Craig Jeffrey. Modern India

It is a feat to condense the history of India into a snappy pocket-size book. Craig Jeffrey’s vividly and lucidly written Modern India: A Very Short Introduction accomplishes that goal. Drawing upon a wide body of texts ranging from history and anthropology to sociology and political science, Jeffrey’s book offers a tour de force reading of three hundred years of India’s political and social history in an attempt to answer the question of why India is so poor, yet so full of hope. The book opens with four vignettes of “ordinary” Indian lives, which I read with a touch of nostalgia—as someone who came to the dinner table late. But that says more about the times in which we live rather than the book itself. As the current Indian government is taking multiple draconian steps to undo India’s democratic institutions, the vignettes feel like relics of a bygone era. That is precisely why this incisive book is a timely introduction to the complex history of the subcontinent and the political experiment of democracy in postcolonial India. Jeffrey begins in the present, with depictions of everyday life to weave a tale of the contradictions that mark Indian democracy, organized around universal political franchise without social equality. Readers are introduced to four lives and four stories of entrepreneurialism—stories of hope and dashed aspirations at a time of rapid economic growth and political stability as India became an emerging market and the fastest growing economy in the world. This sets the stage for the book and the two threads that lead the reader into India’s historical tapestry: Why does India still struggle with poverty? What is India’s source of hope?

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