Grand Tamasha is Carnegie’s weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced with the Hindustan Times, a leading Indian media house. For five years (and counting), I’ve interviewed authors, journalists, policymakers, and practitioners working on contemporary India to give listeners across the globe a glimpse into life in the world’s most populous country.
For the past two years, in anticipation of the show’s holiday hiatus, I’ve published an annual list of my favorite books featured on the podcast over the previous twelve months.
In keeping with this tradition, here—in no particular order—are Grand Tamasha’s top books of 2024. For those readers who are also listeners, you can download the latest episode of the show, where I talk more about my favorite books of the year, with clips of my conversations with the authors.
Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva
By Janaki Bakhle. Published by Princeton University Press.
In today’s era of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dominance in India, there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help explain the current ideological zeitgeist more than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Savarkar was an intellectual, essayist, poet, ideologue, and anticolonial nationalist leader whose writings helped inspire today’s Hindu nationalist movement. Biographies of Savarkar have been a dime a dozen in recent years, but few can compare with the depth and texture of Bakhle’s definitive work.
While most analysts view Savarkar as a unidimensional Hindutva ideologue, Bakhle reminds us that Savarkar was first and foremost a leading public intellectual in the state of Maharashtra whose foundational work was not in English or Hindi but Marathi, the regional vernacular. Bakhle exhumes a treasure trove of Savarkar’s wide-ranging writings in Marathi, from historical essays to poetry and political speeches. In short order, the often black-and-white portrayals of Savarkar give way to a much more nuanced portrait. Bakhle does not shy away from Savarkar’s controversial views on Hindu supremacy, but she also devotes fresh attention to his less known avatars—as an anti-caste progressive, a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, and a patriotic poet.
What emerges is a complicated picture of a complex man. Savarkar was an atheist who confronted Hindu conservatives while simultaneously emerging as their flag-bearer. He was virulently anti-Muslim but also remarkably progressive on caste. He birthed a political movement but was as interested in literature and aesthetics as he was in politics. Whether you love Savarkar or hate him, Bakhle’s book cannot be ignored.
Accelerating India's Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance
By Karthik Muralidharan. Published by Penguin Viking India.
Over the past two decades, few economists have been as prolific or as plugged into the world of development policymaking as Muralidharan, who is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California San Diego. From his earliest work on teacher and health worker absenteeism, Muralidharan has tackled some of the most important—and vexing—development policy questions plaguing India today. Over the years, he has evaluated the effectiveness of teacher performance pay, school vouchers, biometric smartcards, and laptops in schools. Accelerating India's Development represents the culmination of a career’s worth of work—quite a statement given Muralidharan has not yet reached the age of fifty.
Over 600 pages of text and 200 pages of notes, Muralidharan takes readers on an exhaustive deep dive into India’s governance challenges, especially in delivering essential public services. The book draws on a wealth of research and practical insights to offer actionable, evidence-based strategies for reforms. Muralidharan has an encyclopedic knowledge of development policy in India, and his book is a testament to his research as well as his attempts to nudge the Indian state to behave more efficiently and effectively. The book not only covers standard topics in development policy—such as health, education, and social protection—but also delves into areas that are typically the province of political scientists, such as the police and the judiciary.
The book is destined to be a go-to reference on India and development policy more broadly for years to come. A book like this takes ambition and a dollop of audacity. Muralidharan has both—and the research chops to back it up.
The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy (published in the United States and the UK as The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy)
By Rahul Bhatia. Published by Context (South Asia); Little, Brown (UK); and PublicAffairs (United States).
Readers may recognize Bhatia’s bylines from venerable publications such as The New Yorker, the Guardian, and Caravan. He has written celebrated profiles of television personality Arnab Goswami, controversial cricket chief N. Srinivasan, and more. And his reporting has taken on subjects from the enigmatic business empire of yoga guru Baba Ramdev to the coronavirus pandemic. His new book, which features on The New York Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2024, is based on six years of research and reportage from across India, where he set out on a quest to understand the ideological moorings of what we have come to call “The New India.”
The title of Bhatia’s book is a double entendre. The book is about the Indian government’s efforts to provide every resident with a unique biometrically authenticated identification number (known as Aadhaar) but also about the country’s quest to establish its own identity in the twenty-first century amid globalization, domestic social churn, and economic liberalization. The result is an eclectic book that veers from the riot-torn settlements of eastern Delhi to the sterile government offices of India’s apex bureaucrats. Although the precise linkage between Aadhaar and today’s ascendant Hindu nationalist movement is contested, Bhatia’s book nevertheless paints a disturbing portrait of majoritarian democracy unleashed.
Bhatia’s skills as a writer shine through in his portraits of Nisar, a Muslim resident of Delhi seeking justice for gruesome communal violence he witnessed in 2020; life in a shakha (the local organizational hub of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological guide of the BJP), in which Bhatia spent time as an observer; and the machinations of L.K. Advani, the BJP hardliner who first imagined an all-India identification number. The vivid reportage in Bhatia’s book illuminates the subterranean battles taking place that will ultimately shape India’s democratic future.
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