One needs to meet Ramachandra Guha to establish that he is a real person, not an academic machine on steroids. A fast-talking omnibus of public life, when he is not one of India’s most prolific historians, he is a newspaper columnist with a polemical style and an appetite for intellectual duel (remember Arundhati Roy? William Dalrymple?), cricket, environmentalism and civil rights. His recent offering, Penguin’s Makers of Modern India, is an anthology of the writings of 19 socio-political thinker-activists. Selected writings of each figure is preceded by Guha’s introduction. He is a historian who seeks a wider, non-academic readership. Which is why the book is a good read for anyone with an interest in what shaped the most interesting country in the world.
Excerpts from a conversation:
Excerpts from a conversation:
You like to write about people, but are not processes more important than people?
My first book was a social history of the Chipko movement. Social history and peasant studies were good correctives to the so-called good-king-bad-queen theory in history. But maybe we went too far. Many individuals reflect larger social processes. Ambedkar, for example, is central to the history of the Dalit movement. A good biographer must not only probe the moods, anxieties and contradictions of the individual but also how his life affected wider social processes. A robust historical tradition needs history from both above and below.
How did you think up this new book’s idea?
Its origins lie in a course I taught 15 years ago called Arguments With Gandhi, where I read his critics like Tagore and Ambedkar. While working on India After Gandhi, I came across the writings of Rajagopalachari, Jayaprakash Narayan, even Nehru’s post-Independence writings. Then, in 2005, I had a debate with Amartya Sen about our political tradition. All these crystallised into this book.
Why did you settle on these 19 people?
Some names are obvious: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru and Tagore. I’ve always felt the Maharashtrian tradition of social reform has been ignored because its historians write in Marathi. Because Bengali thinkers are bilingual, their contribution and originality has been blown up excessively. So I knew Jyotirao Phule and Gokhale had to figure. I had multiple criteria: relevance, quality of writing, and originality. Do their writings travel across the generations? Today, the writings of Aurobindo and Vivekananda are archaic, while Ram Mohun Roy writing in the 1820s for the freedom of the press still speaks to us. From the Hindutva viewpoint, do you have Savarkar or Golwalkar? In some ways, Savarkar is the more powerful and original thinker, but Golwalkar has had a deeper impact. Verrier Elwin came in at the last moment because I wanted an Adivasi voice.
So how did you decide who to exclude?
This is a list of thinker-activists, not pure thinkers or pure activists. I could not find an original Marxist. I read EMS Namboodiripad and MN Roy. Roy is a figure of interest, but nothing he wrote was rooted in the Indian predicament. A big exclusion is Bhagat Singh who died young. He may have been our first original Marxist thinker. I excluded Sardar Patel, Indira Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose; they were doers and did not write anything much of substance.
Any eureka moments during the research?
What struck me was Gandhi’s openness to acknowledge the force of criticism, to adapt, reformulate and revise his own ideas. Tagore made him much less of a xenophobe; because of Ambedkar, he stopped defending Varnashram Dharma; Jinnah made him more vigorous in his defence of Hindu-Muslim harmony. The quality of Nehru’s post-Independence writing was a revelation. As he ran the State, he reflected on the world changing around him in the 1950s and 1960s. This material is scattered in obscure anthologies. Jayaprakash Narayan’s writings on the Kashmiris and the Nagas show a lesser known side of him.
‘What struck me was Gandhi’s openness to acknowledge the force of criticism, to adapt and revise his own ideas’
How do you balance your public commentary with academic work?
I am a historian and a journalist. I enjoy both the immediacy of comments and analysis of current affairs and the long haul of writing a book. We have a tradition of public intellectuals, but they write selectively, such as Andre Béteille and Ashis Nandy, who I respect enormously for speaking their mind. In my historical work, I try and keep my biases and angularities out of the way.
Do you see Indians changing their views after reading history?
There is a problem of partisanship. If we want to understand caste, we’d have to draw on Ambedkar, Gandhi and Lohia. The danger is not so much in our ignorance as in our fetishising individuals. Acceptance of critical appreciation and understanding of remarkable individuals is lacking in our history.
Why don’t we have good biographies in India?
One reason is the impact of Marxism, a kind of sociological reading of history that discounts the individual. Another is our tendency to put people on pedestals. Popular figures are either lionised or demonised, removing the complexity of the human condition. For another, we don’t keep documents. One of the most important people my state, Karnataka, has produced over the last 100 years was Shivaram Karanth. His biography would be fantastic, but even his family doesn’t have his documents.
{Interviewed by- Sopan Joshi, Published in Tehelka Magazine, Volume 7 Issue 44, Dated November 6, 2010}
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