The Argumentative Indian

William Dalrymple It’s definitely not the first book you should read on India, it’s for someone who knows the country well, but it’s a wonderfully erudite, discursive, witty, clever book. (Source)

Kaushik Basu Depending how you count, almost any nation could be portrayed as argumentative. But he uses this central theme to range over an amazing breadth of scholarship (Source)

Pankaj Mishra The book does a tremendous job of giving you a sense of the many, many layers of history, of identities, that constitute this society. (Source)

David Marquand He shows that in fact there were roots of a democratic culture in India long before the British ever got there, and that is what he means by the ‘argumentative Indian’. (Source)

Mark Tully I like this book because it argues that Indians are by their very nature deliberative, they like discussing. I like this because I think it is one of the great features of India which people in the West can learn from – that Indians don’t see things in black and white in the way that we do. They don’t take polar opposite positions in the way that we do. Instead they like to discuss and to debate. I would argue, although this isn’t absolutely spelt out in the book, that this is all about trying to find the middle way, trying to find compromise rather than having conflict. (Source)