It's inspiriting to see that ethical pursuit of a vocation, rather than the grim clamber for professional preferment which is modern academic life, still animating some of our younger scholars. So, even as public discussion about our politics and history drift further from the shores of reality and truth, we should be grateful for the rich recent stream of high-quality political and historical work written for a broad public. Madhav Khosla's deeply considered and subtly articulated India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press), foregrounds the sheer radicalism that emboldened India's founders to launch the new nation on an experiment in democratic self-invention; Vinay Sitapati's Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi (Viking), an illuminating and fluent narrative charting the rise of the BJP, reveals the labile, deeply political quality of that founding democratic experiment. Sitapati explains the BJP's rise less as a triumph of grandiose ideology, more as grounded in an understanding and deft manipulation of electoral politics by the party's two founding shapers, AB Vajpayee and LK Advani (his book is useful primer for Christophe Jaffrelot's prize-winning study of Modi, forthcoming soon in English translation). Dinyar Patel's authoritative biography Naoroji (Harvard University Press)—a name often, invoked but whose career has rarely been examined—brings to life the capacious human sympathy and staggering intellectual vigour of one of our greatest public intellectuals. Delving back into India's 'early modern' history, Manan Ahmed Asif's The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press), effects a striking recovery of the rich precolonial language of 'Hindustan'—more than just a name for the subcontinent, the term embodied an entire cultural history and imagination. Yet it was obliterated by colonial historians, who substituted their own term, 'India'—adopted, Manan Ahmed argues, with self-harming effects by Indians themselves.

academia

The Perils of Academic Activism

Sunil Khilnani

The American Interest