Freedom : Sixty Years After Indian Independence
Contents: Foreword. 1. The forest of the Brahmanas. 2. The middle class. 3. Disillusion and new dreams. 4. A journey in common sense politics. 5. Emergence of Hindu fascism. 6. Bollywood--a global phenomenon. 7. Delusions and national development. 8. The fourth estate. Artist profiles.
"Confident of its future but proud of its past, this new India is a markedly different place from the country that gained freedom that August midnight in 1947. How this came to be is a fascinating study that this volume records through words and visuals. Essays by finest minds analyze various aspects of the nation\'s progress while paintings by India\'s best and brightest reveal startling yet enthralling ways of seeing these changes.
A self-assured middle class is one the clearest markers of this new India. Usually seen as an economic classification, the article here by India\'s leading sociologist, Andre Beteille, shows, for the first time, how it is also a social formation with certain distinctive features found only in most modern societies. At the same time, former economic advisor and well-known columnist Ashok Desai demolishes shibboleths that have clouded a proper understanding of the Indian economy and its transition from a poor, destitute colony that the British abandoned in despair sixty year ago to its present status as the world\'s fourth largest economy.
Aruna Roy, winner of the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership, records her firsthand experience in the making of the right to information act to make political power more accountable and hence shows that the world\'s largest democracy really works.
While Oxford historian Tapan Raychaudhuri traces the emergence of Hindu fascism--the other side of our polity.
Another sign of the times is seen in the country\'s buoyant media. India\'s was always one of the world\'s largest film industries but, till recently, it was never much respected, either for the quality of its output or even its sheer size. Today, Bollywood mania envelopes the world. Columnist and television presenter Vir Sanghvi records the making of Bollywood as a global phenomenon. And historian-journalist Rudrangshu Mukherjee traces the history of the country\'s fiercely independent print media and its response to the invasion from bullish electronic journalism.
The past however is very much present, in this book as in the whole of India. The learned article by Indologist Roberto Calasso on the Satpatha Brahmanas shows the rich ancient heritage that modern India is built upon.
Memory is the presence of the past and carries with it a text--of loss, absence, nostalgia and pathos. One of Bengal\'s most significant, contemporary writers, Sunil Gangopadhyay\'s poem, the only poem in this collection, is about the trauma of partition. In the absence of monuments to commemorate the division of India, literature has created the memorials through which India remembers.
The insight offered by the writers is enhanced by artists\' impressions of their homeland. Here, too, the continuum that is India is the guiding principle. Venerated masters, like Ramkinkar Baij, Nandalal Bose, V.S. Gaitonde, Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chowdhury, Somnath Hore, M.F. Husain, Sailoz Mookherjea, Meera Mukherjee, stand side by side with current luminaries, like Biju Parthan, Shreyasi Chatterjee, Subodh Gupta, Shakila as well as midnight\'s children like Mona Rai and Amitava Das.
Folk art that transcends the boundaries of conventional art form is represented through works of artists like Bhuribai, Swarno Chitrakar, Mayank Kumar Shyam, Ram Singh Urveti. There can be no doubt that the sixty plates of paintings by sixty artists make this book a collector\'s item." (jacket)
