Review of The New World: 21st-Century Global Order and India by Ram Madhav (Rupa, 2025)
It will attract neither alarm nor significant pleasure if one were to call Ram Madhav’s new book, The New World, a muscular and nationally-inflected tract that aspires to be a map and a manifesto. It has a lucid vision of today’s cartography of power; it does not dwell on ambivalence or ethical nuances; it reads history as theatre; and it tends to solicit readers to accept geopolitical prudence as a moral substitute for new political imaginations. This much is neither a dismissal or avowal of the book. It is merely this reader’s impression distilled in a capsule.
Madhav presents his book as a survey of the decline of the post-1945 liberal order. This, then, underpins his putative map of the contours of an emergent, multipolar global system. He asks explicitly what new political architecture will suit India’s interests in a world that has ceased to orbit Western leadership—according to Madhav. The author makes no secret of his partisan position as a veteran of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bhartiya Janata Party, as well as the head of a prominent New Delhi think-tank. His book makes no secret, either, of its panoramic ambitions. He attempts to play a Thomist to geopolitics and diagnose the nature of the rise of multipolar states and coalitions. What emerges is a potpourri of diplomatic history and a series of prescriptive theses about what India’s posture ought to be within the zeitgeist of unpredictable geostrategic alignments. The New World’s sweep is broad; even longue durée. It is at pains to remind that world orders are made by institutional legitimacy and the narratives that sustain them. Madhav’s style is economical—as is true of many of his ideological colleagues. It is often didactic prose and prizes clarity over lyricality. Had this been a novel, a literary critic might have termed its style as geopolitical realism.
More than a review of the book, this is an opinion on the larger ideological framing within which the book is not only intended to perform but is most likely to be seen; Madhav’s affiliation to the ‘right’ in India—and all the appendages that come with that political affiliation—will weigh on the reader’s mind while they judge the book by its cover, so to speak. However, what is most interesting for political theorists—though this reviewer is surely not one such—is that Madhav situates contemporary power fluxes within a historical flow of imperial decline, post-war institution-building, third-world situatedness, and the renewed salience of geography and demography. This, and his foci on diplomatic groupings, multipolar economic corridors, Global-South-reconfigurations, and regional institutions for India’s resurgence, strike this reviewer as a bottom-up view of the world. Will one still call these ideas the product of a right-wing—in the academic senses of the term—remains a question that this reader continues to grapple with. Some parts of Madhav’s book can give the impression that the moral authority of multilateralism and legitimacy of the West as passe, besides viewing the domestic politics of emerging nation-states as structural outcomes of contestations. Is there a Marxist theoretician lurking in the logic here? By contrast, Madhav frames Sino-American competition as a set of overlapping spheres rather than in binary terms—which is one of the most nuanced views in the book, is far as this reader could gauge.
Madhav moves rapidly from early human social forms through the Industrial Revolution of 1760–1840 to the era of modern imperial expansion, “The Era of Colonization,” the technological transformations of the industrial age, “The rise of North America,” into the political realignments of the twentieth century. The extension of European power overseas and the way nineteenth-century transformations set the conditions for twentieth-century global politics chart the passage of the United States from isolation to global engagement at the heart of the new order. Non-Western actors are not accorded the same agency in this history, which is more titled towards institutional and diplomatic landmarks over social history or the lived experiences of colonial populations. But it is perhaps not Madhav’s intention to be analytically thick. Rather, he intends to underscore macro-institutions and canonical diplomatic events. This top-down view can seem to be at odds with the articulation of his prescriptive vision for twenty-first-century India.
In the catalogue of recent works attempting to narrate the end of one global order and the inauguration of another, The New World stakes a clear claim. And that is, India cannot afford to be a passive passenger of history. As long as one is not worried to see complexity occasionally flattened into policy prescriptions, and read this book as a strategic document, it is beyond useful; it is earnest and unsentimental about the nature of the theatre in which nations now perform; and this book promises one plausible script for the twenty-first century.
Books like The New World cannot be assessed through prisms of literary criticism, historical methodology, and perhaps even political theory—though this is not to undermine either the book or its prospective commentators. On the contrary, Madhav’s diagnostics demands time as its sole yardstick. It is time, alone, that can reveal whether India is able to build and project smart power (combining hard and soft powers); consolidate defense assets and mobilization towards the promotion of ‘Brand Bharat’; sustain high economic growth alongside investing in technology, education, and healthcare; establish a formidable presence in the Indian Ocean regions and steer the Global South’s aspirations; attune its civilizational vocabulary with corresponding policy shifts; and partner in global institutions and lead multilateral blocs, despite the nation’s critical stance towards platforms affiliated to the United Nations in the recent past.
In order to evaluate Madhav’s book against the vantage of time, it is a must-have possession. Simultaneously, the citizen also ought to focus on reducing the chasm between the rich and the poor, and foster critical-thinking abilities at large. This reviewer has had much to learn and ponder about, in the process of reading this book, and it is certain you will, too.
Arup K. Chatterjee 