The Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline, by Sanjeev Sanyal
"Useful enough. But... Misleading title, dry and unengaging prose"
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One-line review: Useful in its own right, but makes for dry and uninviting prose.
Short review: If a country is indeed seen as rising after a thousand years of decline, and if you put so in the title of your book, it stands to reason you are expected to devote some amount of reasoning and logic to that line. This book does not. Why the decline happened is only fleetingly touched upon, and without much conviction. The book's stronger sections are towards the latter part, especially when talking about the country's broken education system and its archaic and dysfunctional justice system. The book's heart is in the right place, but it needed more meat on its bones, and a more vigorous heart, so to say, to elevate it from the ranks of the me-too to a must-read.
Long review:
India was the most technologically advanced, the richest, the oldest, and certainly the most culturally advanced civilization from the beginning of recorded history till about a thousand years ago. It continued to remain the world's richest nation till the eighteenth century. Why India went into a state of decline a thousand years ago, why it continued to decline, and why it should see a renaissance now, starting with 1991, is a conundrum, even an impossibility some would argue. Of course there have been explanations. Those of a more socialist leaning argue against anything worthwhile in Indian civilization to begin with, marking it as a civilization bound to stagnate (as per D.D. Kosambi, eminent historian), and that anything worthwhile in India can be found to have originated only in the last thousand years - the ideological strains in that symphony are loud and clear. On the other hand, those who have made a more honest and detailed study of India and its civilization point out to its immense contributions in almost every sphere of life, including science, culture, language, mathematics, astronomy, urban planning, and more (see Michel Danino's "India's Culture and India's Future" for instance). Sanyal points out that the Indus Valley Civilization (more correctly the Indus Valley Saraswati Civilization, but not pertinent to the discussion in the book) was the largest, earliest, and most advanced example of urban town planning the world has known, with a level of standardization that would take five thousand years to better. Indians were adept at trading, and the world's oldest tidal dock can be found at Lothal (my post). Indians were trading with Sumerians and "India accounted for 33 per cent of the world economy in 1 A.D. However, "(B)etween AD 1000 and 1820, India's share of world GDP fell from 29 per cent to 16 per cent." It would fall to 4% by 1947, and sink to 3% by 1991. So, what caused the decline? That is, surprisingly, a tough nut to crack. A thousand years later we still do not have answers. Conjectures, yes. Ideologically framed theories, yes. But nothing that quite convincingly explains why. So, a book that has the words "India's Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline" should provide enough food for thought, or so I thought.
The author puts forth a conjecture or two, and the main thrust of that conjecture is that Indians turned inwards. They stopped being open to new ideas. Their "spirit of entrepreneurship" was eroded. "There are several independent signs of intellectual fossilization around the eleventh century" as well as "growing technological naivete after the eleventh century." Plausible, and true to an undeniable extent. It is tempting to rush forth to arguments that sound plausible enough to be acceptable and backed by just enough fact to pass initial muster. The most popular myth is that "the Muslim conquest of India was the result of a young and vigorous religion defeating an old pacifist civilization." This, the author points out, "is hardly borne out by the sequence of events." Furthermore, "(A)s Professor Pervez Amirali Hoodhboy puts it: 'One gets the impression that [Muslim] history's clock broke down somewhere during the fourteenth century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague.'" To sum, "by the time Muslim was rule was firmly established in India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic civilization itself was past its peak." Therefore, the author argues that Islamic conquest cannot be blamed for India's decline. This story of civilizational decline is not unique to India. The Roman empire crumbled after the fifth century, unable to withstand the onslaught of an increasingly powerful Christian Church whose rise saw the library of Alexandria burned down by "Christian zealots in the late fourth century", the Greek philosopher Hypatia "killed by a Christian mob in Alexandria", and "Plato's academy shut down under the orders of Emperor Justinian in AD 526." Nearer home, China had naval technology "generations ahead of the Europe" in the early 1400s. Yet a cultural attitude saw this knowledge stagnate and innovation stifled. So, India was not alone in this civilizational decline.
The author argues that "it was civilizational decline that led to foreign domination rather than the other way around." And here is where the biggest problem lies with the book. For two primary reasons. Firstly, while the Indian civilization may well have been at its peak and suffering from the not unexpected signs of complacency by the time the last millennium began, there is nothing in the decades or centuries preceding it to point to an imminent decline. There is near unanimity on the tenth and eleventh centuries as the beginnings of India's decline - not a gradual decay into obscurantism that accelerated in the second millennium. The second is the contradiction in the book itself - if civilizational decline was well and truly underway by 1000 CE or thereabouts, it would have been unusual to find any exceptional centers of learning in the subcontinent. However that was not the case. Far from it. You had the university at Takshila, established in the sixth century BC, destroyed by the "White Huns (Epththalites) around 460 AD." This was followed by the total destruction of the world's largest university at Nalanda in 1193 CE by Bakhtiyar Khilji, and finally the complete destruction of Ujjaini - "a major center for mathematics, literature, philosophy and astronomy" - in 1235 by Sultan Iltumish. A civilization in decay and stagnation cannot be expected to either have had the greatest centers of learning in the medieval world, nor would it be expected to stave off the military advances of Islamic invaders for several centuries, that it did, and which the author points to in his book. This resistance, lasting several centuries, against Islamic conquest, is unparalleled in human history, and defies logic to credit a decaying, declining civilization with being capable of mounting. The book's argument is undermined by its own prose.
What is a plausible explanation is that the steady, unremitting, and murderous onslaught of foreign invaders led to Indian civilization retreating into a survival mode, closing itself to innovations, questions, invigoration, closing itself to adaptation in order to survive. In other words, foreign domination led to a rapid shrinking of the space for openness and this defined, rather than caused, the thousand years of decline. To argue otherwise is somewhat of a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This story of the thousand-year decline takes up one chapter, less than thirty pages in the book. That is perhaps the single biggest weakness and flaw of this book - a distinct imbalance between the premise of the title and the contents of the book, weakened further by a fairly weak line of argumentation in itself.
The rest of the book takes the reader through the emergence of the Indian middle-class, the roots of which can be seen as early as the eighteenth century. The post Independence period saw the full brutality of the "Nehru-Mahalonobis rate of growth" visit Indians, which left economic growth mired at less than four percent and hundreds of millions in abject poverty. While socialism may have been the fashion of the age when Pandit Nehru ruled India, "but the blind following fashion is no excuse for poor judgment." Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate, had as early as in 1956 had pointed out the fundamental flaw and danger in having an able mathematician like Mahalonobis "apply themselves to economic planning." Mahalonobis was also shown to be a plagiarizer by none other than the maverick of Indian politics, then a young, 19 year old Subramanian Swamy!
Much of the book is basically ground covered several times before by several other books, most notably by Gurcharan Das' "India Unbound". There has been no shortage of books on the topic of India's rise, and each has tried to add something to this narrative, some successfully so, some less so (Edward Luce's "In Spite of the Gods" being a particularly nasty example, while Anand Giridharadas' "India Calling" being a paint-by-numbers exercise in enervating mediocrity). This book's shining moments can be found when discussing India's educational and legal systems, both of which have failed the Indian citizen. What is however lacking throughout the book is both the engaging nature that someone like Mark Tully brings through his anecdotes and first-person accounts, as well as the vice-like grasp over facts that Arun Shourie can hold the reader with. If you want to be educated on the utter banality of horror that the Indian bureaucracy is, you need do no more than read Arun Shourie's "Governance". The morbidly fascinating morass of the Indian judiciary is brought to the fore in "Courts and Their Judgments". So, even though the book is arranged somewhat thematically, the discussion fails to cohere, flitting from one topic to the other, and is marked by a lack of an underlying narrative fabric to bring these together into a story. It remains a set of longish essays put together into a book.
On a slightly mischievous note, I must conclude by observing that the author, a Bengali, cannot help but point the decline of the once glorious city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) as symbolic of the decline of an entire civilization!
Publisher: Viking Penguin India
Year: 2008
ISBN-13: 9780670082629
ISBN-10: 0670082627
© 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अà¤िनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.
