India calling: An intimate portrait of a nation's remaking, by Anand Giridharadas, Times Books ($25, £17.99)


Capturing the monumental changes sweeping India is a feat many attempt but few manage. Some of the most perceptive have been those such as Anand Giridharadas who have returned to the country their parents left behind. They bring an insider-outsider mentality, which provides both insight and perspective. They also have a "before and after" picture, a monochrome snapshot of the stagnant country of their childhood visits to set against the technicolour, endlessly protean power it has become.

In India Calling, Giridharadas has written the best of this now established genre. In a newly self-confident nation, he finds, returnees are no longer lauded. Reading Shobhaa Dé, the Mumbai novelist, he learns that the children of the departed were only heading back because the "party's over" in the west. "But sorry," she says, "nobody wants latecomers to the one happening in India."

Giridharadas agonises over leaving the US, where his parents "slogged, saved and sacrificed" to give him the chance of a fulfilling life. They had abandoned an "exhausting, difficult country" paralysed by Soviet-lite economic policies, but now in turn felt abandoned themselves by the "invisible forces of history that make countries rise and fall". They had left India when leaving still felt necessary. By the middle of the last decade, however, the logic behind moving to the US was unravelling. The world was descending on India.

An American citizen, "proudly so", Giridharadas succumbs to the subcontinent's gravitational force. Indianness, for returnees, is no longer something to deny. So they reinvent themselves, as their parents did, "but in reverse". Some learn Hindi, others yoga. They wear the kurtas and saris they spurned in their youth, reflecting what Giridharadas sees as a "sad reality": that they had waited for their heritage to become cool to others before embracing it themselves.

Barely in his 20s, Giridharadas is taken on by the International Herald Tribune as its first Mumbai-based correspondent in modern times – the creation of the post itself an affirmation of India's new status. He admits facing the question common to all foreign correspondents: how to explain to others a country he had yet to understand? But the IHT is a licence to explore and he uses it brilliantly.

His peregrinations explain why India Calling is such a finely observed portrait of the modern nation. His analysis, for example, of the waning of Anglophilia, which he sees as a colonial stain reflecting cultural insecurity, should be obligatory reading for British policymakers. Millions might be striving to learn English but, in a country re-embracing Indianness, few now want to be English.

Beneath the pseudo-Americanisation taking place in the malls, Giridharadas finds a new class unburdened by post-colonial complexes, confident in the country's ability to steer its own path. Information technology guru Nandan Nilekani, for example, tells him of a broader shift where "people are no longer looking at western symbols of having arrived".

Giridharadas also explains well how this self-confidence has changed business. Mukesh Ambani, described as the most powerful private citizen since Gandhi, epitomises the new attitude. Interviewed for the book, the chairman of Reliance Industries recalls how during his college days, "there was a lot of emulation and my own view was that that itself compounded the inferiority complex. My view was, 'What the hell, ya. We can do what we like'."

Giridharadas deftly turns on its head the conventional view that pre-capitalist India was saintlier, more ascetic than the boisterous, consumerist money circus that has emerged from the 1991 reforms. It was not that Indians were ever unmaterialistic or otherworldly, he argues, but that stoicism and self-denial were simply necessary adaptations in a time of scarcity. Indians had always been, deep down, "born moneymakers", who had suffered socialism imposed at independence by a remote governing class with borrowed European ideas.

The big question India Calling raises is whether "indigenous reassertion" is bringing with it what Giridharadas calls "Indian moral tendencies", tolerant of clientilist politics and crony capitalism. He argues that this "alternative morality", based on concern for immediate family circle and caste, is usurping the universal ideals of independent India's founders. India liberated itself by discarding Nehruvian economics 20 years ago. But what type of power might it become without Nehruvian morality?


Jo Johnson is MP for Orpington and an FT contributing editor. He was south Asia bureau chief from 2005 to 2008