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.}

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}

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.}

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}