The Great Indian Manthan

India is rapidly becoming the world’s largest flailing democracy. India’s institutional framework has been systematically undermined, from within and without. In the tenth volume of the Rethinking India series, some of India’s most eminent persons write of how we can think of re-engineering India’s hardware (redressing structural flaws in India’s existing institutions, creating new institutions equipped to address fresh challenges and re-engaging all of India’s systems), as well as ensuring progressive forces radically re-invent their political strategies and operational methodologies to socialize Indians to constitutional values.

India is rapidly becoming the world's largest flailing democracy. India's institutional framework has been systematically undermined, from within and without. In the tenth volume of the Rethinking India series, some of India's most eminent persons write of how we can think of re-engineering India's hardware (redressing structural flaws in India's existing institutions, creating new institutions equipped to address fresh challenges and re-engaging all of India's systems), as well as ensuring progressive forces radically re-invent their political strategies and operational methodologies to socialize Indians to constitutional values.

Rising China and emerging India are becoming major maritime powers. As they build large navies to secure their growing interests, both nations are roiling the waters of the Indo-Pacific—the vast littoral stretching from Africa to Australasia. Invoking a tale from Hindu mythology— Samudra Manthan or "to churn the ocean"—C. Raja Mohan tells the story of a Sino-Indian rivalry spilling over from the Great Himalayas into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He examines the prospects of mitigating the tensions and constructing a stable Indo-Pacific order. America, the dominant power in the area, is being drawn into the unfolding Sino-Indian competition. Despite the huge differences in the current naval capabilities of China, India, and the United States, Mohan argues that the three countries are locked in a triangular struggle destined to mold the future Indo-Pacific.

For the past 25 years, Tamal Bandyopadhyay has been a keen student of Indian banking. A lifelong reporter and journalist, he is an award-winning national business columnist and a bestselling author. He is widely recognised for ‘Banker’s Trust’, a weekly column whose unerring ability to anticipate and dissect major policy decisions in India’s banking and finance has earned him a large print and digital audience around the world. The column won Tamal the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (commentary and interpretative writing) for 2017. Banker’s Trust now appears in Business Standard, where he is a Consulting Editor. Previously, Tamal has had stints with three other national business dailies in India, and was a founding member of Mint newspaper and Livemint.com. He is also a Senior Adviser to Jana Small Finance Bank Ltd. Between 2014 and 2018, as an adviser on strategy for Bandhan Bank Ltd, he had a ringside view of the first-ever transformation of a microfinance institution in India into a universal bank. Author of five other books, Tamal is widely recognised as a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy and Making of New India: Transformation Under Modi Government. In 2019, LinkedIn named him as one of the ‘most influential voices in India’.

This is the definitive account of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the epic 4,000-kilometre nationwide march from September 2022 to January 2023 under the stewardship of Rahul Gandhi, Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) and former President of the Indian National Congress. This book is a comprehensive map of the why, what and how of this Herculean undertaking. Going beyond the symbolic, it strives to capture the aspirations and reflections of the yatris and organizers, and the eminent Indians who joined the Yatra from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. In doing so, it also attempts to understand and embrace India's vast diversities. This book highlights the many layers of meaning underpinning the Yatra. 'Bharat Jodo' meant different things to different people, and therefore had multiple social, economic, political and cultural meanings-which a galaxy of India's foremost academics, activists, politicians and citizens from all walks of life speak to. But what connects these diverse meanings is that the Yatra was primarily a clarion call to all patriots to reclaim our collective humanity, and hence India's soul.

Following an experimental railway track at Chintadripet, in 1835, the battle for India's first railroad was fought bitterly between John Chapman's Great Indian Peninsular Railway and Rowland MacDonald Stephenson's East India Railway Company, which was merged with Dwarkanauth Tagore's Great Western of Bengal Railway. Even at the height of the Mutiny of 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar promised Indian owned railway tracks for native merchants if Badshahi rule was restored in Delhi. From Jules Verne to Rudyard Kipling to Mark Twain to Rabindranath Tagore to Nirad C. Chaudhuri to R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond-the aura of Indian trains and railway stations have enchanted many writers and poets. With iconic cinematography from The Apu Trilogy, Aradhana, Sonar Kella, Sholay, Gandhi, Dil Se, Parineeta, Barfi, Gangs of Wasseypur, and numerous others, Indian cinema has paved the way for mythical railroads in the national psyche. The Great Indian Railways takes us on a historic adventure through many junctions of India's hidden railway legends, for the first time in a book replete with anecdotes from imperial politics, European and Indian accounts, the battlefronts of the Indian nationalist movement, Indian cinema, songs, advertisements, and much more, in an ever-expanding cultural biography of the Great Indian Railways. Dubbed as 'one of a kind' this awe-inspiring saga is 'compulsive reading.' 'In this fascinating cultural history, Arup K Chatterjee charts the extraordinary journey of the Indian Railways, from the laying of the very first sleeper to the first post-Independence bogey. It evokes our collective accumulation of those innumerable memories of platform chai and rail-gaadi stories, bringing alive through myriad voices and tales the biography of one of India's defining public institutions.' – Shashi Tharoor, Author, M.P., Lok Sabha 'The Great Indian Railways is a fascinating and well-researched cultural biography of the Indian Railways-those intricate arteries of the soul of India, as have been experienced, written, filmed, and dreamed. We cannot all travel by rail to know India, as Gandhiji did, but we can and should read this book!' – Tabish Khair, Author, Professor

In this award-winning novel, Tharoor has masterfully recast the two-thousand-year-old epic, The Mahabharata, with fictional but highly recognizable events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics. Nothing is sacred in this deliciously irreverent, witty, and deeply intelligent retelling of modern Indian history and the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata. Alternately outrageous and instructive, hilarious and moving, it is a dazzling tapestry of prose and verse that satirically, but also poignantly, chronicles the struggle for Indian freedom and independence.