Book Experience: India After Gandhi
It would not be wrong to say I was not a big fan of historybooks. Having survived the ‘history-subject’ of Indian Education system, wherethe years of events mattered more than the event itself, I had sworn that my curriculum history book of class 10th will be the last history I would ever read.
The curriculum of our books focus a lot on the events before independence, we all know about the revolt of 1857, Non Co-operation movement, Jaliawalah Bagh and also the architecture of different temples built centuries back. If we talk about post-independence events, I can say that most of the people know that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India, and Dr Rajendra Prasad the first president of India-That’s all. It is quite sad that in our discussions at class, my history teacher never urged us to know the reason behind the events, never discussed the impacts of the event in a non-bullet format (The Non-cooperation event impacted us in 4 ways :a) blah b) blah-blah c) blah-blah blah d) blah-blah-blah-blah. Remember these?) . I recently realized that history is a beautiful subject and there is so much to learn from it. As a member of human race, we should be aware of our existence, we should know that our present-being is not the permanent state we presume it is, that the future could have been different if thing did not happen the way they did. We should know that our whole race is a biological accident and out existence has depended on so many random factors (they might not look so random to you now- you see humans are gifted with the ability to find reason behind events that might have been outcome of a random event – this is the reason people still believe in ghosts in 21st century). The state we are in today –good-or-bad( although it is all relative) is not the one we were gifted with. We should appreciate that the efforts of our previous generations has impacted us in so many ways and that there were times when things were not so easy (talking to your friend over phone, flying in from one place to another- things we take for granted) and we as a race signify the spirit of man- the one who can be destroyed but never be defeated (in words of Ernest Hemingway). I would say “History makes you humble, so does astronomy”.
Now coming back to the point, for the first time in my life, I read history for knowing things (not for completing the syllabus for annual exams) and I loved it, I loved every bit of it. India after Gandhi answered a lot of questions I had, it explained the reasons behind the events I read about in newspapers. There is a reason that there are naxal areas in North-east, they were not always like that (which I just assumed before/never looked for the reason). It made me appreciate India as a country, I can appreciate the secularism, the states we have, I now know how difficult it was to keep this country united in the face of adversities that came upon us, when there were factions throughout the nation trying to break it up. I can also now appreciate the role of Nehru, how his vision shaped our nation’s future- investing in education when our neighbors were investing in military- - Non alignment as our foreign policy (our present generation needs to understand that this single policy states a lot about our goals as a nation- it was difficult path indeed but we took the road ‘usually not taken’). We take democracy for granted, don’t we? This book will make you realize that there were times democracy was threatened (emergenecy) and there could have been a plot/coup and things would have been a lot different. When a person is reading history book, one needs to be skeptical, one cannot simply trust the words of the author blindly, (historical accounts tend to be skewed in favor of a particular side usually), but to my mortal brain, I could see that the author has tried his best to be impartial to the subjects/characters –all credits to Ram Chandra Guha.
In my blog here, I write book-experiences ( not book-review: the difference being, I have no credibility to review books but to express the feeling/experience I had while reading the book), so to sum it all: I would say as an Indian, you should read this book atleast once: Don’t read because you have to prepare for IAS, or because it is coming up in your test next week: read because you want to know what as a nation shaped our policies. You would realize, that country as a whole, behaves like a human being, we have emotions, we are sometimes insecure, we are sometimes ecstatic, and just like human beings, we have failed as well, but we stood up again and we never gave up- This is something we can be really proud of.