On the morning of 15 August 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru, heir to Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha and the European Enlightenment, raised the Indian Tricolour on the ramparts of the Red Fort, the seventeenth-century palace of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, India was free to make experiments with freedom. In the seven decades since Independence, the country gradually changed from Nehru’s democratic socialism to Narendra Modi’s democratic entrepreneurial digital India, dealing with its internal contradictions by playing the game of democracy and in the process becoming the sixth-largest global economy. And with Chandrayaan exploring the Moon, a space nation was born. India overlooks the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, abridging Southeast Asia with the Middle East. With its immense brainpower and young demographics, India is geopolitically an indispensable nation. Indians play the game of democracy any which way they can: through massive elections; parliamentary debates and no-confidence motions; coalition forming and horse-trading; hartals, bandhs, dharnas, fast-unto-death; and finally, when nothing works, they knock at the doors of the Supreme Court. India in a New Key attempts to offer an insight into questions like: -How has India been experimenting with freedom to solve its socio-economic problems? -Can Modi—like Nehru—create a unified Indian consciousness? AUTHOR OF THE BOOK Narain D. Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University—a 200-year institution nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont. His field of academic and professional expertise includes literature, history, journalism, geopolitics, diplomacy, social media, ethics, and most of all, the First Amendment. He is the author of several books including The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society; Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle?; A Self-Renewing Society; and, The Hour of Television. For more than a decade, he wrote a weekly column for The Statesman about American politics, culture and technology. He has also written for The Times of India, Business Standard, Mint, The Diplomatist and LA Reveu De L’Inde. He was the editor and publisher of a monthly magazine, People’s Times (Ahmedabad, India). Yoga, meditation and golf keep him going, and going.
At the start of the nineteenth century, there was a Mughal emperor on the throne in Delhi, but the Mughal empire, in decline for almost a century, was practically gone. A new power had emerged—the British East India Company, which captured the Mughal capital in September 1803, becoming its de facto ruler. Swapna Liddle’s book is an unprecedented study of the ‘hybrid halfcentury’ that followed—when the two regimes overlapped and Delhi was at the cusp of modernity, changing in profound ways. With a ground-level view of the workings of early British rule in India, The Broken Script describes in rich detail the complex tussle between the last two Mughal emperors and the East India Company, one wielding considerable symbolic authority, and the other a fast-growing military and political power.It is, above all, the story of the people of Delhi in this period, some already well known, such as the poet Ghalib, and others, like the mathematician Ram Chander, who are largely forgotten: the cultural and intellectual elite, business magnates, the old landed nobility and the exotic new ruling class—the British. Through them, it looks at the economic, social and cultural climate that evolved over six decades. It examines the great flowering of poetry in Urdu, even as attempts to use the language for scientific education faltered;the fascinating history of the Delhi College, and how it represented a radically new model for higher education in India; the rise of modern journalism in Urdu, and various printing presses and publications, exemplified by papers.
