Grand Tamasha

Later this summer, California could be first American state to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. California’s move, and the moves by universities, cities, and towns across the country, to raise issues of caste discrimination has generated a massive controversy that is roiling the Indian American community in the United States.   One reporter, the freelance journalist Sonia Paul, has been d...

  Leaders come and go, but institutions stay forever. This is the central takeaway of a new book by Subhashish Bhadra, Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back.   Subhashish is an economist whose career has straddled both the policy and corporate worlds. He has worked at a leading global management consulting firm, a venture capital firm, and a tech start-up, working closely wi...

If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these stories, politicians and their henchmen appear to hav...

Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined. Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How well...

Find a list of the defining books about India published in the last 75 years and there’s one book that will show up on list after list after list—Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi. For years, historians approached India as if history more or less ended with the partition of the subcontinent and the achievement of India’s independence in 1947. Guha’s India After Gandhi broke this mo...

  India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today is a big new book on India by the economist Ashoka Mody. Mody is an economic historian at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs and a longtime official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. His new book provides readers with an unvarnished look at India’s twin economic and political failures over the past...

Menaka Doshi, “India’s SEBI to submit report on Adani to Court-Appointed Panel,” Bloomberg, March 29, 2023. Menaka Doshi and Rajesh Kumar Singh, “Adani Total Gas Says Expansion and Spending Plans are Intact,” Bloomberg, February 7, 2023. Hindenburg Group, How the World’s 3rd Richest Man is Pulling the Largest Con in Corporate History, January 24, 2023. Adani Group, “Adani Response,” January 29, 20...

Over the decades, India has developed a reputation for having a strong society but a weak state. This bureaucratic, lumbering behemoth has especially struggled to deliver basic public goods like health, education, water, and sanitation. But a new book by the University of Oxford political scientist Akshay Mangla, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India,...

Thirty years ago, Seema Sirohi first moved to Washington as a journalist charged with covering India’s relationship with the United States. At the time, Washington saw India as a problem—rather than a useful part of its foreign policy solution—to big, complex global challenges.  Today, the situation could not be more different: the United States and India are deeply enmeshed in a strategic partner...

The decline of India’s parliament is a refrain that has often been repeated over the last seventy-five years of modern Indian democracy. A new book on India’s Parliament addresses the decline thesis head-on and provides a warts-and-all assessment of India’s legislative chamber. The book is called House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy and its author is the scholar Ronoj...

Our Grand Tamasha top three books of 2022 (drumroll, please):   Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence By Shrayana Bhattacharya. Published by HarperCollins India.   The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government By Rahul Sagar. Published by Hurst/HarperCollins India.   The Newlyweds: Rearranging...

“A Test of the BJP’s Dominance in Gujarat (with Mahesh Langa),” Grand Tamasha, December 6, 2022.  “Previewing India’s G20 Agenda (with Karthik Nachiappan),” Grand Tamasha, November 30, 2022. “Congress Drama, Indian Diplomacy, and the Diaspora (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, October 12, 2022.

Karthik Nachiappan, Does India Negotiate? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020) Karthik Nachiappan, “The international politics of data: When control trumps protection,” Observer Research Foundation, October 26, 2022. Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, “Data opportunity at the G20,” Hindu, August 18, 2022. “How Rising Powers Can Make—Or Break—International Order” (with Rohan Mukherjee), ...

Semafor “Climate” newsletter by Bill Spindle.  Bill Spindle, “Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, June 14, 2022. Bill Spindle, “The Free Power Flywheel,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, August 29, 2022. Bill Spindle, “Global climate conference threatens to be a bust,” Semafor, October 22, 2022. “How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions (with Jayant Sinha),”...

“What Kind of World Power Does India Want to Be (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, June 1, 2022. Rahul Sagar, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth-Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours (Juggernaut, 2022). Ideas of India, online database curated by Rahul Sagar

Tanvi Madan, “China Has Lost India: How Beijing’s Aggression Pushed New Delhi to the West,” Foreign Affairs, October 4, 2022. Sadanand Dhume, “Hindu Nationalism Threatens India’s Rise as a Nation,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2022. Prashant Jha, “A story of friendship: The underlying theme of Jaishankar’s Washington DC visit,” Hindustan Times, September 30, 2022. “Rearranging Marriage in Modern...

In country after country in South Asia, we are seeing worrying signs of economic turmoil and political upheaval. Earlier this year, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a bruising no-confidence vote, resulting in his abrupt ouster. But now the new coalition government that took over from Khan is struggling under the weight of a rising debt burden. Sri Lanka has experienced a full-blown crisis,...

“Pallavi Raghavan on an Alternative History of India-Pakistan Relations,” Grand Tamasha, April 7, 2020. Brian Finlay, “The Passing of Our Co-Founder Michael Krepon,” Henry L. Stimson Center, July 16, 2022. “Myra MacDonald on the India-Pakistan Battle for Siachen,” Grand Tamasha, March 9, 2021.  

Shyam Saran, “Signs of Twin Troubles in China,” Business Standard, August 17, 2022. Shyam Saran, “Why India@75 Must Pay Attention to Fault Lines,” Mint, August 15, 2022. “India’s Future in a Changing Global Order (with Shivshankar Menon),” Grand Tamasha, February 2, 2022.  

Sri Lanka has been the site of dramatic economic and political upheaval over the past several weeks as years of economic mismanagement have resulted in rampant inflation, shortages of essential commodities, and the country’s first sovereign default in the post-independence era.  The island’s dire economic conditions have spurred angry, and sometimes violent, protests which resulted in the sudden r...

Aqil Shah, “The Shambolic End of Imran Khan,” Foreign Affairs, April 15, 2022. Aqil Shah, “Pakistan’s ‘Moderate Taliban’ Strategy Won’t Hold Up—For Anyone,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 30, 2021. Aqil Shah, “Pakistan: Voting Under Military Tutelage,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (2019): 128-142.     

Joshua T. White, After the foundational agreements: An agenda for US-India defense and security cooperation(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2021) Joshua T. White, “Nonstate threats in the Taliban’s Afghanistan,” February 1, 2022, Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/02/01/nonstate-threats-in-the-talibans-afghanistan/ Ashley J. Tellis, “‘What Is in Ou...

“Information Politics and Social Change,” Ideas of India (podcast) with Shruti Rajagopalan and Rajesh Veeraraghavan, March 3, 2022. Philip Keefer and Stuti Khemani, “Why Do the Poor Receive Poor Services?” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 9 (2004): 935-943. Diego Maiorano, “The Politics of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Andhra Pradesh,” World Development 58 (201...

Sugata Srinivasaraju, “Balancing Opinion And Diverting Attention,” New Indian Express, April 7, 2022. Soutik Biswas, “Bangalore: How polarisation is dividing India's Silicon Valley,” BBC, April 7, 2022. Pooja Prasanna, “Karnataka’s Hindutva hate politics: Blame it on a weak CM and an edgy Opposition,” TheNews Minute, April 6, 2022.  

Christine Hall, “GlobalWonks relaunches as Enquire AI following $5.5M round,” TechCrunch, December 15, 2021. Bilal Baloch, “10 years later, assessing UPA’s response to IAC,” Hindustan Times, December 11, 2021. Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav, “Corruption in India: Bridging Research Evidence and Policy Options,” India Policy Forum 11: 193-276.