Book: India: A PortraitAuthor: Patrick FrenchAllen Lane/Penguin436 pagesRs699

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Call it the Megasthenes and Alberuni syndrome. Megasthenes was the ambassador of Seleucus Nikator at the court of Chandragupta Maurya in the 4th century BCE; Alberuni was a visiting polymath in the court of Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century AD. Both were tempted to write about the India they saw, about what they thought of the country and its people.

Unlike the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India such as Fa-Hien and Xuangjang or the French traveller Francois Bernier in 17th century Mughal India, Megasthenes and Alberuni wrote first person accounts informed by scholarship. Patrick French follows them in his own way, avoiding both journalistic jousts of the Thomas Friedman or Edward Luce kind, as also scholarly incursions like that of Paul Brass or Judith Brown.

French’s earlier book, Liberty Or Death, written in 1997, was on the freedom movement and Partition. This one combines conventional historical narrative with the trained eye and anecdotal tale-telling of a traveller.

This should leave his book hanging in mid-air, with the scholar dissatisfied with the popular icing and the general reader intimidated by the data-laden part of the story. But French takes the risk to make the book accessible to a large number of people. Probably he will succeed because the scholarly detail gives the book a longer shelf-life, though the anecdotes — in the form of interviews with and pen-portraits of individuals from various parts of the country and from different social strata — are likely to pale after the first read.

The popular stuff is also on predictable lines: Venkatesh, a scheduled caste stoneworker; Maoist leader Kobad Ghandy; Mukhtar Ansari, a don-politician from Uttar Pardesh. It is an interesting portrait gallery that French has put together, and he is aware that they do not fully add up to the portrait of India that he is aiming for in the book.

He also covers the murky Aarushi Talwar murder case, and tries to get a handle on India’s infamous corruption by revisiting the Tehelka exposé of dubious defense deals. French is so hungry to cover all the interesting, important things happening that he piles too many topics one on top of another. He would perhaps say that this is exactly what he wants to do.

The reader then has to pick and choose what interests him. The best sections are chapter 5 (‘The Visions of John Maynard Keynes’) and chapter 6 (‘A Dismal Prospect’), where he looks at India’s economic transition from the socialist era to the market one. Unlike most journalists from the West, he does not make the sweeping generalisation about the dark days of socialism in India and the new dawn of economic liberalisation. The scholar in him holds him back, as it were, and his concern is to get the full picture as clearly as possible.

In the last chapter, ‘Only In India’, there is a small paragraph where French takes the liberty of making a full judgment on attitudes towards Indian history and Hinduism. Citing Wendy Doniger’s views on the water tank in Mohenjo-Daro, he writes, “They are an example of a scholarly tendency to write about India, and particularly about Hinduism, in a way that would not be tried when writing about Christianity or Islam. Indeed the blanket title of Doniger’s book, The Hindus, is hard to imagine transposed to The Christians or The Muslims.” He avoids the Doniger approach in this book.