The India Narrative

SIMPLY PUT, The Age of Awakening is the story of the Indian economy since independence.

- Harsh Lambah

It is both an impressive and comprehensive treatise of this country’s economic trajectory since 1947. It looks at some of India’s most important watershed moments, policies and decisions from an economic lens.

Authors Amit Kapoor and Chirag Yadav painstakingly dissect this incredible journey of India – from humble beginnings to her metamorphosis into an emerging superpower. For linearity, the book has been compartmentalized in four segments spanning over seven decades of political and economic discourse. It flows chronologically, starting from just before India’s Independence and focuses on the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel in giving shape to the Indian economy. It then meanders into the territory of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi and their molding of the economy. Part 3 begins with Rajiv Gandhi and journeys into the rather tumultuous era of almost two decades – from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. The new millennium dawns with Part 4 and it is here that we come across the more recent architects of the Indian economy, Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and finally Narendra Modi.

The focus that the authors bring to the pre-Independence and immediate post-Independence years is very insightful. This is relevant not just from a historical perspective but because it helps define the very character of India for the subsequent many decades. Was it the right path or wrong? The authors rarely make their own judgments and leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.