In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the world's third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power.

In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of India's 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India's 600,000 villages. Yet amid these extremes exists the world's largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with corruption.

Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in a different sense than China. There is nothing in India like China's manufacturing capacity, despite the large potential labor force. An ineffective public education system leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Despite its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American leaders have been encouraging India's rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China's influence in Asia.

Above all, In Spite of the Gods is an enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries to balance tradition with uneven modernization. Deeply informed by scholarship and history, leavened by humor and rich in anecdote, it shows India has huge opportunities as well as tremendous challenges that make the future hers to lose.