Amit Chaudhuri provides several good reasons for why we must read Ramachandra Guha’s history of modern India, but it is his assertion that Guha explains the settled complacency of the Indian middle class that is going to make me buy the book:
And yet, despite Kashmir, and various forms of governmental wrongdoing and blunders, the Indian middle class and intelligentsia, unlike their counterparts in Japan, England or Pakistan, have never really known what it means to inhabit a morally uneasy position. There’s a mysterious surplus to being Indian, a feelgood element comparable only to the sense of self that Americans possessed until Vietnam. Visitors wonder at how happy the poor are in India, putting it down to ancient reserves of spirituality; equally wondrous is how impervious the Indian secular middle class is, despite all sorts of setbacks, to the sense of guilt, of being morally compromised. This has less to do with spirituality than with the unassailable constitutional promise of what it means to be an Indian. The absence of moral ambiguity means that there sometimes seems to be very little critical thinking in India, only one kind of debate, a nationalism in various forms, repeated infinitely. With a few exceptions, Indians don’t know how to fashion eloquence out of a sense of being wrong or having wronged, at least not without the unmistakable timbre of self-congratulation.
