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Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India. By Nico Slate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. 372 pp. ISBN: 9780674983441 (cloth).
There is simply no paucity of literature on Indo-US relations. Indian and American diplomatic historians, political scientists, and former policymakers have written quite extensively on the subject. More to the point, with the recent (if partial) opening of India's diplomatic archives, a number of younger scholars have made extensive and adroit use of them to very good effect. However, few if any scholarly efforts have been devoted to a comparison of the evolution of democracy in the two countries.
Nico Slate's book Lord Cornwallis Is Dead ably and imaginatively addresses that lacuna in the extant literature. The book eschews a conventional historical narrative and instead focuses on particular themes and subjects while not entirely losing sight of particular historical epochs. It also draws extensively on memoirs, novels, travelogues, and archives to show how the two countries have struggled to live up to their constitutional ideals. Furthermore, Slate spells out in a most intriguing and novel manner how the two nations have deeply intertwined histories despite the temporal gulf that separates their attainment of independence from the United Kingdom.
Long before India's independence, Slate demonstrates, ideational, material, and diplomatic ties had brought these two disparate states together in utterly intriguing and unexpected ways. He shows, for example, that even the term “Indian” was fraught with extraordinary significance in the nineteenth...