Gandhi

India and Her Futures is a collection of essays by one of India’s most prolific public intellectuals, Gopalkrishna Gandhi. As a former public servant, diplomat and scholar, his contribution to thinking about South Asian and world history is a debt many owe him. Reflecting on a wide canvas, including India’s culture, diversity and the richness of its literary and intellectual history, Gandhi has been a committed loyalist of the essay as a form of expression through decades of writing for news dailies and monthly magazines. These curated essays from his larger oeuvre have allowed him the precision of form to express the urgency and vitality of its varied subjects. Written with unparalleled fluency and clarity of expression, here are meditations on foreign policy and India’s place in the world, burning domestic political and social issues, biographical homages, chronicles on the making and unmaking of India, reflections on Indians who birthed the modern democratic republic, fundamental ideas of India and appraisals of key public institutions of India. Here is a once-in-a-generation writer, a uniquely gifted voice one looks to and will continue to consult to make sense of the India we have come to inhabit and an India to come.

This remarkable memoir, and history of India after Independence, by one of India’s most distinguished public intellectuals, begins with his memories, at the age of three, of the assassination of his paternal grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi. From this poignant opening note, the book expands into numerous encounters with personalities both Indian and foreign, ‘eminent’ as well as little known, and original insights into key events and turning points of modern Indian history, many of which he was an eyewitness to as secretary to presidents R. Venkataraman and K. R. Narayanan, and as governor of West Bengal and Bihar.