'India Reborn' is a provocative treatise on renascence

Prasenjit Basu's book is an inversion of cliched mainstream thinking dominated by Western historians and left-leaning Indian academics.

- AJAY KAPUR

At a dinner party a year ago, an American friend asked me to recommend one definitive book to learn about India. I murmured something about picking up a book by Shashi Tharoor.

There really was no easy answer, no accessible treatment either for the novice, or the expert. Now there is. Another St. Stephen's alumnus, Prasenjit Basu (and like Tharoor, a stalwart of the college’s Shakespeare Society, playing Thersites and Falstaff with aplomb), has done the deed. With “India Reborn”, a follow up to his masterly “Asia Reborn”, Basu has written a magisterial, provocative, deeply researched and inspirational guide to India—its history and its future. Buy it. And read it. Wherever you place yourself on the spectrum of knowledge on India—dilettante to expert—you will walk away satiated, entertained, and educated.

First, and most important, “India Reborn” is a potent destroyer of consensus historical narratives. The Russians have an interesting epigram: “The future is certain; it is the past which is unpredictable.” History is written by the victors, and those who finance its writing. “India Reborn” is an inversion of cliched mainstream thinking dominated by Western historians and left-leaning Indian academics.

Second, the Venn diagram for the intersection of economists and historians normally yields an uninhabited desert. Basu is one of the exceptions, a trained economist who began his long career as an economist at Wharton Econometrics, founded by Nobel Laureate Lawrence Klein. And he knows his history too. Mixing the two disciplines is not easy—Basu does it with verve.

Third, Basu is an expert on wider Asia and emerging markets, his professional focus for the past 30 years. Putting India in the wider Asian and global context is a key strength of this book. Much like William Dalrymple’s latest “Golden Road”, Basu can tell tales of India’s linkages with, and contributions to East Asia, China and West Asia with panache, and depth.