Book Review: Righteous Republic; The Political Foundations of Modern India

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India

By Ananya Vapeyi

Vajpeyi’s ‘Righteous Republic’ is a challenging, but extremely rewarding read and an important contribution to the growing body of Indian intellectual scholarship. The book has as its primary aim the explication of the term ‘swaraj’ or self-rule. In critiquing both past and present scholarship in the area, Vajpeyi argues that scholars have focused inordinately on what the concept of political sovereignty entailed for India’s founding fathers without paying sufficient attention to the first portion of the term, namely the self. How exactly did India’s leading nationalist thinkers conceive of the relationship between self and sovereignty? What did the swa in swa-raj mean to them and how did they go about conferring content on that term? These are hugely important questions but have, as the author persuasively argues, been inadequately addressed in much of the literature on India’s intellectual history. In reading the search for the self through India’s founders, Vajpeyi focuses on five thinkers: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore.

The author argues that the search for the self ‘took the form of an attempt to recover a line of moral inquiry from a welter of Indian traditions’. Vajpeyi suggests that traditions are text-centric; that is to say, texts constitute the building blocks of tradition. This characterization of traditions as text-centric may come across to some readers as inordinately parochial buts its persuasiveness as a characterization need not detain us here- what is important is that once Vajpeyi characterizes traditions in the way that she does, she can then proceed to argue that the best or most insightful way of tracing the founders’ search for self is to examine the manner in which they engaged with particular Indic texts of premodernity. Vajpeyi writes: ‘Rather than trying to figure out where the five founders stood with regard to the idea of “Tradition” as such, I examine particular intellectual engagements with traditional texts that each one undertook, and bring out the categories of selfhood that emerged from these acts of interpretation’.

So what are these texts that India’s founders are said to have engaged with in their attempt to search for the self- the self whose political sovereignty they all struggled to reinstate. Vajpeyi argues that Gandhi’s search for the self is brought out most clearly and compellingly in his engagement with the Bhagavad Gita; Nehru’s search is clarified by looking at his engagement with the texts and artifacts of the Mauryan Empire. Kalidasa’s Meghadhuta is the relevant text for Rabindranath, Abanindranath’s search is reflected in his conceptualization of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal and finally; Ambedkar’s agonizing search for the self is best explicated by examining his engagement with the classical texts of Buddhism.

The claim that the political foundations of modern India derived from classical and historical Indian intellectual traditions is not a new one; the beauty and importance of Vajpeyi’s book, however, lies in its meticulous explication of the ways in and terms on which which India’s founders engaged with the rich knowledge traditions of their past. In fashioning a sense of Indian selfhood, these leading thinkers utilized the vocabularies, themes and concepts embedded in the text-rich traditions of India’s past, employing them in inventive ways to address problems that those traditions had probably not envisaged themselves. The founders engagement with Indian texts of premodernity and their employment of indigenous conceptual categories and idioms to deal with the ‘crisis of the self’ and the issue of political sovereignty enabled them collectively to formulate their values and visions in ways that were intelligible to the Indian masses who although themselves participants in the swaraj project lacked the resources by which to articulate the precise nature of their existential predicament.

Vajpeyi’s book is a thoroughgoing attempt to demonstrate the ways in which India’s rich intellectual, aesthetic and moral heritage influenced the Indian founders collective search for selfhood. In this attempt, the book succeeds masterfully.

Book Review: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea; The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

Austerity: The History of Dangerous Idea

By Mark Blyth

 

Blyth’s ‘Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea’ is a tremendously well-researched and well-written critique of austerity and the assortment of political and economic policies that it inevitably gives rise to. Blyth’s central thesis is that austerity is a dangerous idea since it is riddled with all sorts of internal contradictions and is easily prone to misapplication in practice. Moreover, he argues persuasively that, in its real-world application, austerity imposes a disproportionate burden on poorer households. The book itself is structured into three parts. In its first section, the book examines the current economic crises and fleshes out their causes and consequences. In so doing, Blyth provides us with a perspicuous account of recent economic history, which in turn enables us to better understand our current economic climate. Without going into the economics of the section, Blyth exposes the deeply mischievous manner in which ‘austerians’ have marketed what was essentially a private banking crisis into a sovereign crisis, insinuating ingeniously thereby that profligate national governments are to blame for our economic problems and not the financial elite who are as a result exonerated from the more serious wrong doing. In the second section of the book, Blyth reviews the intellectual history of the Austerity idea, from the Enlightenment to the present, and examines various historical attempts at its employment, concluding in the end that austerity economics have invariably failed to deliver by way of increased economic growth and increased competitiveness. In the final section of the book, Blyth, by way of conjecture, considers what would have happened if governments had not embraced the austerity agenda and concludes the book by offering his own proposals on how the economy and the financial sector in particular could be better managed. All in all, this is a fantastic book, lucid in style, trenchant in its analysis and persuasive in its critique.

 

The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

By David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu

‘The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills’ is a powerful and persuasive critique of governmental attempts to curb fiscal expenditure in an attempt to enhance economic growth and reduce public debt. The book’s central aim is to shed greater light on the human and health costs of austerity politics and economics. The authors argue that healthcare spending, when carried out productively and wisely, can strengthen national economies and heighten national well-being. Countenancing their arguments and undergirding their thesis is an impressive and meticulous body of research which establishes, quite conclusively, that the higher the dose in which austerity was administered in a country, the more people died or deteriorated health-wise. Relying on their findings, Stuckler and Basu point out that countries, which have suffered recessions but yet have continued to maintain governmental spending on health care have managed to avoid deterioration in their citizens’ well-being. Notwithstanding the frequent recourse to statistics in the book, the authors have managed to produce, to their credit, an eminently readable book that is rich in analysis and insight but thankfully un-polemical in its tenor.