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India Waits

Jan Myrdal

Jan Myrdal, the son of Nobel Laureates Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, has become widely regarded as Sweden's most important writer and intellectual, with a national importance possible only in a country like Sweden. When he had a heart attack a few years ago, the largest daily newspaper, a sensational tabloid, Expressen, had its front page completely filled with a headline about it. On his 60th birthday cabinet ministers, labor leaders, religious leaders as well as writers and artists came to his door with gifts (he lives two hours from Stockholm).

In this country,  he is known mainly for his writing about China (Harrison Salisbury called Report from a Chinese Village a social classic) and Confessions of a Disloyal European, which the NY Times Book Review chose as "one of ten books of particular excellence and significance in 1968" in its Christmas book issue. But in Sweden he is the author of over 60 volumes of political commentary, art and literary criticism, history, novels, autobiography, poetry and plays, and has also curated exhibitions and regularly does documentaries  for Swedish TV (recently a 13 part series on the history of political and social caricature, also printed as a coffee table book). Most recent volumes in Sweden are his collected art criticism and a huge art book "Five Years of Freedom," on a period in the 1830s when there was press freedom in France. Myrdal also curated an exhibition on the subject and was recently awarded the coveted honor, Chevalier des arts et des lettres, by the French government.

Coming to terms with the third world has been a continuing concern of Jan Myrdal's books since the publication of Report from a Chinese Village, which Harrison Salisbury has called "a social classic."

India Waits is an impassioned view of today's India—its complex origins and future prospects. It was written over a period of twenty years in which the author returned many times to the same places, the same people and the same questions.

Myrdal visits the poorest villages and the largest cities, stays in a peasant guerilla camp and visits a model capitalist town. His talks with peasants and politicians, revolutionaries and capitalists show an India which will be strange and often shocking to readers accustomed to viewing India through British eyes.

Myrdal confronts Western distortions of Indian culture and history; as he traces them back to the first encounters of East and West, both are revealed in the process. Here the people of India are encountered with an excitement of discovery made possible only by the greatest respect.

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A limited number of copies available.

0-941702-06-5 cloth $35.00

0-941702-07-3 paper $20.00

 

 
 

 

"Jan Myrdal...is always worth reading because in his anger and bitterness there lurks real tragedy. India Waits is pure Myrdal. I disagree violently with much of what he says but I am glad he has written."
   —Harrison Salisbury

"Jan Myrdal is one of the dominant figures in contemporary Swedish culture..."
   —Janet Mawby, Writers & Politics in Modern Scandinavia

"The author of the controversial Report from a Chinese Village delivers a caustic and impassioned indictment of the economic, social and political inequities threatening to tear apart contemporary India...The abuses are known to all...But with poker-hot prose, Myrdal makes us feel each horror anew, impressing through the force of his writing his conviction in the unacceptability of hunger, poverty, and racism."
   —Kirkus Reviews

"Many good books have been written on India. But no one offers such a convincing synthesis of the political and cultural dimensions of its modern history. Beyond the usual political analysis, this book offers the deepest insights into Indian society and finally explains the reasons for which India failed to find its own way out of underdevelopment."
   —Samir Amin, Author, Unequal Development

"India Waits is a most disturbing book, written by the son of the Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva, who was Swedish Amabassador in Delhi, and illustrated by Jan's wife Gun...a blasting indictment of our administration, our leaders, our police, our jails, corruption, poverty and our helplessness to do anything about them. They see 'darkness in every home, tears in every eye.' They ask, 'To whom does power belong? To whom happiness? For whom is the land milked? So that some starve while others reap bounty?'"
   —Khushwant Singh, Editor, Hindustan Times; Author, History of the Sikhs

"Few foreigners have written about India with a similar combination of intimacy, outrage and optimism...This is a nasty, gutsy, angry book. Yet, a deep respect for India's history and an abiding concern for its peoples shines through these journals of Myrdal's and his wife's extended and involved journeys through that stricken and promising land."
   —Eqbal Ahmad

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