Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion by Maria Misra
There can be few more discussed countries in the world today than India. In recent years it has shed its popular image as a poor, tradition-bound backwater to stand poised on the threshold of super-power status, rivalled only by China as the greatest winner in the post-Cold War world order. In Vishnu's Crowded Temple Maria Misra has written the essential history to allow us to understand the fascinating historical trajectory of this emerging third-world super-state. The book dramatizes the dynamic counterpoint between the resilient Indian people and a succession of ambitious, if flawed visions of the nation. This is an extraordinary story and Misra tells it charismatically with wit and style. Vishnu's Crowded Temple is the history of a wholly contemporary state, an India shaped both by western and eastern ideas, but the slave of neither - the harbinger of a resolutely post-modern democracy, at once wholly new and yet steeped in its past.