Review of The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English

The link between development, human fights, and ethnic conflict has become of central analytical concern in South Asian scholarship, particularly in light of the rise of right-wing religious groups and renewed communal antagonisms. This publication examines the difficulties faced by South Asian governments in assimilating impoverished and marginalized groups into industrialization, on the one hand, while protecting their human fights and guarding against ethnic conflicts, on the other. Focusing specifically on the problems of securing minority fights in South Asia, characterized by inegalitarian cultural values and uneven distribution of wealth and political power, Ross Mallick covers a wide range of related issues in thirteen chapters. The preface and chapter one argue that the survival of genuine democracy depends on how successfully dominant groups in control of the state integrate the minorities. Due to the persistence of traditional cultural values among such state elites, combined with the perceived need for a strong state apparatus to effectuate industrialization, the capability of South Asian states to make concessions has been undermined, leading to a tendency towards state sanctioned repression of minorities. The author argues that ineffective governance in South Asia is due to the persistence of caste ideologies and ethnic ties in shaping the cultural values of state elites in South Asia--whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise, and no matter how modernistic or secularistic they appear to be in advocating the desirability of Western human fights standards