NO FULL STOPS IN INDIA: BOOK REVIEW

Mohammad Arsalan
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For those who want to know the ground realities of India and the way her culture and traditions are harbored by its inhabitants ‘No full stops in India’ is a must read. Mark Tully, a renowned British reporter and commentator of BBC has pinned up series of events in such a beautiful way that it paints a felicitous picture of India, his understanding of the ‘Idea of India’, its diverse and pluralistic culture makes this a compelling reading.

He has been critical of his own British people in the way they have swept in the westernized narrative of being superior and further creating an élite class in India that endorses the same. Tully accuses the same élite Indians and British for poverty, despair and jeopardy that major population of India face. He quotes renowned economist Amartya Sen who wrote, ‘It’s important to understand the élite nature of India to make sense of India’s policies’. Citing the democracy and the ruling-class culture in India he says, ‘India’s élite have never recovered from their colonial hangover, and so they have not developed the ideology, the attitudes and the institutions which would change the poor from subjects to partners in the government of India. Democracy has failed because the people the poor have elected have ruled- not represented- them. The ballot-box is only the first stage in democracy.’ He promulgates the idea of perpetuating India’s own civilization rather than making a replica of the west. Brazenly he argues that lingua-franca of English among Indians by the English is part of their cultural hegemony or imperialism. For the adaptation of English language and knowing it’s pride among Indians, Mark being a British brutally accepts the way English giggle at the Indians, he says, ‘yet the irony is that we, the British, laugh at India’s zeal for our language, and Indian accent and Indian English have long been a fruitful source of jokes.’

In ten essays Mark has projected ample of de-facto cosmos of India’s life, from Shudra’s life in Badaun district of UP to Kumbh Mela that is held after every 12 years at Allahabad. He gives case studies and first-hand account of data of how extreme liberals and feminists have caused more fundamentalism in India; he has explained that in the whole episode of ‘Deorala Sati’ incident where a teenage girl Roop Kanwar deliberately committed Sati, and how the issue was then politicized and mongered. The historic epic Ramayna’s telecast at Doordarshan and the art culture of South India is all well imbibed in the essays. ‘Operation Black Thunder’, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, tussle among the Congress party, Rajiv Gandhi as PM and his assassination, Hindu radicalization, tribal issues and their vernacular art, rise and downfall of communism in Bengal, and whatnot. The book is a whole lot of realities and perspective that India falls into.

Tully says that intellectuals in India try to find out the solutions of their problem from the west not actually realizing that much of the solutions to Indian problem lies within India. Though written in 1992, the book still holds a lot of relevance in today’s context in India. For this book ‘No full stops in India’, Kushwant Singh in Sunday magazine has commented, ‘What [Tully] has to say makes for compelling reading’. And yes the Swami rightly said in the book, ‘there is always a story behind a story in India’…’There are no full stops in India, only comas.’

Post Script: Though there are certain points of which I am critical of, the stories are impeccable.