The Invention of India

Shashi Tharoor's suggestion that the author of The Discovery of India was, in fact, India's Inventor — on which one has a bone to pick with him. He might have meant this metaphorically than literally. Nehru, more than anyone else, may well have welded the "world's most disparate collection of fellow citizens" into a nation. But the danger is that this would be grist to the mill of those who continue to pontificate that there was no India before the arrival of the British. It was, according to them, the subsequent creation of a dialectical combination of the British Raj, the freedom movement and Nehru's superhuman efforts.

None of them care to explain why the hard-nosed men who assembled in the City of London in 1601 decide to form the East India Company. More than a century earlier than that, Columbus had embarked on his famous voyage, not to discover America but to find an alternative route to India! INDER MALHOTRA The Hindu Literary Review Sunday, Dec 07, 2003