[Reader-list] Sanjay Kak on Ram Guha's Book

[Wali Arifi]

In continuation of the recent posting of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's review of
India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha · Macmillan, 900 pp, £25.00

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A Chronicle for India Shining

by Sanjay Kak
*
Biblio* July-August 2007

Ramachandra Guha is among Indias' most visible intellectuals, and his
newspaper columns and television appearances mark him off from the more
reticent world of academic historians. At 900 pages his new book India after
Gandhi is not shy of claiming its own space on the bookshelf: from it's
title page, where it announces itself as "The History of the World's Largest
Democracy" (not A History, mind you, but The History); to it's end papers,
which tells us that the author's entire career seems in retrospect to have
been preparation for the writing of this book.

So first the happy tidings from the back of the book: things in India (after
Gandhi, that is) are overall okay. They could be better, he agrees, but for
now we must be satisfied with what the Hindi cinema comic actor Johny Walker
kept us amused with: phiphty-phiphty. For those hungry for a modern
historical understanding – or even an argued opinion – on 60 years of the
Indian Republic, this piece of dissimulation is an early sign of things to
come.

There are some notable features of the paths by which The Historian arrives
at this facile and frivolous conclusion of fifty-fifty. The first is that
all that is troubling and challenging in the short history of this republic
is co-opted into the nationalistic narratives of 'success' and 'victory',
turning our very wounds into badges of honour. "At no other time or place in
human history" he says, "have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so
vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature, or
addressed with such directness by the political system and the media".

I can think of at least five issues that have bedeviled India all the way
from 1947 which simply fail this assertion: Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland,
Naxalism, and of course, Dalit rights. These are at the head of a very long
list which seriously challenge Guhas' assertion that the Indian nation has
been successful at even addressing conflicts, leave alone dealing or
managing them. I use the word 'successful' here because justice has not even
appeared on the horizon on most of these fronts.

Right at the outset of the book he lets us know that the real success story
of modern India lies "not in the domain of economics, but in that of
politics". So it's not the software boom that he offers for approval, but
Indias' political success as a democracy. Politics for him is, in the main,
narrowly defined, and remains the domain of parliamentary politics. From
Prologue to Epilogue, Guha vicariously digs out every negative prediction
ever made for India's future as a democracy, and then since India has had
elections for 50 years, turns it into a vindication of it's democracy.

No surprise then, that it's the romance of the Indian elections for which he
reserves his unqualified enthusiasm. Every General Election since 1951 is
celebrated in tourist-brochure speak, so by 1967, elections no longer are a
"top-dressing on inhospitable soil", they are "part of Indian life, a
festival with it's own set of rituals, enacted every five years". As
evidence we are offered statistics of large turnouts, and accounts of
colourful posters and slogans. By the 1971 polls, the logistics are offered
in giddy detail: "342,944 polling stations, each station with forty-three
different items, from ballot papers and boxes to indelible ink and sealing
wax; 282 million ballot papers printed, 7 million more than were needed…".

To so easily substitute 'election' for 'democracy', to be preoccupied with
the procedural – rather than the substantive¬ – aspects of democracy, and
indeed of politics, is conceptually problematic, and not a mistake any
serious scholar of politics would make. The obsession with parliamentary
democracy, with its first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all bias, also means
that descriptions of India's recent political history remain here focused on
those in Parliamentary Power, and at best, those in Parliamentary
Opposition. But when he has to deal with the more fundamental questions
raised about Indian democracy from outside of this, by the Naxalites in the
1960s, or by Jaya Prakash Narayan and Sampoorn Kranti in the 1970s, or
indeed the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the 1990s, Guha seems to lose his way,
and his enthusiasm for 'politics' is more subdued.

A second clue as to how he reaches here seems to lie in methodology, and
Guha explicitly states his: to privilege primary sources over retrospective
readings, and "thus to interpret an event of, say, 1957, in terms of what is
known in 1957, rather than 2007". One of the reasons he cites for this is
the paucity in India of a good history of India after Gandhi: by training
and temperament, he says of Indian historians, they have "restricted
themselves to the period before Independence". So combine this ascribed lack
of historical interest with Guhas' own stated preference for 'primary'
sources: together they lay out before him a vast – and clearly unchallenged
– canvas.

This is a curious methodological assertion. With the exception of some
primary sources (and some first-time sources, like the PN Haksar papers) the
bulk of the book seems to draw upon the excellent work of at least two
generations of historians and social scientists. The copious Notes at the
back of the book happily acknowledge at least some of this to be so. With
the work before us of Sumit Sarkar, Partho Chatterjee, Rajni Kothari, Tanika
Sarkar, Yogendra Yadav, Zoya Hassan, Christopher Jafferlot (amongst others),
why does Guha pronounce this area to be a tabula rasa, one that this book
alone bravely sets out to fill?

Ramchandra Guha's earlier book on Verrier Elwin was proof of his dexterous
use of archival material, and over the years his newspaper columns have been
rich with his joyful – even eccentric¬ – use of the archive. Here too he
locates some nuggets, which its sources may now well want returned to the
darkness of the archive. In 1944, the Bombay Plan, mooted by a group of
leading industrialists, making a case for 'an enlargement of the positive
functions of the State', going so far as to say that 'the distinction
between capitalism and socialism has lost much of it's significance from a
practical standpoint'. In 1966, as groups of Mizo National Front rebels
appear ready to storm at least two towns in Mizoram, the strafing of Lungleh
by the air force, the first time that air power had been used by the Indian
State against it's own citizens. Or in 1977 India's favourite businessman,
JRD Tata, speaking to a foreign journalist during the dark days of the
Emergency, finding that things had gone too far, adding that 'The
parliamentary system is not suited to our needs'.

But this history by bricolage inevitably ends up with embarrassingly
ahistoric conclusions. For example, to bolster his own naïve view that
"Rural India was pervaded by an air of timelessness" at the time of
Independence, he quotes a British official writing in an official
publication in 1944: 'there is the same plainness of life, the same
wrestling with uncertainties of climate… the same love of simple games,
sport and songs, the same neighbourly helpfulness…" I don't doubt that this
qualifies as 'contemporary narrative', but surely even within the
impoverished state of Indian social science that Guha seems to encounter, he
has heard of enough respectable scholarship, that contests – and even
confounds – this static image of the "Indian" countryside? The peasant
rebellions, the tribal movements, the caste conflicts?

What this often results in is a naïve – even absurd – acceptance of what is
described to us by the privileged 'contemporary narrative'. "Living away
from home helped expand the mind, as in the case of a farm labourer from UP
who became a factory worker in Bombay and learnt to love the city's museums,
its collections of Gandhara art especially". This is no doubt true for this
exceptional individual, but does this aid our understanding of the processes
of rural deprivation and urbanization that translate into the journey from
village in Uttar Pradesh to textile factory in Mumbai? (And where did that
worker go, refined sensibilities and all, once the textile mills began to
shut down in the 1980s?)

And when Nehru formally inaugurates the Bhakra dam in 1954, "for 150 miles
the boisterous celebration spread like a chain reaction along the great
canal…" Because Guha is committed to understanding 1954 in its own terms,
we're often left just there, in 1954, without the illuminating oxygen of
contemporary scholarship on the Bhakra dam and its consequences, for both
the people displaced by the dam (still without re-settlement 50 years on) or
for the land and waters of Punjab (now feeling the ill effects of the
massive hydraulic meddling and its handmaiden, the 'Green Revolution'.) At
such moments we must be forgiven for feeling that we are rifling through the
brittle pages of an official, sarkari history of India.

Where official archives and histories don't exist, the excessive – and
selective –reliance on newspapers and journals seems even less convincing.
Who amongst us has not read the newspaper of the day about an issue or event
that we know about and understand, and not despaired at the errors and
biases inherent? Who amongst us has not shuddered at the thought of some
future historian trawling the pages of the Times of India and the Indian
Express and forming a narrative of what is happening in India in 2007?

Through the book, Guha's writing on Kashmir, for example, is peppered with
insights from a journal called Thought, apparently published out of Delhi.
Forgive me, but what was Thought? Insights extracted from such narratives
can be useful to the historian, but also highly problematic, unless we can
contextualize them, compare them with other assessments, and understand the
nature of the biases we are dealing with. Otherwise we are simply left with
arbitrary assessments of shaky provenance: in1965, of Lal Bahadur Shastri,
second Prime Minister of India, who gets a positive appraisal by the
Guardian newspapers' Delhi correspondent, as well as a condescending
exchange of letters between two ex-ICS men: "I can't imagine Shastri has the
stature to hold things together... What revolting times we live in!"

Guhas' selective dependence on 'contemporary' narratives, and his distaste
of politics that is not 'parliamentary' comes through most clearly in his
treatment of Jaya Prakash Narayan. He musters the following: RK Patil, a
former ICS officer who asks of JP: "What is the scope of Satyagraha and
direct action in a formal democracy like ours…? By demanding the dismissal
of a duly elected assembly, argued Patil, the Bihar agitation is both
unconstitutional and undemocratic". To this Guha adds the opinions of the
"eminent Quaker" Joe Elder, who hectors JP on launching a mass movement
"without a cadre of disciplined non-violent volunteers". And finally, Indira
Gandhi herself, who dismisses JP as a "political naif… who would have been
better off sticking to social work." With such a slanted set of
'contemporary' narratives, it's no surprise who Guha is able to pin the
blame on for the tumult of those years, asserting that the honours for
imposing the Emergency should henceforth be equally shared between Indira
Gandhi and Jaya Prakash Narayan!

For the first 600 pages of his chronicle, Guha piles up the bricks and
artifacts of this structure sort of chronologically, 1947 through to 1987.
Then quite arbitrarily he announces a change in tack, moving from 'history'
to 'historically informed journalism'. He approvingly cites the thirty-year
rule of archives, adding grandly, that as a historian "one also needs a
generation's distance. That much time must elapse before one can place those
events in a pattern, to see them away and apart, away from the din and
clamour of the present".
The claim of 'history' and 'historically informed journalism' is at once too
strong for either section of the book. Because if indeed the section from
1987 onwards is 'historically informed' then shouldn't history actually
inform our understanding? Should this method not prepare us for some things:
the emergence of the non-Congress governments; of Kanshi Ram-Mayawati and
the BSP; for Liberalisation and India's relationship with the International
Financial Institutions? Why then does each of these appear on the horizon of
this book fully formed, with no lead-ins or alerts?

The relentless, even plodding attempt at being comprehensive, and the
dizzying collation of disparate facts, seems to tire Guha out too, and then
his usually elegant prose begins to flag, and the ideas it carries become
tedious, eventually grinding down to a sort-of Year Book listing of
significant facts and figures, people and events. In a chapter called
'Rights' (and which in news-magazine style is followed by sections called
'Riots', 'Rulers' and 'Riches'), a brief 28 pages races us through Caste,
the Mandal Commission and Dalit assertion; and an update on the conflicts in
Assam, Punjab, Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland! But wait, there is also
demography and gender – in a single paragraph that begins with "there was
also a vigorous feminist movement" and then deals with the women's movement
in 15 lines. Tribal rights fares a little better than Women's rights (or
perhaps worse, I'd say fifty-fifty): it just crosses a page, much of it
about the Narmada Bachao Andolan, where the 18 year old history of the
Andolan is reduced to it's leader, "a woman named Medha Patkar", who we are
told, "organized the tribals in a series of colourful marches… to demand
justice from the mighty government of India". And then, "The leader herself
engaged in several long fasts to draw attention to the sufferings of her
flock".

This is India's most well-known non-violent resistance movement, engaged in
articulating the largest internal displacement in our recent history, and in
case you had missed anything, it's her flock. Without prejudice to either
Vogue or Cosmopolitan, this condescension could probably never even make it
to their pages, and defies belief in a work of history written in the 21st
century. Apart from the fact that the NBA is only one of the hundreds of
people's resistance movements in India, many of whom are in the front ranks
of the struggle against neo-imperialism.

Quite early in the book, in assessing the historian KN Pannikar's opinions
of Mao Zedong, Guha reminds us that "Intellectuals have always had a curious
fascination for the man of power". He then puts on display his own unseemly
fascination with Power, with History from Above. (With a few exceptions,
even the small selection of haphazardly organized pictures in the first
edition of the book seems fixated by the man – or woman – of power, from
Lord Mountbatten to Amitabh Bachhan.) This I suppose is symptomatic, this
disinterest, even condescension, towards the fragile and powerless, and this
is what finally prevents his version of history from illuminating our times.
Because the powerless may not always be so, and 'historically informed
journalism' would need to tell us what brought Laloo Prasad Yadav, and
Mayawati to us. Even what preceded Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao
Andolan. (What forms of Adivasi and other organization made their movement
possible? And what in its turn did the NBA make possible, not in the
struggle against large dams alone, but in creating a climate in which the
resistance to SEZs can be contemplated today?)

For in the privileging of the 'primary', the question is, what are your
'primary' sources? Will they be restricted to the libraries of the India
Office, London and the Nehru Memorial, New Delhi, or are they going to go
beyond? Will we, for example, look at Urdu papers in Srinagar (and
Muzafarabad) to understand what was happening in Kashmir from 1947 to 1987?
Will we look at Dalit Hindi language little magazines to understand the
phenomenon of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati? Because if we don't do that, The
History of the World's Largest Democracy – like the Indian State – will
continually be surprised by the events and consequences of the day to day
history of the little in this country.

In the past, however arguable his ideas, Guhas' prose has been highly
readable. But here, hobbled by some Herculean compulsions to be
comprehensive, to reduce everything down to the manageable scale of one
grand narrative, ambition eventually does damage to his book. Impatient with
the increasingly workmanlike narrative, but determined to see it to it's
end, I found myself drifting into marginalia: for example Guha's peculiar
obsession with certain kinds of academic pedigree. Jawaharlal Nehru was of
course a "student at Cambridge", and so was the "Cambridge educated
physicist" Homi Bhabha. Krishna Menon and P N Haksar are identically
"educated at the London School of Economics". P C Mahalanobis is "a
Cambridge-trained physicist and statistician, Saif Tyabji too is "an
engineer educated at Cambridge", and of course, Manmohan Singh has "written
a Oxford D Phil thesis". I'm then curious as to the reasons why the same
insight is not provided to us for Acharya Kriplani, Ram Manohar Lohia,
Shiekh Abdullah, Zakir Hussain; or for Indira Gandhi, Kanshi Ram, Mayawati,
or even Medha Patkar? Of course, BR Ambedkar makes it, because he has
"doctorates from Columbia and London University". Jagjiwan Ram scrapes
through because he is the first Harijan from his village to go to High
School, and then onto Benares Hindu University. (Equal Opportunity in the
New Republic!) Kamaraj doesn't, but he does get a fuller description: "K
Kamaraj… born in a low-caste family in the Tamil country… was a thick-set
man with a white mustache… he looked like a cross between Sonny Liston and
the Walrus". I looked in vain for an equally entertaining description of
former President APJ Abdul Kalam.

If these obsessions with pedigree were the only things impeding my reading
of the book, there would be little to worry about. But armed with the
dangerous licence of 'historically informed journalism' for the crucial last
two decades of his book, he seems at liberty to comment without even the
minimum disciplines of 'history'. To take one example, he draws together
what he thinks of as "the two critical events that… defined the epoch of
competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the
exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits" (from Kashmir). He then goes on to make the
astonishing comment: "Would one trust a state that could not honour its
commitment to protect an ancient place of worship? Would one trust a
community that so brutally expelled those of a different faith?" Neither
needs to be established, both are stated as a priori facts.

He sees a striking similarity between the two pogroms he acknowledges in
independent India: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and at the
Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. "Both began as a response to a single,
stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community. Both
proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole". Guha
is careful to quickly wipe his sleeve, and draw attention to the innocence
of the victims, but I do wish he had shared with us what was the "single,
stray act of violence" committed by minority Muslims in Gujarat? After all,
the jury on the terrible burning of the train in Godhra is still out, is it
not?
At another point he describes the protests against the acquisition of land
by the Tatas in Kalinganagar, Orissa, where in the first week of 2006, "a
group of tribals demolished the boundary wall provoking the police to open
fire. The tribals placed the bodies of these martyrs on the highway and held
up traffic for a week ". How does he establish who was provoking whom, and
how?

Or what can explain his saying, about the aftermath of Sant Harchand Singh
Longowals' killing, in Punjab in 1988: "The sant's assassination was a
harbinger of things to come with a new generation of terrorists taking up
the struggle for Khalistan". I carefully looked over at least a dozen
references to the troubles in the Punjab in his book, there are never
Militants, always "Terrorists".
The point of bringing together these instances is simply to underline the
inherently establishment nature of the positions taken by Ramachandra Guha's
History. This sometimes leads him to places the intelligent reporter – leave
alone the historian – would not want to be stuck in. About the early 1990s
in Kashmir he says: "As the valley came to resemble a zone of occupation,
popular sentiment rallied to the jihadi cause. Terrorists mingled easily
with the locals, and were given refuge before or after their actions". Once
again: hugely contested words like 'Jehadi' and 'Terrorist', which scholars
the world over are cracking their brains over, slip off like the slipshod
words of television anchors.

And finally, on the difficulties of nurturing secularism in India in the
aftermath of Partition, Guha says: "The creation of an Islamic state on
India's borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished to
merge faith with state". Does one need to repeat here that the RSS, with its
fascist ideology borrowed directly from Mussolini, and it's ideal of a
Hindu-rashtra, was set up in 1925, and long preceded the idea of the Islamic
State of Pakistan. But Guha dives in head first: "My own view – speaking as
a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there
will be Hindu fundamentalists in India". Can such a completely ahistoric
assertion make its place into a history? And then remain unchallenged by
historians, commentators and reviewers in the India of 2007?

Incredibly, in the last few pages of the book, Guha does admit that only in
three-quarters of the "total land mass claimed by the Indian nation" does
the elected government enjoy a legitimacy of power and authority, and only
here do they feel themselves to be part of a single nation. How then does
this admission that in a quarter of the World's Largest Democracy people are
substantially alienated from the Nation sit with his insistence on
phiphty-phiphty? At what point will our historians ring the alarm bells?
When Half the nation is holding the Other Half by force? When it really
reaches fifty-fifty?

>From the books' well-publicised entry into the world we learn that the
author has spent the last eight years working on it. I too seem to have
coincidentally spent the same years ruminating on the World's Largest
Democracy, not as a historian, but as a film-maker, and not with the grand
purpose of this book for certain, but just fishing in it's troubled margins:
first in the Narmada valley, and then in Kashmir. Like many others who are
somewhat bewildered at events around us, and have failed to join in the
celebration of democracy this August, the book is an important marker. It
demands to be read seriously, and it's flaws and omissions ask to be taken
seriously by us. Because, in our tumultuous times, when change is fast
forcing all of us to choose sides, fifty-fifty has to be seen as too
cautious an answer, so safe as to translate into an almost mathematically
calibrated cowardice.

What then does the book represent? It's timed for the celebrations of the
60th year of Indian Independence, and arrives amidst the giddy hosannas to
India's success as a democracy, and our newly unfolding status as an
emerging economic power. The recent enthusiasm to burnish our 'shining'
democracy is, as we all know, tightly tied in with the desire to set India
up as a next destination of global capital. (Essentially, India 1, China 0).
So the grinding poverty, the dispossession, the cruelty and oppression are
made charming, and discord and chaos is turned into a tribute to our
democratic credentials. For all the book's sophistry then, Ramachandra Guha
emerges as the chronicler of India Shining. In this season where we
celebrate Indian democracy, surely a reassuring book to pass on to CEOs and
investors at the next Davos.

(*Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary film-maker, whose recent film
Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom) is about the idea of freedom in
Kashmir, and the degrees of freedom in India*.)