History As Myth Myth As History, Hindustan Times

In the early years of this century, people—within and outside India—began speaking of our country emerging as a ‘knowledge superpower’. The proximate reason for this was the country’s then rising software industry.

As that sturdy bellwether of the conventional wisdom, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, wrote in 2005, India, once ‘known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa’, was being ‘recalibrated’ as ‘a country of brainy people and computer wizards’. This ‘recali...