Historical discourse in the Indian public sphere these days is mostly a choice between rigorous historiography but weak politics and political hubris but pedestrian historiography. The two need not necessarily reconcile as far as academia is concerned. But the growing schism does not help us in making sense of the India that we live in today, especially for working journalists rather than professional historians.
It is here that a new cohort of historians – it is more than a coincidence that their academic pursuits are multidisciplinary – are being at their vanguardist best in producing historical work which deals with India of more recent vintage and therefore necessitates political engagement with the present. I chose Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East as my 2024 book for this page last year and am glad to pick Srinath Raghavan’s Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India as my book of the year for 2025.
Raghavan’s work, which was published in the 50th year of the Emergency, is more than what its name suggests: just a historical sketch of Indira Gandhi and her period in politics. What he has pulled off by using his larger intellectual world view, hitherto unused historical archives and a remarkable ability to weave a narrative across what was the most dramatic and disruptive phase in independent India’s eight-decade long history is a political economy argument worthy of great attention by anybody trying to make sense of today’s India.
The book rightly identifies the Indira Gandhi years as a harbinger of two key trends in Indian political economy. First was the rise of Caesarism with the cult of Indira Gandhi and, the second, a pivot of economic policy from structural transformation goals for the economy as a whole to palliatives to preserve political legitimacy. That we hear a lot about Narendra Modi using his popular legitimacy to undermine institutional sanctity and that welfare and cash transfers are the bare minimum to win elections today is enough evidence to underline the historical salience of the pivots that the book discusses in great detail.
{{/usCountry}}The book rightly identifies the Indira Gandhi years as a harbinger of two key trends in Indian political economy. First was the rise of Caesarism with the cult of Indira Gandhi and, the second, a pivot of economic policy from structural transformation goals for the economy as a whole to palliatives to preserve political legitimacy. That we hear a lot about Narendra Modi using his popular legitimacy to undermine institutional sanctity and that welfare and cash transfers are the bare minimum to win elections today is enough evidence to underline the historical salience of the pivots that the book discusses in great detail.
{{/usCountry}}The idea of drawing this historical connection from the present to the past is not to mechanically extrapolate the one with the other. Why this book is useful for students of Indian political economy is best captured by a sentence from its prologue – Srinath Raghavan writes: “I have sought to write a history that supplies the antidote to every generation’s illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive”.