The Failed Mahabharata: Making of the Indian State-History and Present Avatar

The Failed Mahabharata: Making of the Indian State-History and Present Avatar

Product ID: 16352

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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