In close to five decades as a citizen of India I have had plenty of opportunity to discover that this is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world. However, it was only while working on its modern history that I found that it was at all times the most interesting. It was my friend Peter Straus who set me off on the journey, by suggesting that I write a book on independent India. And it was the selfless tribe of archivists and librarians who made the journey an adventure rich in thrills and unexpected discoveries.
The greatest thanks are owed to the staff of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, that capacious repository of private papers, periodicals, microfilms and books about modern India. For weeks on end I had as my kindly companions Shri Jeevan ChandandShri Rautela of the Manuscripts Division, who brought file after file up from alarge, dark corridor into the sunny reading room where Iworked. Outside, in the Main Section, the library staff were unfailingly courteous. In sourcing manuscripts, I also received much help from the Library’s Deputy Director, Dr N. Balakrishnan, and his sterling assistant Deepa Bhatnagar.
Next in order of importance is that other – and more famous – public repository, the British Library in London. My base here was the old India Office Library and Records, which – while I worked there – was called the ‘Oriental and India Office Collections’ (it now functions under the label of ‘Asian and African Studies’. By any name it remains a happy place to work in, with its brisk and efficient staff, its close links to other collections, and – not least – the serendipitous meetings it allows with scholars from around the world.
Among the other libraries and archives where I collected material for this book are those maintained by the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; Cornell University; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the University of Georgia, Athens; Friends House, Euston; the India International Centre, New Delhi; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Imperial War Museum, London; Oslo University; the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai; Tata Steel, Jamshedpur; and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. A special thanks is owed to the Centre for Education and Documentation in Bangalore, from whose fabulously comprehensive collection of news clippings Ihave extensively drawn.
Aside from private papers and periodicals,t his book also draws on other books old and new, as well as pamphlets. Not many of these could I find in libraries (at least not the libraries in my home town, Bangalore, which is a great centre of science but not, alas, of the humanities).The bulk were bought from bookshops known and unrecognized. Iam grateful, in particular, to the Premier Bookshop, Bangalore; the Select Bookshop, Bangalore; Prabhu Booksellers, Gurgaon; the New and Secondhand Bookshop, Mumbai; and Manohar Booksellers, New Delhi. As handy and helpful were the unnamed pavement stalls in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain and Delhi’s Daryaganj – from whom and where, over the past two decades and more, I have obtained so much of the material for my work as a historian.
The photographs that I have used here come principally from four collections: those maintained by the Press Information Bureau, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the Hindu and Ananda Bazaar Patrika group of newspapers. I thank these institutions for their assistance, and my wife Sujata for advice on the final selection.
For help of various kinds, I would like to thank Chinmayi Arun; Kanti Bajpai; Suhas Baliga; Rukmini Banerji; Nupur Basu; Millicent Bennett; Stanley Brandes; Vijay Chandru; Shruti Debi; Kanak Mani Dixit; Zafar Futehally; Amitav Ghosh; my parents S. R. D. and Visalakshi Guha; Supriya Guha; Wajahat Habibullah; Rajen Harshe; Radhika Herz-berger; Trevor Horwood; Shreyas Jayasimha; Robin Jeffrey; Bhagwan Josh; Nasreen Munni Kabir; Devesh Kapur; Mukul Kesavan; Soumya Keshavan; Nayanjot Lahiri; Nirmala Lakshman; Edward Luce; Lucy Luck; Raghu Menon; Mary Mount; Rajdeep Mukherjee; Rudrangshu Mukherjee; Anil Nauriya; Nandan Nilekani; Mohandas Pai; Sriram Pan-chu; Prashant Panjiar; Shekhar Pathak; Srinath Raghavan; Nitya Ramak-rishnan; Ramesh Ramanathan; Jairam Ramesh; my nephew Karthik Ramkumar; Mahesh Rangarajan; Anuradha Roy; Tirthankar Roy; John Ryle; P. Sainath; Sanjeev Saith; Rajdeep Sardesai; Jalpa Rajesh Shah; Rajbhushan Shinde; K. Sivaramakrishnan; Arvind Subramanian; R. Sudarshan; Nandini Sundar; M. V. Swaroop; Shikha Trivedy; Siddharth Vara-darajan; A. R. Venkatachalapathy; Rajendra Vora; Amy Waldman; and Francis Wheen.
Some friends deserve special mention, for their long-term help in matters professional and personal. These good souls are Rukun Advani, André Béteille, Keshav Desiraju, Gopal Gandhi, David Gilmour, Ian Jack, Sanjeev Jain, and Sunil Khilnani. André and David also provided detailed comments on a draft of the book. And I was kept going by the memory of my friend Krishna Raj, editor for thirty-five years of the Economic and Political Weekly, the journal whose own life is so closely bound up with the life of the Republic – as the notes to this book testify.
I thank, for their support, encouragement, criticism and chastisement, my editors, Richard Milner of Macmillan and Dan Halpern of Ecco/HarperCollins. I promise to be less tardy with the books that might follow! In fact, without my agent Gill Coleridge even this one would not have been finished. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to take an extended holiday, or drop the book altogether. Each time it was Gill who brought me back, showing me the ways in which it might be continued and, in the end, completed.
My greatest debt, as expressed in the dedication, is to the always interesting and occasionally exasperating Indians with whom I am privileged to share a home.