Sanjay Jha’s Five Favourite Books

We asked our HarperBroadcast host of the month March, to recommend five books that he thinks everyone should read about Indian history and politics.

Check out his recommendations below and add them to your reading lists!

India After Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha

A masterful rendition by India’s storied historian, Ramchandra Guha, of the post-1947 birth and several rebirths of a fascinating nation, periodically pummeled by its own intrinsic contradictions.  In an age, when Nehru-bashing has become a social media meme, a subject of animated guffaws and stand-up artists script at its periodical and predictable usage by the obsessed right-wing , Guha puts the construction of a modern India, still living with the diabolical demons of the 1947 partition bloodbath, into perspective. Long after history books are scissored and scientifically amputated, Guha’s book will remain an outstanding record worth visiting.

Malevolent Republic: A Short history of the New India : By Kapil Komireddi

This is a searing, scorching look at an India that is besmirched by hate, bedeviled by its newfound crude aggression towards its more vulnerable minorities. Komireddi captures India’s dystopian madness with his brilliant prose, at once astonishingly illuminating and painfully real. There is no escaping his insuperable wrath at all and sundry; he spares neither Narendra Modi  nor the Congress party. By the end of his book, you are left thinking; How did all this madness start, and are you a silent conspirator for your studious disinterestedness about the elephant in the room? A must read, particularly for Gen Z.

Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

I read it as a teenager; Collins and Lapierre make this book a thrilling adventure of India’s epochal moment with its haloed destiny; August 15^th, 1947, its Independence Day. Ironically, that freedom appears more like a hollow misnomer,  as the Idea of India dies in slow motion, hemorrhaging every day at 9 pm on its television shows. The country that once inspired a million mutinies in several European colonies, leading to the end of the imperialist British Raj, has turned itself into a terrifying monster, enslaving its own. I must confess to being hugely inspired to write both my political books, 2024: India in Free Fall, and 2014: The Great Unravelling by Collins and Lapierre’s sublime mixture of research and raciness.

The Billionaire Raj : A Journey through India’s New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

As the Electoral Bonds scam becomes the dominating headline in India heading into the general elections of 2024, James Crabtree’s meticulously researched, and anecdotally captivating tale of rent-seeking crony capitalists of India becomes germane. The meteoric rise of what is often called India’s 2 A (Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani led business conglomerates) and their alleged influence over public policymaking and acquisition of public assets, makes comparisons to Putin’s oligarchic empire inevitable. Crabtree was optimistic perhaps that Narendra Modi would be a Reagan-Thatcherite right-wing economic liberal; he must be disappointed that his government is using Congress’s welfare socialist policies instead to appeal to the impoverished masses. And worse, being accused of encouraging a brutally retributive administration, a vulgar manifestation of extortionist mafia operation through the abuse of state investigative agencies. Plutocracy has serious consequences.

INDIA: A Portrait by  Patrick French

The late Patrick French evidently loved India, and perhaps his empirical work on the former “jewel of the crown” of the British empire was greatly influenced by the fact that he saw a largely benevolent Vajpayee era under the anticipated -to-be bigoted BJP-led government, and a mostly benign  and innocuous UPA coalition  under Dr Manmohan Singh.  This book is an unputdownable treat, which looks at the overwhelming domination of dynasty politics in India, the current scourge of the Congress, and the visceral threat to India’s rise; internal divisions, inflamed with nonchalant ease by religious zealots and upper-caste elites. India’s recent nosedive into a dangerous dysfunctional democracy would have left the scholarly French distressed.