LONDON: It’s in the nature of nations to be addicted to their own histories. Older, pre-national communities, one imagines, occupied themselves with mythology. The secular nation, agog, rehearses its history, the very reasons and outcomes of its existence, to itself. What’s common to both activities is the endless familiarity of the subject-matter to the audience. It’s safe to assume that very few people in a group of devotees listening to, say, the Indian epic Ramayana being read out would not have heard it before. It’s equally prudent to assume that almost all the Indian readers of Ramachandra Guha’s capacious history of democratic India — India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy — would be familiar with a great deal of the story. What is it, then, that gives myths and national histories their appeal?

In mythic retelling, it is repetition itself, accompanied by improvisatory flourishes, that transfixes the audience by returning it to known terrain. Historical narrative, too, depends on familiarity enlivened by interpretative freshness and the surprise of new archival research; but there’s also, at times, something else. Guha reminds us, more than once, that it’s the historian’s job to tell us what happened, and not spend too much time speculating on what might have. Yet it is precisely the possibility of what might have happened but didn’t that gives an immediate but inexhaustible magic to some of the 20th century’s most triumphal historical narratives. Both the American film-maker embarking on the new second world war movie and the Englishwoman wearing a poppy are thinking, yet again, of events that took place many years ago, but also, in some hidden but urgent way, of the world that might have come into existence had the other side won.

Similarly, a “What if?” animates Guha’s reconstruction of the past 60 years of Indian history. Since 1947, the possibility of disaster has taken the form of certain questions and crises: “What if India were to disintegrate; or to become a totalitarian society; or a military dictatorship; or a Hindu state?” All these are scenarios that appeared plausible, at one time or another, to both the Indian and foreign observer. Guha tells us what happened elegantly, sometimes doggedly: but it’s by constantly implying what might have, while disavowing it with the professional historian’s gesture, that he brings his copious material to life. Guha’s book reminds us of what some other recent studies of India have been getting at, but without this civilised single-mindedness: that it’s not just the story of independence that’s worthy of being counted as one of the great triumphal stories of 20th-century world history; that the survival and perhaps the flourishing of free India counts legitimately as another. Once this fact is acknowledged, its political and cultural consequences, I’m sure Guha will agree, need to be viewed with suspicion.

Guha begins at the beginning, sketching the indeterminate setting for the project, with Nehru’s poetic ruminations on India’s “tryst with destiny” on the stroke of midnight. (Has any modern politician’s speech, except Churchill’s wartime orations, had as much currency?) Quickly, the demons of which the Indian psyche has still not exorcised itself appear: the irony of a secular Muslim gentleman, the pork-eating spoilsport Jinnah, being responsible for creating Pakistan. Then Partition, the original sin of our creation-myth, for which blame is apportioned to a variety of people - Jinnah, the British, Nehru, Gandhi - but more commonly to the ordinary Muslim citizen. There’s the nightmare of Kashmir, a continual challenge to the moral high ground that India, with its public posture of post-colonial certitude and humanitarian dignity, has tried to occupy since independence. Guha also brings back to us, as he must, the border dispute with China, which led to a small war that India lost, with deep repercussions for the self-esteem of a generation of Indians.

And yet, despite Kashmir, and various forms of governmental wrongdoing and blunders, the Indian middle class and intelligentsia, unlike their counterparts in Japan, England or Pakistan, have never really known what it means to inhabit a morally uneasy position. There’s a mysterious surplus to being Indian, a feel-good element comparable only to the sense of self that Americans possessed until Vietnam. Visitors wonder at how happy the poor are in India, putting it down to ancient reserves of spirituality; equally wondrous is how impervious the Indian secular middle class is, despite all sorts of setbacks, to the sense of guilt, of being morally compromised. This has less to do with spirituality than with the unassailable constitutional promise of what it means to be an Indian. The absence of moral ambiguity means that there sometimes seems to be very little critical thinking in India, only one kind of debate, a nationalism in various forms, repeated infinitely. With a few exceptions, Indians don’t know how to fashion eloquence out of a sense of being wrong or having wronged, at least not without the unmistakable timbre of self-congratulation.

There are reasons for that tenacious feel-good experience. Guha delineates them effectively: the establishment of the machinery and the miracle of the elections (there’s an excellently orchestrated chapter on how the first one happened); the creation of provinces along linguistic lines (which should have led to conflict) by forgotten historical figures; the survival of democracy and free speech in spite of poverty, corruption, sectarian strife, Indira Gandhi and, more recently, the waning of power at the centre and the rise of an opportunistic federalism. Every dubious development has a positive outcome; it’s a story of incorrigible resilience and charm. The first two-thirds of the book, where Guha is describing the consolidation of the shaky state, are, notwithstanding the deluge of facts, surprisingly absorbing; by quoting frequently and shrewdly, Guha allows us to eavesdrop on the multiplicity and richness of the conversation — between politicians, writers, civil servants, well-wishers, detractors — within which change took place.

One thing the book lacks, despite its comprehensiveness, is a sense of interiority. It’s hardly alone among recent Indian histories in this regard. Guha’s understanding of the secular basis for Indian democracy is a constitutional one; that is, the “secular” is a product, in India, of ideals, laws and institutions articulated and validated by the constitution. But the “secular” in India is not only a political construct; it is a cultural space. The domain of culture was inhabited and produced by writers and artists and their audience from the early 19th century onwards; it’s a domain that comprises the interior life of Indian secularism.

In this sense, independence and the Nehruvian era that followed are not really the beginning of a history, but the last phase in the story of Indian humanism. From the 1980s onwards, the secular middle class and its culture is completely redefined; the parameters for a new free-market understanding of “Indianness” are put in place. As it happens, the single chapter Guha devotes to culture, or “entertainment”, as he calls it, is the weakest one in the book, with Wikipedia-like accounts of cultural achievements; it attempts to place culture in the constitutional idea of secularism — as providing instances of pluralism and fellow-feeling — but doesn’t locate the constitutional in the interior life that culture represents.

The epilogue, “Why India Survives” (echoing RK Narayan’s unflappable assurance to Naipaul in the 60s: “India will go on”), is a strangely moving coda, and clarifies the country’s peculiar appeal. At one point, Guha mentions he’s “speaking as a historian rather than as citizen”; but allowing the historian to be in commerce with citizenship is what provides the book with impetus, and gives it its most palpable strength. Guha, as a citizen, has been “exasperated” by India, but, in the light of historical evidence, has been won over by it. This mixture of distance and surrender is fairly emblematic of why many middle-class Indians continue to invest themselves, emotionally, in the country; it’s quite distinct from patriotism. To suggest the ambiguity of his own relationship with the country of his birth, and also his utter investment in it, Guha has often in the past used some oddball Englishman of distinction who’s lived in India or thought about it as a metaphor: Verrier Elwin, EP Thompson. In his epilogue, Guha invokes the biologist JBS Haldane, who, moved by the “wonderful experiment” India had embarked on, decided to become an “Indian citizen”. Guha’s book reminds us that the citizenly pride that permeates it is not incompatible with judgment, hindsight, intelligence and distance; that citizenship is not a natural thing, but that it is, in some cases, inevitable.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service