India In 2050

After nearly ten centuries of invasions and colonial rule, and seven decades after achieving a bloodied and partitioned freedom, the Indian nation-civilisation is experiencing a remarkable surge in nationalism. There is a strong urge to revive and assert itself politically, culturally, and economically.

India, that is Bharat, is challenging its colonised mindset and manners, striving to write its own story and history, which were distorted by its colonisers and tormentors. India’s New Right captures this pivotal moment in Bharat’s life. The book seeks to understand this exceptional period in Bharat’s history through the eyes of the many protagonists driving this change. Some of these individuals are prominent public figures, while others are faceless individuals working behind the scenes to bring about change.

The book features nearly fifty full-length interviews woven into the larger narrative. It covers a wide range of subjects, from youth to economy, history to popular culture, law to gender identity, minorities to ghar wapsi, and the demographic war.

A Primer on Indian Social Structures Caste is being used as a major weapon to shame Hindus. This crisp and easy primer presents a powerful counter to Western Universalism’s harsh attacks on caste. It is a long over-due toolkit to help all open-minded people gain an understanding of the subtleties of Hinduism’s complex social order. This social structure has, after all, produced a civilization with unparalleled diversity. The Vedic world view along with the historical journey of Varna and Jati demolishes the prevailing myths about caste.

Reclaiming Bharatavarsha is a collection of topical and exploratory essays organized around three broad themes. The first explores various facets of classical Bharatavarsha, which is defined as India before the advent of alien Islamic invaders and British colonisation. The second delves into the condition of an India under successive alien regimes. The impact of these regimes on our culture and society is contrasted with the conditions prevailing in the preceding classical era. The third studies the imprint of these bouts of foreign rule on contemporary national life. The three themes taken separately are complementary, and together they offer a scope for comparative analyses of the politics, culture, society, customs, and literature of different eras in the life of this ancient land.

From selected episodes drawn from the Puranas and the Mahabharata to the sacred history of the banana, from the 17th-century Bengali arrack to woke cinema, from the 1962 war with China to hair dyes, the book offers an eclectic mix of atypical essays, the narratives of which are filled with rare anecdotes and vivid details, all of which are backed by scholarly research.

The book also has a contemporary context—the unprecedented transformation of India over the last decade. A major outcome of this transformation is the surge in interest for recovering India’s national and civilizational past. This collective resurgence is an expression of cultural self-confidence, which had fallen by the wayside for centuries. Reclaiming Bharatavarsha is a humble addition to this national endeavour.

Since the 13th century, numerous European have travelled to India. Driven by a thirst for adventure or trade opportunities, they embarked on extraordinary voyages across the sea to India. Their journeys were fraught with obstacles, including attacks by marauding gangs and animals, exposure to harsh climates, treacherous terrain, and unknown tropical diseases. Nonetheless, the desire to explore India’s exotic and distant lands propelled them forward.

Almost all of them kept meticulous journals of their travels, chronicling the course of Indian history. Crossing Continents explores the stories of several such travellers: Niccolao Manucci, William Hawkins, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Mark Twain, Athanasius Nikitin, Fanny Parkes, etc. All these travellers were relatively unknown at the time and were of little significance in their native homes. They were not bound by their rulers to report in a certain way, which was why their reports were largely unfiltered, unbiased, and unhindered. Each of them travelled to India with different objectives. One seeking precious gems while another a means to fend off debts. Others were driven purely by a desire to travel. They arrived in India during different periods and had unique stories to share. Their untiring pens stitched together a dispassionate history of India—a land of unfathomable contradictions—where sadhus meditated in high-mountain caves and merchants haggled in bustling markets.

India became politically independent in 1947, but for economic freedom it had to wait for another four decades until P.V. Narasimha Rao, in tandem with Dr Manmohan Singh, chaperoned the country’s liberalization process in the summer of 1991. In 2014, another seismic revolution unravelled, the contours of which are still being drawn. For the first time, a ‘new India’ had not just seen an alternative model of governance that is truly divorced from the Nehruvian ethos but also initiated a process of democratization and decolonization of the largely ‘elitist, insular and compromised’ Lutyens’ world.

Argumentative and deeply researched, Bharat Rising combines the narrative style of journalism and the rigour and discipline of academia. It is as much about the resetting of Lutyens’ world as it is about a new India shedding its traditional distrust, if not distaste, for the country’s civilizational and cultural past.

Being Hindu adopts a longue durée view of history and attempts to contextualize the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its progenitor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), as political phenomena by examining certain medieval state structures and instances of advocacy and popular mobilization in the colonial period. Further, it studies the politics of Narendra Modi and the policy initiatives undertaken by him as the prime minister of India to highlight their apparent cultural and moral underpinnings. Its eventual objective is to make a case for the historical authenticity of the Hindu mode of politics that emerged in post-Independence India. The attempt, in other words, is to demonstrate that it is a thing in its own right and not a cynical invention of hostility towards religious minorities, an irrational or ‘fascist’ mindset, or sundry anxieties, but has precedents in frameworks and practices going rather far back in history. The BJS and the BJP are thus shown to be locatable in a long tradition of Hindus organizing their political practice or politics through cultural resources and a cultural imagination distinctive to them. Narendra Modi, similarly, brings an inclusive Hindu catholicity and sangathanist outlook to his politics and developmental agenda. Being Hindu, in this way, relates a brief history of the political expressions of being Hindu over slightly more than eleven centuries—from the ascension of Aditya I, the first of the imperial Cholas, in 870 CE until our own time and age.