It’s now 20 years: Reforms Vicenary: 1991-2011

It’s now 20 years—a generational epoch—since the 1991 economic reforms that have helped spur the fastest economic growth in our country’s history, and that have embedded us in an ever-more-complicated world. That 1991 also brought another pivot point, the fall of the Soviet Union, and seemed to signal a profound global switch: the victory of market capitalism and liberal democracy. But 20 years later, the meaning of 1991 looks more blurry.

Authoritarian China controls the world’s most dynamic economy, while the beacon of liberal democracy—the United States—finds its legitimacy chastened and its economic momentum checked, with no clear idea of how to renew that impetus. The neoliberal dream embodied in the ‘Washington Consensus’ has evaporated and, while China increasingly asserts itself as a powerful sovereign actor, the idea that there could emerge an attractive model that is styled around a ‘Beijing Consensus’ seems delusive.

Where, in this transformed, undecided world does India—itself changing profoundly, and ambivalent about its options and desires—stand? How is economic expansion altering our own society—and our place in the world? What is India’s post-liberalisation story, and how does it fit both with our own account of what we wish to be, and with a new global story?

We have now an entire post-1991 generation of adult Indians for whom the ambiguities of coalition politics, a volatile Hindu nationalism and intense caste politics are simply parts of the landscape—as are the market economy, dynamic growth rates, traffic hell and the electronic media. They have been reared in the age of economics. If in the 20th century India’s search was for political freedom, today most Indians are in search of wealth—and power.

Yet, in that search for wealth, it’s worth remembering that economic advantages are not always best achieved by economistic means. Achieving them requires a more complex view of human beings, and of the world, than the dismal science can ever allow. The greatest economists are not the whizkid ‘quants’ trying to model and predict the future in numerical terms. The greatest have been those—Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes—with insight into human psychology and how the nature of uncertainty itself shapes human actions. Keynes, in 1937, wrote: “We assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than a candid examination of past experience would show it to have been hitherto. In other words we largely ignore the prospect of future changes about the actual character of which we know nothing.”

As Indians seek now to expand and consolidate the opportunities opened by the reforms of 1991, we need more than ever to think systematically about such uncertainties. Republics that endure and prosper are those that balance optimism about the future with a sense of the threats that may spring.

In our exuberance, we forget we cannot stay insulated from a dysfunctional neighbourhood.

“India is firmly on the growth expressway,” Goldman Sachs declared a few years ago, but the future is seldom reached by a through-route, nor can we foresee it in an economist’s graph or forecast. And only in the rhetoric of politicians do we reach out to grasp the future—more often, it hits us in the face, from unnoticed angles and with unexpected force. “The paradigmatic moment of political awareness”, the political theorist John Dunn reminds us, is Julius Caesar’s greeting his least-expected assassin, “Et tu Brute?”

It is clear that structurally, the fundamentals are now aligned to sustain India’s economic expansion. The country’s demographics, its levels of savings and investment, and its entrepreneurial talents could indeed enable significant growth to continue for another generation and more.

But the world consists not just of structures and trends—it is made up also of agency, and of actors. And how we cope with our own actions and their unforeseen results, as well as the often unpredictable actions of others, will be decisive for whether India’s economic potential is realised or squandered.

Twenty years on, the most important legacy of 1991 is that it has given us real choices to make, for better or worse. In making those choices—political judgements—two facts are crucial. The first is that we now have a very limited window of opportunity during which to get things right with respect to our productive capacities and competitive abilities—five years at most, perhaps ten. The second is that the decisions we take will have long-term effects, and will set us on paths that will be hard to alter. In that sense, the real turning point in our economic prospects will lie just ahead—and not back in 1991.

One of the most striking transformations since 1991 has been in our psychological outlook. Changes in the material world produced by economic growth—directly or vicariously experienced—have sparked extraordinary optimism about the future. Whether measured by levels of the stockmarket, investment, policy forecasts, it’s an optimism that seems insulated against political uncertainties, terrorism and the corruption that marks so much of what passes for everyday life in India.

Similar optimism pervades popular views. In 2009, when the effects of the financial crisis were cascading across the world, the Pew Global Attitudes group surveyed opinion in G-20 countries and found Indians to be the most positive in their attitudes towards market capitalism. Ninety-one per cent of Indians could describe their economic situation as good; 96 per cent were positive about trade with other countries; and 81 per cent agreed that people were better off in a market economy despite the inequalities. Such survey figures often do demand a dose of salt—but still they indicate the enthusiasm of the new convert, for whom the tests of experience lie ahead.

It used to be said that Indians didn’t bother to pursue wealth because of their belief in karma, a fatalistic determinism that held back economic development. Now, as we hear repeatedly—whether it is from caste groups or from national leaders—that “our turn has come”, there’s equally the danger of an inverted complacency: a deterministic faith in our upward economic surge. There is no way of knowing how history works, but it certainly does not work like a game of musical chairs.

The new optimism that fills young India is undoubtedly a good thing. Economic growth, despite being uneven (in fact, precisely when uneven), does have the initial psychological effect of encouraging hope and optimism. This in turn shapes behaviour. People may become initially less risk-averse, more willing to borrow, to invest—and to believe in the future. But setbacks can have equally powerful reverse effects. Think of Japan: once the paragon of consumerism, today shops there implore people, not very successfully, to buy.

It would be a mistake to imagine our future on the basis of extrapolating economic trend numbers. The core problems we face—questions of social justice, of ecology and natural resources, social conflict, an insecure neighbourhood—are not merely external constraints on our search for wealth, matters to be addressed in due course. They will have to be tackled all at once, and this will often generate contradictory choices. But working to sustain multiple commitments, often in tension with one another, is a lesson our founders taught us.

Three tensions—domestic, international and global—are intrinsic to our economic possibilities and will frame the choices we make.

We should by now be well aware of the accumulating domestic strains accentuated by our post-1991 growth pattern—a pattern economic analysts like Michael Walton have called ‘disequalising’. It results in fantastic over-concentrations of wealth, ‘Antilian’ islands teetering above impoverished oceans. Walton notes that the private wealth of India’s billionaires has surged dramatically in recent years (from less than one per cent of GDP in 1997 to a peak of over 23 per cent in 2008), and as a share of GDP, it’s now close to that of Russia and Saudi Arabia, even while India’s level of per capita income is much lower than in those countries—and it is a democracy.

The rich, we have learned to recognise, are a necessary public good for every society. But there are also times one has to ask the question: What exactly is the social utility of such levels of wealth concentration?

Precisely because we are a democracy, there will be pressures for redistribution. Yet, unsurprisingly, these have been couched in terms that seek preferential treatment for groups defined by social identities—which, in many cases, do indeed correlate with deprivation. But the correlations are increasingly contentious, not least because identifying them calls for a fair number of discretionary judgements—and the disputes as well as the attempts to smooth them over (“Let’s extend quotas”) run the risk of jamming our economic progress. We need to move away from notions of social justice based on redistribution, and towards an Indian social democracy based on expanding participation and giving the citizenry universal access to the dynamic parts of the economy.

That can only be done by a steroidal enhancement of our human capital. Spreading education and improving skills have to be the one central task to which we commit, now, our accumulating wealth. Azim Premji’s judgement about where to invest his wealth is exactly right—and it will need many more to clamber off their Antilias and Anandams and follow his example, as well as more sensible government efforts, if we are going to scale up to the levels we need.

Twenty years on, it’s time to broaden attention from economic liberalisation, toward achieving knowledge and skill liberalisation—so that Indians can participate in the growth economy. Rapid experiment and innovation will be needed as we search for effective ways to educate and train millions of Indians in quick march. We are talking, in effect, about an educational revolution: revolutionary in methods, scope, speed—above all, in will.

We have so far relied on 19th century models of education. It cries out for radical change.

Government will have to open up space for new ideas and approaches to building India’s human capital. Until now, we have relied on models developed in the 19th century—elite institutions and universities, supposedly fed by schools and colleges lower down the food chain—and on the amazing autodidactic capacities of Indians. Given the magnitude of the problem—one million Indians entering the workforce every month for the next 20 years—neither self-help nor lumbering governmental institutions can offer a strategy to educate citizens and make them socially mobile.

Lines of tension also loom in the international domain, in both our regional neighbourhood and the international economy.

Since 1991, the paths and prospects of India and Pakistan have dramatically diverged: if it is optimism that prevails in India, in Pakistan the dominant sentiments are resentment, victimhood and despair. Pakistan’s problems are severe. The country’s population is rapidly expanding, and it will likely be the world’s third most populous country by 2050. It has dismal social and human indicators, and its rate of growth is declining. Combined with the predicament of Afghanistan and the brittle veneer of order in Burma, the dysfunctionalities of our immediate region will hold back India’s progress: distracting attention and resources, extracting opportunity costs and hindering the economic integration of the subcontinent. The crises of these societies are deep; we are in no position to intervene to try to resolve them. Yet, neither will we be able to keep out. It will need considerable political skill to manage our economic development in this geopolitical terrain.

Beginning in 1991, we embraced an economic model based on the liberal premise of benign global integration—which for many years the western economies pressed on India. Yet, in today’s world of structural imbalances, the developed economies grow ambivalent about the liberal premise. They sense a threat in Asian economic growth—yet, also for their own purposes, need the economies of China and India to grow. The western economies, struggling to cope with the effects of trade imbalances, are likely to meander between efforts to protect their acquired gains, to intervene in and seek to regulate markets, and to push for greater access to growing markets.

The leaders of western economies recognise that India can be one of the main drivers of global economic growth. But, the more India succeeds in integrating, the more it may face pushback, as its growth collides with a sense in western economies that this threatens their prosperity. Already among western electorates there is a popular reaction against open markets—and their governments will be compelled to be more politically active in the management of their economies.

India, for its part, needs to be careful and shrewdly strategic as it deals both with global markets and competitor states. The fact that India appears frequently now on the business pages of the New York Times and in the Financial Times is driven by western self-interest in India’s growth. This is perfectly reasonable. India’s likely demands for consumer goods, for major infrastructure projects and for defence wares—makes it the last great economic frontier. Given India’s scale, if it maintains its current growth rates and profile, that will be sufficient to keep western economies in business. The latter only really need the revenue-rich Indian state—the buyer of armaments, and of major infrastructure— and a relatively small part of India’s society, the part that can hang out at DLF Emporio in Delhi or the Palladium in Lower Parel, Mumbai, to provide the necessary markets.

NREGA is fine, but when will we address the problems that made it necessary in the first place?

But is that the sort of growth we should be interested in? The standard leftist response, of course, is to abhor with full moral fervour any growth linked to the global economy—while remaining unable to offer a viable account of how to improve the lives of the majority of Indians. A more intelligent response, though one requiring greater political skill, is to figure how to leverage the current western interest in Indian growth to the advantage of those parts of the society that really need to benefit.

The third paradox is a truly global one—one that escapes and encompasses state boundaries. India’s post-1991 globalisation has not only increasingly connected it to international flows of goods, services, capital and ideas, it has also inserted India into a universal history of nature, a history in which all humans, whatever state they happen to live in, have a stake. It’s a history that is making humans, even as they have imagined themselves nature’s master, become its ever more abject supplicant.

For Indians, this has a particularly sharp edge, because, just when they feel that they are gaining some control over their material conditions, those material conditions are proving unsustainable in ecological terms. The growth pattern we’ve fallen into essentially replicates the high natural resource and energy use that the earlier growth economies followed. But for latecomers, it’s unlikely to be a repeatable ploy—especially not for an economy of India’s scale. What should India do? The answers remain in dispute. Alter growth models; trust in the market; or place hope in technical solutions. Frugality, price, science—individually, none seems adequate, but perhaps there is a winning combination.

Crisis prompted the economic reforms of 1991. It’s ironic, then, that the most recent global economic crisis has produced virtually no further reforms or policy ambition—at a time when much remains to be done. The one significant initiative in social and economic policy in recent years, NREGA, is an attempt to mitigate the failures of the Indian agrarian economy. The real question to ask is not whether NREGA is working or not, but: When are we going to address the causes which made NREGA necessary in the first place? There will be more crises and surprises ahead—and we’ll need to make better use of them, as we did in 1991.

{ Sunil Khilnani in Outlook | Magazine | Jan 10, 2011}

The Wall of Modern India: Ramchandra Guha

In Makers of Modern India, the historian Ramachandra Guha presents excerpts from the speeches and writings of 19 men and women – beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy – whose ideas influenced the formation of the Indian republic. Sharing space with iconic figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar are lesser-known thinkers such as the 19th century feminist Tarabai Shinde.

The author of a powerful tract comparing the situations of men and women, and the liberal Muslim writer Hamid Dalwai, who encouraged social reform and modernism within his community. A conversation with Guha:

Q. How, for the purposes of this book, did you define "modern India"? What criteria did you use while selecting these thinkers? 
A. "Modernity" here is defined in terms of the challenge posed to the culture and civilisation of the subcontinent by a more technologically dynamic and aggressive civilisation – which is what happened when the East India Company came in. These challenges provided a wake-up call, which was accepted by Raja Rammohan Roy. I call him "The First Liberal" because he confronted head-on this encounter with another civilisation.

There were several criteria for choosing these thinkers: the originality of their ideas, the quality of their writing, and whether their ideas travelled across the centuries. Some people – such as Aurobindo or Vivekanand – are excluded partly because of the archaic nature of their prose, which hasn't travelled well. But when Roy talks in the 1820s about the freedom of the press, you can still see the relevance of what he's saying.

Also, they had to be thinkers AND doers. I didn't take pure intellectuals and I didn't take pure practising politicians. Indira Gandhi, for example, didn't write much, unlike her father.

Q. The disagreements between these thinkers make for fascinating reading – there are differences of opinion that range from the respectful arguments between Tagore and Gandhi to the outright hostility that Ambedkar shows towards Gandhi, to the complex relationship between Nehru and Rajagopalachari. What conflict do you find most illuminating in terms of how it pits one idea of India against another? 
A. I wouldn't want to pick just one. I think there are a series of very interesting conflicts, starting with Bal Gangadhar Tilak (who I designate "the militant nationalist") vs Gopal Krishna Gokhale ("the liberal reformer"). The book is constructed as a series of arguments and debates, which are part of any political tradition. These are debates about principles, and sometimes they can have a sharp edge. For example, Ambedkar is quite bitter about Gandhi personally. But the substance is about the origins of the caste system, the structural inequalities and how one can remove them. Gandhi's perspective was that the upper-caste Hindus should purify themselves, while Ambedkar said no, the lower castes should assert their self-respect. These are two different routes to the emancipation of the Dalits, and that's what makes it so interesting.

In a sense, this is a multi-vocal book, about multiple legacies. It's not a prescriptive book at all. One can sympathise with Gandhi, or with Ambedkar. There's a brilliant polemic by Rammanohar Lohia against the English language, while there's an equally vigorous argument by Rajagopalachari in its favour.

Q. In Part III ("Nurturing the Nation"), you have a selection of Gandhi's writings on various subjects, followed by the views of his adversaries like Jinnah and Ambedkar. Then in the final chapter you return to Gandhi, who revisits or clarifies his position while answering his critics. Why this unusual structure? 
A. Gandhi was the fulcrum around which these debates arose, and though he's developed a reputation for rigidity, what's always struck me is his open-mindedness – his ability and willingness to revisit certain positions he took, to modify them. When I was doing this section, I thought this would be a nice way of showing that side of the man.

Having said that, he was certainly not above a bit of sarcasm or point-scoring in certain situations. At one point, when he mentions Ambedkar publishing a speech at his own expense, he says, "Dr Ambedkar has priced the pamphlet at 1 rupee. It would be better if he had priced it at 8 annas – then it would have reached a wider public." A completely gratuitous piece of advice!

Q. The excerpt from Tarabai Shinde's book about the suppression of women in Maharashtra is such a raw, angry, sarcastic piece of writing – truly remarkable for its time. Why is she not better known?
A. I was fortunate that Shinde has been very skilfully translated, by Rosalind O'Hanlon. The whole pamphlet was a goldmine for scholars, but the bits I excerpted were the ones that would appeal to a reader who isn't an expert on Maharashtra but is interested in the history of India or in literary craftsmanship more generally. One shouldn't get the impression from my book that everything these thinkers wrote was brilliant or incisive; often there was bombast and meandering. These excerpts might give a slightly exaggerated picture of the quality of their writing. I had to cull out the irrelevant stuff.

Q. You've also included excerpts from Nehru's more obscure writings – his letters to chief ministers. Are efforts underway to make his less-known, post-Independence writings more accessible? 
A. For Nehru, it would require a detached eye – it can't be done by an official historian or a paid-up devotee of the Gandhi-Nehru family. The writings would have to show some of the ways in which he was wrong, and locate him in his time. Unfortunately, it's only darbari, courtly historians who are allowed access to Nehru.

But Nehru aside, I hope some young scholar does a good one-volume anthology of Rajagopalachari's political writings. Or Lohia's political writings. In this book they are represented in only 30-40 pages.

Q. You include the RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar, who stridently called for a "Hindu Rashtra". What legacy justifies his inclusion in a book full of nuanced thinkers?  
A. Golwalkar presented a very influential philosophy in very direct and clear terms. I had to have someone who expressed the Hindu political philosophy – the point of view that Hindu ideas and thought are the bedrock of Indian civilisation and should continue to be so. Veer Savarkar may have been more intellectually sophisticated, but Golwalkar had a much bigger impact, in terms of the RSS and the BJP: Advani, Vajpayee and others were trained by him. His ideology, his ideas about statecraft, our attitude towards the West, and the relationship between religions, had a profound impact on one of India's major political movements. So even if I personally didn't like him, he had to be there – he had helped shape modern India.

Q. You end the book with a very intriguing figure, the Muslim liberal Hamid Dalwai, who is relatively obscure even though he lived recently. What makes him so significant?  
A. I discovered Dalwai in the mid-1990s. I bought his book Muslim Politics in Secular India, became fascinated by it, and talked about him with his friend and translator Dilip Chitre. I quoted from his work in a newspaper article around 10 years ago, and that got my Muslim friends very angry because they couldn't stomach his radicalism. As you know, these things become very black and white. A Hindu can't say Muslims must reform themselves, even if he's already been telling Hindus to be less bigoted – someone like me, for instance, whose views on Hindutva are well known (chuckles).

But Dalwai's real significance struck me in the post-9/11 global world, and given the crisis Islam is facing now. He speaks to that issue. He and Rammohan Roy are complementary figures, because both were fighting the prevalent orthodoxy of their time – Rammohan Roy was as much of a heretical Hindu for his time as Dalwai was a heretical Muslim in his. But Roy lived into his 60s and became well-know, whereas Dalwai died in his early 40s.

Q. If you had to pick one person to make this a round number – 20 – who would it be? 
A. It's interesting you ask this, because just this morning it struck me that there was one person I should have included. He represented a very influential and important point of view, and he was very eloquent: I'm talking about the engineer M. Visvesvaraya, a technological modernist who wrote a famous book Industrialise or Perish. He was an outward-looking, rational person who was famous for building a steel dam in Karnataka, much before Nehru. He anticipated the model we have now, with technology transforming society, and he also anticipates Nehru, J.R.D. Tata, Narayana Murthy in different ways. He would have made a fitting twentieth.

{By- Jai Arjun Singh, 7th Nov 2010, The Sunday Guardian.}

Liberating perspective :Leela Gandhi

From the last word..

IN his introduction to the recently published The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri insists that "this anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology". But riposte it is. The thoughtful, if often provocative, organisation and presentation of modern Indian writing in this volume comes as a timely rejoinder to prevailing literary orthodoxies, held in place by a pantheon of postcolonial critics, commentators, editors and anthologisers. According to Chaudhuri, the current critical consensus on Indian literature is constrained by a series of lamentable "misreadings". 

Such misreadings are visible in, for example, the privileging of Indian-English writing over its vernacular counterparts; the valorisation of the novel form with its new found respectability (akin, Chaudhuri maintains, to dentistry) over other genres, specifically poetry; and, finally, in the unthinking celebration of postmodern pastiche over the quieter, and possibly more profound, pleasures of realism. This position, readers may recall, stands in stark contrast to the one assumed by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West in their controversial, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997.

Where Rushdie and West informed their international audience that English "India novels" constituted a "more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 'official languages' of India", Chaudhuri, irascibly, begs to differ. How, he asks, would the "West" react, if , in the event of some unanticipated bibliographic disaster, all of Britain's modern and ancient cultures disappeared from view, leaving the rest of the world to judge English literature on the basis of a few paltry contemporary novels? What if Julian Barnes, Angela Carter and Martin Amis, alone, were entrusted with the literary labour of bringing England out of an apparent age of obscurity? An absurd prospect, but no more so than the situation where, "Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England and America and whom one might have met at a party, most of whom have published no more than two novels, some of them only one".

Why, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature seems to ask, should Europe alone claim the privilege of representing itself as a whole culture? And, even more important, why should the Indian reader/writer collude in the arbitrary fracturing of her complex and confluent literary inheritance? Once, writing in the wake of the barbarisation and ghettoisation of culture perpetrated by Nazism in Europe, the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, extolled, as politically expedient, a composite view of European literature. Faced with the regional, cultural and religious divisiveness of the time, the critic, he believed, was ethically obliged to show the presence of "Homer in Virgil, Virgil in Dante, Plutarch and Seneca in Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen ... the Odyssey in Joyce; Aeschylus, Petronious, Dante ... Spanish mysticism in T. S. Eliot". Albeit on a lesser scale, the anthology under review is driven by similar convictions.

Refusing to indulge the false (and damaging) linguistic hierarchies so apparent in the Rushdie and West anthology, this volume draws our attention, anew, to the symbiotic development of vernacular and English literatures in modern India. If colonial education led directly to the rise of English in this country, it also provoked a concurrent efflorescence within the vernacular languages. So much so, that "many of the greatest and most interesting writers in the vernacular languages were or are students or teachers of English literature". The immediate benefit of this liberating perspective is that it opens up the very culture of Indian secular modernity to a vertiginous variety of voices and views. If the epochal publication of Midnight's Children conferred on modern Indian history, "the air of a fancy dress party ... full of chatter, music, sex, tomfoolery, free drinks and rock and roll", the diverse writers gathered in this collection complicate that vision. For the crisis of modernity also speaks its name, poignantly and eloquently, in Michael Madhusudan Dutt's self-divided cosmopolitanism, in Nirmal Verma's stark European landscapes, in O. V. Vijayan's mystical atheism, and in the Oriya memoirist Fakir Mohan Senapati's struggle against the hegemony of Bengali.

Aspects of this anthology may well alienate some readers. The editorial headnotes are chatty to a fault, and the selections themselves are fairly idiosyncratic. Bengal is predictably pre- eminent, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu literatures are clumped together under a featureless "The South", and there is something puzzling about the omission of Maharashtra from a volume devoted to the representation of Indian secular modernity. So too, one is not always persuaded by Chaudhuri's protestations about the very literary fashions of which he is, in some ways, a direct beneficiary as a new-Indian-writer-in-English. Nonetheless, the clarity of editorial purpose and the elegance of most translations are exemplary, and invite us to welcome The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature as a major literary event.

(Leela gandhi is Co-Editor of Post-Colonial Studies and teaches English at the School of English, La Trope University, Australia.) 

{As on the Online Edition of 'The Hindu', Sunday, August 19, 2001}

Indian experiment of making nation: Ramachandra Guha

New Delhi: The well-regarded and influential writer and historian Ramachandra Guha is not the author of his newest book, Makers of Modern India. Instead, he has selected and compiled the writings of 19 Indians who he feels played a formative and pivotal role in the shaping of modern India over the last two centuries. In an interview Guha explains his choices.

Edited excerpts:

Some names in your list are very familiar while others are virtually unknown. What selection criteria did you follow?

I chose people who were active in politics and social reform, but at the same time left behind a significant corpus of writing. That is to say, those who were both thinkers and doers. Which is why, for example, Sardar Patel is not in the list—he didn’t leave behind books or essays of any substance or depth. Nor did I want pure writers. So, they had to bridge the barrier between thought and action. Then, they had to speak to their time as well as ours. Even among the famous figures, I have highlighted their less-known works. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote three celebrated books before Independence, but since I was interested in Nehru the state maker, I focused on his fortnightly letters to chief ministers, which deal with minority rights, foreign policy, economic planning, etc. Similarly, we are familiar with the writings of B.R. Ambedkar on the caste system, but not with his profound meditations on democracy and constitutionalism.

Is it fair to say that Gandhi is the most influential person in this list?

It is for the reader to decide which of these 19 individuals is the most compelling. This is a book of conversation and argument. The two core sections of the book, sections III and IV, have Gandhi and Nehru as their central figures, respectively. In section III, the debates revolve around Gandhi and his work. In section IV, Nehru plays the same role. Thus Nehru’s writings are followed by the writings of his critics to the right, such as Golwalkar, and to the left, such as Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). A forgotten figure this book rehabilitates is the Muslim liberal, Hamid Dalwai, who spoke of the need for modernizing Islam. In the 1960s he wrote that unless an avant garde liberal elite Muslim developed in India, there would be a revival of Hindu conservatism. Dalwai is relevant not just to present-day India but to a post-9/11 world. Gandhi once reportedly referred to Rammohan Roy as a pygmy. Can one sum up their different philosophies in a few lines? You can’t. My hope is for this book—which is the first serious compendium of modern Indian political thought— to act as a spark for other books.

There are only three Muslim names. Are there any common threads in their ideas?

Syed Ahmed Khan and Hamid Dalwai might have some aspects in common. I would like the readers to draw these out. The place of Indian Muslims is very important and unique because they are a large minority. In other countries, Muslims are either an insignificant minority or the ruling majority. Indian Muslims thus face peculiar dilemmas. The theme of inter-religious relations in a multi-religious state runs through the book—it is articulated in different ways by Dalwai, Syed Ahmad Khan and Jinnah on the Muslim side and Gandhi, Golwalkar and Nehru on the Hindu side.

Mohammad Iqbal is missing.

Iqbal was an interesting and original poet and thinker, but he is not among the makers of modern India. A more real complaint would be the absence of Subhas Bose, Patel and Indira Gandhi.

Would you call any individual a negative influence on India?

In my epilogue I have written that 16 of them are still relevant. The three I excluded are Golwalkar, Jinnah and Tilak. Tilak is a representative of militant nationalism. He saw people like Gokhale as being too accommodating of the British. Now that we are a free nation that debate is no longer relevant. Jinnah is not relevant either because he wanted a Muslim nation and obtained it. Golwalkar’s ideas shaped our society but the fate of Pakistan and other theocratic countries is a warning for us not to follow him. These three are important for historical and antiquarian reason, while the other 16 still speak to us—Tarabai Shinde and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya on gender, JP on the rights of the Nagas and Kashmiris, C. Rajagopalachari on economic freedom and election reforms to curb the influence of money and business, and so on.

Who besides Gandhi in this list can be called a thinker of global significance?

Gandhi does have a global reach, but others are relevant too. India is a large, diverse and very complex country. Nation building here was a massive project. Given the scale of this enterprise and the quality of thinkers it has produced, the Indian experiment is relevant to the emerging multiculturalism in Europe, and to African transitions from dictatorship to democracy.

And there are three Bengalis in this list.

Only two. Bengalis dominate the humanities in India—and Bengali historians tend to exaggerate the importance of their compatriots. I didn’t start out with the idea of debunking the Bengalis, but the Maharashtrian social reformers played a much more important and fundamental role in shaping modern India. Amartya Sen, for example, never talks about Shinde, Phule and Ambedkar, while he has plenty of time for Tagore. In this he is representative. Our leading historians and social scientists tend to be Bengalis; this is to the detriment of the recognition of the substantial and enduring contributions of other regions.

{Interviewed by Himanshu Bhagat, published in 'Mint' on Monday, Oct. 25 2010}

Vernacular Modernity: Girish Karnad

An anthology of modern Indian literatures, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, including the vernaculars, edited by noted novelist Amit Chaudhuri this time, tries to represent the complexity that is modern India. We present two reviews which look at the book from different perspectives. Girish Karnad feels the anthology tilts too much towards Bengali and English and lacks a cohesive organising principle. 

But, in going against currently prevailing orthodoxies and upsetting established linguistic hierarchies, the collection is a landmark, says Leela Gandhi. (Soon in the next post..)

Squandered Opportunity: Girish Karnad

IN his Introduction to the Vintage Book of Indian Writing ( 1947- 1997), Salman Rushdie declared that the one point he wanted to establish through his anthology was that "the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what is being produced in the 16 'official languages' of India, the so-called 'vernacular' languages, during the same time: and indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, 'Indo-Anglian' literature represents the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books". The storm raised by this obviously unsubstantiatable statement hasn't yet settled down. So, although Amit Chaudhuri dissociates himself from "the sanctimonious outrage and self-congratulatory response to the remark in the liberal, middle-class India", and declares, in his Introduction to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, that "this anthology is not a riposte to any other anthology", Rushdie's contentious presence is very palpable in the background when Chaudhuri asks, "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful writers who write in English?" Again and again, throughout this anthology, Chaudhuri is at pains to explain how deeply his sympathies lie with the "vernacular" literatures and how his anthology is only an attempt to bring those riches to the attention of the English-reading world. 

This raises the question of how faithfully an anthology of this kind can be expected to mirror this rich and complex entity. Even allowing for the fact that, despite its claim to be an anthology of Indian "literature", the volume contains no poetry or drama and focuses entirely on prose, it would be unrealistic to expect every Indian literature to be represented within the confines of a single volume. Omissions are inevitable, but, I fear, one is less than persuaded by the reasons offered by Chaudhuri for his. "This is not a representative anthology," he tells us, "there is nothing, for instance, from Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi and Punjabi....This is so partly because I couldn't find enough translations of quality in these languages from which to make a selection, and partly because there wasn't enough space...."

This book has 632 pages of main text. Of these, 130 are devoted to Bengali, and 300 to English. It is hardly surprising then that there isn't much space left for other languages. And yet Chaudhuri adds, "This slight tipping of the scale towards 'regional' or 'vernacular' writing is not strategic or premeditated, but a numerical fact that has emerged after the completion of the selection". Can cramming six vernacular languages into a third of the book, while the remaining two- thirds is devoted to the two languages with which Chaudhuri is familiar, be described as "tipping of the scale towards" the vernaculars ? Is he being ironic? Naive? Insensitive? Or is he - a suspicion that becomes stronger as one goes along - merely justifying his laziness?

An editor of an anthology such as this is not merely expected to select from what is ready at hand and then yield to the "numerical fact that emerges". Once he has done his groundwork, he is expected to decide how much weightage should be given to the different literatures he is choosing from, and when he has made his final choice, give the reader some idea of the basis on which the weightage was distributed. The extraordinary thing about this anthology, however, is that, apart from a scrappy two- and-a-half page apologia, there is no Introduction explaining why a particular piece was chosen, how the editor relates to the work and, most important of all, how the work chosen fits into the editor's total perception of the state of Indian literature. Instead, we are presented with two reprinted articles, which were originally written for and published in totally different, unrelated contexts.

One of these is about the development of the Indian novel in English! The other is titled "Modernity and the Vernacular", but is devoted entirely to Bengali, bringing home to us once again how for Chaudhuri the only vernacular which merits attention is Bengali . His complacent assumption that the experience of the Bengali renaissance has national relevance ( if not, what is the article doing at the head of this anthology?) does great injustice to literatures such as Urdu, whose confrontation with colonialism was far more violent, far more traumatic. Since he goes back to the 19th Century to trace the origins of modernity in Indian writing, a balanced perspective could only have been achieved by taking into account a non-Bengali classic like Mirza Hadi 'Ruswa' 's Umrao Jan Ada, which fiercely engaged with contemporary history and altered the subsequent development of the Indian novel. (And there are several translations of the book available, including one by Khushwant Singh, called The Courtesan of Lucknow.)

The extracts are generally well chosen, but safe. The English section includes the works of a few young writers, such as Sunetra Gupta, Aamer Hussein, Ashok Banker and Rohit Manchanda, on which Chaudhuri should be commended, for otherwise the choice of extracts is so predictable as to be dull. It is difficult to see what new insight a Western reader interested in Indian literature could possibly gain from being offered such chestnuts as Midnight's Children, The Golden Gate, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, The Serpent and the Rope, or The Engish Teacher. The same scarce space could have been made available to writers from other vernaculars, or to other, lesser-known writers in English, or, if these marquee names were inescapable, to their lesser-known works.

The impression that not much serious thought has gone into the book is further strengthened by the chaotic organisation of the material.The first section, marked "Introduction", is followed by sections titled, "Bengal Renaissance and After", "Hindi", "Urdu", "The South" (in which three South Indian languages are lumped together in a manner reminiscent of the days when anyone South of the Vindhyas was called a "Madrassi") and finally "English". The basis for classification would thus seem to be linguistic, except that wedged in the penultimate position, without any explanation, is the section, "Autobiographies"! It's not as though this rubric enables the editor to reach out to other languages. For, although we are told ,"Some of the most important and creative work in modern Indian writing has been done in the genre of autobiographies", three of the four items included are again from English. Large statements about "Indian writing", followed by a quick reversion to Bengali or English, is a recurrent feature of Chaudhuri's editorial method. If he was sincere about finding good vernacular autobiographies, surely it wouldn't have taken much effort to locate Lakshmibai Tilak's magnificent Marathi autobiography, Smriti Chitre? Lakshmibai was an illiterate Chitpavan Brahmin, whose husband converted to Christianity in the late 19th Century. Her autobiography vividly describes her struggle not only to cross caste and family barriers to join her husband but also to realise her own potential in the new and unfamiliar world opening up in front of her. And we have an excellent translation by Josephine Inkster, called I Follow After, which is still in print after 50 years.

Again, if the appearance of the autobiography as a distinct genre is an index to the emergence of modern self-consciouness, some consideration would have been in order of what is probably the first Indian autobiography, Ardhakathanak, a 17th Century record by a Jain trader called Banarasi Lal. This book too is available in an excellent English translation by Mukund Lath.

Talking of this genre, probably the most significant development in the last half century of Indian literature has been the appearance in Marathi of "dalit" autobiographies, which for the first time in the entire history of Indian writing have given voice to the world of the untouchables. Dalit contribution to contemporary Indian sensibility is so unique that if no satisfactory translations were available, fresh ones should have been commissioned. As for Dalit fiction, A. K. Ramanujan has rendered into English several short stories by the Kannada writer, Devanooru Mahadeva.

Chaudhuri's excuse that "translations of quality" are not available simply won't wash. On the contrary, he doesn't seem to have made the minimal effort to equip himself for the task he has undertaken. The volume has been beautifully produced.

The authority of Picador will no doubt get it a wide distribution. It's a shame then that such an opportunity should have been so thoughtlessly squandered. 

(Girish Karnad is a playwright, actor and director who has received many awards for his plays, including the Jnanpith Award in 1998.)

{As on the Online Edition of 'The Hindu', Sunday, August 19, 2001}

Interview: Ramachandra Guha – Modern India’s Historian

In an exclusive interview with Flipkart, Ramachandra Guha talks about his latest book “Makers of Modern India”, his criteria for choosing the personalities in “Makers of Modern India”, his childhood ambition of becoming a cricketer, advice to young writers on earning success, why he refuses to write fiction and much more!

Introduction

Who is Ramachandra Guha and what makes him tick?
I do a job like anyone else. Just as a software engineer writes code, a doctor examines patients, a lawyer takes briefs, a teacher lectures students – I’m a scholar who does research and writes books. Mine is a vocation like any other; more in the public eye but probably of less public consequence than the vocation of a doctor, teacher, lawyer, or entrepreneur.

Would you say your childhood was integral in shaping you as a writer?
Not really. I became a writer by accident. I had a very happy childhood and grew up in a very beautiful part of India and studied in a well-wooded campus.

I became a writer much later in life. Nothing prepared me for this. In fact my childhood ambition was to play cricket for India. I played for my school and college elevens, but in my early twenties I realized that I wasn’t good enough even to play for a Ranji Trophy team. So I took the scholarly route and did a PhD. Unlike many other writers, it was quite late in my life I realized this would be my calling.

Who and what were your inspirations to become a writer?
Well, I did a PhD, which meant I had to train to do rigorous, deep and thorough research. My thesis took me four and a half years and was on the social history of the relations between peasants and forests in the Himalaya, from the 19th century right up to the Chipko movement. I enjoyed the rigour of research. I enjoyed battling with complex ideas and studying patterns of social change in all their variety and diversity.

Slowly I realized that the kinds of things I was working on needed to be communicated to a wider audience, so I started writing more accessible prose, and also began contributing to newspapers. Becoming a full-time writer was a gradual process. It wasn’t a eureka moment where I read a wonderful book and said, “I’ve read this book by George Orwell, I must also become a writer!” It happened slowly, over a period of time.

What is it about history that fascinates you?
Well, I think it’s this country that fascinates me, the modern history of this country. I argue in “Makers of Modern India” and also my last book “India After Gandhi”, that we’re living in an extraordinary, interesting time in Indian history. This is a country, which is very large, very diverse, very divided, and undergoing these five simultaneous revolutions: the national, democratic, urban, industrial and social. This churning has produced social conflict, social emancipation, great leaders, corrupt leaders. Some parts of India are marked by peace, prosperity, and tranquility, while other parts of India are marked by poverty, disparity, and violence.

At no other time in human history have social conflicts been so richly articulated and expressed. So for anyone dealing with words or images it is a privilege to be in India. Why are Indian films so robust and diverse? Why is Indian fiction so vigorous and creative? India is a difficult country to be a citizen, but if you’re a historian, a playwright, a novelist, a filmmaker, a journalist, then India is the place to be.

On Makers of Modern India

“Makers of Modern India” is different to “India After Gandhi”, could you describe the format of the book?
It’s an anthology. I’ve done other anthologies in the past, of writings on cricket and the environment, but this one is more important. It’s an orchestra of 19 brilliant individuals and I’m the conductor; putting their thoughts in a particular order, setting one idea or thinker against another, exploring their tensions and arguments.

This book evolved over a period of time. It could not have been done by a younger person. I’ve been reading people like Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Ambedkar for 15-20 years. As I worked on “India after Gandhi” and various other projects, I realized there was a very rich and robust tradition of political debate and argument in modern India, starting with Rammohan Roy and continuing on with the Marathi social reformers, through Gandhi and Nehru and their critics right up to the 1970s. I first thought I’d write a book about it in my own words, selectively quoting from these people, as a sort of history of debates on democracy.

Yet, as I started working on the project, I realized the writings themselves were so powerful, so vivid, so evocative, that they should be presented in their own words, with this kind of orchestration placing them in some sort of context for the reader. Especially younger readers, who might not know some of these individuals, so they get a sense of who they were, where they were coming from, what they were trying to say, what they were trying to do, and hence this book emerged.

What kind of research went behind this book and how long did you take to complete it?
It may have been about five years ago when I decided to edit, introduce and compile this book. In 2005-6 I had a debate with Amartya Sen on intellectual traditions in India and this book is in a sense an outcome of that debate. But as I said, somewhere subconsciously it’s been evolving in me for a very long time. Had I not been grappling with these thinkers and their legacies for so long, I could not have done this.

What are the common traits of the personalities featured in the book, was there a specific criteria you employed when you were choosing who to profile?
The criteria I employed were, the people who featured in this book had to be both thinkers and activists. Not pure intellectuals. Radhakrishnan, for example, was a very important figure in the middle decades of the 20th century, but he was an academic philosopher, not a political activist. Of course he was later President of India but that was more a symbolic, ceremonial role.

So they had to be thinkers and activists. On the other hand where you have intellectuals like Radhakrishnan who are not actors, you have actors like Subhas Chandra Bose, Indira Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, who are very important in shaping the history of our nation – but they did not leave behind a corpus of written work. They were out and out doers, they were not thinker-activists in the way in which Gandhi and Ambedkar and the others in this book were.

The second criteria was that their writing had to be of a certain quality and relevance. They had to be speaking of important social and political issues. Not inward, psychological, spiritual writings, but reflections on caste and gender inequality, on religion and politics, on India’s attitude to the world.

The third criteria for inclusion was that the prose had to travel across the generations. You read Rammohan Roy writing in 1820 and he’s still fresh and alive today! Whereas some other thinkers, who I won’t name, wrote a very stiff, formal and archaic prose. There are some 19th century political activists whose prose is incomprehensible to the younger reader.

These were the three defining criteria. They had to be thinkers and activists. They had to be writing about important social and political issues. And their writings had to be clear, accessible and timeless with the ability to communicate across generations.

Can you comment on the timelessness of the ideas presented in the book?
This book reflects the sheer size, diversity and unique nature of the Indian political experiment. We’re trying to create a united country out of so many diverse parts that we’re trying to run democratically. This social churning has thrown up some very interesting and original thinkers.

These writers speak about freedom of the press, the plight of the farmers, the position of women, about the need for Hindu-Muslim harmony. However, this book is not a manifesto or work of advocacy. I’m not telling the reader what to make of its contents. I’m presenting this extraordinary richness and diversity of our political tradition through 19 representative figures. I’m telling the reader of today that if you’ll acquaint yourself with the history of India of the last 150 years through reading this book, you’ll get a sense of the sophistication of thought, of argument, of the real personality of these people. Now what is fresh about them, what is relevant about them, I’ll leave for each reader to decide.

It seems peculiar that you’ve included Jinnah as a “Maker of Modern India”.
Jinnah is a controversial inclusion, but I had to include him because he shaped the history of our country – for good or for bad. Through the two-nation theory, the politics of the 20s and 30s evolved in a particular direction. Because Pakistan was created the politics of the 50s and 60s evolved in a certain way. You could say he is a negative influence but he is an influence all the same.

Nehru would not have so vigorously promoted Hindu-Muslim harmony had it not been for Jinnah. He certainly shaped the history of our country in a very profound way and his writings are very eloquent and direct. The case of Pakistan is made with such clarity and force; you have to contend with it. Including Jinnah (or even Golwalkar), doesn’t mean I endorse what they did or what they stand for. It’s simply that as a historian I’ve recognized the profound impact they had on the history of our country.

On contemporary politicians versus The Makers of Modern India We should not expect contemporary politicians to be thinkers because there are very few original thinkers amongst politicians anywhere in the world. Sarkozy is not a well read or articulate man. David Cameron gets someone else to write his speeches for him. The only thinking politician of today is probably Obama.

What we should be worried about is that politicians of today are so ignorant of the legacies they claim to represent. Mayawati hasn’t read Ambedkar’s speeches to the Constituent Assembly, Rahul Gandhi does not appear to know about Nehru’s letters to Chief Ministers. That’s what we should be worried about. Even someone like George W Bush, who is as anti-intellectual as any President can get, would know the legacy of the founders of his country – he would know what Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln stood for. You don’t expect Rahul Gandhi to have the original ideas of a Nehru, but he should be more aware of his tradition and legacy.

Politicians who are also original thinkers are not common in any country or time period. A Nehru comes once in a generation, an Ambedkar comes once in a century, a Gandhi appears perhaps once in millennia – we were just fortunate they came together in 20th century India.

General (Miscellaneous)

As an avid cricket fan who has written a few books on the subject, what are your predictions for the upcoming World Cup?
I don’t normally predict and I should also say I’ve more or less stopped writing on cricket after Twenty20. I’m not a fan of Twenty20 at all. It’s a vulgar debasement of the game. ODIs are slightly better but Test cricket is the real cricket for me. Two months ago when India played Australia in a Test match in Bangalore, I was there for all five days. In that sense, I’m a purist, a romantic, an old-fashioned guy who likes Test cricket.

The other thing about me which is slightly peculiar, is that I’m not a cricketing jingoist. I like good cricket, I’m not really desperate for India to win. I appreciate good cricketers and I grew up admiring the West Indians. I’ve admired the Australians, the Pakistanis – Wasim Akram is one of my all time favourite cricketers. I want to see good cricket. Of course, I’d like India to win, but it’s not a top priority for me, it’s not something I’m obsessed about.

You’ve been a teacher who has taught all over the world, what has the experience been like?
I enjoy teaching. I enjoy working with young people. Teaching is very important. For someone like me it’s a constant source of nourishment and creativity to be in contact with young people. It’s hugely enjoyable.

A historian who thrives on and embraces archives of information on politics, what are your views on the WikiLeaks saga?
I have not thought it through seriously. Obviously at one level there are some shocking revelations that were uncovered. Yet on another level, diplomacy can only succeed if it’s done in private. I don’t think diplomacy can be conducted against the full glare of public opinion. You’ve had a tradition in most governments where only after 30 years are the documents of the period made open to the public and to scholars.

I don’t think you should be leaking all this and damaging relationships between countries. These are private communications. At a suitable time, say after 30 years, when the present controversies have died out, historians should have access to them so that they can assess why the issues arose in the first place. On balance I don’t think it’s a good idea to encourage this kind of rampant leaking of diplomatic information. At the same time I think the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder is unfortunate.

Advice to young writers who would like to start pursuing it as a career?
It’s very hard work. The first piece of advice is, reject the idea that you have to be inspired to write – that today I’m not in a mood to write but then tomorrow suddenly the creative juices flow! That’s rubbish. Writing is hard work. It’s like a factory worker at his lathe from 10-6. You have to go to your desk and write. If you are a historian or biographer, you have to go to the archives and look at dozens of files a day to find new or relevant material. If you’re a traveler or someone who bases his writing on real life experience – then go out into the countryside, go to different parts of India, talk to people from different backgrounds, if need be live in difficult circumstances. Consistency and hard work are most important. Creativity and imagination are secondary. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is you must read very widely. Don’t get stereotyped, don’t just read one kind of writer. Don’t read only one political tendency. If you’re a left-wing kind of person, read as much right-wing literature as possible. You must know what the other side thinks. In fact read more right-wing literature than left-wing literature, because then you can hone and refine your arguments and ideas.

Don’t be dogmatic in your approach, travel widely and work very hard. For the writer, there are no weekdays or weekends. Sachin Tendulkar is so good not just because of his natural gifts. At 37 he practices as hard in the nets as when he was 18. Hard work, discipline and rigour are the most important qualities.

Unless you are willing to be in it for the long haul and be patient, you can never really be a good writer.

Is there a particular reason you avoid writing fiction?
I have so much diversity in what I do; I write history, biographies, political commentary, cricket, different kinds of books, that confront different kinds of challenges. I’ve never had the desire to write fiction. Fiction has to come from within you.

Recently, at my book release in Bangalore, someone asked me, “You’ve written this big tome on history, but why don’t you now give us some saucy fiction?” I answered, with complete sincerity, “One of the reasons I don’t write fiction, is that there are various writers I’ve admired in the past, the British historian EP Thompson, the American cultural critic Lewis Mumford who wrote on ecology and town planning, the Caribbean writer CLR James who wrote the finest book on cricket, “Beyond a Boundary”, the Indian naturalist M. Krishnan, and I think, and what is common to these people? If I look at these people whom I admire, what’s common to them is that each of them wrote one novel and it was a bad novel.” So it’s a caution to me to never write a novel. I’m a historian, biographer and political commentator, that’s my calling.

Books that have changed your life?
That’s a complex question, but there are a few. Not changed my life, but the way I look at the world, there were books that changed my worldview. One book is George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”, which I had bought in a pavement in Dehradun. I was in my early 20s and very attracted by Marxism. While reading this book, which is a wonderful and moving account of how the communist party destroyed the Spanish democratic movement in the 1930s, I realized how callous, instrumental and brutal the communist ideology would be in practice. In theory it was all about equality and liberty for all, but in reality it was totalitarian, anti-human and barbaric.

Another book that changed the way I looked at the world was a wonderful book published by a Gandhian publisher in Ahmedabad. It was called “Truth Called Them Differently”. It’s a reproduction of the letters between Tagore and Gandhi over a period of time. It’s about many things: India’s place in the world, the role of the English language, whether Indians should live simply or live as they choose – the debate is very rich and very productive. It also shows you the quality of the men as they argue with each other and are willing to change their position. You learn a lot about the Indian national movement, Indian culture and political traditions, but you also learn about the ability to adapt and change, when circumstances compel you to change.

There were other books too for example, a work by the great French historian Marc Bloch entitled “French Rural History”. This is a combination of environmental, social, economic and political history – a total history as the French call it. I read this book when I was starting my career as a historian and it impressed me greatly.

What are you currently reading?
It’s normally a mix. I might have a novel, a book on Indian history, a book about some other part of the world.

I just finished Ian McEwan’s “Solar”, which is a novel about a once brilliant scientist gone to seed. It’s not McEwan’s best work, still, it’s an acute psychological portrait of intellectual and moral corruption.

I’m now reading a wonderful book on the history of Paris called “Parisians” by Graham Robb, who is a very distinguished British writer on French affairs. It’s slices of the history of Paris through individuals. He starts with Napoleon’s first visit to Paris as a 19-year-old lieutenant. It goes on to follow various people who lived in Paris, the great novelist Zola’s wife for example. Then Robb writes of Hitler’s only visit to Paris during the war. It’s a marvelous book.

I’m also reading a memoir of a Sindhi woman writer, who grew up in Karachi and Hyderabad before partition and then had to flee into India. The book is very revealing about the impact of Partition on Sindhi Hindus.

What’s next for Ramachandra Guha?
For the long term, I have been working on (for several years) a multi-volume project on Gandhi. Each book will be self contained; a book on Gandhi’s years in South Africa, a book on Gandhi’s years in India, a book on the global impact of Gandhi – there will be at least three volumes and possibly a fourth, a kind of multi-volume series on Gandhi, with standalone books that are part of a larger series. Before that, I might come out with a collection of my political essays.

{ Interview By- Sailen,  Published: December 28, 2010 on Flipkart Blog.}

Is Indian Modernity Working: Shashi Tharoor

Books Reviewed: The Idea of India: Sunil Khilnani, 1997

A mid the popular ferment that forged an Italian nation out of a congeries of principalities and statelets in the nineteenth century, the novelist Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio memorably wrote, "We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians." Oddly enough, when the British pulled down the Union Jack in 1947, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought-"we have created India. Now all we need to do is to create Indians." 

Such a sentiment would not have occurred to the preeminent voice of Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru. India's first prime minister would never have spoken of "creating" India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that separated Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Creating Indians was, in fact, what the nationalist movement did.

After all, this was the India that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as "a geographical expression"-a land that was "no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. The Indian nation is not united by a shared ethnicity (it incorporates almost every conceivable racial type), a common language (it has at least 17, according to the constitution, or 35, if one counts all languages spoken by more than a million people), or a single religion (India is home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism, the majority religion, itself reflects the country's diversity).

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of Nehru, "by strong but invisible threads . . . a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive." That nebulous quality is what the analyst of Indian nationalism is ultimately left with. It is an idea-the idea of India. But what is that idea? Nehru articulated it as pluralism vindicated by history, seeing the country as an "ancient palimpsest" on which successive rulers and subjects had inscribed their visions without erasing what had been asserted previously. A generation of nationalist historians echoed him, making "unity in diversity" the most hallowed of independent India's self-defining slogans.

In the 1950s and 1960s came the skeptics, almost all based abroad, who began to take scalpels to this sanctified idea of India. Nirad Chaudhuri, the iconoclastic author of The Continent of Circe and other volumes of largely autobiographical social commentary, excoriated India's nationalist presumptions and what he saw as its civilizational inadequacies.

V. S. Naipaul, a descendant of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean, visited his ancestral homeland and chronicled his disappointment in An Area of Darkness and the even more savagely negative India: A Wounded Civilization. A host of Western writers portrayed the problems and limitations of India's modernization as portending the imminent breakdown of the nation and the inevitable collapse of its political institutions. Despite the doomsayers-and there were many who predicted India's disintegration well before the twentieth anniversary of its independence from British rule-the country survived, withstanding political, military, and economic challenges. By 1990 Naipaul was writing in celebration of the "million mutinies" through which Indian diversity was working to transform the democratic society he had so recently been prepared to write off. 

How did India preserve and protect a viable idea of itself in the course of the last 50 years, while it grew from 370 million people to 970 million, reorganized its state structures, and sought to defend itself from internal and external dangers, all the while remaining democratic? Explaining this is central to the task taken on by Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India, a title probably borrowed from Amartya Sen's celebrated lecture at Oxford in 1993. "Reflective and incisive nonfictional interrogations of India's distinctive modernity have yet to be produced," Khilnani claimed recently, setting the stage for his own work. This comment was-as I informed the editor who offered me this review-in a dismissive notice of my own book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium. Though I mention this to declare an interest, I rather like Khilnani's slender volume, an amiable disquisition on Indian modernity structured as four essays on democracy, political economy, urbanization, and Indian identity.

RETELLING TALES 

"This book," Khilnani tells us in his introduction, "is an initial venture into the task of retelling the political history of independent India." The qualification is necessary; Khilnani competently organizes a series of reflections on well-worn themes, and despite the occasional lapse into the turgid prose that afflicts all political scientists, generally does so with style. Style is central to both the pleasures and the pitfalls of his narrative. Khilnani is charmingly self-indulgent, fond of sweepingly colorful generalizations. (The Government's Planning Commission is a "retirement home for the socially benevolent," whatever that may mean.) His penchant for sweeping one-liners is fetching in an academic-who can resist a chapter that begins with the sentence "India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete"?-but he cannot resist an epigram, even when it is more witty than wise. "Like the British empire it supplanted, India's constitutional democracy was established in a fit of absent-mindedness," he declares, ignoring the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary in nationalist literature.

Khilnani tells us he is working on a biography of Nehru, and he is sound on the lasting contributions made to the Indian state by that remarkable man, whose extemporization of Indianness remains an enduring legacy to so many Indian liberals. A highly self-aware scholar, Khilnani ends his book with an assertion of the value of Western political theory and a useful if contentious bibliographical essay that students of Indian politics will appreciate. But the unwary should be warned that Khilnani's glibness sometimes trips him up. Any reader of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography knows that he did not "discover" vegetarianism in Holborn; Nehru was never a head of state; Chandigarh is not "400 kilometers north of Delhi," which would put it in Kashmir; the Mughals entered India in 1526, not 1528 (this would be like a British historian placing the Battle of Hastings in 1068). This sort of carelessness is disconcerting, for it undermines the reader's willingness to take some of the author's more esoteric suggestions seriously. For instance, Khilnani attributes the existence of "less stark inequalities" in the Indian state of Kerala to its "own cultural forms of matrilineal property inheritance"-a dubious proposition at best, since not all Kerala communities are matrilineal and inheritance per se has few redistributive implications, but one made worse by being wholly unsubstantiated.

THE FAILURES

More important, Khilnani's exegesis on Indian modernity inadequately examines its failures. Nehru's legacy to India was a mixed one. It consisted of four major pillars-democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, nonalignment, and socialist economics. The first two were indispensable to the country's survival; the third (not examined by Khilnani) preserved its self-respect and enhanced its international standing, though without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people; the fourth was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere.

In the five decades since independence, Indian democracy has failed to create a single Indian political community. Instead, we have become more conscious than ever of what divides us: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. The Indian political system has become looser and more fragmented. Politicians mobilize support along ever-narrower lines of political identity. It has become more important to be a "backward caste" Yadav, a "tribal" Bodo, or a sectarian Muslim than to be an Indian. This is particularly ironic because one of the early strengths of Nehruvian India-the survival of the nationalist movement as a political party, the Congress Party serving as an all-embracing, all-inclusive agglomeration of the major political tendencies in the country-led to this situation by undermining the evolution of a genuine multiparty system. Had the nationalist movement given birth to, say, three parties-one right of center, one social democrat, one communist-a culture of principled and ideological contestation might have evolved in India's polity.

Instead the Congress Party's dominance stifled this process, and opposition to it (with a few honorable exceptions, like the pro-free enterprise Swatantra Party between 1959 and 1974) was largely based on the assertion of identities to which the Congress was deemed not to have given full expression-regional, religious, or caste-based. With the increasing weakness of the Congress, politicians have been tempted to organize themselves around identities other than party (or to create parties to reflect a particularist identity).

A distinctive feature of the Nehruvian legacy was its visionary rejection of India's assorted bigotries and particularisms. The Nehrus-displaced Kashmiris-were, by upbringing and conviction, completely secular. Not only did Indira Gandhi marry a Parsi, but her daughters-in-law were an Italian Christian and a Punjabi Sikh. The one strand of political opinion Nehru and his offspring abhorred was that of Hindu religious revivalism. Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, language, and religion, something impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician. There could be no starker indication of the end of Nehruvianism than the fact that, 50 years after partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity. Demolishing a mosque they say stands on a Hindu holy site, denouncing what they decry as the appeasement of minorities, clamoring for office and power for their "saffron brigades," Hindu revivalists have assertively attempted to convert the religion of the "majority" into a badge of Indian identity.

If the Nehruvian version of democracy is discredited, democracy itself is not. Amid India's myriad problems, it is democracy that has given Indians of every imaginable caste, creed, culture, and cause the chance to break free of their lot. There is social oppression and caste tyranny, particularly in rural India, but Indian democracy offers the victims a means of escape, and often-thanks to the determination with which the poor and oppressed exercise their franchise-of triumph. The significant changes in the social composition of India's ruling class since independence, both in politics and in the bureaucracy, are proof of democracy at work, but the poor quality of the country's democratic political leadership in general offers less cause for celebration. India's rulers increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills to wield it for the common good. Pluralist democracy is India's greatest strength, but its current manner of operation is also the source of its major weaknesses.

These new developments are ensuring a dramatic transformation of Indian society, but they imply another idea of India than the one in which the Nehruvians rejoice. The workings of Indian democracy have served to create and perpetuate India's various particularisms. The Hindu-Muslim divide is merely the most visible, but that within Hinduism, between caste Hindus and the former "untouchables," and now between the upper castes and the lower intermediate castes known as the "backwards," is actually transforming Indian society in ways the founding fathers did not anticipate. Caste, which Nehru and his ilk abhorred and believed would disappear from the social matrix of modern India, has not merely survived and thrived, but has become an instrument for highly effective political mobilization. Candidates are picked by their parties with an eye toward the caste loyalties they can call upon; often their appeal is overtly to voters of their own caste or sub-caste, urging them to elect one of their own. The result has been the growth of caste-consciousness and casteism throughout Indian society. In many Indian states, caste determines educational opportunities, job prospects, and governmental promotions; all too often, India's unique brand of affirmative action means you cannot go forward unless you're a "backward." Whether through elections or quotas, political mobilization in contemporary India has asserted the power of old identities, habits, faiths, and prejudices, which suggests a more complex form of "modernization" than that implicit in Khilnani's essays. 

SOCIALISM, INDIAN STYLE

In economics, too, the Indian idea described by Khilnani is fading. Self-sufficiency and self-reliance were the twin mantras of Nehruvian India, which shackled itself to statist controls that emphasized distributive justice above economic growth, stifled free enterprise, and discouraged foreign investment. The Government's reasons were embedded in the Indian freedom struggle: since the British had come to trade and stayed on to rule, Indian nationalists were deeply suspicious of foreign investment. (One of the lessons history teaches us is that history often teaches us the wrong lessons.) "Self-reliance" thus became a slogan: it guaranteed both political freedom and freedom from economic exploitation. The result was that for most of the five decades since independence, India pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. We called this socialism.

Socialism, Indian style, was a compound of nationalism and idealism. It was the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands-not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, the father and mother to all Indians. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests-socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets-kept it beyond political criticism.

The "permit-license-quota" culture of statist socialism allowed the ruling politicians to use politics as a vehicle for self-gratification. Over the years India has overflowed with the sort of professional politicians the educated middle classes have come to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing uncountable-and unaccountable-riches. Of all this, there is very little in Khilnani's book. His admiration for the Nehruvian project is boundless: Rajiv Gandhi, the impatiently modernizing prime minister, is mentioned precisely three times, whereas P. C. Mahalanobis, the socialist advisor to Nehru's Planning Commission, gets a fulsome seven pages, including the titles of the "technically striking but intellectually rather listless" papers he published as a statistician in the 1930s and 1940s.

In fact, India's misfortune, in Jagdish Bhagwati's famous aphorism, was to be afflicted with brilliant economists. And clamorous politicians: for every group claimed a larger share of a national economic pie that decades of protectionist economic policies prevented from growing. It is sadly impossible to quantify the economic losses inflicted on India over four decades of entrepreneurs frittering away their energies in queuing for licenses rather than manufacturing products, paying bribes instead of hiring workers, wooing politicians instead of understanding consumers, and getting things done through bureaucrats rather than doing things for themselves. The penny, or rather the paisa, finally dropped in the major financial crisis of 1991, which forced the Government to let sweeping dogmas die and to adopt new policies. India's economic liberalization since then has often seemed hesitant, but its essential repudiation of Nehruvianism now seems irreversible. 

INEVITABLE DIVERSITY

"The idea of India," Khilnani concludes, "has been constituted through struggles to balance contrary pulls in a coherent political project, to respect the diversities of culture with a commitment to a common enterprise of development." This unexceptionable proposition rests on an idea of India as, in essence, an ever-ever land, the product of a long history, a wide geography, and a short memory. This India is a plural nation, where diversity is as natural as sunshine and there is no alternative to democratic coexistence. The stresses and strains of competing identities are real. In pluralist India, it is essential that each citizen feels secure in his or her identities. But Indians have come to understand that while they may be proud to be Muslims or Marwaris or Mallahs, they are secure in these identities only because they are also Indians. It is their larger national identity that gives them the framework within which to work, trade, compete, and coexist with other members of the broader society, contend for political office, and feel safe behind defensible borders.

So the only idea of India that can work is that of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, costume, and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus-on how to manage without consensus. It is an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it and unafraid of the power or the products of the outside world.

Our founding fathers wrote a constitution that gave passports to their ideals. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of "the narcissism of minor differences," in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. If America is a melting pot, then India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Khilnani's four essays do not culminate in quite so direct an explication of his title. Yet his somewhat uneven, decidedly partial, but intelligent and readable book reveals that he belongs in a congenial camp, among those who cherish an idea of India as a land that safeguards the common space available to a medley of identities-an India that remains safe for diversity.

{From 'Foreign Affairs' January/February, 1998 Issue.}