India: The Rebel Continent

This book is a reinterpretation of the dynamics of India from ancient times to the present, with the intention of enabling a better understanding of India in the twenty-first century, beyond the worn-out clich?s of India’s poverty and inability to take-off at the economic level, despite her being ‘the largest democracy in the world’. By penetrating into the depths of India’s history, the author presents India’s multiple traditions with attention to the religious ways open to the socially excluded, practised by the Bhakti poets and musicians from at least the thirteenth century AD. While analyzing the complexity and burden of the caste system, that appears as an age-old social law of the jungle, the author finds that it also incited a long-standing tradition of social rebellion and counter-positioning to balance the dominant currents and norms. The author also traces the social glaciation of India under British occupation with the emergence of the maharajas and collaboration of sections of India’s elites in the colonization process. He then touches on the political awakening of Indians with the Independence Movement and the tragedy of Partition. The book terminates with an optimistic evocation of a possible reconfiguration of the entire Indian continent as apluralistic Confederation in the future.