The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India

by Achin Vanaik

Book by Vanaik, Achin

Genres: India

Hardcover

About the author

Left analyst and peace activist. Teaches at the University of Delhi on Indian domestic and foreign policy, communalism and international relations.

Reviews

[Suryashekhar Biswas · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the title says, the book is a study of bourgoeis democracy in India. Achin Vanaik covers a wide array of themes relating to bourgoeis democracy, which include the mode of production debate, the agrarian question, the condition of the working class in India, the amount of autonomy enjoyed by the Indian bourgoeisie and its historical evolution vis a vis the Indian state. There is a brief exposition over the paradigm of permanent revolution in the Indian context, which goes over the dilemmas rather than providing a simplistic and formulaic blueprint. The chapter on foreign policy is useful too.

The approach is classical Marxist, and committed to the revolutionary core of Marxism. Moreover, while holding a revolutionary Marxism framework, the author does not merely squabble over vague ideological ponderings, but surveys a dirth of empirical research and data on all the themes.

While dated and in need of at least a new edition, this is the kind of scholarship that is required of the classical Marxist left in India.

[Anyusha Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

'The Painful Transition' gives a detailed overview of internal group conflicts and dynamics. It discusses various middle class segments and their conflicts with one another. My difficulty with this analysis is that it only considers different objective variables between groups insofar as they aggravate those of another. It is a book about class conflict that claims to be about middle class development. The writing is tired and at times it is almost painful to see the great lengths the author has gone to stylistically to make the prose more engaging. There are desperately dull sentences bursting with outlandish vocabulary; it is almost as though Achin Vanaik has written this book using only the thesaurus and The Communist Manifesto for reference.

It was not a complete disaster, and certainly there are interesting points made on the industrial-agrarian divide, but for a historical account of the Indian middle class, this book is intensely disappointing.