Holding the Mirror
Jaithirth Rao
INDIA REVISITED: CONVERSATIONS ON CONTEMPORARY INDIA by Ramin Jahanbegloo Oxford University Press, 2008, 280 pp., 550
December 2008, volume 32, No 12

Ramin Jahanbegloo is unusual in more ways than one. He is an Indologist in the best sense of the word. But he is not a scholar in the pay of sinister imperialists. He is an Iranian intellectual who studies India, writes about India and unabashedly loves India. Exiled by the present totalitarian dispensation from his home country (he was also imprisoned in Tehran earlier) he now makes his home in Canada. He has lived in India as a visiting scholar. He has travelled extensively in India and met a wide variety of people. He is not a scholar of the distant past but of our immediate past and present predicaments. His interest in contemporary India is deep and passionate. He writes with informed sensitivity, transparent integrity and above all with great affection. Of the two books under review, India Revisited is a compilation of twenty-seven interviews covering politics, art, culture, psychology, film, religion economics and sport … in short most facets of the country. It is an extraordinary book simply for the range of topics and issues that he covers and the ability he demonstrates to get people to articulate multiple points of view.

The book is definitely weak on economics. Amit Bhaduri with his love for Stalinist planning is hardly the best choice of a person to be interviewed on this subject. Someone like Yoginder Alagh with his balanced understanding of the Indian economy would have been a better choice. In that process, Jahanbegloo could have captured not just the shortcomings with present economic policies (of which undoubtedly there are many), but of the enormous tragedy of the permit-licence Raj whose enduring legacy is India’s poverty and the creation of a rentier culture.

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