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The Rise of Modern India
Doubleday
January 2007
On Sale: January 4, 2007
400 pages
ISBN: 0385514743
EAN: 9780385514743
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is
poised to become the world’s third largest economy within a
generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in
population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than
the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods,
Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years,
makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power.
Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book is
sure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive
introduction to modern India.
In Spite of the
Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The
booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce
points out, employs no more than one million of India’s 1.1
billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal
enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the
country lives in extreme deprivation in India’s 600,000
villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world’s
largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely
successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with
horrifying corruption.
Luce shows that India is an
economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense
than China is. There is nothing in India like the
manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential
labor force. An inept system of public education leaves
most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other
extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many
engineering students a year as the United States.
Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a
globalized economy, American. leaders have been
encouraging India’s rise, even welcoming it into the
nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China’s influence in
Asia.
Above all, In Spite of the Gods is an
enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries
to balance the stubborn traditions of the past with an
unevenly modernizing present. Deeply informed by scholarship
and history, leavened by humor and rich in anecdote, it
shows that India has huge opportunities as well as
tremendous challenges that make the future “hers to lose.”
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