My first and longest read of 2025.

I bought a kindle in June and started reading. Daily commutes helped get into the habit. First book I picked up was India after Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha.

Starting with this huge 900+ pages book while getting into a reading habit after few years seems like a bad idea. But this book had been on the top of my TBR list for so long. And especially with all that is happening in the country today, I just had to read this.

One big lament I had with my school history curriculum is that - like cliche Indian movies it climaxed at Independence, switfly glanced over the formation of constitution saying: and they lived happily ever after...

Ramchandra Guha gives a brilliant potted history of India starting around 1947 all the way till 2017. This made me understand what a herculean task it was to unite, build and grow such a huge and varied mass of land. Partition, its aftermath, accession of princely states, building constitution, setting up electoral records and conducting elections, formation of states, regional conflicts in the north and north-east, foreign policies, wars, communal conflicts, industrialization, rise and fall of governments are few among a long list of events the country went through. The book seems to jump at many different geographical locations and places, but that is only because there was so much happening in the country and the writer tries to maintain chronological order of events.

It was fascinating to see traces of some current happenings back in time:

The negative side:

• We always worship our great leaders, right since the first general election in 1951-52. After architecting the Indian constitution in 1950, B. R. Ambedkar chose to leave Congress and contest separately. Thanks to Nehru's aura, he lost to a milkman named Kajrolkar. P. K. Atre amusingly wrote in Marathi: कुठे तो घटनाकार आंबेडकर आणि कुठे हा लोणीविक्या कजरोळकर which rougly translates to: Where the great constitution maker Ambedkar and where this butter-seller Kajrolkar. We see many such occurrences today where capable and educated candidates lose by a landslide against incompetent ones.

• After the 1952 elections, someone remarked "even a lamp-post standing on the Congress ticket could have been elected".

• One person becoming the embodiment of whole nation.

• The 1975 emergency and re-election of same Prime Minister after just few years.

• Petty acts of vindictiveness and bans on a singer who refused to perform in a programme to raise money for the nation-wide family planning drive.

• When a prominent opposition leader organized a huge rally, to divert attention of the masses, famous movie Bobby was aired on national television at the exact same time.

• Congress was split into two parties Congress (O) and Congress (R). Maharashtra has seen similar breakups recently.

You can find many many such examples in the book. Perhaps these days things have gone too far and further amplified by social media, but the roots were already visible back in history.

The positive side:

Independence, Nehru's death, wars - after every major event, the west always proclaimed that country would fall apart. So many small princely states, religious hatred, nascant democracy of such huge scale, etc. were proving their point beyond doubt. And yet miraculously India stood strong on all those obstacles and grew.

And as you can see even in this small blog, the negatives are piled up. But history echoes.

This is just a small glimpse, there is so much more in the book and I am so glad I read it.

I understand India better now.