India A Portrait

Patrick French is the author of India a Portrait, French is a historian and a writer who has also published Liberty or Death: India’s journey to independence and Division and The World is What it is: The Authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul. Penguin books published India A Portrait in 2011.In this novel, French gives a detailed account of the economic and political state of India starting from the Aryan era to modern India. French has divided the book into 3 parts: part 1 is Rashtra: Nation, 2nd part being Lakshmi: Wealth and the 3rd part being called Samaj: Society. In each section of the book French provides detailed explanations of the changes that the Indian society and nation had to deal with during times of major political and economical change such as the times of the Aryan, Mogul and British rule and the partition of India in 1947. This book focuses largely on the changes that Indian society had to deal with after the end of the British rule in their country and how the economic and political state of India has changed since gaining independence. The book takes you on a 435 page long journey in which the rich history of India is explored and the change of India from being a colonized country to the world’s largest democracy is witnessed. I have compared French’s book India A Portrait to his other nonfiction history novel the Biography of V.S Naipaul and to Ramanajuns novel India after Gandhi.

French begins his book by describing India's painful separation from Pakistan in 1947 in great detail. He gives us an overview of the political situation of the time with such vivid details that one is clearly able to visualize the economic state of India during the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty. The Gandhi-Nehru governed the country until the 1990s, managing simultaneously to keep India democratic and united, while running its economy into the ground.

French then goes on to describe the struggles of Indian businessmen who struggled greatly and faced much difficulty in this socialist economy created by the politicians during the Gandhi-Nehru era. These businessmen would not be able to pursue their entrepreneurial desires till the 1990s when the government of the country begins to relax on its control of businesses. These descriptions of economic growth and wealth for entrepreneurs is balanced by descriptions of those many individuals who did not benefit from India’s economic boom, such as the Naxalites, the Maoist rebels who are fighting an insurgency against the Indian state and the domestic servants who get down on their knees to mop the floors while the country's software engineers accumulate large amounts of wealth by simply tapping away on their laptops.
The book had many faults to it such as the parts where French gives a very detailed description of Indian businessmen and politicians which moved sluggishly and made for a dull and boring reading where he gives extensive and irrelevant details about food and clothing; never once making the kind of startling observations that he made regularly in the beginning of his book. Such as the instance when he noted that violent coughing is as much a sound of the Indian countryside as the lowing of cows (300,000 Indians die each year from tuberculosis). A bit paunchy, like one of the south Indian male physiques it so accurately describes, India a Portrait needed to be disciplined and trimmed. In a lovely paragraph, French notes how the Hindu sense of religion can be simultaneously comical and moving; as when a Ganesha idol left by the Irish ambassador outside his office turns into a shrine, creating a diplomatic conundrum for Ireland.

To write well about India, however, one needs more than just affection; and what is missing in this book is evidence of that, the reader is left struggling to understand India and one's own place in it. French never gets beyond the assertion which he makes in the preface that the new, cool India is the "world's default setting for the future": and though he acknowledges the presence of a few malcontents, he celebrates the prosperous, multicultural, tech-savvy Indian as the 21st-century's Everyman. That at least 300 million Indians live on the verge of malnutrition is dutifully noted, but the figure seems to make little real impression on French. When he sees the desperate conditions in which construction labourers in Bangalore live, he asks how long it would take to turn them into software engineers – a question which presupposes that they will turn into engineers and that India's transformation into an egalitarian society is somehow inevitable.

And this is the main problem with the book: if there is some strong writing in it, there is not a grain of original thinking. VS Naipaul managed to combine a love of Indians with a healthy contempt for the nation's shortcomings; however, this is something French fails to do entirely in this novel. The following is an example from the novel where it is quite obvious that a large populace of India is not ready to move forward with new technology and change: French notes that Hinduism is a tolerant religion, yet millions of Indians vote in state and national elections for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party whose platform is exclusionist and bigoted. How is one to reconcile these contradictory facts? The easy answer, which French leans towards and this is what any politically correct Delhi journalist will tell you, is that the BJP has deceived voters for decades by promising a return to an imaginary Hindu past. To keep falling for this promise, election after election, millions of Indian voters must be in favour of old traditions and technology and not the smart budding world-conquerors that French describes them as. For all the diversity and exuberance that India's democracy presents to outsiders such as French, it often leaves its voters with little real choice. French states that in the southern state of Karnataka , voters sometimes pick the BJP simply because they are frustrated with the corruption and inefficiency of the secular parties.
In the final pages of his book, French retells the story of Ramanujan, the brilliant young Tamil mathematician who died in England before he could fulfil his life’s ambitions. The suggestion is that the talents of 1.2 billion Ramanujans, all of them tremendously multicultural and supremely talented and are on the verge of exploding. The leading historian of modern India, Ramachandra Guha, chose to end his novel India After Gandhi, on a more sombre note: his countrymen, he pointed out, could be legitimately proud of their democracy but they had to remember that the task of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty still lay ahead of them. Any responsible book on India must end like this: for the greatest danger to the nation's future is no longer poverty or Pakistan, but overconfidence. Lacking Naipaul's passion or Guha's judgment, Patrick French ends up as another forgotten author who had written a historic nonfiction novel about the rise of the new India.

India: A Portrait Book Review Prepared For: Deepak Kumar Prepared By: Gagan Singh 211045168 February 9, 2012