Krishna
This is a very puzzling book, on two counts. First, the authors list: The official authors are Mark Tully and his partner, Gillian Wright (In the version I read. However, the picture here seems to suggest that it was only Mark Tully, perhaps a correction by publishers in the latest version. Oh well). However, you read the book and it is all written in the first person from Mark Tully. Gillian is mentioned very little, and then only as another character in the book populated by several dozens of them and even so, most of the others get bigger parts than Gillian does. You wonder which part of the book Gillian wrote, and why she is the coauthor.
The second part of the puzzle is the intended audience for this book.
For a foreign reader unfamiliar with India, this book gives nothing much of interest. It reads like a collection of essays about very obscure topics – corruption in the village administration, the religious feud in India, told only from the point of view of individual instances, details of the quaint form of democracy practiced in India, the strange politics in place and other equally obscure subjects: An example is the plight of a quality weaver of rugs, the owner who is of English extraction, who decided to make India his permanent home, rather like Mark Tully himself, but sticks to his strictly English way of life, unlike Mark..
For a local reader, it is all old hat – We know the story of the destruction of the mosque, the rise of VP Singh from an obscure, unknown politician to the Prime Minister (interestingly, the book is silent on the most reviled trait of VP Singh, his support for the openly casteist policies like Mandal Commission report, that caused many young students to self immolate in despair due to their bleak future). Who does not know the plight of the Narmada dam or the corruption of Bofors, or how Kashmir came to be the mess today?
So this book falls between two audiences, satisfying neither, appealing to I do not know whom.
Even for the dogged reader who ploughs through the sometimes tired prose and the prosaic telling of the story, it holds no satisfaction. Does Mark Tully agree that Narmada dam is bad? Does he think that the good ultimately over weighs the bad? No answer, just obfuscation. Well, did politicians destroy Kashmir, did administrators ruin it? No clear answer – the only stance he takes is against former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s overly political and unjust decisions related to Kashmir.
He seems to support a village which adopted summary people’s court and summary justice, ruled with an iron hand by a self-styled benevolent dictator, in violation of the country’s constitution. Curious….
The only vignettes of interest in this documentary-like regurgitation of known facts about India are the angle on Sant Bux Singh, the brother of VP Singh, and the information that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s father Shah Nawaz Chutto was a minister in Saurashtra, ruled by a Nawab, Mahbatkhan Rasulkanji but majority Hindu population. He plotted to have Saurashtra annexed to Pakistan against the will of the majority of its own people but failed. He fled to Pakistan when the Indian Army was amassed at its borders. (In the sixties, after India had come into being).
Too much painful plodding is required to unearth the few nuggets such as this, and therefore, this book deserves no more than a 3/10
— Krishna