[Reader-list] Arundhati roy has become a joke: Guha

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

Arundhati roy has become a joke: Guha*Link* -
http://www.bangaloremirror.com/article/1/201010292010102903332299368035e3f/Arundhati-roy-has-become-a-joke-Guha.html

Bangalore Mirror

Nine years after the Booker winner snubbed him, eminent historian
Ramachandra Guha makes the most of the opportunity to get even with her;
says she’s a publicity fiend.

Almost a decade after an intellectual controversy of V S Naipaul-Paul
Theroux proportions, Ramachandra Guha claims that his stand against
Arundhati Roy has been vindicated.

“She’s crazy. Arundhati Roy has become a joke, a publicity fiend,” Guha told
Bangalore Mirror. “She hops from cause to cause, and just look at the
company she’s keeping ... the likes of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, an ultimate
bigot who wants to keep women in purdah and bring in an Islamic theocracy.”

The central government is contemplating slapping sedition charges on Roy for
saying that Kashmir is not an integral part of India, but Guha believes that
far more basic issues are involved. There is a reason, Guha says, why as a
historian he doesn’t want to get too involved in Kashmir, the Maoist
insurgency or, for that matter, even conservation movements. Apart from the
obvious hubris of believing that an outsider can ‘speak for’ a community or
a victim, Guha thinks it is far more challenging and nuanced from an
intellectual standpoint to ‘listen to’ or ‘speak to’ victims as opposed to
‘speak for’ them.

Casting himself firmly on the side of traditional historiography as against
postmodern ones, that celebrate dissent and flux for their own sake, Guha
agreed with Edward Said’s notion that scholarship has to always oppose the
guild mentality that unquestioningly privileges notions like ‘country’,
‘citizen’, ‘community’ and the like above everything else. But it is also
the scholar’s task, Guha asserts, to discern when an attack on these notions
are warranted and when not. The current ‘seditious’ charges on Kashmir,
emanating from certain quarters, in his view, certainly aren’t.

The highly acrimonious spat between the two writers started after Roy,
basking in her Booker fame, became a zealot for the anti-big dam cause. Then
followed her opposition to Pokhran II. At that point, Guha in a piece titled
‘Arun Shourie of the Left’ wrote about how celebrity endorsements of social
or political protest movements were fraught with danger because sooner than
later the celebrity would replace the cause but he offered a seeming olive
branch by saying that Roy and he were ‘objectively’ on the same side.

Roy, in her riposte in the form of an exhaustive interview to a national
fortnightly magazine in Jan 2001, was to dismiss this in no uncertain terms,
criticising Guha’s “suspect politics and slapdash scholarship” and
concluding that, “We are worlds apart, our politics, our arguments. I’m
inclined to put as great a distance as possible between the Guhas of the
world and myself.”

Later Guha explained to an interviewer: “There was the worry of someone long
involved with the environmental debate that the simplifications and
exaggerations of Roy would tend to polarize issues and make meaningful
environmental reform that much more difficult ...”

Guha, who is busy with the launch of his latest book Makers of Modern India
- “a kind of bridge” between his magisterial India After Gandhi - which was
voted by the Economist and Wall Street Journal as the best book of the year
in 2007, and the two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi he’s working on -
said that “India has this habit of continuously surprising us.” Often in a
not-so-good way.

Talking of the three interlocutors for Kashmir, who got the job “just
because they are close to the dynasty in Delhi”, he said the fact that the
Indian state was not just violent or callous but so incompetent too came as
a surprise. “The one Muslim in the team has been appointed for no other
reason than his surname. The other two don’t even speak Urdu,” he said. “Why
couldn’t they have appointed people who would have commanded respect from
both sides, people who could act as genuine go-betweens. Right away I can
name two - Rajmohan Gandhi and Swami Agnivesh.”

In India After Gandhi, Guha claimed that Indian democracy was phifty-phifty,
with an efficient ‘hardware’ but also with recurring ‘software’ problems.
His implicit argument in that book, as well as in Makers of Modern India, is
that despite troubled times, or perhaps especially in troubled times, it
becomes necessary to harp on the strengths of Indian democracy.

He explained that India was an “unnatural nation”, in that it defied many
norms, particularly the one where nation states are founded on a ‘wound’.
India had Partition, as horrible and near-fatal a ‘wound’ as possible but it
was “Gandhi and Nehru’s genius to obscure that wound, to overcome it and not
make India a Hindu Pakistan.”

Denying that the Kashmir problem and other mutinies plaguing India were a
result of our founding fathers’ refusal to confront the ‘wound’ squarely, he
said that it was presumptuous to ponder if Sardar Patel would have handled
India’s post-Independence destiny differently from Nehru. “We can always ask
‘what if’. But there has to be plausibility also. Patel was a great man, but
Nehru was always, always Gandhi’s chosen successor,” he said. “Moreover,
Patel was someone who never appealed to women, south Indians and Muslims
which would have made him a suspect ‘national’ leader. A more interesting
‘what if’ would be Subash Chandra Bose - what with the man’s charisma, his
visions, his whole unpredictability.”