India since 1947: The Independent Years

404 Pages·17.575 MB·English

by  Gopa Sabharwal

PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIA SINCE 1947
Gopa Sabharwal obtained a PhD in Sociology from Delhi University
for her research on ethnic groups and ethnicity with respect to the
town of Belgaum in Karnataka. In 1993 she set up the Sociology
department at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi, where
she is currently Reader.
Gopa Sabharwal’s interest in quizzing and contemporary history
has resulted in associations as director, consultant and concept
designer with some prestigious television series. She is deeply
commited towards developing a knowledge bank on India. She is
the author of The Indian Millennium AbD 1000-2001 (Penguin) and
Ethnicity and Class: Social Divisions in an Indian City (OUP). Her
next book on India in 1947 is forthcoming from Penguin. She has
also co-authored several quiz books for Penguin.
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India Since 1947
The Independent Years
Gopa Sabharwal
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi 110 017, India
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL,
England
First published by Penguin Books India 2007
Copyright © Gopa Sabharwal 2007
All rights reserved
1OMDeSE Ono A onl et
ISBN-13: 978-0-14310-274-8 ISBN-10: 0-14310-274-5
Typeset in Perpetua by InoSoft Systems, Noida
Printed at Chaman Offset Printers, New Delhi
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For my father,
Pran Sabharwal
Generous with love, life and ideas
In Memoriam
1928—2006
tikess‘ i tA it es
We at
iyi 5 a Age
Author’s Note
Every generation feels the need to understand the society it is part of,
for the key to the present is often in the past. For some of us this quest
takes on greater importance than for others, and thus begins a search
for answers, for links, for building blocks which will explain how things
came to be the way they are. However, a major roadblock in this
enterprise is the lack of information that will help the pursuit.
In my case, this situation pushed me into trying to put together what
I was looking for and the result was a book titled, The Indian Millennium:
AD 1000—2001 (Penguin: 2002). The book covered a thousand-year time-
span and attempted to, using a diverse range of sources, put together
one version of social history. The idea was to at least condense in one
place various aspects of Indian society and culture and the changes they
underwent through the course of time.
The sixtieth anniversary of Indian Independence allowed me to
revisit one part of Indian history, the most recent years, current history
in every sense of the word, and therefore very interesting to me as a
sociologist. I discovered as I looked at the older work afresh, after a gap
of a few years, that reading only the past sixty years, separate from the
rest, gave me a completely different feel now that they were not
weighed down by the preceding 950 years of history. This encouraged
me to rework the information in these years and try and make the
coverage even more comprehensive and interesting.
India Since 1947, The Independent Years is therefore an almost new
book even though it uses the time-line format. The events span a range
of activities and are arranged under various heads ranging from politics
to science and the arts. Independence is in many ways first and foremost
a political independence, and in that sense it is obvious that political
events occupy a large part of the documentation of nation-building. Yet,
there are other aspects of life that are equally significant, socially if not
politically, and these also impact the lives of citizens in crucial ways. A
full attempt has been made to try and expand the range of coverage
to as many diverse activities as possible.
Writing current social history is not. an easy task. There is a paucity
of systematic information on various aspects of contemporary India.
Also, scholarship on India tends to be of two kinds. On the one hand is
the scholarship of ‘public’ intellectuals comprising sweeping generalizations
and grand theories, not necessarily backed by facts. On the other hand
is serious scholarship backed by solid research by scholars who fight shy
of stretching their theories or conclusions to cover the whole country
or large sections of it.
In this scenario, one has to draw upon various sources from the
seriously academic to newspapers and journals to piece together the full
picture. This is what I am attempting to do.