Edward Luce was the New Delhi correspondent of the Financial Times from 2001 to 2005. This gave him a chance to observe India's recent rise from close quarters. He made very good use of it as this book shows. Being married to an Indian, he is also somewhat of an insider, but he has maintained a critical distance which enables him to look at India from his own perspective. The gods may wonder how Luce can be so sure about India having progressed without their help. But his intention in giving his book this title is to controvert the usual emphasis on spiritual India. It is somewhat more difficult to explain why he finds India's rise strange. Probably, it is the stark contrast between persistent poverty and surprising achievements which strikes him as strange. It is to his credit that he does justice to both the aspects.

In the first chapter, he discusses India's "schizophrenic" economy which is both "global" and "medieval". In the second chapter, he deals with the "burra sahibs", the Indian ruling elite, which is often far removed from the problems of ordinary people. But he also comes across the compassionate civil servant who does his best to improve the chances of those of whom he is in charge. Luce does not forget that among the powerful in India, there are also the underworld dons. His conversations with the sinister but courteous Arun Gawli must be mentioned in this context. In the next chapter, he looks at the lower castes whose members fight a "righteous battle" to overcome their fate. Of course, there are also clever political bosses who make use of their low caste status to good effect. Luce's encounters with Lalu Prasad Yadav illustrate this very well.

In the next two chapters, Luce turns to the two major political parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the National Congress. It is quite obvious that he does not like Hindu nationalism. The title of his chapter on the BJP is "The Imaginary Horse". This refers to the attempts of the Hindu nationalists to rewrite ancient Indian history and to assert the Aryan origin of the Indus civilization. It is well-known that the people of the Indus civilization had no horses, but if they were Aryans they are expected to have had them. This is how the "imaginary horse" appears on the scene. The National Congress is discussed by Luce in a chapter with the telling title, "Long live the Sycophants!" in which, he highlights the "dynastic" preferences of the Congress politicians. But while these chapters are full of interesting insights and valuable interviews, there is little of detailed political analysis of the changing party system of India, the rise of regional parties and the new phenomenon of coalition building under an electoral law which actually is supposed to create clear majorities, thus making coalition building unnecessary. Presumably, Luce did not want to bore his readers with such analytical details and rather highlighted interesting stories concerning political actors.

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