Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › India: A Million Mutinies Now

India: A Million Mutinies Now

V. S. Naipaul
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Summer 1991
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
V. S. Naipaul
Viking
1991
520 pp.
$24.95

V. S. Naipaul is a rare combination of born narrator, who brings to life the places and people he encounters, and thinking traveler who offers stimulating insights. This is a beautifully written, intellectually satisfying account of the huge complexity that is modern India. Naipaul sees in postcolonial India many revolutions within a revolution. All over India scores of "long buried disruptive peculiarities"-of region, caste and clan-have come to the surface and produced growing factionalism. The result is "a country of a million little mutinies" supported by "twenty kinds of group excess"-sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess. These "mutinies" cannot be wished away. They are part of the beginning of a new way for India, part of its restoration.

Related

Essay, Jul/Aug 2006
America's New Strategic Partner?
Ashton B. Carter

Over the last year, the U.S. and Indian governments struck a deal that recognizes India as a nuclear weapons power. Critics say Washington gave up too much too soon and at a great cost to nonproliferation efforts. Perhaps. But India could in time become a valuable security partner. So despite the deal's flaws and the uncertainties surrounding its implementation, Washington should move forward with it.

Read
Essay, Apr 1968
India in Transition
Dilip Mukerjee

THE fall in India's stock with her friends abroad is matched by the doubts that assail her own people. To misgivings about economic prospects have now been added a deep disquiet about the political future. The marked increase in tensions within Indian society, accelerated by intensified competition between the political parties since the general election in February 1967, raises fears that the consensus which has so far sustained the Indian experiment in democracy may break down. These fears, now at the center of the political debate within the country, testify to a crisis of confidence which is far more debilitating than the actual difficulties faced by India as a result of the loss of economic momentum and political coherence. But, paradoxically, the crisis is also a sign of hope. India has reasonably well- evolved political institutions and a fair leavening of educated public opinion, and these give her a sporting chance of pulling through. The practical solutions are still difficult to perceive, but the fact that all political elements are searching for them is itself reassuring.

Read
Review Essay, Sep/Oct 2001
Behind India's Bomb: The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Deterrence
Sumit Ganguly

With its two nuclear tests in 1998, India provoked bitter international criticism and retaliatory tests from Pakistan. But in India's Emerging Nuclear Posture, Ashley Tellis argues that fears about nuclear instability in South Asia may be unfounded-and that the time has come for Washington to rethink its unyielding policy on nonproliferation.

Read