The Dismantling Of India

In October 1947, two months after Independence, TJS George arrived in Bombay. He was nineteen years old, with a degree in English Literature. He sent out job applications––to the Air Force and to the city’s English-language newspapers. Only one organization cared to reply, The Free Press Journal. The editor was known to hire anyone who asked for a job, but most new hires were sacked in a fortnight. George was put on the news desk as a sub-editor and eventually became an assistant editor. In Patna, as editor of The Searchlight, he was arrested by the chief minister for sedition. He spent three weeks in Hazaribagh Central Jail. In Hong Kong, he worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review as regional editor; in New York he was a writer for the United Nations population division; and, back in Hong Kong, in 1975, he founded Asiaweek. Six years later, he returned to India and settled in Bangalore. He began a column for Indian Express that ran without a break for twenty-five years, until 2022. His seventy-five years of journalism, concurrent with India’s development as an independent nation, make for a unique understanding of events and personalities. Acclaimed for his widely historical, pan-Asian vision, George brings this far-flung experience to a compulsively readable new book, The Dismantling of India. It is the story of India told in 35 concise biographies, beginning with Jamsetji Tata and ending with Narendra Modi.