The author attempts to play safe, a la television channels in US giving equal time to both sides, which has been attempted not so successfully in television in India - for example in a case of rape and murder the anchor might give equal time to both sides, and this can be made to look like the victim's side is being vindictive while the criminal being forgiven is the only way for you to be not papally disapproved and be set on par with the rapist and murderer, unless of course you can be set below for not having felt guilty of everything and begged for mercy - which no one demands from the murderer and rapist a convincing demonstration of, especially if he is being tried, or was convicted for a couple of years.
Guha thus holds people and parties guilty of seriously injuring interests of nation and responsible for massacres on par or not quite as guilty as those that would hold that majority of India is not slave and beneath respect for eternity, having committed the crime of being ruled rather than convert en masse or be massacred as per demand by the rulers from other cultures for over a millennium.
As usual with people who label or accept labels without thought, he too identifies Hindu with traders and right wing, never mind majority is poor or desperately poor, and more. This label has a very convoluted sort of reasoning - leftists of India had gone over a to set up across to the separated part of India set up then as the nation for those intolerant of living with people of other faiths, thus identifying leftists with muslims, and anyone whom muslims would not live with as therefore right wing. This further is used in labeling or identifying all those as not only right wing but also as business or more disparagingly as trading community. That the so labelled communities whether Hindu or Jewish or western in general have also intellectuals, great thinkers and philosophers, inventors and scientists and writers and music maestros and artists of all sorts, is ignored, since the only criteria is whether you are a killer and marauding looter or merely a trader. Values are thus set topsy turvy in all thought and discourses from those that hold terrorism as a superior creed.
Guha holds, like all good kids so labelled by their education oriented to west rather than within the nation, that India is an idea, and without saying so explicitly seems to drive the reader to conclude that it was an invention of those not of India but looking from anywhere else, and that those of India have no choice in that matter - thus negating the reality of the nation he does not exactly deny belonging to but deprecated at all levels.
So it is almost a small corollary that invasions, massacres and looting by invaders, forced conversions at knife or sword points held to throats, and enforced slavery in all but name, et al - suffered by those indigenous that would not convert - is all a non sequitur pretty much as wages of slave labour denied to slaves and their descendents in US are held non sequitur in all but explicit statement; Guha goes with labeling all those invasions, looting and massacres under the seemingly non invasive, almost friendly term of "cultural impact", as if those invading and marauding and massacring and more were no more than stones set hurtling down by an avalanche, without any will or thought or guilt, no more to blame than an el nino or el nina. He denies humanity to them in the process, perhaps unaware of this, as a consequence of holding them not guilty of their actions as full adults but ascribing to them an innocence one might ascribe to the landslide or earthquake.
He, like another author from his region, surprisingly is halfway ignorant of his heritage and nation to a degree and context very unexpected - he mentions Krishna as one from Gujarat, never mind India steeped for millennia in stories and songs about Krishna, in literature and music and homes - favourites among tales told children by parents and grandparents - and completely saturated with the lore of origins and childhood, even young adulthood, of Krishna being of ancient city of Mathura and its immediate neighbourhood, while the coastal city of Dwaarakaa in Gujarat (and its ancient version discovered submerged in ocean off coast) are credited to Krishna as having created for his kingdom, after he migrated with his people to avoid a civil war that would kill thousands of innocents - which was ultimately forced anyway, on the good people willing to live in peace, by those intent on swallowing the whole, pretty much as WWII was forced despite all sorts of concessions by all attempting to placate a central power intent on swallowing Europe and the world, both times aims being to end civilisation.
Guha wrote this as an essay in a weekly that is not unknown for such disparaging writing about India and her own, but this fact is only given at the end, rather than in the information about the book - which isn't really a book at that, merely a piece of propaganda that fails in facts.
One major failure is unexpected of someone officially a scholar of history, namely, his assertion about someone being Indian, while facts of legality are otherwise. He can simply brand those pointing at facts as being communal, intolerant et al, but fact is he is either a shoddy scholar or is lying, as are those making this particular assertion.
But in this case, while one can easily understand someone - anyone - trying to hold on to a citizenship of a seemingly safer part of the world, especially when not related to India except by marriage, falsifying it by claiming that marriage amounts to citizenship whether accepted or not by the person is simply rubbish. Which is not discordant with the essay parading as a book, either - it is garbage mixed with some not so much garbage and covered in sauce so mix is concealed decoratively.
