| | |  | Kitchen & Dining | Home » » » In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India | | | | | | | Description: | | As the world's largest democracy and a rising international economic power, India has long been heralded for its great strides in technology and trade. Yet it is also plagued by poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a vast array of other social and economic issues. Here, noted journalist and former Financial Times South Asia bureau chief Edward Luce travels throughout India's many regions, cultures, and religious circles, investigating its fragile balance between tradition and modernity. From meetings with key political figures to fascinating encounters with religious pundits, economic gurus, and village laborers, In Spite of the Gods is a fascinating blend of analysis and reportage that comprehensively depicts the nuances of India's complex situation and its place in the world. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9781400079773
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Edward Luce | | Paperback:
| 416 pages | | Publisher:
| Anchor | | Publication Date:
| March 11, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1400079772 | | Product Length:
| 5.18 inches | | Product Width:
| 0.82 inches | | Product Height:
| 8.02 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.88 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.1 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 76 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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81 of 82 found the following review helpful:
 Great big picture but shaky detailsJul 17, 2007
By R. Ayyagari
Edward Luce is a British journalist and former Financial Times New Delhi Bureau Chief. His main interests in this book are the social, political and economic arenas in India. Luce writes about several "patterns" that he has noticed in collective Indian behaviour: sycophancy, criminalization of politics, Hindu fundamentalism, the State unintentionally oppressing the poor, and so on. He weaves these patterns into small scale themes such as the fallacy (in his opinion) of the Indian nationalist perception that progress lies in developing the villages and decentralizing political power. His grand theme is the condition of the poor in India.
To shore up the argument for each of the patterns, Luce relies on interviews (with a surprising number of very prominent people), events (historical and current), anecdotes, and other cultural observations. He does all of this a trifle haphazardly, but manages to make it all very interesting. His anecdotes and event summaries are piquant and entertaining. Luce seems to have benefited from advice from people like Ramachandra Guha, a very prominent Indian historian. The bigger picture that emerges from this book is reasonably accurate. For people unfamiliar with India, the book would be great: a concise yet fairly comprehensive introduction.
On the negative side, the book is journalistic rather than scholarly. The result is that nearly everything in the book expresses opinion rather than the result of any kind of study. Some topics are the author's pet peeves rather than anything important. Others are important, but rather than report all angles, Luce often picks a side and provides a very zealous argument in its favour. This bias sometimes results in inaccuracies. His portrayal of prominent personalities seems to have more to do with his personal likes and dislikes than with their public service record. The book is an elucidated collection of existing opinions; Luce doesn't provide any new insights of importance. Luce seems partial to sensational reporting designed to shock and awe his readers. The book also seems, mostly, to follow the standard Western viewpoints on India -- so the reader isn't getting the Indian perspective.
A couple of examples:
- On child labour, one of India's biggest social problems, Luce claims that people don't want to fix it (he provides four mostly academic arguments and says people use them to justify child labour). He omits mention of the real issues. Most Indians are interested in ending it, but there are problems. First, it is very low on the list of political priorities, which is dominated by things like caste, religion, reservations and subsidies of various kinds. Second, most of the children are working so that they can eat; simply taking their labour away will starve them. Providing free food or sending them to school is hard because of bureaucratic corruption. Removing bureacratic corruption, again, is low on the list of electoral priorities. Perhaps Luce would have seen this if he had tried to suggest a solution.
- Many politicians (appropriately) get torn apart by Luce. However, he is surprisingly, inexplicably charitable towards Sonia Gandhi, the closest thing India has to a dictator. Luce's portrayal of her is adoring and reads like Congress party progaganda: that of a graceful, tearful, long-suffering widow, humble, patriotic (towards India), pure of motive and gentle of heart, yet blessed with amazing insight into the hearts of the Indian people and electoral politics and motivated by a genuine desire to protect the India her family worked so hard for. She might be some of those things, but there isn't much evidence cited. Luce's admiration doesn't seem to be based on anything she has done. To me, an Indian, it looks like he was just charmed by her Western demeanour.
To be fair, Luce covers so much ground in this book that it would be almost impossible for him to provide a complete and perfectly balanced view of every one of his topics. Overall, this is an informative and readable book that gives a good general picture of Indian life, strife and politics. The reader should just keep in mind that there may be more to individual issues than Luce lets on.
36 of 40 found the following review helpful:
 Disappointing and without directionMar 06, 2007
By anavidreader
I bought this book expecting insighful analysis on modern India and its various strengths and weaknesses. Either this book is titled wrong (in my view it should be titled "India - 1001 observations") or the writer lost the plot quite early on.
After an initial chapter or two about the rise of modern India this book went into a never ending drivel of perceived drawbacks in India's democracy, history, society, religions, infrastructure, politics, bureaucracy etc...the list is endless. However, after a while I stopped seeing what point the author was trying to make. What made matters worse was there was no logical progression throughout the book. He was either too critical .. a prime example of this was critical conclusions the author made about some religions in India with what seemed a very superficial understanding of these religions. At other times the author made statements which had little factual basis other than being his observations.
Furthermore, the lack of adequate analysis and insight shows in the concluding chapter where again (without any logical progression) we are given a list of things India should do to address its shortcomings. Many of these recommendations seem not carefully thought through and lacking in detail. When 90% of the book is devoted to India's numerous shortcomings and contradictions (according to the author), the author could have adequately thought through his recommendations on how to address these in the remaining 10% of his book.
Again, my disappointment stems from the fact that I expected the author to go a few layers deeper to make a cogent argument rather than merely present a lengthy list of observations. I expected insightful analysis rather than a mere reporting of facts and the author's observations.
63 of 75 found the following review helpful:
 Where we are, How we got hereFeb 11, 2007
By Kashyap Deorah
"Righthalf"
If you are looking for a book that tells you where India is today, where she's going and how she can get there, this is NOT the right book for you. However, if you are looking for a book that tells you where India is today and how it got here in the last century especially since independence, Ed Luce does as good a job as anyone can given the complex glob of a million entangled threads that is India. The book is not futuristic, it is introspective. The book does not speculate, it reveals.
At the time of release of this book, it is hip to write about India's growing economy and laud the unbelieveable potential that lies ahead, what with the booming IT and Biotech industry and scores of parallels one can draw with other countries that passed this phase. While those books present great hypotheses, imagination and optimism; they either focus on a section of India that is not representative of the country as a whole, or miss some fundamental understanding of the realities of the country.
The issues covered in this book are given as much relative priority as a top Indian diplomat or policy maker ought to give. In that sense, the book provides a holistic view of India in a manner that is investigative, well informed and insightful. The author's criticism is far from cynicism, and his admiration is far from adulation. For a country that incites much emotion among authors, Ed Luce's objective view is quite refreshing. The author is probably at just the right viewing distance from India: not too close to let emotions cloud his judgement, and close enough to be wise and vested (not just well informed) in the topics he writes about.
After reading this book, I have learnt about topics that I did not expect to learn about when I picked up the book. Having said that, the book does not explore the depths of all topics, though cites other works that do. Ed Luce is certainly on my watch-list of authors now.
65 of 79 found the following review helpful:
India: Land of ExtremesFeb 16, 2007
By Izaak VanGaalen
Any discussion of the India's current economic ascent begins in 1991 when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao began dismantling the decades-old system of controls and permits known as the "License Raj." With the subsequent influx of foreign capital and the proliferation of business activity, the economy began to grow robustly and has continued to do so at a 6% annual rate - only China has performed better over the same period of time. Edward Luce, who was the Financial Times bureau chief in New Delhi from 2001 to 2005, chronicles India's rise with a series of anecdotes that make up the chapters of this book. It is a very personal account - he includes his wedding - of the powerful and contradictory forces that are driving India to great power status.
India is often compared to China and this book is no exception. The comparison is helpful because they both started to pull away from socialist-statist economies after the end of the Cold War. Luce predicts that they and the US will be the three key nations that shape the 21st century.
Speaking of extremes: India graduates over 1 million engineers every year, as opposed to the US and Europe who graduate about 200,000 between the two of them. India now ranks third in scientific capacity behind Japan and the US. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65%, whereas China's is 90%. This is explained, according to Luce, by the fact that India remains a very poor and rural country. About 750 million people live in some 680 thousand villages, and about 300 million of them in extreme poverty. There are chronic shortages of land and water making subsistence a daily struggle - under these circumstances education is not even a consideration.
In another comparison to China, Luce notes that India only has 7 million people involved in manufacturing, whereas China has 100 million. Labor laws in India - some remnants of Nehru-Gandhi socialism - make it difficult for employers to lay-off workers. Therefore many factory owners have invested heavily in high-tech, minimizing the need for manual labor. If anything good can be said about the Communist party in China it is that they have done away with such laws making hiring and firing much easier. This may sound unjust to some but it employs an additonal 93 million workers.
Luce also points out that India has basically bypassed the industrial revolution, going directly from agriculture to high-tech services. This shows that they invested heavily in higher education for the elite while neglecting the poor. The result is having a middle class about the size of France or Germany and at the same time having an underclass of about 900 million. That there is not enough money for universal education is not surprising since only about 35 million in a population of 1.1 billion pay taxes.
India, unlike China, remains a vibrant democracy. It has witnessed the rise and fall and rise again of the Gandhi dynasty, it has experienced the rise and fall of Hindu nationalism. There have been many incidents of Hindu-Muslim strife, not to mention border wars with Pakistan. Compared with Western countries, India is unique because it became a democracy before it had a middle class. India is currently governed by a 24 party coalition which is actually not much more inefficient than when it was run by a single party - in both cases corruption was epidemic. The running joke is that "the economy works at night when the government sleeps."
In 2006, India completed a 3,000 mile interstate highway called the "Golden Quadrilateral" running from New Dehli to Mumbai to Chennai to Kolkata and back to New Delhi. It was a remarkable feat since many of the politicians sitting in the ruling coalition would try to prevent its completion because the highway disrupted many of their constituents' communities. All of it was settled, however, through bribes and the legal system. In China this kind of development is done by decree. In many ways the Chinese system is more efficient but no one would vote for its authoritarian tactics.
India like China still has many serious problems to tackle, among them energy, environment, poverty, and public health. The fact that they have a democracy is a plus in a country divided by many languages, religion, and caste. On the downside they have a huge bureaucracy that is corrupt and resistant to change. Yet India seems to work, moving slowly toward economic development and great power status inspite of the gods.
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
areaderfromcaJan 15, 2010
By TrustNoOne
I am originally from India. I have read quite a few books on India written by non-Indian authors, some of them quite good, the others just average.
I rated this book a 3. I agree with some of the criticisms leveled against it by some other reviewers, like the book seems to be a juxtaposition of facts, observations and conclusions, lacking a central thread to unite them.
It does not bother me that the book is mostly condescending. It is one person's observations who has a point of view. However, it suffers from some other more serious flaws.
For example, the book, like many other books written about a country or a culture by a writer who is not a native of that country, did not provide an understanding of India or its culture beyond scratching the surface. I have lived in the US for many years now. I have voted in two election cycles. I am a news junkie and I consider myself to be fairly well-informed. However, I am sure that if I were to write a book about the US, every 10-20 pages, a reader native to the US would almost certainly exclaim - oh! this guy did not get that, or, oh! This guy's understanding of this is incomplete or wrong.
It is only natural for a journalist, who spends a few years in India, dividing his time between the various countries of the subcontinent, to miss a lot more than what I would miss about the US. That is OK.
But the problem arises when such a person tries to cover too much ground starting with ancient history to the present day, and covers too many topics, and to top it all, tries to analyze the information he has compiled. The information for a large part, is incomplete, and often wrong. His analysis cannot be any better than that, assuming the author is good at analyzing.
There are too many things to point out in the book that I found were either factually incomplete, or incorrect. I will cite only a few.
The author claims that Ashok (from 300BC) is considered the greatest Indian king/ruler of all time. And then he claims that India basically splintered into many smaller pieces until Akbar, the moghul emperor reunited the country in the 1500s. The author completely missed the golden age of India from 3rd to 6th century AD, when the Guptas ruled most of India for several hundred years and during whose time India made so many contributions to the arts (Ajanta, Elora, Kalidas), architecture (the great temples), math (zero, the decimal system), science, astronomy, law etc. Between Ashok and Akbar, there were many periods and rulers when most of India was under one rule.
The author claims that Gandhi understood that unlike the other colonialists from Europe, the British were susceptible to argument. And Gandhi used the power of his arguments to win independence for India. The author hasn't even read his own (British) history well. Gandhi used non-violence as a method to implement a policy, of non-cooperation, with the British. It was not his arguments but the policy of non-cooperation that cause the British some pain. And the British still would not have given up India (what a laughable idea in itself) were it not for World War II which effectively bankrupted the empire and left them short of manpower and finances to keep hanging on to a non-cooperative colony.
The author claims that the Indian policy makers are blind and deaf to the reading the nuclear posture of Pakistan and this could lead to a catastrophe. He cites the period after the attacks on the Indian Parliament in 2002 when India and Pakistan almost came to blows. He claims that Pakistanis explicitly kept saying that all options were open, while the Indians and their hyperventilating media maintained that there was no such danger. And all this while, most of the western press kept ringing the alarm bells. What the author failed to observe is that many Western countries lead by the US and the UK had issued serious travel advisories against India and most foreign businesses were putting their operations in India on hold or thinking about pulling out altogether. The US and others did this to put pressure on India to back away from its aggressive posture so that their plans in Afghanistan would not be disrupted. And a lot of the hype about a nuclear confrontation was just that, hype created by Western governments and media to that end.
There are many other instances. In sum, I would say that the author's writing style is entertaining but I would take his analysis with a few lumps of salt.
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