Sanjeev Sanyal’s
wonderful read titled, The Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a Thousand Years
of Decline is about India at the crossroads.
Shashi Tharoor has
praised the book as ‘Absolutely superb – thoughtful, well-researched, and full
of insight’, and Nandan Nilekani has also showered petals of praises on the
book calling it a ‘thought-provoking book,’ appreciating Sanjeev Sanyal’s ‘impressive
breadth and depth of knowledge’.
The book literally leads you by the hand and takes you on a ‘history tour’ down the ages, or to be precise, into the past ten centuries, and howww!
One amongst the any many things that endears Sanjeev's writings to us all is the fact that, his sentences are
direct, matter-of-fact and precise! To cite Bacon, ‘the soul of wit’ is on
display all through his 230 pages of narrative!
This blogpost ain’t a review though! Rather, through this post I would so love to share with y’all amazing nuggets that I found so impressive, from the book. Most of the books that he’s cited along the way are by themselves amazing reads! So yup! Quoting them too!
Sanjeev Sanyal for y’all -
The Opening of India in the 1990s
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| Sanjeev on Song! |
It was only with the
opening of India in the 1990s that it has seen a renaissance both as an economy
and as a civilization. The efforts of the 19th century reformers had prepared
India for the flood of ideas.
Hurdles Along the Way
This book is about how
India has finally become free, and how it has the opportunity now of
transforming itself and the world. There are many hurdles on the way — the poor
state of the institutions of governance, the quality of tertiary education and
so on. However, there are also strong forces that will support India’s
transformation.
An Open Cultural Attitude: Single Most Important Condition
for an Indian Renaissance
This book largely
deals with India’s economic resurgence. However, throughout the book, we will
be mindful that economic resurgence is only part of a wider civilizational reawakening.
An open cultural attitude is perhaps the single most important condition for an
Indian renaissance — far more important and long lasting than demographic
shifts and rising savings rates. Both the rise of Europe following the
Renaissance and the revival of Japan after the Meiji Restoration predated their
demographic shifts. Rising savings rates and literacy rates were important to
the extent that they accelerated the pace at which new ideas and
technologies were disseminated and absorbed.
On the Book Indika
by Greek Ambassador Megasthenes
In his book “Indika”,
Greek ambassador Megasthenes describes a country with a well-irrigated
agricultural system and a sophisticated artisan manufacturing sector. It is
clear that India’s economy was considered very advanced at that time. This does
not mean that Indians were too proud to absorb new ideas from the Greeks. In subsequent
centuries, Greeks influence is clearly visible in areas ranging from sculpture
to coinage. Even the Hindu temple may be of Greek origin. The ancient Vedic
texts suggest that Hindus originally did not worship idols and build temples,
and it is quite likely that both Hindus and Buddhists got the idea from the Greeks.
Reasons for Intellectual Fossilization in the 11th Century
There are several
independent signs of intellectual fossilization at around the 11th century.
The most direct comes from the writings of Al Beruni, an 11th century scholar
who lived in the court of Mahmud Ghazni and wrote a remarkable book on the
India of his time. While Al Beruni is not entirely a neutral commentator, some
of his comments provide an interesting insight into contemporary Indian
attitudes to knowledge and science. Take for instance:
Al Beruni goes on to
quote a passage from Varahamihira in which the ancient Indian thinker gives credit
to the scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Al Beruni lived in the
court of Mahmud of Ghazni and was probably commissioned by him to write the
book on India. Clearly, Mahmud took the trouble to learn about his victims.
This is what allowed him to make raids into northern India between 1000 and
1025 AD without eliciting a successful response from a country that was still a
major economic power. Perhaps it is significant that the Indians did not bother
to write an equivalent book about Ghazni.
Brain Drain and Successful Indian Expatriate Communities in
the West
Till the late eighties,
talented and skilled Indians had two worthy choices — join the civil services
(particularly the elite Indian Administrative Services) or emigrate. Taking the
GRE/GMAT and applying to US universities was not so much about gaining new
skills but a way to opt out of the system. The resultant brain-drain laid the
foundations of successful Indian expatriate communities in the West.
Predicament of Those Who were Not Caught ‘Up’
Those who remained
behind became part of an underemployed pool of cheap white-collar workers. When
reforms were finally introduced, the entrepreneurs showed a preference for
deploying these easily available skilled workers rather than the relatively
unemployable masses.
Thomas Freidman’s The
World is Flat
The globalization of
the skilled middle-class was sharply accelerated by the fact that
liberalization coincided with the telecommunications revolution. As described
by Thomas Freidman in his book “The World is Flat”, technological changes in
the last decade of the 20th century gave a whole new dimension to the process of
globalization. It was now possible for knowledge workers sitting in Bangalore
and Gurgaon to participate and compete directly in the global economy. In an
earlier era, such direct trade in services would not have been possible.
Managing Consumer Waste, Pollution, Water and Forests: The
Need of the Hour
Looking ahead, India
needs to seriously think about how to manage the growing amounts of industrial
and consumer waste, the dwindling and increasingly polluted water resources and
the last remaining forests. If not, it will unnecessarily impose long-term
costs on future generations. As a latecomer to the development game, India has the
advantage that it can leapfrog various technologies.
On Jared Diamond’s How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
However, it has one
major disadvantage — India may have to go through its development phase at a
time that the Earth’s carrying capacity is at its limit. As Jared Diamond
points out in his popular book “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, many
societies through history have committed ecological suicide.
Remembering the Renaissance Today
Today, the Renaissance
is remembered mainly for its cultural achievements but this was merely one side
of the phenomenon. It is no co-incidence that the epoch began in the merchant
republics of Venice and Florence rather than in the larger and more powerful
kingdom of Europe. Both of them were the first and foremost successful
financial centers. Their innovations ranged from the standardized use of
double-entry accounting to the trading of financial securities. Remembered
today from their patronage of the arts, the Medicis were a family of bankers!
In other words, the Renaissance was much bigger than paintings and sculpture.
It was an age that produced individuals like Leonardo daVinci with his remarkable
curiosity in virtually all fields of knowledge.
Despite Threats from Establishment, They Made their
Contributions
Of course, many of
these individuals made their contributions despite threats from establishment.
Galileo, for instance, was actively persecuted by the Inquisition. Yet, the
European world view had changed enough to allow the questioning of fundamental
beliefs. During the Dark Ages, such intellectual innovation would not have been
possible. As the spirit of innovation and risk-taking spread across Europe,
Western civilization saw a rebirth in all spheres. The process was helped by
yet another Renaissance innovation — printing. The technology probably
originated in China but it was in 15th century Germany that it was perfected.
The movable type was
perfected by two Mainz goldsmiths Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust. The Gutenberg
Bible was published in 1455, the first printed book. From here the technology
spread like wildfire. Within five years we have the first printed dictionary,
the Catholicon. By 1500, less than 50 years after the first printed book, we
have printing firms in 60 German cities and Venice alone has 150 presses.
Books Were Once the Preserve of the Church and the Rich
Books were once the preserve
of the church and the very rich, but were now available to virtually everyone.
Before printing, the largest libraries had around 600 books and together all
the libraries in Europe were estimated to have a hundred thousand books. By
1500, this increased to nine million. This is democratization of
knowledge on a colossal scale.
The person who
epitomized this new spirit was Christopher Columbus. Said to be an Italian from
Genoa, he managed to convince
the Spanish crown to support a voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. From what we
know, he was not an especially talented sailor or navigator. He was not the
first to realize that the world was spherical. He totally miscalculated the
circumference of the Earth and the westward distance to India. He was not even
able to comprehend the true scale of his own discoveries. But, he was open to a
one good idea — that the world was round — and he had the courage to follow it.
In other words, he was not a born genius but a man who was driven by the spirit
of his times. This spirit of his influenced many others. Within a few years of
Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, Vasco da Gama was sailing around the Cape of
Good Hope to India.
The Spirit of Adventure
Today, the
achievements of Columbus and Da Gama are often disparaged by the politically
correct. I am not arguing that they were “good” men. By modern standards, they
clearly were not. However, there is no doubt that their extra-ordinary
achievements were an integral part of the European revival. They represent the
same spirit of adventure that drove Galileo and Da Vinci.
The History of the 21st Century Will be About…
In his widely read
book “The World is Flat”, Thomas Friedman argues that the history of the 21st
century will be about how technology and the wider process of globalization has
created an interlinked world where geography does not matter. He talks about
the “Ten Forces that Flattened the Earth” including Supply-Chaining and Outsourcing.
His central point is that the “World is Flat” because it is now possible for
anyone (presumably with the right skills) to participate in the world economy.
Sanjeev’s Concluding lines…
The World is not Flat
just because technology allows us to connect various points on the planet. The
Internet is no more than the latest step in a series of globalizing
technologies that go back to the ships of the Spice Trade, the camel caravans
of the Silk Route, the railways, telephones and the radio.
To take advantage of
the world, one needs the right attitude towards innovation, change and
risktaking. The real change in today’s India is that there is a significant
proportion of the population, the middle class, that feels confident and
capable enough. The demographic shift and the primary education revolution will
make it possible for more people to participate in the process in the near
future. However, it is an opportunity that India still needs to actualize and
its success will depend to a large extent on the choices it makes.
As Columbus proved,
the earth is not flat but round, and its opportunities are open only to those
who dare to sail around it.
How true he proves!
To sum it up, the book
is, insightful and impactful, perceptive and penetrative, incisive and
intuitive!
[On an aside, when some of us got this lovely chance of meeting up with him in Mumbai, this past year, i was able to get two of his books autographed for me, straight from the lion himself. And when i told him that we enjoyed listening to his talk when he came last time to Chennai, he had this for quips: 'You see, Samuel, almost 24 days a month I'm giving talks or lectures at some place or the other. So i just can't place this talk that you're talking about. Still, I'm happy you liked it. Thank you so much'! That shows his great demand amongst academia, in spite of the fact that he shoulders huge responsibilities up his sleeve as the Principal Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, with the Government of India.]
To be continued…
images: this blogger's ;-)
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