But the book of the year, for me, was a book of non-fiction: Ramachandra Guha’s magnificent history of the republican state, India After Gandhi. To set yourself the task of telling the tangled political history of independent India in a single volume is a bit like deciding to comb out Shiva’s matted hair in an afternoon. Guha carries it off: His achievement is that he tells his story with such conversational modesty, such poise, that his reader is instructed and moved and amused without being oppressed by the massive scholarship that underwrites the book.
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