In Search of Real Marxist: Ramchandra Guha

Keeping intellectual duels aside, Ramachandra Guha’s new book presents the writings of 19 giants who shaped India’s socio-political landscape. Sopan Joshi tries arguing with him.

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:

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}

Captative Ideologues: Ramachandra Guha

CAPTIVE IDEOLOGUES 

- History beyond Marxism and Hindutva 

In October 1984, I got my first academic job at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata (then Calcutta). A week after I joined, a friend from Chennai (then Madras) sent me a petition on the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka, which he hoped some of my colleagues would sign.

The first person I asked was a senior historian of Northeast India, whose work I knew but with whom I had not yet spoken. He read the petition, and said: “As Marxists, the question you and I should be asking is whether taking up ethnic issues would deviate attention from the ongoing class struggle in Sri Lanka.”

My colleague was known to be a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Yet I was struck by the way in which he took it for granted that I must be a party man too. Although this was our first meeting, he immediately assumed that any new entrant to the Centre must, like him and almost all the other members of the faculty, be a Marxist as well.

In the 1980s, Marxism occupied a dominant place in the best institutes of historical research in India. There were three reasons for this. One was intellectual, the fact that Marxism had challenged the conventional emphasis on kings, empires and wars by writing well-researched histories of peasants and workers instead. Indian history-writing was shaped by British exemplars, among them such great names as E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Marxist pioneers of what was known as ‘history from below’. 

The second reason for Marxism’s pre-eminence was ideological. In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa were led by Communist parties. Figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Samora Machel were icons in India (as in much of the Third World). These fighters for national freedom were supported by Soviet Russia and Communist China, but opposed by the United States of America and the capitalist world more generally. To be a Marxist while the Cold War raged, therefore, was to be seen as identifying with poor and oppressed people everywhere. 

The third reason why there were so many Marxist historians in India was that they had access to State patronage. In 1969, the Congress split, and was reduced to a minority in the Lok Sabha. To continue in office, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sought, and got, the support of MPs of the Communist Party of India. At the same time, several former Communists joined the Congress and were rewarded with cabinet positions. Now the ruling party began leaning strongly to the left in economic policy — as in the nationalization of banks, mines and oil companies —and in foreign policy, as in India’s ‘Treaty of Friendship’ with the Soviet Union. 

In 1969, before the Congress and Mrs Gandhi had turned so sharply to the left, the government of India had established the Indian Council of Social Science Research. The ICSSR was meant to promote research on the profound social and economic transformations taking place in the country. The Council funded some first-rate institutions, such as the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, and the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum. 

History is both a social science and a branch of literature. In theory, historical research should also have been within the ICSSR’s brief. However, in 1972, the government established an Indian Council of Historical Research instead. The education minister at the time, Nurul Hasan, was himself a historian. Those who promoted and ran the ICHR were, in personal terms, close to Professor Hasan. In ideological terms, they were Marxists or fellow-travellers. 

The two men responsible for establishing the ICSSR were the economist, D.R. Gadgil, and the educationist, J.P. Naik. Both were outstanding scholars, but neither was a Marxist. They were true liberals who promoted high-quality research regardless of ideology or personal connections. The ICHR, on the other hand, was from the beginning dominated by left-wing historians who favoured themselves and their friends in the distribution of funds for research, travel, and translation.

The control of Marxists over the ICHR weakened slightly in the 1980s, but was then re-established when Arjun Singh became education minister in 1991. He was persuaded that the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign could best be opposed by the State sponsoring ‘secular’ and ‘scientific’ history. Marxist historians flocked to his call, accepting projects and appointments within the minister’s favour.

In 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power. The new education minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, was an ideologist of the right rather than left. Under him, the ICHR was handed over to academics charged with, among other things, diminishing the contributions of socialists to the freedom movement and discovering the origins of the river Saraswati. 

In courting Marxist historians, Arjun Singh took inspiration from Nurul Hasan. In promoting Hindutva scholars, the current HRD minister is following in the tracks of M.M. Joshi. Hence the recent appointment of Y. Sudershan Rao as chairman of the ICHR. I had never heard of Professor Rao before, and, nor, it appears, have most other historians. Since he belongs to Andhra Pradesh, I asked some historians in that state what they knew. They described Professor Rao as a “non-descript scholar who does not have any academic or intellectual pretensions”, but was known to be close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. They added that despite his ideological bias and lack of scholarly distinction, he was an amiable and friendly man. 

His personal charm notwithstanding, Professor Rao has not published a major book, nor a single scholarly essay in a professional journal. However, he has made known his belief in the essential goodness of the caste system, and the essential historicity of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. These may be among the reasons why he has been appointed chairman of the ICHR. 

The Marxists who once ran the ICHR were partisan and nepotistic, but also professionally competent. The thought of Karl Marx — as distinct from the practice of Communist parties — provides a distinct analytical framework for understanding how human societies change and evolve. This privileges the role of technology and of social conflict between economic classes. Marxist historiography is a legitimate model of intellectual enquiry, albeit one which — with its insistence on materialist explanations — is of limited use when examining the role of culture and ideas, the influence of nature and natural processes, and the exercise of power and authority. 

A sophisticated intellectual culture should have room for able right-wing scholars too. In the US, conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson are both credible and prominent. Their work celebrates the stabilizing role of family and community, and argues that technological dynamism and respect for individual rights are not evenly distributed across cultures. And where Marxist historians chastise capitalists for exploiting workers, right-wing historians celebrate them for creating jobs and generating wealth.

Why are there no Indian equivalents of Niall Ferguson? This is because the right-wing here is identified with Hindutva, a belief system which privileges myth and dogma over research and analysis. And no serious historian can be expected to assume a priori that Ram was a real character, that Hindus are the true and original inhabitants of India, that Muslims and Christians are foreigners, and that all that the British did in India was necessarily evil.

Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A.R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history.

The scholars named in the preceding paragraph have all written excellent books, on different themes and periods, in different stylistic registers.They have all read Karl Marx and digested his ideas. At the same time, they are not limited or constrained by his approach.They have been inspired by other thinkers, other models, in their reconstructions of human life and social behaviour.

Like their counterparts outside India, these scholars bring to the writing of history both primary research and the analytical insights of cognate disciplines such as anthropology, political theory, and linguistics. Their personal or political ideology is secondary (if not irrelevant) to their work, whose robustness rests rather on depth of research and subtlety of argument. 

In the 42 years since the ICHR was founded, the historical profession has moved on. The economic and technological determinism of Marxism, once so appealing, has been found wanting in pushing the frontiers of research. If the HRD minister wanted a professional, non-partisan (and non-Marxist) scholar to head the ICHR, she had a wide field to choose from. But it appears that the minister wanted not a capable or respected historian, but a captive ideologue. And she has got one. 

ramachandraguha@yahoo.in

{As appeared in The Telegraph, Calcutta on Saturday , July 26 , 2014}