For many sensitive minds India has fallen on bad days within forty years of its Independence. This crisis is the grist for Saberwal and Thapar who have put in book format a number of sub-themes they have previously written or talked about at various fora.
The crisis of India has brought its own versions of togetherness and extraordinary correspondence between the modernist and romanticist streaks in Indian thinking, which these two books under review represent. Indeed, it is like review¬ing two facets of Nehruvian tradition as it lingers on in contemporary India.
Call it a crisis or a lingering malaise, the troubles of India are attributed to the misfit between alien belief systems, legal framework and grafting of institutional networks on a society characterized by long periods of social involution and stratification. Instead of building ‘mega-society’, ‘impersonal codes’ and filling the ‘social blanks’ (a la Satish Saberwal), India’s tryst with destiny is plagued by maldevelopments, distortions and atrophies at all levels.