At the heart of her book are the sections on the two men seen as central to the story of modern India: Mahatma Gandhi, the most prominent leader of the nationalist movement and known as the father of the nation, and his protege, Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to become India's first prime minister. Misra is unfairly harsh on Gandhi, seeing him as idiosyncratic, traditionalist and with a gift for combining political shrewdness with a sense of self-promotion and opportunism.
She has unmixed admiration for Nehru, who she sees as the opposite of Gandhi in many ways: "He differed from Gandhi in the most important question of the age: modernity. While Gandhi romanticized the Indian past, both real and imagined, Nehru was in love with the future. Gandhi decried the Raj as the harbinger of modernity, while for Nehru it was the detested heart of the ancient regime. Nehru was a technophile, a religious agnostic, cosmopolitan in his tastes and an instinctive internationalist; the Mahatma was the opposite."
The template of pluralism that is the key to India's enduring democracy, Misra argues, was conceptualized and laid out by Nehru. And she sees that - and the foresight and vision that implies - as his biggest contribution. "Nehru's goal was to make a virtue of India's variety by creating the world's first self-consciously multicultural modern nation state."
Misra is weak on two aspects of India's cultural life that have glued together for decades people from utterly different social classes and with different cultures, mother tongues and cuisines: mainstream Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, and cricket. Bollywood is the world's largest film industry and its popularity and reach are unrivalled by anything else in India bar cricket. Cricket is the only team game at which India is any good and it infuses as much of a sense of national identity and pride in the urban middle-class professional as the farmer living beneath the poverty line.
These are the two things that the tiny metropolitan elite - the biggest beneficiary of India's economic boom - and the 70 percent of the population that lives in grinding poverty in the country's rural hinterland have in common - they comprise their only shared language. The movies and cricket are strong, critical threads that make India the patchwork quilt that it is.
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