India After Gandhi

the history of the world's largest democracy

Plot

"Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language, and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country. This hugely acclaimed book tells the full story--the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories--of the world's largest and least-likely democracy. While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it is also the most interesting. Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free India. But he writes also of the factors and processes that have kept the country together (and kept it democratic), defying numerous prophets of doom who believed that its poverty and heterogeneity would force India to break up or come under autocratic rule. Once, the Western world looked upon India with a mixture of pity and contempt; now, it looks upon India with fear and admiration"--Page 4 of cover.