Speculations across Millennia

India: Another Millennium? comprises quite fulcral contributions on some central themes of ‘modern’ India as also sentiment summations of the exploratory coordinates which provide the contexts for those contributions. It is indeed an important volume, not least also because, by and large, it skirts overly subtle immersions into tertiary scholarship, making its communicative apparatus to a readership that may be intelligently interested without being terminally specialised.

It is just as well to recognise at the outset that the claim, in the title, of a millennial reach is an understandable part of productive packaging; after all, any abetment that may make a good book sell is welcome. Substantively, speculations across millennia can only be abstractions, however absorbing. In Mahesh Rangarajan’s sensible words, “it still takes a brave man or woman to predict the future”. After the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union on the one end and of the ‘south-east Asian giants’ on the other, it is indeed a bad time for teleology beyond a point.