Ananya Vajpeyi's Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations
of Modern India is a book that everyone interested in the
evolution of the ideas that shaped the modern Indian nation
should read. "I didn't basically buy the thesis that India's
modernity derived from the west, which is the big argument of
the subaltern historians," says Vajpeyi. "If you look at the
important leaders, they were negotiating the relationship
between the past and the present; not rejecting outright what
was Indian and imitating the western," says the professor of
South Asian History at the University of Massachusetts. Her
study takes in Gandhi, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore,
Nehru and Ambedkar, five of the country's founding fathers, and
looks at how each turned to pre-colonial texts including the
Gita in the case of Gandhi, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka for
Nehru, and Buddhist literature in Ambedkar's case, to create an
Indian sense of self. Vajpeyi grapples with the big,
exasperating questions about the origin of a modern n