In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce.

Luce is an extremely unfortunate person who looks at a living treasure and is too blinded by his agenda of destruction to recognise the value he is looking at, of an oppoutunity in an eternity he has found for transformation, and carries on the hacking by a sword barely disguised as a pen (or a writing instrument of whatever sort before he publishes). Extremely unfortunate, reminding one of the old proverbs about those who have nothing to receive and hold it when heaven showers blessings.

A priori the very title clears the fact that one must expect some bias, at the very least, from this author; but Luce goes much further in his determination to remain pathetically, despicably poor in matters above stomach, matters of heart and higher mind and spiritual. He deals cleverly enough with mention of all sorts of greatness of India and of those that belong to India, of the culture and people and persona, but camouflages his agenda the usual way in weightage assigned to various matters. His agenda begins to be clear pretty soon, although for a reader unfamiliar with the country - and today that can only be said of people very remote from world concerns - it is an informative book and comprehensively so. The danger is, one might assume it is a fair description. It isn't - and that is clear for anyone familiar with the country, the culture and history thereof.

For instance Luce mentions the train full of people burnt to death, prior to 2002 riots but gives it short shrift, and while he refrains from assigning or admitting where guilt lay thereof he mentions how the people on the train taunted those that have been blamed for the burning of train and the passengers locked in. He refrains from mentioning that the proportion of people arrested was 3:1 during this riots unlike any other occasion of the riots that happened regularly in the state and elsewhere for that matter, but mentions that police were not as impartial as they ought to be.

He does mention '84 massacres and calls them riots, one falsehood; does not mention the partisan role played by the party he approves of for rule, another implicit falsehood; makes no mention of the comments made openly and officially by those responsible for the nation on that occasion, or of the fact that the so called communal party had helped save lives of victims (of another community, those they were supposed to be at war with) during this - '84 - horror; nor of the fact that two of the top persons responsible those horrific days for the nation and city of the capital went on to be top office holders. This last compares ironically with the clamour for resignation of the chief minister of the state accused for 2002 riots.

It gets even more bizarre when compared with his accounts of the '46 massacres explicitly ordered by a communal leader demanding a division of the nation, which forced the division due to the horrific bloodshed the said leader commanded and made happen - thousands dead in a day or two of what was called "action day". He does not see that one man cannot massacre thousands with knives, that the community that obeyed him must then remain suspect that the very least to those that were related to the murdered a la Germans to Jews, and he lets off the said leader lightly with no blame while giving certificate of peace to those responsible for the massacre then.

This very agenda of anti Hindu attacks in the book is camouflaged with praise of the Hindu culture of tolerance and the repeated surprise at India remaining a democracy successfully, not seeing that the latter is due sheer to the very nature of Hinduism, of Indian culture rooted in Hinduism, of ancient treasure of knowledge inherent in the living nation of very ancient roots that did not fall to any conversionist onslaughts the way most of the world did. He repeatedly attacks the highest priests and teachers community of Braahmans, comparing them incessantly with the lowest and accusing them, never reflecting that in his root culture no one expects the pope or the monarch of a nation to live on par with East Enders much less with colonial citizens or ex ruled. That there is a complex net of a hundred if not thousands of communities is forgotten or glossed over for the convenience of attacking Braahmans, never questioning if a carpenter would admit a cleaner as equal for marriage, much less if an ex ruler or a rich owner of a trading house would.

His agenda of attacking Braahman community - who in fact are mostly poor or very poor, since by tradition they are not supposed to engage in money making, devoting themselves to preserving knowledge and helping teach others along with priestly duties of various kinds - is inherited from the days immediately past 1857 when colonising rulers and missionaries alike realised it was necessary to attack and destroy Braahmans in order to demoralise and disintegrate India, since Braahmans kept the roots alive and India living despite horrendous onslaughts from abroad seeking to loot wealth and rule a nation that never went out attacking others. This agenda has been since carried out diligently with every falsehood employed for the purpose, including blaming Braahmans for various acts that in fact the church and especially Rome was responsible in their own territory for, short of the inquisition or slavery.

Another falsehood is about introduction of other religions in India - Luce goes on repeatedly blaming Hindus for holding Islam responsible for attacks and forced conversions and claims that in fact Islam was introduced by traders along the coast by peaceful means, attracting lower classes with its promise of equality. The latter is true on a very small scale of the total experience with Islam in fact whether in India or in general in the world, although the promised equality is a lie, unveiled at that, in any conversionist religion for that matter. Fact is India did experience huge violence due to expansionist agenda of Islam prior to Europe taking over, and those memories necessarily take over being the largest part.

What peaceful introduction of either conversionist religion did take place made no more disturbance than that of any other such faith or community from abroad, and of those India has more than the rest of the world is even aware of existence of. That various people from Jews to Parsees (fleeing Persia at the Islamic threat to their indigenous culture and finding refuge and respite in India, nowhere else, and flourishing here for centuries) in past millennia, to Tibetans and others in more recent times, have found refuge and respite in India to sanctuary and flourishing after a stabilisation, is taken for granted in India as much as the flourishing of various branches of Indigenous faiths either separating or branching or interacting or absorbed back as a stream, including Buddhist and Jain and Sikh and many, many others, old or new.

Luce and his sorts may see it, and yet be unable to comprehend it - which is why his bias and his incessant attacks on the majority while absolving those that have an agenda to convert the world. Luce and his sorts comprehend being a jackal, but do not comprehend gratitude to those that provide sustenance and help in life, without whom life would be direly destitute. Hence his derision of those that love cows and the nation that depends on cattle for milk, farmwork, transport, fuel, and much, much more. He forgets laws of yore in out west in US, not so long ago, hanged a man to death for stealing another man's horse - since life there depended on a horse likely as not. He forgets life in India for the poor billion depends on cattle for the livelihood and food. He can afford to forget it, as can those that just as soon move on when India is torn to shreds and poor starve to death. It is another story for those that care about the land.
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The official description on the site where I discovered the book before finding it in a store and buying it to read it (a site based in US and related generally to books and readers with worldwide membership (but nevertheless an assumption by its US members of an implicit ownership of the site and in fact of the very internet that is in fact a work and space of the whole world to meet), a description which officially may or may not represent the book or the author, and might very well be an editorial comment on the site, goes :-

"India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the world’s third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods , Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power. Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book is sure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive introduction to modern India. In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of India’s 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India’s 600,000 villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world’s largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption. Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labor force. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American. leaders have been encouraging India’s rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China’s influence in Asia. Above all, In Spite of the Gods is an enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries to balance the stubborn traditions of the past with an unevenly modernizing present. Deeply informed by scholarship and history, leavened by humor and rich in anecdote, it shows that India has huge opportunities as well as tremendous challenges that make the future “hers to lose.” "

The underlying biases are so taken for granted that they are not clear in plain sight, and amount to biases similar to equating blond with beautiful (with opposite assumptions silent but held tacitly far more strongly).

The title for instance assumes no reaction to any insult to the many, many religions and faiths and differences of thought that are equally held reverent in the country, mainly due to the character of the traditional way of thought of majority and their religion (often denied a status of religion in western television channels, since it does not confirm to a one person one book one god imposed on all followers and attempting to convert all others sort of pattern understood more easily for its simplicity, never mind the similarity of such faiths with any totalitarian way of thought) - but also the very freedom of worship inherent in the character of the nation is blatantly ignored, or worse, heavily disrespected, in the title and the underlying assumption therein.

Often people tend to hold concatenation as causal connection, and in west this has happened with economic rise being related to a relentless imposition of authoritative mode of faith and wiping out of alternatives - even all knowledge and rights thereto - being imprisoned within the authority fences and the duel that therefore necessarily was fought for freedom of thought against the religious authorities. It is forgotten that while this need to fight for the freedom of thought and knowledge might have helped a great deal, the prosperity would be far less if not accompanied by colonial occupation of other continents and usurping of their wealth, whatever the state of the local people and the treatment accorded to them by the colonial usurping occupiers, whether in Australia or across the ocean in American continent or Asia or Africa.

If this is not believable, just think of how life would be in Europe if there were no migration possible to any other continent, if everyone who wished to travel from Europe anywhere had to mortgage a significant part of their properties and undergo humiliating experiences on arrival in the other lands. Without the migration and the loot from other continents, Europe would be very crowded with poor as it was only two centuries ago - in fact, UK sponsored migration to Australia for all her poor just post wwII, officially, just as it was done for a while towards Canada or US prior to the wars so as to free large estates of aristocracy of the poor locals.

Much more to the graphic illustrative point, imagine if Africa owned the diamonds and the firms in Europe and coffee were to be as expensive as diamonds are today to west, while diamonds cost as much as best Champagne (and I mean, Champagne, not sparkling wine from elsewhere) - which might very well happen if local people owned the lands and used it to feed their own, sparing little for export to others for luxuries.

Once a neighbour in Germany had described poverty of East Germany where she visited relatives by relating how they could not afford bananas. I pointed out that first and foremost if the thing does not grow locally it could not be good for health, much less a necessity; as long as they had apples in their back or front yards on trees, they were in good shape for health and food and fruit. Bananas in fact are suitable only for tropical consumption, where they do grow - they are good food for heat of the locales and are cold in effect as food.

But to continue the thread, here is one more - imagine bananas cost more than opium and its byproducts in lands where they do not grow, and coconuts are no less than precious metals by weight. Would that be deprivation, when a product of one's own land gets a mere fraction of that from another? That is what the ex colonial lands (and natives of occupation forgotten lands of Australia and America too) have lived through.

In short, the prosperity of west has just as much to do with the looting via colonial occupations of various lands and migration to the lands taken over for good, as to do with the science versus faith wars Europe had to fight resulting in tremendous growth in science and technology.

Relating this prosperity to the religion of the west is the false assumption inherent in the title. Relating the prosperity to virtue of every kind is the other, deeper false assumption.
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