Book Review: Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline

chillibreeze writer — Amrita De Aiyer

Title of the book: The Indian Renaissance
Subtitle of the book: India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline
Name of the author: Sanjeev Sanyal

A middle class is emerging that will soon demand major institutional and political change. India’s rise is not predestined but, for the first time in a millennium, it looks like it has the courage to exploit the window of opportunity.

It is this concept that sets the tone for the rest of Sanjeev Sanyal’s indi opus – “The Indian Renaissance, India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline”. The author, in his chronicles of the Indian economic civilization, is not only extremely confidant about the future but also very particular regarding the reasons for its ‘Thousand Years of Decline’.

The first chapter is dedicated to an anthology of the “golden age”, prior to the 11th century, when India was a country that encouraged innovation and change. Consequently, India came to exercise influence, both economically and culturally, in the entire known world, especially in South East Asia.

However, its days of glory steadily began to recede with its share of the global GDP going down from 33 per cent in 1 AD to 29 per cent in 11 AD and finally to 16 per cent in 19 AD. It is with this bit of information that the author establishes his belief that India’s thousand years of fossilization set stage well before the Muslim invasions or the British colonial period as is commonly accepted albeit the fact that the “industrial revolution and colonial occupation only sped up the process”.

Then what was it that caused a decline in the thriving Indian civilization? “The main factor that seems to have let down Indians, whether Hindu or Muslim, appears to have been growing technological naiveté after the eleventh century,” says Sanyal. A tragedy considering that India had contributed some of the best discoveries and inventions prior to the 11th century – yoga, algebra, the concept of zero, chess, plastic surgery, metallurgy, Hinduism and Buddhism.

He goes on to state with conviction that “A change in cultural attitudes by the 11th century created a fossilized society obsessed with regulating all aspects of life according to fixed rules. Not surprisingly, this discouraged the spirit of innovation and led to a long and painful decline. India fell behind not just as an economy but as a civilization.” To this treatise we can all agree that India is yet to come out of its shell entirely especially if we consider the record breaking rounds of social ignominies taking place in our country. And we are just into two months of the current year.

Coming closer to the present, Sanyal opines that Nehruvian policies did nothing to unleash India’s potential after 1947. Progressive reforms initiated in the 19th century by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and followed up by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Dadabhai Naoroji, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and many more luminaries got lost in the subsequent inward-looking economic regimes of the post-independence era.

It is in this backdrop that Sanyal provides an analysis of what happened after Independence and how, after the turning point in 1991 when from being a closed, conservative market, India started rapidly transforming into an open, consumerist market. By referring to the opening up of the economy, Sanyal includes all aspects of life – mainly being the opening of mind and a changed attitude towards innovation and risk. Hence the days of market monopoly were gone and competition hit the complacent really hard. Lifestyles and aspirations started changing and India, after an economic hiatus spanning a millennium, received an opportunity to re-establish itself as a global power. That this powered by positive demographic shifts and rising literacy levels coincided with the communications revolution – cable TV, mobile phones and the Internet, was the icing on the cake.

The author does not get into too many issues concerning social divisions and political biases that are increasingly interfering in societal and business enterprises in India today. A few examples are the growing heavy-handedness of rightwing hardliners in pluralistic India and the Tata Nano case in Singur (West Bengal). In fact Sanyal is quite upbeat about the trends and predicts a very bright future for the country.

All in all, this book is an amalgam of clear thought and understanding, and the advantage for most of us who read Sanyal’s book is that we will not have much problem in grasping his story since we are Indians who have experienced the two sides of Watershed 1991.

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Amrita writes for chillibreeze.

Book Review: Indian Renaissance: India's Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline

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