Mr Tharoor's identity crises

Book review of The Battle of Belonging

What do you expect of a book “that unambiguously establishes what true Indianness is and what it means to be a patriotic and nationalistic Indian in the 21st century”? Such assertions on a book jacket are ludicrous even if the author is a distinguished man of letters. Our vast and diverse population cannot be constrained by a single vision; the assertion glosses over the reality of competing loyalties, identities, and nationalisms.

The Battle of Belonging could have been an outstanding work of scholarship if the author had stuck to exploring how “the very concepts of nationalism and the nation-state (that) are