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

Fri Oct 29 23:21:02 IST 2010

Inder, from what have you construed that Ram Guha supported Pokhran II?

On 29/10/10 11:07 PM, "Inder Salim" <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:

> ³We are worlds apart, our politics, our arguments. I¹m
inclined to put as
> great a distance as possible between the Guhas of the
world and myself.²

This
> what Roy, said, if one goes by the article posted by Mr. ARK
So what is the
> fuss, it is Gua ji himself who is crossing lines,
mixing the faculty of
> history with activism. he is doing is at his own
peril.

. "Then > followed
> her opposition to Pokhran II. At that point, Guha
in a piece titled
> Arun
> Shourie of the Left¹ reading comments like this, my suggestion to myself is
> that i should not take Gua ji seriously. Paradoxically, he seeing a genius in
> Gandhi, but would Gandhi support Dams and Nuclear test. I saw his theatrical
> gestures in front of Barkha Dutt, ( his latest company ). so what to
> say.

however, there are some good quotes ³Gandhi and Nehru¹s genius
> to
obscure that wound, to overcome it and not make India a Hindu
Pakistan.²
> much to disappointment of Patal lovers.

Well, i was actually a little late
> when i switched on TV. to see his
interview with our Genius Barkha Dutt ji on
> NDTV. . Gua said that in
absence of MA Jinnah, both Gandhi and Nehru would not
> have pursued '
Secularism' in Congress politics, vigorously those days. So,
> the
indirect contribution of Jinnah in the making of India is immense,

So, if
> one goes by this Gua logic,  how is A.Roy a joke? . Isnt she
pushing, single
> handedly the Indian state to look around their
shoulders and see the mountain
> of injustices piling up in every
sector.

Thanks Mr. ARK for posting
> this

with love
is

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/Aru
> ndhati-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 she¹s 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.
>
> ³She¹s crazy. Arundhati Roy
> has become a joke, a publicity fiend,² Guha told
> Bangalore Mirror. ³She hops
> from cause to cause, and just look at the
> company she¹s keeping ... the
> likes of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, an ultimate
> bigot who wants to keep women in
> purdah and bring in an Islamic theocracy.²
>
> 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 doesn¹t
> 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 for¹ a community or
> a victim, Guha
> thinks it is far more challenging and nuanced from an
> intellectual
> standpoint to listen to¹ or speak to¹ victims as opposed to
> speak for¹
> 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 Said¹s notion that scholarship has to always oppose
> the
> guild mentality that unquestioningly privileges notions like
> country¹,
> citizen¹, community¹ and the like above everything else. But it
> is also
> the scholar¹s task, Guha asserts, to discern when an attack on these
> notions
> are warranted and when not. The current seditious¹ charges on
> Kashmir,
> emanating from certain quarters, in his view, certainly aren¹t.
>
>
> 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 Left¹ 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 objectively¹ 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 Guha¹s ³suspect politics and slapdash scholarship² and
>
> concluding that, ³We are worlds apart, our politics, our arguments. I¹m
>
> inclined to put as great a distance as possible between the Guhas of the
>
> world and myself.²
>
> Later Guha explained to an interviewer: ³There 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 ...²
>
> Guha,
> who is busy with the launch of his latest book Makers of Modern India
> - ³a
> kind of bridge² 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 he¹s working on -
> said
> that ³India has this habit of continuously surprising us.² Often in a
>
> not-so-good way.
>
> Talking of the three interlocutors for Kashmir, who got
> the job ³just
> because they are close to the dynasty in Delhi², he said the
> fact that the
> Indian state was not just violent or callous but so
> incompetent too came as
> a surprise. ³The one Muslim in the team has been
> appointed for no other
> reason than his surname. The other two don¹t even
> speak Urdu,² he said. ³Why
> couldn¹t 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.²
>
> In India After Gandhi, Guha claimed that Indian democracy was
> phifty-phifty,
> with an efficient hardware¹ but also with recurring
> software¹ 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 ³unnatural nation², in
> that it defied many
> norms, particularly the one where nation states are
> founded on a wound¹.
> India had Partition, as horrible and near-fatal a
> wound¹ as possible but it
> was ³Gandhi and Nehru¹s genius to obscure that
> wound, to overcome it and not
> make India a Hindu Pakistan.²
>
> Denying that
> the Kashmir problem and other mutinies plaguing India were a
> result of our
> founding fathers¹ refusal to confront the wound¹ squarely, he
> said that it
> was presumptuous to ponder if Sardar Patel would have handled
> India¹s
> post-Independence destiny differently from Nehru. ³We can always ask
> what
> if¹. But there has to be plausibility also. Patel was a great man, but
> Nehru
> was always, always Gandhi¹s chosen successor,² he said. ³Moreover,
> Patel was
> someone who never appealed to women, south Indians and Muslims
> which would
> have made him a suspect national¹ leader. A more interesting
> what if¹
> would be Subash Chandra Bose - what with the man¹s charisma, his
> visions,
> his whole unpredictability.²
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> 

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