Nepal's close relationship with India is one rooted in a common South Asian cultural coin. Sylvain Lévi, in his three-volume 1904 study Le Népal: Etude historique d'un royaume Hindou, famously stated that the Nepal with which he engaged was “l'Inde qui se fait” (India as it was) ([repr., New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1990], 1:28). The modern nations that Sanjay Upadhya handles in the monograph under review reflect the differences that Lévi implies; however, whereas Lévi writes of Nepal as displaying the medieval cultural features of an India now fully enmeshed with the British Raj and the notions of modernity entailed therein, Upadhya writes of the political asymmetry between these two nations, largely the result of the absence of an imperial British presence in the Himalayan kingdom.

The author, a journalist by trade, states his intentions early on: “I hope to explain to Indian readers the roots and realities of anti-Indianism in Nepal” (p. xi). Though this anti-Indianism, or at least the perception of it on the part of the author's fellow Nepalis, is rather diffuse, the author succeeds at bringing these perceptions to the surface through, first of all, the title of the book. The Raj Lives refers to the complex British-Indian imperium that has dominated South Asian politics since the mid-eighteenth century, and the subtitle—“India in Nepal”—focuses our attention on the penetration of Indian interests into Nepal in postindependence South Asia. The author focuses squarely on politics as a means for contextualizing the nearly 250-year history of modern Nepal, as he states that it is Nepal's politics that “provides the best arena for inquiry because it is where India's influence has been most conspicuous, detrimental and untenable” (p. 2). India's influence serves largely as a counterbalance to China, Nepal's superpower neighbor to the north, and successive Nepalese governments have attempted to negotiate their own place as “a yam between two boulders,” as Prithvi Narayan Shah, the first king of modern Nepal, referred to his country (p. 4). And it is the perception that India recognizes the benefits it accrues from Nepal's status as a perpetually insecure and unstable “buffer state” that the author asserts drives and explains this Nepalese “anti-Indianism.”

Upadhya organizes his monograph historically, devoting each chapter to one historical period. Following an introductory chapter laying out the sometimes difficult relationship between India and Nepal (and China), chapter 2 handles the nearly two-century period between Prithvi Narayan Shah's conquest of the Kathmandu Valley in 1768 and Nepal's independence from the Rana regime in 1951. It was during this imperial period that the unequal relationship between India and Nepal was established, and it was the 1815 Treaty of Segauli following the Anglo-Nepali War—a war that resulted in the transfer of rich and productive agricultural border lands to British-ruled India—that set the terms of engagement for future generations. Even Nepal's supportive role in putting down the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 was insufficient to unmake this relationship, and the author asserts that the Delhi Compromise of 1950, which replaced the Treaty of Segauli, “became the symbol of the perpetuation of the Raj” (pp. 32, 44–45).

Each subsequent chapter handles a much shorter period of time, most from two to ten years each. These chapters detail the official political interactions between India and Nepal, and the author returns to the most pressing and ongoing issues in many of these chapters: security, border issues, trade and transit, and water rights and river development. The details of each of these issues, gleaned largely from publicly accessible newspapers and scholarly materials, are historically collated in an efficient manner, and the reader gets a feel for how each of these pertinent issues reflects the author's general thesis of India's conspicuous influence in Nepalese affairs.

These issues are so pertinent, in fact, that the author might have done better by organizing his monograph thematically rather than historically, though he does return to analyze these issues in the book's final two chapters. Chronologically, the final event he handles is the then-forthcoming Maoist assistance in drafting a new constitution (April 2007) (p. 211), when not only did Prachand, the Maoist leader, assist in redrafting the constitution, but his party also won the general election, and he was selected prime minister. At the time of writing this review (mid-May 2009), however, this same prime minister had suddenly resigned his office, and the specter of another “People's War” begins to loom large in Nepal. Thus, this book provides an excellent and highly readable account of the political wranglings between these two South Asian nations, and its bibliography will be of great service to historians in the field. The greater story, however, is yet to be completed.