book-reviews, books, international-affairs
Book Review : JINNAH : India-Partition Independence
JINNAH : India-Partition Independence By Jaswant Singh
Rupa and company
Pages 669, Rs. 695
As I completed the enjoyable navigation through the ponderous, pompous, and pontificatory prose of Jaswant Singh, I was reminded of three other famous writers:
Oscar Wilde:
The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Benedetto Croce:
All historiography is contemporary historiography.
Voltaire:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
To put the last quotation in context, Voltaire is said to have said this to Helvetius after his book De l’esprit was burned in 1759.That was 30 years before the French Revolution began. One wonders whether Gujarat under Narendra Modi is in a pre-Revolutionary situation.
(more…)
October 04th, 2009 | category:book-reviews, books, international-affairs |