'Fifty Year Road': A personal history of India mid-60s onwards

New Delhi: A new memoir written in the narrative history style by journalist-turned-publicist Bhaskar Roy looks at half a century in the republic's life from the mid-60s onward.

"Fifty Year Road" is about a series of upheavals that had milestoned India's contemporary history and appeared like a panorama before the author.

Roy says in the summer of 2020, distressed and homebound by the pandemic-induced lockdown, he began to look back.

"When the Naxalbari uprising led by the far-left militants in the eastern Himalayas grabbed the international headlines, I was six years old. The next big event on the calendar was the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

"That was followed by George Fernandes' historic rail strike, the Emergency, Operation Bluestar, Indira assassination, Rajiv Gandhi's push for technology, his ghastly killing by LTTE terrorists, the rise of the Hindu right, the Babri Masjid demolition, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh's stewardship of the UPA, and Narendra Modi's ascent to power," says Roy.

He says his life gets intertwined with the Indian narrative all across the book, published by Jaico.

"Where 'Fifty Year Road' stands out is in graphically reconstructing the Naxalite insurgency and the movement's deep impact on India's cultural scenario. Perhaps no other political movement, except for the Gandhian satyagraha, has prompted such an enviable volume of cultural output," Roy argues.

Among the personalities portrayed in the book are: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Rajiv Gandhi, Jyoti Basu, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Charu Majumdar, N. T. Rama Rao, G. K. Moopanar, Manmohan Singh, L. K. Advani, Brajesh Mishra, V. P. Singh, Madhavrao Scindia, Sonia Gandhi, Amitabh Bachchan, and Narendra Modi.

British novelist and playwright Paul Pickering has written the foreword to the book.

Pickering says Roy's book is "so refreshing because he looks at the events after Independence in his own life, his intimate family relationships, that map out a strange and bewitching world that is not chained to the past, but in which that past jumps through the future on every page".

He says in "Fifty Year Road", it is a passionate and an often-violent enthusiasm and individualism that shine through and place India at the centre of the region and the globe.

"What Bhaskar Roy writes about in a brilliantly attractive and involving way is not just the end of colonialism but a tectonic shift in world power," Pickering writes.