A poor man’s Max Mueller

India: From Midnight to the Millennium

by Shashi Tharoor

Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1997

A secular, liberal, urbane, globalised Indian fails to grasp India.

As one wades through India: From Midnight to the Millennium, one cant avoid feeling that though Shashi Tharoor probably got himself a good literary agent, what he really needed was a stern editor, someone who could impose a semblance of discipline on his intellectual waywardness. A good editor, for example, would have insisted that Tharoor make up his mind on the tone of the book.

In the event, he at times appears to be making a statement on the confusion of his midnight generation; while at other times the book is just a diary of his personal pain at discovering the ugly and violent side of Mother India; often it reads like introductory material for a political science course at some university in Americas Midwest; and, in parts, it assumes the tone of a rambling magazine piece by a writer who is trying desperately to engage the attention of an indifferent reader. And then there are times when the text is reduced to a plain travelogue. A demanding editor would have imposed some order on this conceptual chaos.

But Tharoor, a senior official at the United Nations in New York, does write easily and fairly elegantly. That talent nonetheless is not sufficient to hide the fact that he does not have anything new or original to say after the first 22 pages. He begins with an interesting and novel argument:

The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India that denies itself to some Indians could end up being denied to all Indians.

Along similar lines, the most thoughtful line in the entire book appears early enough on page 8:

The singular thing about India is that you can only speak of it in the plural.

The next three hundred pages are devoted to taking the reader through a quick, at times sweeping, chronicle of events presumably meant to sustain the basic India in the plural argument. Since Tharoor does not live in India (as he tells us quite frankly), his understanding of the daily unfolding drama is necessarily second-hand, and inevitably patchy; he tries to set right this deficiency during his periodic visits to the country, times when he also attempts to sort out his identity problem.

Tharoors perception is that of a secular, liberal, cosmopolitan, urbane, and globalised Indian. But the India  he encounters is full of medieval prejudices carried to their conclusion with the tools of violence and hate. He is painfully baffled. He is baffled by the Sonia Gandhi phenomenon. He quotes, predictably enough, Mani Shanker Aiyars gushing eulogy to her and then concludes that if "a former diplomat with a Cambridge degree" does not "squirm at the prospect of pledging allegiance to a leader whose only qualification to lead is the name on her marriage certificate", then it would be premature to write the dynasty's obituary.

Tharoor is naturally baffled by the rise of Hindutva just as he is baffled by the caste calculus. There is the nagging refrain that too much democracy has derailed the rebuilding of India. a familiar leitmotif in all NRI-writings, and that perhaps India could have been a giant Singapore. Tharoor is unable to avoid the lamenting tone, and the result is there is too much Naipaulism here without the insightfulness of a Naipaul.

One reason Tharoor is not able to add to our understanding of why it seems impossible to even maintain order in India is his inexplicable and inexcusable reluctance to observe the simple courtesy of sourcing quotations and opinions. Take for example this passage on page 32:

Nonetheless, Indira Gandhi once memorably confessed to an American interviewer, "I do not have a political philosophy. I can't say I believe in any ism. I wouldn't say I'm interested in socialism as socialism. To me its just, a tool.

The statement becomes meaningful only in a certain context. But the reader is left absolutely clueless as to when Indira Gandhi made this memorable observation. It could have been before 1969, during the Emergency. during her years of political exile, or during her second innings as prime minister. Knowing the period would make a difference in the understanding.

This kind of indifference to basic discipline persists throughout the book and detracts from its usefulness even as a quickie reference guide to modern India. The end result is that one cannot help feeling that Mother India has once again managed to confuse and befuddle another chronicler who tried to play the poor mans Max Muller.