In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
By Edward Luce (Author)

Business Week reviews the book: James Paul, 29, is emblematic of India's new dynamism. The son of lower-middle-class Christian schoolteachers from the southern state of Kerala, he is a graduate of the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. His parents were forced to take out a loan to fund his $120-per-term tuition. It paid off: Paul now manages a 1,500-person business unit at Bangalore software giant InfoSys Technologies Ltd. (INFY ), where he was hired in 1998. His salary has jumped tenfold in a decade, to $50,000, a huge sum given the area's low cost of living....

Amazon Review: Quoted from From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Edward Luce, a keenly observant British journalist who headed the Financial Times's bureau in New Delhi at the cusp of the new century, ventures an answer in this insightful and engaging book. His sharp-witted prose brings today's India to life with insight and irreverence. ("If Gandhi had not been cremated," Luce writes, "he would be turning in his grave.") Luce's writing is richly evocative of place and mood, and In Spite of the Gods sparkles with the kind of telling detail that illuminates an anecdote and lifts it above mere reportage. Almost the only thing not worth admiring in this book is its awful title, which suggests a nation struggling against the heavens -- a thesis that has nothing to do with Luce's sophisticated and sympathetic narrative.

Advised early on that in India it is not enough to meet the "right people," Luce travels throughout the country meeting the "wrong people" as well. He explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture (a "modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland"); he punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion (which he correctly argues will not solve India's fundamental employment problems because it employs only about 1 million of the country's 1.1 billion people); and he depicts the continuing allure of the secure and corruption-laden "government job." Few foreigners have written with as much understanding of the skills and limitations of India's senior government bureaucrats -- of their idealism and inefficiency, of the vested interests that impede growth and progress -- and Luce also captures the extraordinary triumphs of India despite these obstacles.

On my frequent visits home, I discover that India is anything but the unchanging land of cliche. The country is in the grips of dramatic transformations that amount to little short of a revolution -- in politics, economics, society and culture. In politics, the single-party governance of India's early decades has given way to an era of multiparty coalitions. In economics, India has leapt from protectionism to liberalization, albeit with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders. In caste and social relations, India has witnessed convulsive changes. And yet all this change and ferment, which would have rent a lesser country asunder, have been managed through an accommodative and pluralist democracy. Luce tells this story remarkably well.

There is, for instance, a gently sympathetic portrait of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the ruling Congress Party, for whom "the political is very personal." Luce, who is married to an Indian, clearly admires much of India's culture, such as its remarkable novelists, musicians and film-makers: "If world trade were to be conducted purely in cultural products," he writes, "then India would have a thumping annual surplus." He suggests an answer to the famous question of why so few of India's 140 million Muslims, unlike their neighbors in Pakistan, have joined jihadist groups: because of "the political system under which they live," which guarantees them "freedom of speech, expression, worship, and movement."

But Luce is a far from uncritical admirer. He is unsparing on the corruption that infests Indian politics and society, on the ersatz Westernization that has seen sonograms used to facilitate the abortion of female fetuses by parents wanting sons, on the "unimpressive politicians" who run India's "impressive democracy."

Still, no one speaks seriously anymore of the dangers of disintegration that, for years, India was said to be facing. Luce demonstrates that, for all its flaws, India's democratic experiment has worked. The country has seen linguistic clashes, inter-religious riots and sputtering separatism, but democracy has helped to defuse each of these. Even the explosive potential of caste division has been channeled through the ballot box. Most strikingly, the power of electoral numbers has given high office to the lowest of India's low. Who could have imagined that, after 3,000 years of caste discrimination, an "Untouchable" woman would become chief minister of India's most populous state? Yet that has happened twice and looks likely to happen again this year when the northern state of Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls. In 2004, India witnessed an event unprecedented in human history: A nation of more than 1 billion people, after the planet's largest exercise ever in free elections, saw a Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) -- in a country that is 81 percent Hindu.

Luce is right to list the many problems the country faces: the poor quality of much of its political leadership, the rampant corruption, the criminalization of politics (more than 100 of the 552 members of Parliament's lower house have charges pending against them). The situation in Kashmir festers, provoking periodic crises with Pakistan and leading to fears (mostly exaggerated) of nuclear war on the subcontinent. Luce summarizes these issues crisply and cogently. But I'd like to have read a little more about the strengths of India's vibrant civil society: nongovernmental organizations actively defending human rights, promoting environmentalism, fighting injustice. The country's press is free, lively, irreverent, disdainful of sacred cows. India is the only country in the English-speaking world where the print media are expanding rather than contracting, even as the country supports the world's largest number of all-news TV channels. Disappointingly, Luce tells us nothing of this.

But these are cavils. Luce clearly loves the country he writes about -- an essential attribute for a book like this -- but he is tough-minded as well, and his judgment is invariably sound. "In India," a colleague once told Luce, "things are never as good or as bad as they seem." If you want to understand how that might be, read his wonderful book.

About the Author: Monisha Das Gupta is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Hawai’i. More about Prof. Das Gupta

Amazon Review: In Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta explores the innovative strategies that South Asian feminist, queer, and labor organizations in the United States have developed to assert claims to rights—such as fair wages or protection from violence—for immigrants without the privileges or security of citizenship. Since the 1980s, many South Asian immigrants have found the India-centered, “model minority” politics of previous generations inadequate to the task of redressing problems such as violence against women, homophobia, racism, and poverty. Thus they have developed new models of immigrant advocacy. They have sought rights that are mobile rather than rooted in national membership; they have advanced their claims as migrants rather than as citizens-to-be. Creating social justice organizations, they have inventively constructed a transnational complex of rights by drawing on local, national, and international laws to seek entitlements for their constituencies.

Professional Life in the US  By Mohan Babu K Mohan Babu has assembled in one place his ideas for professionals aspiring to live and work in the US. In the past few years, we have seen an exodus of a vast number of Indians who moved west. Young professionals in India still aspire to partake in the globalization that we are experiencing. In the proposed book the author shares snippets of life and experiences, gained while living and working in the UK and US. Many of the ideas for the book have emerged from Mohan's weekly column on working abroad that appears in Express Computers' IT People section. Click to read the complete book online

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