The Billionaire Raj: A Journey through India’s New Gilded Age

by James Crabtree

English 388 pages 1 edition

Shortlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award ‘Enlightening and engaging’ AMARTYA SEN ‘Bound to become a classic’ JAGDISH BHAGWATI ‘An essential guide if you want to understand modern India’ EDWARD LUCE ‘[A] timely, fascinating and eye-opening book . . . wonderfully witty and beautifully written’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE ‘Compelling . . . vivid . . . James Crabtree has given us the most comprehensive and eminently readable tour of economic India.’ FINANCIAL TIMES A colourful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1 per cent now owns nearly 60 per cent of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population lives in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesteryear, funnelling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, James Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation – and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.