting ready to play for one lest time. It is a very different world from the one where they began playing as a band in their early youth.

Two of the four have moved on from their youthful sojourn with music and made some thing of their lives – they are successful... success in terms of what we usually define as success. Two others had not been so lucky. At the time of this final concert, one of them n fact was dying and one other was emigrating after not managing to make any thing much of his life in India. How the men bonded together after having drifted away and celebrated their friendship seeing in that bond an imperishable treasure was some thing that stayed with me long after I picked my bags and left the flight.

Friendships form rather easily in youth and wither away almost quite as easily as in the film as we pass out of our schools and colleges and get busy with our lives. If we happen to be in the same line or business or profession, we may stay in touch in the form of an old boy’s club or an alumni association, but the connections remain tenuous at best. Social pleasantries may be exchanged and hands shaken but they remain rituals of inveterate shallowness

We don’t have time for investing in relationships that truly last ; for we are too busy networking – that is the power play of today – seeking out time to meet and connect with people who matter – matter in the professional and career sphere, that is; not in the ethereal space called friendship.

So we go to parties, seminars, and conferences armed to the teeth with our wallets stuffed with our calling cards because we can’t afford not to; not going or going unarmed may mean a lost business deal – a successful deal will mean more parties and networking events and a more power packed business card. And along the way what is often sacrificed at the altar of professional networking is the rich flavor of friendships – friendships that may or may not open professional or career goals for us but will always be a healing spa for our tired and weary spirits.

As my flight descended to land in Mumbai , the closing credits of Rock On came on screen. it said that long after Magick played their last song together, they continued to meet together every week and they were not weary. not in one-dimensional networking where selfishness and self gain is couched in velvet gloves, but in inhibited friendship, they found the lyric of their lives.

“tum ho toh
gaata hai dil
tum nahin
toh geet kahan
tum ho toh
hai sab haasil
tum nahin toh kya hai yahan
“tum ho toh hai har
ek pal meherbaan ye
jahaan”

Surely few gifts and few joys are worth more !

Happy Birthday, Sir!

Shantanu Dutta — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:09:16 EDT

The first birthday greeting I received a few days ago wasn’t from any of my friends. It was from an online dining portal who wished me a very happy birthday and very quickly followed up with a query as to how I was planning on celebrating it and could they suggest some options for a nice and quiet meal from their catalogue.

I managed to send them on their way; but soon there was another one coming and this was from my financial planner. he had been suggesting for some time that I was under insured and that I ought to buy some more insurance – from him of course and after his good wishes and all, he didn’t waste any time in reminding me that in buying insurance , age was every thing and that on my birthday, I had become a year older and in all likelihood the premiums would now go up a bit… if only I had bought the policy a little earlier, the cost would have been lesser… but it was not still too late….

A little later, it was the relationship manager at the bank. He went through the motions and then went on to tell me that this was a very auspicious day to begin investments in SIPs of some high grade mutual funds that he would be of course be very happy to recommend. After a brief talk about rupee cost averaging, he urged me to consider buying some gold for the kid’s education and all that. Akshay Tritiya, the Hindu New Year was at hand and what better time to buy gold which was guaranteed to be pure. There were a couple of more phone calls from assorted people some of whom I did not know even existed, much less they knowing and remembering my birthday. By the time my friends and family got around to wishing me eventually, I could tell them with a smirk that they were rather late in the queue.

Makes me think as to how commercialized we have become and we have taken our intimate moments into that commercialized zone, where there are no barriers and boundaries to privacy ; no thinking twice before making what is often an absurdly stupid social transaction? I mean how can you really greet any one who you have never met in your life and are unlikely to; or at best some one you meet a couple of times a year and for perhaps for no more than an hour at a time.

Less intrusive but no less bothersome are the numerous e-mail messages from friends who seem to sprout like mushrooms in the monsoon around your birthday. scroll down a bit, and there is the pitch – a discounted flight ticket for the spouse, a cheap holiday package, home delivered movie tickets and there was even a free pen drive provided I shopped for a certain amount at a shopping portal.

While wanting to sell your product if you have something of worth is a good thing ; demeaning special days and occasions in such a shallow way that you know it is phony and I know it is phony is crass! relationships are sacred and precious and although admittedly the state of most of them is not what it should be and we and our friends often forget dates we ought not to, few of us would like to be greeted on our birthdays by an insurance agent selling a policy on our birthday - just in case - that is grotesque and there is no other better way to describe the consumer age we live in!

Book Review: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Shantanu Dutta — Thu, 9 Apr 2009 11:28:06 EDT

Amitav Ghosh’s novels are all meticulously researched and Sea of Poppies is no exception. With the opium trade and the opium wars as a background, the book explores in detail the East India Company-run opium factory at Ghazipur, the workers whose lives depended on it and its produce. At another level, it also tracks the origins and journey of the first batch of the Indian Diaspora, the indentured laborers of the nineteenth century. This class of people, who supplied cheap labor in the British Empire after slavery was abolished, traveled under horrendous conditions to escape the poverty and deprivation in their native land. The book chronicles well, the life and ambitions of the grandiose empire builders and the effect of their actions on ordinary Indian people.

Against this background, Sea of Poppies paints a poignant picture of the human devastation caused by imperialism. The fertile farms of the Ganges plain are blooming only with poppies - beautiful, deadly, denying the peasants the crops to sustain them and indebting them to moneylenders and landowners, themselves indebted to the buccaneers of the East India Company. Skillfully and seemingly randomly, Ghosh assembles those who will set sail in his narrative of the Ibis, an old slaving ship that is taking indentured laborers to Mauritius.

The characters are many and diverse and yet richly etched. He begins in the villages of eastern Bihar with Deeti, soon to be widowed; her addicted husband, who works at the British opium factory at Ghazipur; and Kalua, a low-caste carter of colossal strength and resource. Moving downstream, we meet a bankrupt landowner, Raja Neel Rattan; an American sailor, Zachary; Paulette, a young Frenchwoman, and her Bengali foster-brother Jodu; Benjamin Burnham, an unscrupulous British merchant, and his Bengali agent, Baboo Nob Kissin; and an assortment of nautch girls and Indian sepoys and soldiers in the service of the Company.

As they sail down the Hooghly and into the sea, their old family ties are washed away, and they view themselves as jahaj-bhais (ship-brothers) who will build whole new lives for themselves in the remote islands where they are being taken.. Cut off from their roots, in transit, and looking ahead to a fresh start, the migrants are prone to invent new names and histories and innovatively try to recreate rituals surrounding marriage , funerals and other rites of passage which can no longer be performed in their original form.

The novel closes with the Ibis in mid-ocean in a storm. Serang Ali, leader of the lascars, has abandoned ship, along with the convicts and the condemned; the first mate as well as the subedar are dead; of the key figures only Deeti, Paulette, Nob Kissin and Zachary are left, watching from the deck the disappearance of the long boat and those close to them. the deliberately ambiguous ending of the novel which leaves the reader speculating about the fat of those left behind on the ship as well as those who have sailed away on the boat seems to have in its kernel the seeds of the other parts of the trilogy that Ghosh is said to be writing around the them of the opium wars.

India Goes to Vote

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:52:42 EDT

The world’s largest democracy, India, will hold general elections starting in a few weeks from now. In a country of more than a billion people, general election is nothing sort of a “make or break” time for many interest groups, political parties and the common folk. For how their life will be for next five years is decided on that day.

This time things are different and the political map of the country has undergone a drastic change with the delimitation of the Lok Sabha and assembly constituencies. Many constituencies have disappeared and new ones have emerged with different contours and demography and that does not always suit politicians. Justice Kuldip and his team have worked diligently for the last three years to bring out this map which will make and mar the destiny of many of our netas in a few weeks from now. The boundaries of 499 constituencies have been redrawn in the run up to the forthcoming 15th general elections leaving contestants scrambling for “safe” and winnable seats.

In a deeply fractured society divided along caste, religious, tribal and identity lines, redrawing the constituencies has, in the words of political scientist Yogendra Yadav, "wiped out their histories" and altered the political representation of social groups. And in the mean while, although much is being written about the fact that regional parties are increasingly becoming prominent, a closer scrutiny would reveal that it is not that they are regional parties, but that they are almost generally caste and ethnic based parties. And that is a cause for concern. There is nothing wrong per se in the growth of regional parties; the Indian Constitution after all encourages a cultural federalism; but the same constitution actively discourages casteism.

Another difference this time is the number of first time voters. Since the last election, the demographic profile of India's electoral based has shifted. More than half of India's 1150 million population is younger than 25, 42 million new voters have entered the electorate since 2004, and, as a result of the newly delimited constituencies, the importance of urban votes has increased in the electoral collage. The internet and mobile penetration in India has increased dramatically since 2004, from 26 million to 365 million for mobile, and from 16 million to 80 million for the internet. All this will make the coming election, India’s first digital elections. The search giant Google has launched the Google India Elections Centre in both English and Hindi to facilitate the spread of information relating to elections.

Among the main players, the political parties themselves, there are total confusion. The original alliances, the UPA and the NDA have become reduced to being the 1st and 2nd front and now we have a 3rd and a 4th front too competing for space. There are satirical quips that the real elections will happen after the ordinary citizen would have exercised his franchise between April 16 and May 13 and in fact after May 16th when the counting is done and the final tallies of the various fronts has become visible.

One of the aspects of the digitized elections that we are seeing in India is the increasing relevance of technology and media converging with the efforts of civil society in reaching out to people – particularly the middle class recluses who are often reluctant to vote but who could; if they choose to do so and vote also with discernment, make a difference to the electoral tally. So whether it be the Advani. in web site calling for an endorsement of the lauha purush as the nirnayak neta the country supposedly needs ; to Aamir Khan endorsing people to vote or the Tata tea campaign with Janagraha or the Lead India campaign, the media and the digital platforms has greatly widened the reach

As candidates scramble to balance equations of caste and constituency, in the midst of all the ensuing confusion, citizens are busy fumbling to find a candidate who can represent their interests best and will not merely juggle parties and affiliations to be a minister…….only time will tell whether the bogs and the Sass and pod casts are going to influence the outcome or it will be the old fashioned combination of money, muscle power with some sage advice from the family astrologer! Let us wait and see!

Indentured Laborers - The First Non-Resident Indians

Shantanu Dutta — Thu, 2 Apr 2009 09:23:46 EDT

When we think of NRIs today, we probably largely think of wealthy movers and shakers like Lakshmi Mittal or Swaraj Paul or Bobby Jindal and the likes of them. a few will perhaps recall the many numbers of Indians who sweat it out in the Gulf countries and some others will recall the professionals – the doctors, the scientists and the IT professionals. But not many perhaps will think of the first NRIs as slaves or rather glorified slaves as the indentured laborers from India in a way were.

If you have read Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Sea of Poppies, you will know. In the 18th century, the labor needs of the rapidly expanding British Empire were met by the slave trade.This was opposed by Christian reformers like William Wilberforce in Britain and William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, tabled a motion in Parliament in 1792 to gradually abolish slavery. In 1807, the shipping of slaves to British colonies was forbidden and in 1808, the slave trade was prohibited. The gap in the labour market was filled by indentured labourers or contract labourers, and these came largely from india. Although these men( and some women); mostly from the cow belt of India and usually victims of political machinations as well as poverty and often both were treated marginally better than slaves, they too were permanently uprooted from their home lands which they would never see again. India was the source for the greatest number of indentured workers to the New World, and approximately 1.3 million individuals crossed the oceans under contracts of indenture.

As Amitav Ghosh’s book recounts, poverty, political upheaval, ecological disasters such as droughts, floods, and famines, and overcrowding were causing increased internal migration and large refugee populations. Conditions were often so bad that although many Indian communities were close-knit and, in some cases, migration overseas actually violated certain caste restrictions, many individuals often felt compelled to abandon their homes and families and seek employment in other areas of India or across the ocean in an effort to improve their situations

Many of the indentured labourers were convicts. Indian convicts transported out in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped settle and colonize the overseas European empires. Such workers filled a critical need for labor, playing an especially significant role in carrying out the building and infrastructure projects that were so critical to the institution and consolidation of the Empire. For instance, Indian convicts sent to Singapore built some of the finest colonial buildings here, including the St Andrews Cathedral and Government House. With the convicts came indentured labourers to provide manpower for the ports and railway, Sepoys and Sikh policemen, milkman, tailors and artisans, merchants and moneylenders

The end of indentured labour from India was actually decided through the intervention of the growing clout of the Indian nationalist movement; and it happened as later as in the earliest years of the 20th century- that is barely a hundred years ago. Curzon was the first Viceroy to India to actually consider the plight of the indentured labourer an issue and, although he often had to accept the commands of his superiors in England, he was staunch in pressing the issue and raising awareness. Gandhiji was also instrumental in bringing to light the racism and inequality suffered through the indenture system and low-paying labour. In fact 2016, just eight years away, will mark the centenary of the struggle spearheaded by Gandhiji against continued Indian indentureship from India to Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Fiji and Mauritius, among several other countries, at the height of British colonialism, an event that might well go unrecognized in spite of the now institutionalized pravasi bharatiya divas observed every year.

Coaching Classes - The Sweat Shops of Education

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 08:06:05 EDT

The son of a friend recently went away all the way from Delhi to Kerala to prepare for the medical entrance tests. It seems that they have coaching centers there which have tracked the entrance tests of some medical colleges for years and have now got the requisite expertise to say that any one that enrolls with them has a much better chance of cracking the tests than the man on the road who can’t access these privileges.

Nearer home, my newspaper vendor puts in with the daily newspaper, pamphlets of institutes some well known and some not, that would put the neighborhood kids through their board exams, their medical entrance tests, their IIT entrance exams and all other kinds. That there is so much demand for them and that they are mushrooming by the day, makes me feel extremely uneasy. however in the rather bizarre imitation of keeping up with the Jones, and try and beat the competition which is getting stiffer by the day, most people I know will have to make use of one or the other of them. may be some will enroll in more than one such coach shop , leading to the piquant situation where a bright student – may be some one who has topped the IIT–JEE is claimed by more than one institution.

What started in a small way with Agrawal Classes and Brilliant Tutorials nearly 30 years ago has transformed into a big business today. In north India, Kota is a well known hub where the coaching school industry has grown and multiplied. In fact, it has even given rise to ancillary industries like those who rent out rooms and those who supply meals to the numerous people who turn up from the remotest parts of India who take up lodgings here and take rigorous tuitions so that they can crack the IIT entrance tests.

While coaching classes are certainly churning out would be scholars in an assembly line fashion and for small town India, where often there is wealth but lack of opportunity, this seems to be a god sent opportunity to pursue higher education. Very likely, given the state of the formal education system in India, these children would never be able to clear the entrance examinations without the coaching that these institutes would provide.

But what about aptitude? The entrance tests to IIT and elsewhere were conceived to evaluate aptitude as much as or even more than merits. By quantifying examination results, we have ensured that aptitude has been thrown in to a never never land of oblivion. Says Prof. M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-M “by attending the IIT coaching classes, students were learning a wrong lesson that the ends justify the means.” They (students) think there is nothing wrong in missing school to attend coaching. But the student does not realize his real loss." he further says that the coaching institutes were enabling many among the less-than-best students to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying.

Meanwhile industry body Assocham's estimate of size of the Coaching Class Industry is based on about 6 lakh students attending these classes every year at an average cost of Rs.1.7 lakhs per year and average cost of each student is 1.7 lakhs ,as given by a spokesman of the Industry body provided to TOI. According to Assocham, the staggering sum of Rs.10, 000 crore is being netted every year by private Academies that coach students for admission test,

Meanwhile the common man is caught between a rock and a hard place. There are heaps of private universities and even foreign universities, where admissions are relatively easier but the costs are unaffordable. Publicly funded institutions are relatively cheap (though they are getting expensive), but the road to their door leads through very expensive coaching institutions. and with the state steadily privatizing education in guise or the other, things presumably can only get worse for the present.

Book Review: India - A Million Mutinies Now : A Review from 2009

Shantanu Dutta — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:54:08 EDT

Trinidadian born Indian journalist-novelist V.S Naipaul wrote the book India – A Million Mutinies Now in the 1990s and over and over again, he recollects here , his reminiscences from his first trip of 1962 and his next one 1n 1975. He emphasises in this book that much has changed since his last two trips to India, which yielded his darkly pessimistic books, An Area of Darkness and “ India: a Wounded Civilization. In this multi layered travelogue, he describes "a country of a million little mutinies," reeling with "rage and revolt," with movements like the Shiv Sena, Dalit Panthers, the agitation of the Naxalites and the Sikh separatist movements, which were active in the 90s profiled in detail. Reading the book in 2009 is revealing ; for it shows how indeed time and tide indeed wait for no man.

The Dalit panthers have faded, the Shiv Sena exists but arguably fading and the original Naxalites of Bengal described in the book are gone as are the Sikh khalistanis. The new kids on the block are names like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, terrorists of the SIMI or LeT variety and the Naxalites of Chattisgarh and the militants of Kashmir, none of whom were around in 1990. If Naipaul were to write a third travelogue in the next ten years, may be the landscape would have changed immeasurably.

A Million Mutinies Now," which is made up of several intersecting outline, leaves the reader with a powerful impression of people's ardour, diligence and zeal. Seemingly selected at chance, these persons may not be entirely typical of the country, but they come from a multiplicity of religious, social and economic backgrounds. What they have in common is a willingness to brave gigantic difficulties to achieve their ideals or their thoughts. Some lead lives light-years separated from those of their ancestors ; others resolutely attempt to preserve tradition and ritual in their lives.

Among his profiles are Papu, a successful Jain trader and Anwar, a Muslim from Mohammed Ali Road in Bombay; Rajan, a displaced Brahmin in Calcutta; Kala, a Tamil woman who has thrown off the chains of tradition; Dipanjan, a West Bengali science professor; Rashid, a Shia Muslim in Lucknow; and Gurtej Singh, a Sikh in Chandigarh. He ends the journey in Srinagar, at the hotel on the lake from which he wrote An Area of Darkness.

in this highly readable, albeit now some what dated book, V.S.Naipaul celebrates the many expressions of every day life, of lives victorious in the midst of all the chaos, untidiness and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, he finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably.

Naipaul ends the book thus:

“Change is present everywhere, "India was now a country of million mutinies. A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess: the beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem the beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But there was in India now what didn't exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea. .... What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt that they could appeal. They were a part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India's growth, part of its restoration."

As a reader reading the book, close to two decades after it was written and having the benefit of hindsight, I am thankful for the rich and detailed analysis, and perhaps for the sense of hope Mr. Naipaul leaves me with in his concluding pages. This is a conclusion that at first seems at odds with much of his book's own evidence, and with what many of the interviewees see in the future.