Crisis and Change in Contemporary India

India is presently seen as going through a crisis of governability. That is not the only crisis through which India has gone. When India completely went under to the British power in the nineteenth century, the first crisis that arose was that of self-esteem. Were Indians at all capable of being their own masters? What was the essence of being an Indian and how valuable was that essence? Thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to find answers to these questions. Some of them concluded that there was nothing of value in the Indian essence and propagated wholesale adoption of western values. Probably the first person who proclaimed the greatness of Indian-ness was Vivekananda.