Democrats and Dissenters

287 Pages·2016·1.14 MB·English

by  Ramachandra Guha

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

DEMOCRATS AND DISSENTERS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Preface: Leaving a Capital, Finding a Country
PART I: POLITICS AND SOCIETY
1. The Long Life and Lingering Death of the Indian National Congress
2. Eight Threats to Freedom of Expression in India
3. Debating Democracy: Jayaprakash Narayan versus Jawaharlal Nehru
4. Thinking Through China
5. Pakistan without Tears
6. Democracy and Violence: In India, Sri Lanka and Beyond
7. Tribal Tragedies in Independent India
8. Which Was Our Worst Year Ever?
PART II: IDEOLOGIES AND INTELLECTUALS
9. The Brilliance and Dogmatism of Eric Hobsbawm
10. Indonesian and Irish: Benedict Anderson as Scholar and Human Being
11. The Life and Death of a Gandhian Buddhist
12. The Wisest Man in India: The Career and Credo of André Béteille
13. Arguments with Sen, Arguments about India
14. Dharma Kumar: An Intellectual Portrait
15. U.R. Ananthamurthy Alive, and from Beyond the Pyre
16. Where are the Conservative Intellectuals in India?
Footnotes
7. Tribal Tragedies in Independent India
13. Arguments with Sen, Arguments about India
14. Dharma Kumar: An Intellectual Portrait
Sources
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
For the scholar-administrator V. Ramani, a friend and guide for forty years
And for Koshy’s Parade Café, a second home for almost as long
No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if her [or his] state or government
commits crimes, including those against their fellow citizens.
Benedict Anderson
PREFACE
LEAVING A CAPITAL, FINDING A COUNTRY
I
This is the fourth in a series of books exploring the creation and subsequent
career of the Republic of India. The first, India after Gandhi, presented a
narrative social and political history of the country since its founding in August
1947. The second, Makers of Modern India, was an anthology of the writings of
nineteen influential thinker–activists, who helped argue the republic into
existence. The third, Patriots and Partisans, contained fifteen essays of my own,
each exploring a different dimension of the Indian experience.
In terms of genre, Democrats and Dissenters is akin to its immediate
predecessor, in that it too is a collection of (in this case, sixteen) essays. But in
theme and tenor it is very different. While Patriots and Partisans focused quite
sharply on individuals and institutions within the country, this book often moves
beyond India to consider parallel processes in South Asia and beyond.
Although I now consider myself a historian, I was originally trained as a
sociologist. Émile Durkheim famously remarked that comparative sociology was
not a branch of sociology—it was sociology itself. While using materials
gathered in the archives, Democrats and Dissenters is nonetheless more
comparative in intent and presentation than the other books I have published on
democracy and nationhood in India.
The essays in this book have all been written while living in Bangalore.
Bangalore is my wife’s home town, and a sort of second home town for me too. I
grew up in Dehradun, but came south every summer to visit my grandparents,
who lived in what was then a Garden, and not yet a City. I moved permanently
to Bangalore in 1994 after some enormously stimulating years in that centre of
political power and scholarly research, New Delhi. I owe our capital much; I was
morally and intellectually shaped by my years as a student at the University of
Delhi, and without the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library (NMML), I would not be able to go about my professional
business. Some of my closest friends, and the scholar whom I most admire, still
live in that city. But I do not think I could have written as I did had I continued
to live in Delhi, as I briefly explain below.
I studied in Delhi University between 1974 and 1979, and worked there
between 1988 and 1994, first at the Institute of Economic Growth, and later at
NMML, in the heart of Lutyens’s Delhi. In November 1993 I was appointed to a
professorship at the sociology department of the Delhi School of Economics, a
department founded by the great M.N. Srinivas, and then commonly
acknowledged to be the best in India (and perhaps Asia), its glamour and
prestige enhanced by its being part of the Delhi School itself. I was just thirty-
five. My wife’s design practice was flourishing. This, the country’s capital, was
where, it seemed, we would spend the rest of our working lives.
A month before I had to join the Delhi School, I travelled to Puné to speak to
an environmental group. I returned to tell my wife that it was time we went back
home to Bangalore. My hosts in Puné were warm and welcoming; the traffic (in
1993) was manageable; the people courteous and civilized. It was in these
respects much like Bangalore. I persuaded my wife that our (then small) children
would be far happier in our home town; besides, our ageing parents needed us
close at hand.
Here, I was being slightly disingenuous (as Indian husbands often are with
their wives). There was a familial reason for us to move back to Bangalore; but
there was also a personal, professional reason so far as I was concerned. For, I
was increasingly disenchanted with Delhi’s academic world. In the department I
was to join, M.N. Srinivas’s emphasis on the ‘field-view’ of Indian society no
longer held sway. French theory was all the rage—doctoral students had to quote
Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida and Deleuze whether their own research was on the
peasantry, the working class, the aged, the young, or whatever. As for the
university in the other side of town, it was pervaded by a mechanical form of
Marxism. A group of economics students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University had
invited me to speak at their department. I asked them to check with their
professors first. They did, to be told that they saw no point in my speaking to the
students, since environmentalism was a bourgeois deviation from the class
struggle.
When I was offered a professorship at the Delhi School I was enormously
When I was offered a professorship at the Delhi School I was enormously
chuffed. But as the joining date came closer I was consumed by fear and dread.
Would I get into endless arguments with my colleagues about the relevance of
French post-structuralism to Indian realities? Would I have to begin to say
important things in obscure language? I was then working on a biography of
Verrier Elwin, an anthropologist who wrote lyrical prose (perhaps because he
lived among the Adivasis of central India, and because he never held an
academic post). My intellectual hero was E.P. Thompson, the British social
historian (and superb prose stylist) who also mostly worked outside the
academy.
Shortly after I moved to Delhi, a Tamil friend came visiting, and noting the
signs of excitement and self-regard in one who was now at the ‘centre’ of things,
dryly remarked: ‘Delhi is a capital in search of a country.’ By the time of my
visit to Puné five years later, I had come to see the wisdom in that throwaway
line.
II
In the end, I did not join the Delhi School. But I did extend my NMML
fellowship for a year, so as to give my wife time to wind up her studio and allow
her colleagues to either find new jobs or shift to Bangalore with her. We moved
back in 1994, and have been in Bangalore ever since. Like my father,
grandfather and great-grandfather before me, I shall most likely die in this city
too.
Moving to Bangalore meant a shift in location and a shift in profession, since
after ten years in salaried jobs I became a full-time writer. Finally, it also meant
a shift in intellectual focus. For almost two decades I had worked on
environmental subjects. However, shortly after moving to Bangalore I began
research on a history of independent India, and, when that was done,
commenced work on a two-volume biography of Gandhi. I am now more a
political and social historian than a scholar of the environment, although residues
of my earlier training (and interests) are not entirely absent in the pages that
follow.
Living outside Delhi made me realize afresh how diverse our country was—
and is. As a student and young researcher, I had often taken long train journeys
across India. Now, I resumed those travels, sometimes in search of materials for