Lineages of the Present

In March 1998, India broke a quarter-century's silence when it detonated a series of nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Having announced it possessed the credentials for membership in the nuclear club in 1974, India quickly disavowed any desire to join, pledging not to develop its capability f [...]
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In March 1998, India broke a quarter-century's silence when it detonated a series of nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Having announced it possessed the credentials for membership in the nuclear club in 1974, India quickly disavowed any desire to join, pledging not to develop its capability further. The Pokhran explosions revealed that promise to have been broken. The principal beneficiary of its breaking was a right-wing government seeking to shore up its shaky base with commitment to the "Hindu bomb." While most in the West were taken unawares by this sudden bellicosity in the land of Gandhi, more scrupulous observers on the Indian scene insisted it had a clear history. In this, his first book since the hotly debated In Theory, Aijaz Ahmad untangles many of the intertwined threads of historical and political traditions in a still-too-poorly-understood region of the world.