India's Quiet Revolution

IN SPITE OF THE GODS

The Strange Rise of Modern India

By Edward Luce

Doubleday. 383 pp. $26

"India," Winston Churchill once barked, "is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but he had a point this time: No other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the sweep from high-tech wealth to grinding rural poverty that India does.

So how does one come to grips with a land of such bewildering contrasts? The paradoxes abound: The world's largest democracy is also the home of the ageless caste system; a land steeped in superstition is a world leader in information technology; the nation of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, is convulsed by periodic bloodletting. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is "Satyameva Jayaté" -- "Truth Alone Triumphs." The question remains, however: whose truth?

Edward Luce, a keenly observant British journalist who headed the Financial Times's bureau in New Delhi at the cusp of the new century, ventures an answer in this insightful and engaging book. His sharp-witted prose brings today's India to life with insight and irreverence. ("If Gandhi had not been cremated," Luce writes, "he would be turning in his grave.") Luce's writing is richly evocative of place and mood, and In Spite of the Gods sparkles with the kind of telling detail that illuminates an anecdote and lifts it above mere reportage. Almost the only thing not worth admiring in this book is its awful title, which suggests a nation struggling against the heavens -- a thesis that has nothing to do with Luce's sophisticated and sympathetic narrative.

Advised early on that in India it is not enough to meet the "right people," Luce travels throughout the country meeting the "wrong people" as well. He explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture (a "modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland"); he punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion (which he correctly argues will not solve India's fundamental employment problems because it employs only about 1 million of the country's 1.1 billion people); and he depicts the continuing allure of the secure and corruption-laden "government job." Few foreigners have written with as much understanding of the skills and limitations of India's senior government bureaucrats -- of their idealism and inefficiency, of the vested interests that impede growth and progress -- and Luce also captures the extraordinary triumphs of India despite these obstacles.

On my frequent visits home, I discover that India is anything but the unchanging land of cliche. The country is in the grips of dramatic transformations that amount to little short of a revolution -- in politics, economics, society and culture. In politics, the single-party governance of India's early decades has given way to an era of multiparty coalitions. In economics, India has leapt from protectionism to liberalization, albeit with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders. In caste and social relations, India has witnessed convulsive changes. And yet all this change and ferment, which would have rent a lesser country asunder, have been managed through an accommodative and pluralist democracy. Luce tells this story remarkably well.

There is, for instance, a gently sympathetic portrait of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the ruling Congress Party, for whom "the political is very personal." Luce, who is married to an Indian, clearly admires much of India's culture, such as its remarkable novelists, musicians and film-makers: "If world trade were to be conducted purely in cultural products," he writes, "then India would have a thumping annual surplus." He suggests an answer to the famous question of why so few of India's 140 million Muslims, unlike their neighbors in Pakistan, have joined jihadist groups: because of "the political system under which they live," which guarantees them "freedom of speech, expression, worship, and movement."

But Luce is a far from uncritical admirer. He is unsparing on the corruption that infests Indian politics and society, on the ersatz Westernization that has seen sonograms used to facilitate the abortion of female fetuses by parents wanting sons, on the "unimpressive politicians" who run India's "impressive democracy."

Still, no one speaks seriously anymore of the dangers of disintegration that, for years, India was said to be facing. Luce demonstrates that, for all its flaws, India's democratic experiment has worked. The country has seen linguistic clashes, inter-religious riots and sputtering separatism, but democracy has helped to defuse each of these. Even the explosive potential of caste division has been channeled through the ballot box. Most strikingly, the power of electoral numbers has given high office to the lowest of India's low. Who could have imagined that, after 3,000 years of caste discrimination, an "Untouchable" woman would become chief minister of India's most populous state? Yet that has happened twice and looks likely to happen again this year when the northern state of Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls. In 2004, India witnessed an event unprecedented in human history: A nation of more than 1 billion people, after the planet's largest exercise ever in free elections, saw a Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) -- in a country that is 81 percent Hindu.

Luce is right to list the many problems the country faces: the poor quality of much of its political leadership, the rampant corruption, the criminalization of politics (more than 100 of the 552 members of Parliament's lower house have charges pending against them). The situation in Kashmir festers, provoking periodic crises with Pakistan and leading to fears (mostly exaggerated) of nuclear war on the subcontinent. Luce summarizes these issues crisply and cogently. But I'd like to have read a little more about the strengths of India's vibrant civil society: nongovernmental organizations actively defending human rights, promoting environmentalism, fighting injustice. The country's press is free, lively, irreverent, disdainful of sacred cows. India is the only country in the English-speaking world where the print media are expanding rather than contracting, even as the country supports the world's largest number of all-news TV channels. Disappointingly, Luce tells us nothing of this.

But these are cavils. Luce clearly loves the country he writes about -- an essential attribute for a book like this -- but he is tough-minded as well, and his judgment is invariably sound. "In India," a colleague once told Luce, "things are never as good or as bad as they seem." If you want to understand how that might be, read his wonderful book. ·

Shashi Tharoor is the author of, among other books, "India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond" and "Nehru: The Invention of India."