[Reader-list] Sanjay Kak on Ram Guha's Book

[Pawan Durani]

Who is Sanjay Kak ?

On 3/5/08, radhikarajen at vsnl.net <radhikarajen at vsnl.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> No doubt the book by Guha about "The histroy   " is worth a good read but
> it has its own bad portions as well, which are not exactly the history but
> only perspective of a writers look at history, partial to the core.
> Any history to be accurate in journalising it, must have the true facts
> retrieved from the archives of the period, that is the period in
> consideration, is India after gandhi, from 1948 to 2007.
>
> All democratically governed nations in the world have de-classified the
> archives of governance and the classified documents as confidentia are
> declassified as open, after a certain time frame, like say those of after
> 1948 have been declassified after 20 or thirty years. India is one nation
> where beauracracy and  political class does not believe in tranparency in
> governance and hence is every thing is classified as confidential and
> secret.
>
> The nett result of this is the omissions and commissions during the
> actions of governance good or bad actions in governance are classified as
> top secret, confidential with lame excuse of national safety, where as in
> actual practise it is only to shield the corruption and corrupt practises in
> governance., unethical and immoral acts of the individual in governance by
> this shroud of classification of secrecy.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Wali Arifi <waliarifi3 at gmail.com>
> Date: Wednesday, March 5, 2008 11:42 am
> Subject: [Reader-list] Sanjay Kak on Ram Guha's Book
> To: reader-list <reader-list at sarai.net>
>
> > In continuation of the recent posting of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's
> > review of
> > India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
> > by Ramachandra Guha · Macmillan, 900 pp, £25.00
> >
> > ------------------------------------------
> >
> > A Chronicle for India Shining
> >
> > by Sanjay Kak
> > *
> > Biblio* July-August 2007
> >
> > Ramachandra Guha is among Indias' most visible intellectuals, and his
> > newspaper columns and television appearances mark him off from the
> > morereticent world of academic historians. At 900 pages his new
> > book India after
> > Gandhi is not shy of claiming its own space on the bookshelf: from
> > it'stitle page, where it announces itself as "The History of the
> > World's Largest
> > Democracy" (not A History, mind you, but The History); to it's end
> > papers,which tells us that the author's entire career seems in
> > retrospect to have
> > been preparation for the writing of this book.
> >
> > So first the happy tidings from the back of the book: things in
> > India (after
> > Gandhi, that is) are overall okay. They could be better, he
> > agrees, but for
> > now we must be satisfied with what the Hindi cinema comic actor
> > Johny Walker
> > kept us amused with: phiphty-phiphty. For those hungry for a modern
> > historical understanding – or even an argued opinion – on 60 years
> > of the
> > Indian Republic, this piece of dissimulation is an early sign of
> > things to
> > come.
> >
> > There are some notable features of the paths by which The
> > Historian arrives
> > at this facile and frivolous conclusion of fifty-fifty. The first
> > is that
> > all that is troubling and challenging in the short history of this
> > republicis co-opted into the nationalistic narratives of 'success'
> > and 'victory',
> > turning our very wounds into badges of honour. "At no other time
> > or place in
> > human history" he says, "have social conflicts been so richly
> > diverse, so
> > vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and
> > literature, or
> > addressed with such directness by the political system and the media".
> >
> > I can think of at least five issues that have bedeviled India all
> > the way
> > from 1947 which simply fail this assertion: Kashmir, Manipur,
> > Nagaland,Naxalism, and of course, Dalit rights. These are at the
> > head of a very long
> > list which seriously challenge Guhas' assertion that the Indian
> > nation has
> > been successful at even addressing conflicts, leave alone dealing or
> > managing them. I use the word 'successful' here because justice
> > has not even
> > appeared on the horizon on most of these fronts.
> >
> > Right at the outset of the book he lets us know that the real
> > success story
> > of modern India lies "not in the domain of economics, but in that of
> > politics". So it's not the software boom that he offers for
> > approval, but
> > Indias' political success as a democracy. Politics for him is, in
> > the main,
> > narrowly defined, and remains the domain of parliamentary
> > politics. From
> > Prologue to Epilogue, Guha vicariously digs out every negative
> > predictionever made for India's future as a democracy, and then
> > since India has had
> > elections for 50 years, turns it into a vindication of it's democracy.
> >
> > No surprise then, that it's the romance of the Indian elections
> > for which he
> > reserves his unqualified enthusiasm. Every General Election since
> > 1951 is
> > celebrated in tourist-brochure speak, so by 1967, elections no
> > longer are a
> > "top-dressing on inhospitable soil", they are "part of Indian
> > life, a
> > festival with it's own set of rituals, enacted every five years". As
> > evidence we are offered statistics of large turnouts, and accounts of
> > colourful posters and slogans. By the 1971 polls, the logistics
> > are offered
> > in giddy detail: "342,944 polling stations, each station with
> > forty-three
> > different items, from ballot papers and boxes to indelible ink and
> > sealingwax; 282 million ballot papers printed, 7 million more than
> > were needed…".
> >
> > To so easily substitute 'election' for 'democracy', to be
> > preoccupied with
> > the procedural – rather than the substantive¬ – aspects of
> > democracy, and
> > indeed of politics, is conceptually problematic, and not a mistake any
> > serious scholar of politics would make. The obsession with
> > parliamentarydemocracy, with its first-past-the-post, winner-takes-
> > all bias, also means
> > that descriptions of India's recent political history remain here
> > focused on
> > those in Parliamentary Power, and at best, those in Parliamentary
> > Opposition. But when he has to deal with themore fundamental
> > questionsraised about Indian democracy from outside of this, by
> > the Naxalites in the
> > 1960s, or by Jaya Prakash Narayan and Sampoorn Kranti in the
> > 1970s, or
> > indeed the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the 1990s, Guha seems to lose
> > his way,
> > and his enthusiasm for 'politics' is more subdued.
> >
> > A second clue as to how he reaches here seems to lie in
> > methodology, and
> > Guha explicitly states his: to privilege primary sources over
> > retrospectivereadings, and "thus to interpret an event of, say,
> > 1957, in terms of what is
> > known in 1957, rather than 2007". One of the reasons he cites for
> > this is
> > the paucity in India of a good history of India after Gandhi: by
> > trainingand temperament, he says of Indian historians, they have
> > "restrictedthemselves to the period before Independence". So
> > combine this ascribed lack
> > of historical interest with Guhas' own stated preference for 'primary'
> > sources: together they lay out before him a vast – and clearly
> > unchallenged– canvas.
> >
> > This is a curious methodological assertion. With the exception of some
> > primary sources (and some first-time sources, like the PN Haksar
> > papers) the
> > bulk of the book seems to draw upon the excellent work of at least two
> > generations of historians and social scientists. The copious Notes
> > at the
> > back of the book happily acknowledge at least some of this to be
> > so. With
> > the work before us of Sumit Sarkar, Partho Chatterjee, Rajni
> > Kothari, Tanika
> > Sarkar, Yogendra Yadav, Zoya Hassan, Christopher Jafferlot
> > (amongst others),
> > why does Guha pronounce this area to be a tabula rasa, one that
> > this book
> > alone bravely sets out to fill?
> >
> > Ramchandra Guha's earlier book on Verrier Elwin was proof of his
> > dexteroususe of archival material, and over the years his
> > newspaper columns have been
> > rich with his joyful – even eccentric¬ – use of the archive. Here
> > too he
> > locates some nuggets, which its sources may now well want returned
> > to the
> > darkness of the archive. In 1944, the Bombay Plan, mooted by a
> > group of
> > leading industrialists, making a case for 'an enlargement of the
> > positivefunctions of the State', going so far as to say that 'the
> > distinctionbetween capitalism and socialism has lost much of it's
> > significance from a
> > practical standpoint'. In 1966, as groups of Mizo National Front
> > rebelsappear ready to storm at least two towns in Mizoram, the
> > strafing of Lungleh
> > by the air force, the first time that air power had been used by
> > the Indian
> > State against it's own citizens. Or in 1977 India's favourite
> > businessman,JRD Tata, speaking to a foreign journalist during the
> > dark days of the
> > Emergency, finding that things had gone too far, adding that 'The
> > parliamentary system is not suited to our needs'.
> >
> > But this history by bricolage inevitably ends up with embarrassingly
> > ahistoric conclusions. For example, to bolster his own naïve view that
> > "Rural India was pervaded by an air of timelessness" at the time of
> > Independence, he quotes a British official writing in an official
> > publication in 1944: 'there is the same plainness of life, the same
> > wrestling with uncertainties of climate… the same love of simple
> > games,sport and songs, the same neighbourly helpfulness…" I don't
> > doubt that this
> > qualifies as 'contemporary narrative', but surely even within the
> > impoverished state of Indian social science that Guha seems to
> > encounter, he
> > has heard of enough respectable scholarship, that contests – and even
> > confounds – this static image of the "Indian" countryside? The peasant
> > rebellions, the tribal movements, the caste conflicts?
> >
> > What this often results in is a naïve – even absurd – acceptance
> > of what is
> > described to us by the privileged 'contemporary narrative'.
> > "Living away
> > from home helped expand the mind, as in the case of a farm
> > labourer from UP
> > who became a factory worker in Bombay and learnt to love the
> > city's museums,
> > its collections of Gandhara art especially". This is no doubt true
> > for this
> > exceptional individual, but does this aid our understanding of the
> > processesof rural deprivation and urbanization that translate into
> > the journey from
> > village in Uttar Pradesh to textile factory in Mumbai? (And where
> > did that
> > worker go, refined sensibilities and all, once the textile mills
> > began to
> > shut down in the 1980s?)
> >
> > And when Nehru formally inaugurates the Bhakra dam in 1954, "for
> > 150 miles
> > the boisterous celebration spread like a chain reaction along the
> > greatcanal…" Because Guha is committed to understanding 1954 in
> > its own terms,
> > we're often left just there, in 1954, without the illuminating
> > oxygen of
> > contemporary scholarship on the Bhakra dam and its consequences,
> > for both
> > the people displaced by the dam (still without re-settlement 50
> > years on) or
> > for the land and waters of Punjab (now feeling the ill effects of the
> > massive hydraulic meddling and its handmaiden, the 'Green
> > Revolution'.) At
> > such moments we must be forgiven for feeling that we are rifling
> > through the
> > brittle pages of an official, sarkari history of India.
> >
> > Where official archives and histories don't exist, the excessive – and
> > selective –reliance on newspapers and journals seems even less
> > convincing.Who amongst us has not read the newspaper of the day
> > about an issue or event
> > that we know about and understand, and not despaired at the errors and
> > biases inherent? Who amongst us has not shuddered at the thought
> > of some
> > future historian trawling the pages of the Times of India and the
> > IndianExpress and forming a narrative of what is happening in
> > India in 2007?
> >
> > Through the book, Guha's writing on Kashmir, for example, is
> > peppered with
> > insights from a journal called Thought, apparently published out
> > of Delhi.
> > Forgive me, but what was Thought? Insights extracted from such
> > narrativescan be useful to the historian, but also highly
> > problematic, unless we can
> > contextualize them, compare them with other assessments, and
> > understand the
> > nature of the biases we are dealing with. Otherwise we are simply
> > left with
> > arbitrary assessments of shaky provenance: in1965, of Lal Bahadur
> > Shastri,second Prime Minister of India, who gets a positive
> > appraisal by the
> > Guardian newspapers' Delhi correspondent, as well as a condescending
> > exchange of letters between two ex-ICS men: "I can't imagine
> > Shastri has the
> > stature to hold things together... What revolting times we live in!"
> >
> > Guhas' selective dependence on 'contemporary' narratives, and his
> > distasteof politics that is not 'parliamentary' comes through most
> > clearly in his
> > treatment of Jaya Prakash Narayan. He musters the following: RK
> > Patil, a
> > former ICS officer who asks of JP: "What is the scope of
> > Satyagraha and
> > direct action in a formal democracy like ours…? By demanding the
> > dismissalof a duly elected assembly, argued Patil, the Bihar
> > agitation is both
> > unconstitutional and undemocratic". To this Guha adds the opinions
> > of the
> > "eminent Quaker" Joe Elder, who hectors JP on launching a mass
> > movement"without a cadre of disciplined non-violent volunteers".
> > And finally, Indira
> > Gandhi herself, who dismisses JP as a "political naif… who would
> > have been
> > better off sticking to social work." With such a slanted set of
> > 'contemporary' narratives, it's no surprise who Guha is able to
> > pin the
> > blame on for the tumult of those years, asserting that the honours for
> > imposing the Emergency should henceforth be equally shared between
> > IndiraGandhi and Jaya Prakash Narayan!
> >
> > For the first 600 pages of his chronicle, Guha piles up the bricks and
> > artifacts of this structure sort of chronologically, 1947 through
> > to 1987.
> > Then quite arbitrarily he announces a change in tack, moving from
> > 'history'to 'historically informed journalism'. He approvingly
> > cites the thirty-year
> > rule of archives, adding grandly, that as a historian "one also
> > needs a
> > generation's distance. That much time must elapse before one can
> > place those
> > events in a pattern, to see them away and apart, away from the din and
> > clamour of the present".
> > The claim of 'history' and 'historically informed journalism' is
> > at once too
> > strong for either section of the book. Because if indeed the
> > section from
> > 1987 onwards is 'historically informed' then shouldn't history
> > actuallyinform our understanding? Should this method not prepare
> > us for some things:
> > the emergence of the non-Congress governments; of Kanshi Ram-
> > Mayawati and
> > the BSP; for Liberalisation and India's relationship with the
> > InternationalFinancial Institutions? Why then does each of these
> > appear on the horizon of
> > this book fully formed, with no lead-ins or alerts?
> >
> > The relentless, even plodding attempt at being comprehensive, and the
> > dizzying collation of disparate facts, seems to tire Guha out too,
> > and then
> > his usually elegant prose begins to flag, and the ideas it carries
> > becometedious, eventually grinding down to a sort-of Year Book
> > listing of
> > significant facts and figures, people and events. In a chapter called
> > 'Rights' (and which in news-magazine style is followed by sections
> > called'Riots', 'Rulers' and 'Riches'), a brief 28 pages races us
> > through Caste,
> > the Mandal Commission and Dalit assertion; and an update on the
> > conflicts in
> > Assam, Punjab, Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland! But wait, there is also
> > demography and gender – in a single paragraph that begins with
> > "there was
> > also a vigorous feminist movement" and then deals with the women's
> > movementin 15 lines. Tribal rights fares a little better than
> > Women's rights (or
> > perhaps worse, I'd say fifty-fifty): it just crosses a page, much
> > of it
> > about the Narmada Bachao Andolan, where the 18 year old history of the
> > Andolan is reduced to it's leader, "a woman named Medha Patkar",
> > who we are
> > told, "organized the tribals in a series of colourful marches… to
> > demandjustice from the mighty government of India". And then, "The
> > leader herself
> > engaged in several long fasts to draw attention to the sufferings
> > of her
> > flock".
> >
> > This is India's most well-known non-violent resistance movement,
> > engaged in
> > articulating the largest internal displacement in our recent
> > history, and in
> > case you had missed anything, it's her flock. Without prejudice to
> > eitherVogue or Cosmopolitan, this condescension could probably
> > never even make it
> > to their pages, and defies belief in a work of history written in
> > the 21st
> > century. Apart from the fact that the NBA is only one of the
> > hundreds of
> > people's resistance movements in India, many of whom are in the
> > front ranks
> > of the struggle against neo-imperialism.
> >
> > Quite early in the book, in assessing the historian KN Pannikar's
> > opinionsof Mao Zedong, Guha reminds us that "Intellectuals have
> > always had a curious
> > fascination for the man of power". He then puts on display his own
> > unseemlyfascination with Power, with History from Above. (With a
> > few exceptions,
> > even the small selection of haphazardly organized pictures in the
> > firstedition of the book seems fixated by the man – or woman – of
> > power, from
> > Lord Mountbatten to Amitabh Bachhan.) This I suppose is
> > symptomatic, this
> > disinterest, even condescension, towards the fragile and
> > powerless, and this
> > is what finally prevents his version of history from illuminating
> > our times.
> > Because the powerless may not always be so, and 'historically informed
> > journalism' would need to tell us what brought Laloo Prasad Yadav, and
> > Mayawati to us. Even what preceded Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao
> > Andolan. (What forms of Adivasi and other organization made their
> > movementpossible? And what in its turn did the NBA make possible,
> > not in the
> > struggle against large dams alone, but in creating a climate in
> > which the
> > resistance to SEZs can be contemplated today?)
> >
> > For in the privileging of the 'primary', the question is, what are
> > your'primary' sources? Will they be restricted to the libraries of
> > the India
> > Office, London and the Nehru Memorial, New Delhi, or are they
> > going to go
> > beyond? Will we, for example, look at Urdu papers in Srinagar (and
> > Muzafarabad) to understand what was happening in Kashmir from 1947
> > to 1987?
> > Will we look at Dalit Hindi language little magazines to
> > understand the
> > phenomenon of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati? Because if we don't do
> > that, The
> > History of the World's Largest Democracy – like the Indian State –
> > willcontinually be surprised by the events and consequences of the
> > day to day
> > history of the little in this country.
> >
> > In the past, however arguable his ideas, Guhas' prose has been highly
> > readable. But here, hobbled by some Herculean compulsions to be
> > comprehensive, to reduce everything down to the manageable scale
> > of one
> > grand narrative, ambition eventually does damage to his book.
> > Impatient with
> > the increasingly workmanlike narrative, but determined to see it
> > to it's
> > end, I found myself drifting into marginalia: for example Guha's
> > peculiarobsession with certain kinds of academic pedigree.
> > Jawaharlal Nehru was of
> > course a "student at Cambridge", and so was the "Cambridge educated
> > physicist" Homi Bhabha. Krishna Menon and P N Haksar are identically
> > "educated at the London School of Economics". P C Mahalanobis is "a
> > Cambridge-trained physicist and statistician, Saif Tyabji too is "an
> > engineer educated at Cambridge", and of course, Manmohan Singh has
> > "writtena Oxford D Phil thesis". I'm then curious as to the
> > reasons why the same
> > insight is not provided to us for Acharya Kriplani, Ram Manohar Lohia,
> > Shiekh Abdullah, Zakir Hussain; or for Indira Gandhi, Kanshi Ram,
> > Mayawati,or even Medha Patkar? Of course, BR Ambedkar makes it,
> > because he has
> > "doctorates from Columbia and London University". Jagjiwan Ram scrapes
> > through because he is the first Harijan from his village to go to High
> > School, and then onto Benares Hindu University. (Equal Opportunity
> > in the
> > New Republic!) Kamaraj doesn't, but he does get a fuller
> > description: "K
> > Kamaraj… born in a low-caste family in the Tamil country… was a
> > thick-set
> > man with a white mustache… he looked like a cross between Sonny
> > Liston and
> > the Walrus". I looked in vain for an equally entertaining
> > description of
> > former President APJ Abdul Kalam.
> >
> > If these obsessions with pedigree were the only things impeding my
> > readingof the book, there would be little to worry about. But
> > armed with the
> > dangerous licence of 'historically informed journalism' for the
> > crucial last
> > two decades of his book, he seems at liberty to comment without
> > even the
> > minimum disciplines of 'history'. To take one example, he draws
> > togetherwhat he thinks of as "the two critical events that…
> > defined the epoch of
> > competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid
> > and the
> > exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits" (from Kashmir). He then goes on to
> > make the
> > astonishing comment: "Would one trust a state that could not
> > honour its
> > commitment to protect an ancient place of worship? Would one trust a
> > community that so brutally expelled those of a different faith?"
> > Neitherneeds to be established, both are stated as a priori facts.
> >
> > He sees a striking similarity between the two pogroms he
> > acknowledges in
> > independent India: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and
> > at the
> > Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. "Both began as a response to a
> > single,stray act of violence committed by members of the minority
> > community. Both
> > proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a
> > whole". Guha
> > is careful to quickly wipe his sleeve, and draw attention to the
> > innocenceof the victims, but I do wish he had shared with us what
> > was the "single,
> > stray act of violence" committed by minority Muslims in Gujarat?
> > After all,
> > the jury on the terrible burning of the train in Godhra is still
> > out, is it
> > not?
> > At another point he describes the protests against the acquisition
> > of land
> > by the Tatas in Kalinganagar, Orissa, where in the first week of
> > 2006, "a
> > group of tribals demolished the boundary wall provoking the police
> > to open
> > fire. The tribals placed the bodies of these martyrs on the
> > highway and held
> > up traffic for a week ". How does he establish who was provoking
> > whom, and
> > how?
> >
> > Or what can explain his saying, about the aftermath of Sant
> > Harchand Singh
> > Longowals' killing, in Punjab in 1988: "The sant's assassination
> > was a
> > harbinger of things to come with a new generation of terrorists
> > taking up
> > the struggle for Khalistan". I carefully looked over at least a dozen
> > references to the troubles in the Punjab in his book, there are never
> > Militants, always "Terrorists".
> > The point of bringing together these instances is simply to
> > underline the
> > inherently establishment nature of the positions taken by
> > Ramachandra Guha's
> > History. This sometimes leads him to places the intelligent
> > reporter – leave
> > alone the historian – would not want to be stuck in. About the
> > early 1990s
> > in Kashmir he says: "As the valley came to resemble a zone of
> > occupation,popular sentiment rallied to the jihadi cause.
> > Terrorists mingled easily
> > with the locals, and were given refuge before or after their
> > actions". Once
> > again: hugely contested words like 'Jehadi' and 'Terrorist', which
> > scholarsthe world over are cracking their brains over, slip off
> > like the slipshod
> > words of television anchors.
> >
> > And finally, on the difficulties of nurturing secularism in India
> > in the
> > aftermath of Partition, Guha says: "The creation of an Islamic
> > state on
> > India's borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves
> > wished to
> > merge faith with state". Does one need to repeat here that the
> > RSS, with its
> > fascist ideology borrowed directly from Mussolini, and it's ideal
> > of a
> > Hindu-rashtra, was set up in 1925, and long preceded the idea of
> > the Islamic
> > State of Pakistan. But Guha dives in head first: "My own view –
> > speaking as
> > a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan
> > exists there
> > will be Hindu fundamentalists in India". Can such a completely
> > ahistoricassertion make its place into a history? And then remain
> > unchallenged by
> > historians, commentators and reviewers in the India of 2007?
> >
> > Incredibly, in the last few pages of the book, Guha does admit
> > that only in
> > three-quarters of the "total land mass claimed by the Indian
> > nation" does
> > the elected government enjoy a legitimacy of power and authority,
> > and only
> > here do they feel themselves to be part of a single nation. How
> > then does
> > this admission that in a quarter of the World's Largest Democracy
> > people are
> > substantially alienated from the Nation sit with his insistence on
> > phiphty-phiphty? At what point will our historians ring the alarm
> > bells?When Half the nation is holding the Other Half by force?
> > When it really
> > reaches fifty-fifty?
> >
> > From the books' well-publicised entry into the world we learn that the
> > author has spent the last eight years working on it. I too seem to
> > havecoincidentally spent the same years ruminating on the World's
> > LargestDemocracy, not as a historian, but as a film-maker, and not
> > with the grand
> > purpose of this book for certain, but just fishing in it's
> > troubled margins:
> > first in the Narmada valley, and then in Kashmir. Like many others
> > who are
> > somewhat bewildered at events around us, and have failed to join
> > in the
> > celebration of democracy this August, the book is an important
> > marker. It
> > demands to be read seriously, and it's flaws and omissions ask to
> > be taken
> > seriously by us. Because, in our tumultuous times, when change is fast
> > forcing all of us to choose sides, fifty-fifty has to be seen as too
> > cautious an answer, so safe as to translate into an almost
> > mathematicallycalibrated cowardice.
> >
> > What then does the book represent? It's timed for the celebrations
> > of the
> > 60th year of Indian Independence, and arrives amidst the giddy
> > hosannas to
> > India's success as a democracy, and our newly unfolding status as an
> > emerging economic power. The recent enthusiasm to burnish our
> > 'shining'democracy is, as we all know, tightly tied in with the
> > desire to set India
> > up as a next destination of global capital. (Essentially, India 1,
> > China 0).
> > So the grinding poverty, the dispossession, the cruelty and
> > oppression are
> > made charming, and discord and chaos is turned into a tribute to our
> > democratic credentials. For all the book's sophistry then,
> > Ramachandra Guha
> > emerges as the chronicler of India Shining. In this season where we
> > celebrate Indian democracy, surely a reassuring book to pass on to
> > CEOs and
> > investors at the next Davos.
> >
> > (*Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary film-maker, whose
> > recent film
> > Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom) is about the idea of
> > freedom in
> > Kashmir, and the degrees of freedom in India*.)
> > _________________________________________
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>
>
> _________________________________________
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> Critiques & Collaborations
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