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

[anupam chakravartty]

Samvit, now you are using a weary rickshaw wallah's shoulders to fire guns.
For your information, there are a bunch of rickshaw wallahs who boldly
resisted the RSS-endorsed man slaughter in Gujarat during the 2002 riots by
taking their safely passengers to their destinations through burning lanes
of Vadodara. I wonder what would you say about the boldness. I want to thank
you for dragging Rakhi Sawant as well. She is problematic for a lot of
lecherous men of our times. I think I was right when I said I saw you in DU
passing comments on women's clothing. You and your kinds in all stratas of
the society.

Ramachandra Guha also took potshots at himself for your kind information:

http://www.siasat.com/english/news/india-now-lacks-thinking-politicians-ramachandra-guha?page=0%2C1

New Delhi, October 26: India has been lucky to have a continuous political
tradition of high quality original thinking that touched every aspect of
human condition but much needs to be done to restore it and make it relevant
in today''s context, noted historian and writer Ramachandra Guha has said.

"India may be unique in having a long tradition of original political and
reflective thinking that has been both continuous and continuously of high
quality and touched every aspect of the human condition," he said.

Speaking at the fourth Penguin India lecture on "The Indian Political
Tradition And Those Who Made It" based on his new book "Makers of Modern
India", Guha said here last night that, "The big idea of India owes itself
to a remarkable set of men and women who founded and nurtured the Indian
political tradition. Like in his book, Guha began with reformer Rajarammohun
Roy, describing him as one of India''s first liberal and modernist who was a
"precocious pioneer, swimming against the current, both a thinker and an
actor, a scholar and social reformer who confronted an orthodox hierarchical
and ossified society by Western thought.

"He pointed out that unlike today, yesteryear thinkers and makers of Indian
political tradition had original, compelling and relevant things to say
about democracy, nationalism, economic policy, religion, gender, caste,
environment and India''s relations with the world. Giving examples of
Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jaiprakash Narayan, M S Golwalker
and Ram Manohar Lohia, Guha said, "No politician or social reformer in
India''s political society thinks like them anymore.

What should worry us is not that we don''t have thinker politicians but the
leaders of today are so ignorant of the lineages they claim to represent. He
asked whether Congress MP Rahul Gandhi had ever read letters written by
Jawaharlal Nehru to chief ministers, whether the BSP leader Mayawati had
read Ambedkar''s speeches or whether Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh
Yadav could name a single book written by Lohia.

Finding other world leaders like French President Nicholas Sarkozy, or
British Prime Minister David Cameron or even Sri Lankan President Mahindra
Rajpakse deficient in original political thinking, he commended US President
Barack Obama describing him as "the closest to come to a thinker politician
anywhere in the world". Dubbing Obama''s predecessor George W Bush as
"anti-intellectual" and "anti-scholarly", Guha said even George W Bush knew
something about the American political tradition.

The historian-author who has bagged a seven-book deal with Penguin that
includes a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi described the father of
the nation as "mother of all battles concerning social reforms.

Guha said both Gandhi and Nehru had to confront people with ideologies
different from them but they argued cogently.

During the lecture, Guha took pot-shots at himself, fellow thinkers and also
several ethnic communities in India such as Malayalees, Bengalis, Gujaratis
and the Punjabis which left the 700 plus audience in splits. Guha concluded
that the Indian political tradition was not merely an obscurely, or
antiquarian or of archival interest but one where the multiple legacy of its
thinker activist makers was still available to fulfil and redeem the
unhonoured and unfulfilled ideals of a "remarkable political experiment in
history.


ENDS

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Samvit <samvitr at gmail.com> wrote:

> “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.”
>
> ---> My rickshawalla made a comment about her today. He said-" She is
> the Rakhi Sawant of the pseudo-intellectuals!!!". It is strange to
> know that both the axis of society have the same opinion about her.
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul
> <kauladityaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.”
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>
>
> --
> Samvit Rawal
> 9422037853
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.
>   - Franklin P. Adams
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