Thriller to analysis of public policy: The top books of 2023
In 2019, HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joined forces to launch a new weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy, Grand Tamasha. Each week the show features an in-depth conversation with a politician, policymaker, author, or practitioner that covers the most important issues confronting India, from domestic politics to foreign policy. As the year comes to an end, host Milan Vaishnav put together a short list of Grand Tamasha’s top books of 2023, as featured on the show.
Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
Joya Chatterji
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This book is a sweeping look at twentieth-century South Asia. It is a work of history, certainly. But it is equal parts memoir, social commentary, and cultural critique. Its brilliance is that it defies easy classification. Chatterji sums up a career’s worth of scholarship and insights into a book that, as William Dalrymple noted, is destined to become the perfect companion volume to Ramachandra Guha’s acclaimed history of postindependence India, India After Gandhi.
Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness
Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil
Anyone who has turned on a film or cracked open a book set in modern India knows that Indian slums are regularly portrayed as dens of inequity and deprivation in which citizens are trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. This book, based on ten years of fieldwork in the slums of Bhopal and Jaipur, tells us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact. Auerbach and Thachil demonstrate that India’s slums are actually intricate, democratic political systems in which patrons, clients, and brokers engage in an everyday contest over representation and responsiveness.
Age of Vice Deepak Kapoor
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Age of Vice is a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics. At the heart of the novel sits the Wadia dynasty—a shadowy business conglomerate run by Bunty Wadia, an industrialist in cahoots with the sitting chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The book centres on the exploits of Bunty’s son, Sunny, the ne’er-dowell scion struggling to find his place in his family’s business empire. Any further detail risks spoiling a plot full of twists and turns, leaving readers’ heads spinning as if they were accompanying Sunny on one of his legendary all-night benders.
Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India
Akshay Mangla
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India has developed a reputation for having a strong society but a weak state. This lumbering behemoth has especially struggled to deliver basic public goods like health care and sanitation. Making Bureaucracy Work illuminates how some Indian states have managed to overcome these endemic weaknesses.
Mangla finds that in unexpected places, the Indian state has succeeded in delivering quality education for its poorest citizens despite sharing the same institutional framework and demographic characteristics of poorly performing regions. Where bureaucracies are guided by deliberative norms, the state is adaptive and responsive to citizens’ needs. But where civil servants rigidly follow legalistic norms, they may deliver schools on paper but educational outcomes lag behind.
Grand Tamasha