Examining India

Edward Luce combines affection and criticism in his book about the many complexities of India.

When a foreign correspondent spends five years in a country and then writes a book about it, there's bound to be a measure of scepticism "" murmurs, perhaps, about why an outsider with little emotional stake in the place should hold forth on its problems and the possible remedies.

But Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India isn't that sort of book. It doesn't make overreaching judgements; it's content to observe and chronicle, which is often the best anyone can do with a country this vast and complex.

One reason why it's so readable is that Luce is respectful of the complexities, and of Amartya Sen's observation that "anything one might say about India, the opposite can also be shown to be true".

Luce himself is quick to stress that India isn't a mere pitstop in his itinerant career. He considers it a second home, and besides he's related to it by marriage; his wife Priya, a development economist, is half Bengali and half Gujarati.

They first met as students in Oxford and were married in Delhi in 1994 "" years before he came here in a professional capacity, as the bureau chief of the Financial Times's South Asia edition.

In Spite of the Gods aims at providing "an unsentimental evaluation of contemporary India against the backdrop of its widely expected ascent to great-power status in the 21st century".

Without ever striking a patronising note, Luce discusses the many contradictions in India's society; the lopsided growth of the economy; the attitude towards corruption; the legacies of leaders like Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar; the often-peculiar nature of Indian modernity in the new century; and the country's relations with China and the US, which he describes as a triangular dance that will be crucial to the world's future.

There are anecdotes involving politicians such as Amar Singh. He meets activists who have been battling corruption for years, records their near-surreal stories "" being taken to the same dam by different routes, for instance (because the corrupt authorities had recorded one construction as four).

The result is a welcome perspective on modern India by someone who cares about the country but can also look at it from a standpoint denied to those of us who have been on the inside for years, each with our own prejudices and crosses.

The book's title (partly directed at those who continue to think of India in principally spiritual "" and exotic "" terms) is inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru's thesis that the country's greatest strengths are not exclusively located in its religious traditions.

Luce believes India's heterogeneity is central to its success as a democracy: "A long tradition of pluralism has given India hundreds of years of practice at managing social conflicts without automatic resort to violence." This, he says, is why India's increasing power in the coming decades is in the world's larger interests.

"Having dealt with diversity for centuries, it has a lot of experience in managing a multi-ethnic society," he says. "One of its great strengths is that "" unlike China, say "" it has never been an absolutist country. It has a lot to teach the world."

Among the things that worry him are the callousness of the metropolitan elite towards less privileged Indians, and the strange need for affirmation from other countries "" mixed up, of course, with proclamations of India's moral superiority to the rest of the world.

"This attitude isn't peculiar to India," he says, citing the British ambivalence towards the French; the surface condescension that conceals a layer of envy. "But the simultaneous existence of superiority and inferiority complexes often acquires worrying proportions."

"India isn't on an autopilot to greatness," Luce writes at one point, "but it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane." What is his worst-case scenario for the country (not considering something as disastrous as nuclear conflict)?

"The further widening of inequality," he replies, "as the result of the government's inability to get infrastructure programmes going and to plug rural India into the economy. That would lead to greater migration to the cities, the alienation of the more efficient states (like Kerala) from the Centre and "" eventually "" genuine political tensions about the nature of Indian federalism."

Naturally, he hopes none of those scenarios will come to pass. Luce is working for the FT in Washington, DC now, but he expects to live in India again sometime in the future; the country has clearly got under his skin.

At his book launch he told the story of how the staff at a hotel in Delhi began calling him "Mr Basu" (his wife's name) once they learnt he was married to an Indian. "India appropriates you very quickly," he laughs; he's clearly enjoyed being appropriated.