Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (review)

This is the second edition of this fantastic general history of South Asia covering the period from antiquity to the twenty-first century, with the majority of the book (seventeen of twenty chapters) focusing on the period since circa 1500. As with the first edition, published in 1998, Modern South Asia will function very well as a textbook in undergraduate South Asian survey courses and will yield a wealth of information about the subcontinent’s history for committed general readers. Moreover, the insightful comments about South Asian historiography will repay careful readings by senior undergraduates and benefit specialists.

The new edition brings the book up to date in terms of important political developments since 1998, such as the two nuclear blasts of 1998 and the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the wealth of new scholarship that has appeared in the past seven years. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the book is that both authors, Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, are eminent scholars at the forefront of ongoing debates in South Asian historiography. They combine the best of materialist and empirical historiographies of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, for example, with new intellectual currents associated with postmodern and postcolonial scholarship. They also convey the excitement of South Asian historiography and show its social and political relevance to the present day. This makes Modern South Asia compelling and should help to attract promising students into graduate programs.

The most intense discussion of South Asian historiography in the 1998 edition appeared toward the end of the book’s introduction, posing some problems since it could intimidate and scare off all but the most intrepid undergraduates and general readers before they actually reached the history. The second edition has successfully addressed this issue by moving these theoretical insights from the introduction into a new “general note on historiographical trends” at the beginning of the bibliography. These valuable notes work well here, and the excellent, updated select bibliography now runs to twenty-seven pages. The authors have also added a four-page chronological outline (211–14) that covers the years 6500 BCE–2003 CE, which should please students. The glossary and index are also first-rate, and the five maps and twenty-odd illustrations complement the text admirably. In addition, many instructors will like that most of the chapters are quite short (ten to twenty pages), and students can be expected to read a chapter per class in some weeks, or chapters can be supplemented with other primary or secondary source readings for in-depth analysis of some themes and topics.

Modern South Asia is a strong book because it provides so much information on the early modern, colonial, and postcolonial periods in India, and it is unique in that it covers all of South Asia in the post-1947 period. But it is equally important that all of the material presented chronologically in the twenty chapters is connected thematically. The dominant theme running through the entire book is about efforts to accommodate difference and resolve center versus region tensions through notions and practices of layered and shared sovereignty. The theme is never overbearing or didactic and works well, even imbuing the book with a sense of hope and optimism.

Since the book tries to do so much in 206 pages of text there are bound to be areas where improvements could be made. For example, some sections are a little dense and might give trouble to some students. One could also wish for better definitions or explanations of terms such as military fiscalism and communitarian. The latter is employed on five or six occasions between pages 6 and 215 but is never clearly defined; it appears positively on some occasions as an alternative to communal and negatively on others in the sense of the postcolonial penchant for “the fragment.” These, however, are minor criticisms of an excellent and highly recommended history of South Asia that is even stronger in...