Author: A D Moddie
Publisher: Allied Publishers
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 205
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8177643681
Description
The purpose of this brief essay in a short book is simple; the task is complex. To compress the lesson s of 25 centuries of recorded history of the world’s most plural society in vulnerable state-making, so vulnerable to invasion, influx, and weak institutions, is not easy. It is meant to be an intelligent citizen’s brief guide today to the changing and unchanging patterns, to the continuities and discontinuities in the long making and unmaking of the Indian State from the Mauryas to the Nehrus.
It is not meant to be a heavy researched academic tome, packed with footnoted authorities. In any case, before and after independence, our leaders and our intelligentsia have been unwilling to sufficiently enquire about past historical conditioning factors of the Indian state, as will be seen in the text. Quite a few imagine that the history of the Indian state began in 1947, and pre-British history is lost in a mist, too distant for relevance, with occasional appearances of on Asoka, a Mahmud Ghazni or an Akbar out of the blue.
In a way, this is a critique of past Indian history in the making and unmaking of the Indian state in its totality, on which few have dwelt as a specialization. So the eye to past ages and centuries may help to throw light on our unhistorical conditioning to only contemporary perspectives and impressions, hammered as we are by the daily media and the rush of contemporary history.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Characteristics of the Universal State and Cultures
The Historical Nature of the Indian State: Five Propositions
Twenty Centuries of Decentralized States in Twenty-five Centuries of History
The Pax Britannica and the Subcontinental Holocaust
Thoughts on Nation and Civil Society
The End of History: The Soft, Sick, Sauda State
The Crippled Nehruvian State
India Bound and Unbound
INDEX