Language | English |
---|---|
ISBN-10 | 978-0-670-08551-4 |
No of pages | 436 |
Font Size | Medium |
Book Publisher | penguin |
Patrick French (born 1966) is a British writer and historian, based in London. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he studied English and American literature.
French is the author of several books including : Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband, The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorized biography of Nobel Laureate V.S Naipaul which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America, and India: A Portrait. An intimate biography of 1.2 billion people.(2010)
During the 1992 general election, French was a Green Party candidate for Parliament. He has sat on the executive committee of the Tibet Support Group UK, and was a founding member of the inter-governmental India-UK Round Table.
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The independence of India was a time of hope and uncertainty in equal measure. It was also a time of accelerated history, when every decision—whether considered or arbitrary—had a lasting effect on its vast and diverse populace. In the decades since, India has evolved into a globally prominent nation of enormous promise and achievement, great contradictions and conflict.
In this landmark book, Patrick French, author of the acclaimed bestseller Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, chronicles the epic change. With his superb sense of history and political insight, and an eye for the extraordinary that is as keen as his understanding of the everyday, he builds a compelling narrative of the social and economic revolutions that are transforming India in fundamental ways.
Beginning with an account of how the Union was conceived and put together—when India took ‘a gamble on democracy’—he examines the astonishing shift from rigid socialism to unbridled capitalism, the continuing empowerment of the Dalit and lower castes, the anxieties of secular India’s large Muslim minority and the rise of violence in the conduct of the State and among those it neglects or suppresses.
Focusing on the most recent changes, he shows how extreme hunger and destitution persist even as millions are pulling themselves free of poverty, how nepotism has triumphed in politics and how sudden societal changes allow the deeply traditional and the startlingly unconventional to co-exist.
Along the way, French also paints revealing portraits of Nehru, Ambedkar, Indira and Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, L.K. Advani and Manmohan Singh. And through his travels across India, he speaks to Maoist revolutionaries, mafia dons, chained quarry workers, technological innovators, cash-rich pimps and self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, trying to answer the central question of the book: ‘Why is India like it is today?