DANGERS OF BURIED STORIES - Forgetting history may harm India’s insight into the present

By Swapan Dasgupta

The extent to which India as a nation lacks a sense of history was driven home to me recently by an account of the Bangladesh Government’s commemoration of the liberation war of 1971.

Anxious to honour those Indians who had contributed the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation four decades ago, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina organised a series of events in Dhaka over the past two years. Since most of those who contributed, either publicly or under a cover of anonymity, to the liberation struggle had died, Bangladesh graciously invited their family members to accept the awards on their behalf. Predictably, since most of the non-Bangladeshis who played a role in ensuring the defeat of the brutal Pakistani regime between March and December of 1971 were Indians, the authorities in Dhaka were compelled to seek the assistance of the Government of India to locate the individuals or their families.

According to the officials in Bangladesh handling the commemoration, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Delhi over Sheikh Hasina’s gracious gesture. In particular, Bangladeshi officials were stumped over the complete blank that greeted their inquiries of two individuals. One was an Indian Foreign Service officer managing the Pakistan desk in South Block, the only non-military Indian official present at the surrender of the Pakistan army in Dacca; and the other was a more shadowy figure, the right-hand man of R&AW chief R.N. Kao, operating from Calcutta. Inquiries about the first gentleman produced no results from the Ministry of External Affairs and the intelligence community in Delhi were unaware of the existence of one of the early stalwarts of R&AW.

At one level, the entire episode reeked of official indifference to anything that was not in the normal line of duty. Far more important, it seems to me, was the confirmation of a huge lacuna in ‘official’ India: the complete absence of institutional memory. The collapse of East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh was one of the most important chapters of India’s post-Independence history. It continues to define Pakistan’s attitude towards India and, as such, has a direct contemporary bearing. Yet, it is astonishing that absolutely no organised attempt is made to disseminate the history of that crisis to a new generation of diplomats who will be managing India’s relations with its neighbours in the future. This wilful disregard of history can be contrasted to the exacting importance the Pakistan Foreign Service and, for that matter, the Pakistani military establishment attaches to learning the lessons of its greatest national humiliation.

The publication of Gary J. Bass’s eminently readable The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan is as good an occasion as any to revisit the events of 1971. Based almost entirely on official US Government documents, the White House tapes pertaining to the presidency of Richard Nixon and the papers of Indira Gandhi’s Principal Secretary P.N. Haksar and the then Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul, the book provides a gripping insight into the calculations of policy makers in Washington D.C, New Delhi and Islamabad. Although much of the narrative now belongs to the realms of history, there are important strands that have a direct bearing on the contemporary relations between India and Pakistan.

Bass’s most crucial revelation is one that was well known in official circles in India but was quite consciously hidden from public view and, consequently, is insufficiently factored in contemporary Indian assessments of Pakistan. The Pakistan army’s crackdown in erstwhile East Pakistan began as an offensive against Bangladeshi nationalism and the Awami League. This involved murderous action against students, political activists and the paramilitary forces staffed by Bengali speakers. However, once the Pakistan army entrenched itself in the towns it initiated a parallel campaign of ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. So much so that by the time the Indian army began its military offensive against Pakistan in December 1971, nearly 80 per cent of the 8.5 million refugees who were camped in India were Hindus.

This attempt to ‘purify’ Pakistan of non-Muslims was well known to both India and the West, particularly the US. On July 19, 1971, Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s amoral Secretary of State, had remarked that President Yahya Khan of Pakistan had loved the cloak and dagger arrangements surrounding his ‘secret’ visit to China, adding: “Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre.”

The remark may have been characteristically tasteless—and the White House tapes resonate with Nixon and Kissinger outdoing each other in showering profanities on Indians and Bengalis—but it indicates that the viciously sectarian character of the Pakistan military regime was well known. It is a different matter that India deliberately underplayed the denominational details of the refugee problem to avoid any diversion from the fact that the crisis had stemmed from a Bengali uprising against Pakistani domination. However, in allowing the real story to remain buried for more than 40 years, India lost sight of a larger reality. It also glossed over the fact that Pakistan was not normal. A state that couldn’t countenance any deviation from its Islamic identity and, in fact, was fanatical enough to lose more than half the country on this count, cannot be judged by the accepted standards of international statecraft.

What emerges from the Nixon-Kissinger private exchanges is that Pakistan’s foremost ally was clear in its mind that Yahya had embarked on a path of self-destruction. Pakistan, they knew, couldn’t win a war against India in the East. At various point they even tried telling this to the “big, honourable, stupid man” that was the Pakistani President. However, as Kissinger was to confess later, Yahya “was oblivious to his perils and unprepared to face necessities. He and his colleagues did not feel India was planning war; if so, they were convinced that they would win. When I asked tactfully as I could about the Indian advantage in numbers and equipment, Yahya and his colleagues answered with bravado about the historic superiority of Moslem fighters.”

Ayub Khan too had believes that one Pakistani soldier was equal in worth to 20 Hindu fighters. This was the basis of his war to occupy Kashmir and even reach Delhi in 1965. In both 1965 and 1971, Pakistan failed to live up its exalted self-esteem. Yet the belief in its superior national character has never waned. There is a big section of the Pakistan establishment that believes that the country was “betrayed” in all its wars against India. Consequently, the belief that unflinching Islamic nationalism is the only way to realise Pakistan’s manifest destiny (in Kashmir or elsewhere) is deep-rooted and widespread.

For India this implies permanent danger on the frontiers. The threat is doubled by Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine that is premised on the understanding that the adversary in India is somehow a sub-human whose elimination is also a religious duty.

Beginning with Indira Gandhi and P.N. Haksar who felt that Pakistan must be allowed to recover from Dacca debacle with an iota of self-respect, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh whose perception of the Pakistani national character is coloured by pre-Partition nostalgia, India has tried its best to couch neighbourly relations with civility and the lure of good economics. After each disappointment, India has tried to begin afresh, believing that pragmatism will mark every new generation in Pakistan. Each time history has hit back. 

In dealing with Pakistan, India cannot eschew institutional memory. We may have changed, become more cosmopolitan, more global and more post-national. Across the Radcliffe Line, however, the mindset of 1971 is alive and dreaming of revenge. 

The Telegraph, October 25, 2013

When in Britain, do as the Great Britons did

By Swapan Dasgupta

Last Friday's British newspapers contained a startling revelation: the number of self-professed Christians in the United Kingdom has fallen below 50 per cent. The Census report, on which this finding is based, has also led some demographers to conclude that by 2060, the majority of Britons will be non-white.

Considering that immigration to the UK from the erstwhile colonies began in full steam from the early 1950s, and mainly in response to the post-war labour shortages, and was given an additional fillip by the movement of European Union nationals from the 1980s, the demographic shifts will be monumental. In just a century or so - a very small time in the history of nations - the Britain which we knew (and in many cases idolized) will be a completely different place. The "green and pleasant land" invoked by the hymn 'Jerusalem' will probably still be there, unless the property developers and road builders are given unlimited powers of desecration, but it will be littered with abandoned churches , pubs serving tepid bitter and samosas and its bustling markets filled with hijabwearing housewives. The England of P G Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, John Betjeman and Agatha Christie will be a thing of the past.

"Change? Why should things change?" Guy Burgess, the upper-class British traitor living in grey Moscow remarked in Alan Bennett's celebrated play 'An Englishman Abroad' . It's a question that many who were deeply influenced by the soft power of Empire often ask in exasperation when confronted by Caucasian waitresses for whom English is at best a fourth language.

"Change and decay" may well be all around we see but transformation is inevitable. Indeed, there is little point opposing it, demanding the return of the pre-decimal currency and the meat-and-two-veg diet that was a feature of the culinary wasteland. The real challenge is to manage change so that the future doesn't break with the past and present entirely.

Fortunately, there are politicians whose vision doesn't merely extend to the next general election. One of the most intellectually stimulating members of David Cameron's government is education secretary Michael Gove, a man many commentators say could end up as a future leader of the Conservative Party.

What distinguishes Gove from the 'modern' Conservatives of the Cameron school is his innate distrust of fashionable theories and politically expedient choices. Gove has offended the powerful teacher's unions by suggesting shorter holidays, longer school hours and tougher evaluation standards. He has called for a renewed emphasis on teaching grammar and encouraged the establishment of independent schools that put a premium on academic excellence. It would also be fair to say that Gove's stress on raising standards has enjoyed the backing of parents with school-going children.

However, what has raised the hackles of the 'progressives' who have dominated the education establishment for very long is his proposal for a fundamental change in the teaching of history - an issue that remains a favourite with ideologically-driven politicians.

The changes proposed by Gove fall into two broad categories . First, he has sought the return of the traditional narrative history within a chronological framework. Therefore, rather than present history as a 'fun' exercise replete with fancy dress shows and allusions to popular characters from comics and Disney films, Gove has sought to reinject history teaching with the cultivation of lucidity, analysis and logically consistent thinking . Secondly, and this is important in the context of a Britain that is changing a bit too rapidly for anyone's comfort, he has suggested that curriculum include a substantial chunk of British history.

The patchy syllabus of the past where familiarity with Tudor England was blended with an awareness of Germany's Nazi experience has been attacked and sought to be replaced with a more thorough and chronologically flowing awareness of the British experience.

Predictably, Gove has been attacked for encouraging insularity and putting the UK at the centre of the world. There is merit in that charge. But when you consider that in the next few decades Britain will have a generation which lacks the moorings of the British oak, he is right to emphasize the importance of the national over the cosmopolitan.

When people make a choice to live in Britain, leaving the 'old country' behind, they also accept the obligations of citizenship. And these obligations are better appreciated by imbibing the essence of the entire British experience. If multiculturalism becomes a celebration of the ethnic menagerie, the next 50 years will see Britain undergoing a personality change. That, to me at least, would be undesirable.

Sunday Times of India, May 19, 2013

APOLOGY EXCHANGE - The debate about Cameron at Jallianwala Bagh is rather silly

By Swapan Dasgupta

The accomplished British cartoonist Martin Rowson is—as befitting his profession—naturally attracted by the absurdities of public life. Last week, he directed his fire at the Think Tanks. “Let’s form a Think Tank”, he suggested to his Twitter followers, “Call it… ‘Policy Carousel’…Front it up with a couple of nerdy teenagers in suits…and start issuing press releases…arguing the dumbest things that comes into our heads. Insist that children reared in trees are better at French; nurses who eat nothing but jam have better mortality outcomes; if the moon was painted mauve reading standards would improve among ‘White British’ mice living in buckets…Then see how long it is before lazy news editors at the BBC makes our latest batshit…the third story on their main morning news…”

As a response to my endorsement of the whacky scheme, Martin suggested I open a Delhi chapter of Policy Carousel. Ever helpful with identifying the bizarre, he suggested an opening initiative—an ‘Apology Exchange: Amritsar for Black Hole.”

Since the authenticity of the Black Hole of Calcutta remains in some doubt—there are grave suspicions that an imaginative account by a survivor written many years after the event was responsible for the infamy that was bestowed on the area around the majestic General Post Office—there are other possible initiatives that Apology Exchange can mentor. How about restoring the beautifully crafted Angel of Cawnpore to the original site of the Bibighar massacre where an estimated 120 people, including large numbers of women and children, were massacred by the troops of the ‘perfidious’ Nana Sahib on July 15, 1857? After Independence, the memorial was relocated to a corner of the All Souls Church in Kanpur.

And, just to demonstrate that it is not merely the loathsome Lt-General Dyer who is being pilloried by history, how about an appropriate memorial in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk to commemorate one of the worst massacres of civilians in India? I am, of course, referring to the massacre of Delhi by Nadir Shah on March 9, 1739 in retaliation for the mob fury the night before that led to the killings of some 3,000 Kazalbash troopers. According to a contemporary account, the Iranian troops began the carnage at 9 am “and forced their way into shops and houses killing the occupants and laying violent hands on anything of value… No distinction was made between the innocent and the guilty, male and female, old and young.” By the time Nadir Shah called off the pogrom after six hours, the roads of Delhi were blocked by heaps of bodies. The death toll was said to be anything between 8,000 and 40,000—a darn shade more than the highest estimates of those killed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

Nadir Shah, who continues to be celebrated in modern Iran as a great national hero, also made off with the Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor diamond (which subsequently found its way into the Tower of London). Indeed, to this day, the term ‘Nadirshahi’ is used is northern India as a synonym for brutality and oppression. How come, therefore, the frequent visits of Shah Reza Pehlavi in the past and more infrequent visits of the stalwarts of the post-1979 theocratic regime these days isn’t peppered with calls for either the return of the Peacock Throne to Delhi or at least a heartfelt but grovelling apology? Instead, the representatives of Independent India lose absolutely no opportunity to emphasise the “deep civilizational ties” that bind the peoples of Persia and Hindustan.

Going back a little further in time, there was also the invasion of the Moghul Tamerlane in 1398, a mere 615 years ago. That invasion was marked by an equal show of blood-thirstiness by the Moghul army. Having taken nearly a lakh prisoners during the course of his advance from the Indus, Timur was apprehensive that they would “join their countrymen against him” when he attacked Delhi. To forestall that possibility, he massacred the lot of them in cold blood. Having taken Delhi, Timur allowed his soldiers to go berserk. According to a contemporary account Firishta, “the Hindoos, according to their custom, seeing their females disgraced, set fire to their houses, murdered their wives and children , and rushed out on their enemies.” A massacre followed and, like in 1739, the streets were clogged with corpses. “The desperate courage of the Delhiyans was at length cooled in their own blood, and throwing down their weapons, they at last submitted themselves like sheep to slaughter…”

The irony is that 228 years later, a scion of the Timurid dynasty established the Moghul empire in India, an empire that is celebrated as an authentic encapsulation of the Indo-Islamic encounter. In 1857, when the sepoys and dispossessed chiefs rose against the firinghees of the East India Company, they did so in the name of the bewildered and bedgraggled Mughal who was perceived as the alternative pole of sovereignty. In the 459 years between Timur being loathed as the barbaric invader and Bahadur Shah Zafar’s emergence as the symbol of what some historians regard as patriotic resistance to the British, the Moghuls had been recast. Their legitimacy was no longer a contested issue, a reason why street names in the showcase Capital of the Republic bear the names of Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Shah Jehan and even Aurangzeb.

There are many reasons why the absorptive powers of India which Rabindranath Tagore wrote about—and, incidentally, included the English, along with the Huns and the Moghuls, as communities of ‘them’ who became ‘us’—has escaped the British Raj. One of the possible reasons could be expedient erraticism that accompanies the already feeble Hindu grasp of chronology. In contemporary discourse, for example, the Great Calcutta Killings and the accompanying bloody Partition of India is ‘history’, as is, say, the Emergency of 1975-77. At the same time, the Jallianwala Bagh butchery that happened 94 years ago still warrants a limited debate over whether visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron should have opted for an unequivocal apology—akin to his predecessor Tony Blair’s ‘sorry’ for the Irish famine or former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famous genuflection in Poland in 1970—rather than mere ‘regret’.

Without underplaying the importance of the Amritsar killing which effectively broke the moral backbone of an Empire that had cast itself in a paternalist garb, today’s debate is rather silly. For a start, the pressure to distance an economically beleaguered United Kingdom from its Empire inheritance hasn’t originated from the Dominions and the former colonies. Its origins are strictly rooted in the post-colonial angst that has gripped the younger and more cosmopolitan generation of Britons. In India, the Raj is well and truly history and a toy wheeled out by the tourism industry for hard currency. Apart from politicians and xenophobes who peddle pop history as political slogans, the mass of young India crave for proficiency in the English language, western culture and global opportunities. M.K. Gandhi and Tagore would have squirmed in despair.

Ironically, that doesn’t make them any less nationalist. Perhaps the greatest satisfaction Indians drew from Cameron’s visit was not the ‘regret’ in Amritsar but the caricature in a British publication depicting Cameron as the supplicant before the throne of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi. The perverse like me  would say that this wasn’t a parody of Sir Thomas Roe in the court of Jehangir; it corresponded more to Lord Clive extracting his due from a cowering Shah Alam whose realm, as we all know, extended from Delhi to Palam.

History is cruel but fun. Why kill it with pedestrian earnestness?

The Telegraph, February 28, 2013 

‘The Poor And Afflicted’: Vivekananda’s Many Gods Much of the life-blood of our freedom struggle doesn’t conform to Nehruvian republican ideals. Swamiji’s life must be seen in its socio-political context.

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is a scene from the late-Sixties’ mushy and jingoistic Bengali film Subhashchandra that is worth recalling in a less innocent age.

The moustachioed head of the local thana in Cuttack walks into the book-lined room where a teenage Subhas Chandra Bose is engrossed in his studies. Brandishing his baton menacingly, he glowers at the numerous photographs on the wall—including one of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee the author of Anandamath and one of martyr Kshudiram Bose who was executed for killing an Englishman. The policeman then turns his disapproving gaze on Subhas. “You’ve overlooked one,” interjects the boy insolently and points to another wall. The camera focusses on a portrait of Swami Vivekananda. The policeman stares at the photograph intently. Then, pointing his baton at Vivekananda, he declaims: “That is the raja of all the revolutionaries. Whichever revolutionary we catch, his picture is with them.”

More than 65 years after Independence and with ‘official’ history being constantly reworked, it is both fashionable and obligatory to brush aside the inspirational importance of Swami Vivekananda to earlier generations. He was a sanyasi in saffron robes who was unabashedly committed to the propagation of spiritualism and national regeneration and who, at the same time, didn’t shy away from his self-identity as a proud Hindu. That such a man greatly inspired India’s passage to freedom may seem at odds with the puerile perception that contemporary Indian nationhood is based solely on universalist, secular and republican ideals. A complex past has become unwanted baggage that, if not discarded, is best left in storage. Unfortunately, what we were happens to be markedly different from what the champions of a spurious cosmopolitan modernity believe we are and, more important, should be.

To the Left-liberal elites that have a stranglehold on the citadels of intellectual power, the ‘idea of India’ is governed by the broad acceptance of the Nehruvian consensus and adherence to what might loosely be described as ‘Constitutional patriotism’. Anything which doesn’t fit into this neat scheme is deemed to be in conflict with the national ethos and, as happened to Vande Mataram, quietly relegated to the ante-room. Alternatively, awkward facets of an infuriatingly complex inheritance are sanitised, bowdlerised and, like balls of plasticine, made to fit any shape.

“The intelligentsia of my country”, Nirad Chaudhury wrote slyly in his Autobiography, “have always had the faith—which certainly is justified by the secular changes in our political existence—that they are indispensable as mercenaries to everybody who rules India.” 

In 1993, just after the demolition of the Babri structure in Ayodhya, the then Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh attached considerable importance to celebrating the centenary of Swami Vivekananda’s speech to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The focus then was on projecting the “Orange monk” as the epitome of inclusive religion, tolerance and egalitarianism—in fact a man who anticipated the ‘enlightened’ secularism and even socialism of the Nehruvian order. The underlying agenda was to deny an aggressive BJP and Sangh brotherhood a monopoly claim over Hindu symbols. The project also had the blessings of “progressive” historians and even the tacit nod of a Ramakrishna Mission which was engaged in a bizarre battle to claim ‘minority’ status by declaring itself to be outside the Hindu fold. The Supreme Court, mercifully, rejected that claim in 1995.

Two decades later the enthusiasm for appropriating Swami Vivekananda for the good fight against the dark forces of bigotry appears to have lost momentum. Last year, as the evocative photographs in Outlook (January 21, 2013) reminded us, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi did something characteristically audacious: to coincide with the 150^th anniversary of the Swami’s birth, he packaged his pre-election tour of the state as the Vivekananda Yatra.  Nor was this entirely a gimmick based on the fact that the Bengali monk and the Gujarati CM shared a first name. As someone who has been inspired by Vivekananda since his youth—he even sought to join the Ramakrishna Mission as a monk—Modi’s symbolism was not disingenuous. It was centred on broadly the same assumptions that made Vivekananda the inspiration for generations of Indian nationalists, particularly prior to 1947.

Three features of Vivekananda’s philosophy warrant special emphasis. First, unlike other Hindu religious leaders who made the quest for God a matter of personal salvation, Vivekananda enlarged the scope of his spiritual quest. It became co-terminus with a nebulously defined national service. “The poor, the illiterate, the ignorant, the afflicted”, he wrote, “let these be your God, know that service to these alone is the highest religion.” It was an invocation that, in the context of the times, was unmistakably revolutionary.

Secondly, Vivekananda was clear that what distinguished India from the materialist West was its attachment to a Hindu ethos grounded in spiritualism. Yet, he didn’t reject this-worldliness out of hand. In his study Europe Reconsidered (1988), historian Tapan Raychaudhuri argued that Vivekananda saw the West “as an admirable manifestation of rajas, manly vigour, a necessary step to higher things. Indians sunk in tamas, pure inertia and all that is brutish in man, had to emulate that quality first.”  Vivekananda addressed a question that was preoccupied middle-class India at the turn of the 20^th century: what facet of the West should India accept or reject? Raychaudhuri suggested that Vivekananda “proposed a fair exchange of ideas, a synthesis based on national dignity.”

Finally, Vivekananda’s priorities for national regeneration were determined by the prevailing conditions in India, particularly the grim realities of political subordination. Despite his avowed defence of the principles of the Vedic caste system—one of the few things he had in common with Mahatma Gandhi—Vivekananda was unequivocal in his denunciation of the corrupted institution, particularly the rules of ritual purity that made Brahmins the oppressor and Sudras the victim. He saw caste as a major impediment to the forging of a purposeful, united nation.

Added to this was his impatience with the physical inadequacies of a subject people and his over-weaning desire to contribute to the emergence of a muscular Hinduism which would not countenance servitude and humiliation. It would be fair to say that the lessons he drew from the Bhagwad Gita was radically different from those drawn by Gandhi.

Vivekananda was essentially a product of his times. He belonged to a period when the early infatuation with westernisation was yielding to a more nuanced understanding of the wider world that blended with the grim realities of India as a subject nation. Moreover, in his short life—he died at the age of 39—he spent five active years outside India fostering an understanding of the India’s Hindu heritage. Predictably, his attention was focussed on projecting India’s innate strength rather than highlighting its many shortcomings. How he would have evolved had he lived to witness the political turbulence that accompanied the Partition of Bengal in 1905 is a matter of conjecture. Would he have retreated into a personal quest within the monastic order he created? Or would he have travelled in a more politically active direction? It is significant that most of his contemporaries believed his message was relevant in shaping public life.  

It is tempting to dissociate Vivekananda from his context and see him through the prism of contemporary politics. This is precisely the underlying tone of Outlook’s sensational description of him as the “The Hindu Supremacist” that implicitly identifies him with a form of Hindu fascism. This approach is in line with other recent interventions that have projected Vivekananda as the epitome of a regressive machismo.

Fortuitously, this attempted vilification of a towering symbol of Hindu pride may have unintended consequences. That Vivekananda was much more than yet another in the long line of eminent Hindu spiritualists preoccupied with personal salvation is obvious. By linking his life and teachings with the evolution of the political Hindu, his detractors may have unwittingly helped in locating him in the larger debate on the shape and future of an emerging India. After all, the liberal elite’s disavowal of everything ‘Hindu’ is not universally shared in India. 

Outlook, January 28, 2013

Don vivant

Tapan Raychaudhuri dominated South Asian studies at Oxford. Swapan Dasgupta reviews his memoir, which reveals the history behind the historian

To understand history, E H Carr had advised in his celebrated Trevelyan lectures in 1961, it helps to also understand the historian.

Over the past five years or so, the publishing world has witnessed a relatively new phenomenon: historians writing about themselves, and biographies of historians. There is Hugh Trevor-Roper’s celebrated Letters from Oxford, his wartime diaries and the enthralling biography of him by Adam Sisman; at least three readable accounts of the colourful life of the contrarian A J P Taylor; a collection of Richard Cobb’s indiscreet letters to sundry dons; the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s erudite autobiography Interesting Times; and, of course, the late Tony Judt’s memoirs that have secured rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Apart from providing interesting glimpses into the cloistered and often petty world of the High Table and Senior Common Room, the historians’ literature has helped demolish a stereotype. The caricature of the grumpy medievalist poring tirelessly over forgotten manuscripts and waging purposeless departmental wars against equally obscure colleagues has been replaced by the figure of the glamorous, cosmopolitan, bon vivant historian, at ease in the city of dreaming spires, in business class lounges and in TV studios. As the soaring careers of, say, Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and even our very own White Moghul suggest, historians can be every bit as interesting as their bestselling narrative histories.

India, as usual, has been slow to cotton on to the trend. There is very little information, except stray anecdotes that rarely travel beyond rarefied circles, about the lives, predilections and preferences of the old masters. Apart from their published works, do we know anything significant about the loyalism of Sir Jadunath Sarkar or the strong political views of R C Majumdar? Why does intellectual history not embrace the lives and experiences of India’s historians? Is it connected with the overall Hindu disdain of history and the bored bewilderment with the strange animal that goes by the name of “scientific history”?

For some three decades, Tapan Raychaudhuri was the presiding deity of Indian (or should we say South Asian) history studies in Oxford. Erudite, intellectually alert, easygoing and, most importantly in the context of the old university, clubbable, he guided many generations of students through their gobbets, the final year special paper and their DPhils. His intellectual horizon was vast, and he was as much at home discussing abstruse clauses of the Sunset Laws as he was with French cooking. Blessed with social skills — without which Oxford can either be a nightmare or a very lonely existence — he could negotiate his way through departmental committees and supercilious colleagues. Along with his wife Hashi-di, whose cooking skills were legendary, Tapan-da was the father figure of the Indian community in Oxford.

Yet, and curiously, it is not the accounts of his long stint in Oxford first as a research student at Balliol and subsequently as a don at St Antony’s College that makes his memoirs a must-read. There is an underlying sense of disappointment and bitterness with a community of otherwise enlightened scholars that refuses to acknowledge that empires by definition personify evil. What distinguishes Raychaudhuri’s story of his life from similar accounts by more famous historians is the narration of a childhood spent in the district town of Barisal (now in Bangladesh).

Comparable in many ways to Nirad Chaudhuri’s description of the Hindu bhadralok way of life in the small town of Kishorganj in the early decades of the 20th century, Raychaudhuri’s paints a vivid and sensitive picture of a zamindari class in decline. From descriptions of a joint family where indolence and fractiousness was combined with active intellectual pursuits and pen portraits of old family retainers, to accounts of the lavish but homely Durga Puja celebrations at the old ancestral house, Raychaudhuri captures the ambience of the lesser zamindars of East Bengal.

What makes the section compelling is that Raychaudhuri brings his historian’s perspective into the narrative. This enables him to move from simple nostalgia — important as that may be — to a clinical analysis of the untenable facets of noblesse oblige. The point he drives home repeatedly is that a system based on the collection of rents and cesses was insufficient to justify a lifestyle centred on pretentiousness.

At the same time, he is careful in indicating that a life based on fractured rentier income and weighed down by litigation wasn’t necessarily decadent but intellectually invigorating. Economic stagnation and decline did co-exist with the larger Bengal Renaissance. And, alongside a desire to usher an independent India into existence was a corresponding fascination with Western civilisation. Raychaudhuri brings out the many-faceted complexities of a people that loved England and hated the Raj.

Equally revealing is the account of the nationalist movement as experienced in Barisal. The sense of composite nationalism and adherence to the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi was, in East Bengal, a Hindu bhadralok phenomenon. The failings of the movement lay in the disconnect from a Muslim peasantry which had begun harbouring very different ideas of the shape of post-Raj Bengal.

However, it is in the treatment of the underlying communal tension between Hindus and Muslims that Raychaudhuri takes evasive action. The reader gets a sense of the looming tensions in the outside world and a sense of the pain and despondency that engulfed the family as it left Barisal for the journey to an inhospitable Calcutta. For most Hindu migrants from East Bengal, it was the final departure that was most traumatic. What triggered the final decision to move in Raychaudhuri’s household? How did they cope in the final days? These are questions that arise in the minds of the reader. Unfortunately, Raychaudhuri deals with the subject perfunctorily, as if he is unable to relive the pain.

The denial of the human tragedy of Partition is a feature of the “progressive” Bengali intellectual. It is sad that Raychaudhuri, no doctrinaire Marxist, has succumbed to the same evasion, perhaps in the fear that explicit accounts of experiences and true feelings are fraught with dangerous consequences. In his Forgotten Land, on the monuments and memories of the Germans expelled from East Prussia, Max Egremont notes a similar sense of denial. As a historian, Raychaudhuri should have transcended the base considerations of contemporary politics. His Oxford friend Nirad Chaudhuri did. Which is why, as even Raychaudhuri concedes, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian will always remain a classic.

This book came perilously close to complementing Nirad Babu’s work. If only Tapan-da had not been so guarded and diplomatic. Writing memoirs is implicitly hazardous: it invariably involves offending some people.

Business Standard, March 10, 2012

Maharani's durbar and a blinkered view of history

By Swapan Dasgupta

Apart from newspapers that commemorated the event and an agreeable party on the lawns of Ambassador Hotel where the cultural elite drank to the occasion, the centenary of the transfer of the Capital and the foundation of New Delhi was largely unobserved. ‘Official’ India which otherwise loves to organise tacky commemorations by producing unappealing postage stamps gave this event a wide berth. And, while no one was forthcoming about the reason, the rationale was inescapable: the 1911 Durbar was a ‘colonial’ event and, therefore, only worthy of sneer.

The Hindu sense of history has at the best of times been rather feeble. However, when it comes to the 190 years of British rule, the disdain for a recorded past is coupled with a spurious political correctness and hypocrisy. Even after six decades of Independence and flamboyant assertions of national sovereignty, India has yet to develop the necessary self-confidence to view history as history. Instead, the past has been sought to be tailor-made to view the prevailing political fashions of the present.

It is not that the ignominy of being ruled by a ‘foreigner’ has weighed heavily on the national consciousness. In the past thousand years or so, predators from the west have repeatedly overwhelmed indigenous kingdoms, particularly in northern and eastern India, and combined ruthless vandalism with innovations. Turks, Mongols, Persians and Afghans made India their happy hunting ground, and ruled with a mixture of raw coercion and cultural co-option. The conquerors always took care to maintain a discreet distance from the conquered peoples without creating a closed system based on ethnicity and religion. Of course, post-Akbar many of these barriers broke down but never sufficiently for the hapless Dara Shukoh to become a trendsetter. Not enough of the conquerors went ‘native’ although enough of the conquered peoples appropriated facets of the Persian and Turkish ways of life.

Many of these changes stemming from conquest and subordination were also dutifully played out in the two centuries of colonial rule. The British steadfastly maintained their social distance from the ‘natives’, particularly after the uprising of 1857 and the influx of the memsahibs into the Civil Lines and cantonments. The Indians were socially wary of the British but there were enough ‘collaborators’ (as in Moghul times) who sought to bridge the cultural and emotional gulf between the West and the East.

More to the point, there were enough Indians that genuinely believed (particularly after the demise of the East India Company in 1858) that British rule constituted a significant advance on anything the country had hitherto experienced. At one level the 1911 Durbar was a spectacular show of imperial might—as evident from the grovelling genuflection of the Indian princes (barring Baroda and Udaipur) to the King-Emperor. But it would be imprudent to forget that until Mahatma Gandhi captivated the nation with his simple message of swaraj, the common Indian was genuinely enamoured of the “Queen’s peace”. The choreography of the 1911 Durbar was thrown out of gear when the Indian crowds broke the cordon to kiss the ground on which the King and Queen had walked. Were they victims of ‘false consciousness’?

“Maharani” Victoria wasn’t Indian and nor did she ever visit India. Yet, this diminutive frump became as much a part of India as any distant Moghul. In 1911, when the New Delhi project was inaugurated by George V on December 15, the British Empire was the most world’s most decisive power; by 1931, when New Delhi was finally ready to function as the seat of government, the imperial sunset was approaching.  

This is not revisionist history. It is the history that was itself cynically revised as part of the nation-building project of India’s post-imperial rulers. But history isn’t rewritten by removing the George V statue from its canopied pedestal opposite India Gate or by renaming Connaught Place as Rajiv Chowk. Unless India is overcome by perversity, there will be a Lutyens’ Delhi distinct from a DDA Delhi, a Kingsway called Rajpath, the North and South Blocks and a Parliament House built for an India where democracy was conceived of as the future.

The British Raj wasn’t quite the dark ages the sloganeers make it out to be.


Sunday Times of India, December 18, 2011 

An Airtight Compartment: India's historians prefer committee versions of history

By Swapan Dasgupta

Since clever one-liners are as much a part of a journalist’s stock-in-trade as hard information or penetrating insights, I have often described myself as a lapsed historian. This self-description has served two functions: first, to explain why the past invariably intrudes into my writings on the present and, second, to allay fears of being a crashing bore.

This may seem needlessly harsh on India’s historians — a community that is forever involved in public brawls over one thing or another. In most ‘free’ countries, by which I don’t include China and countries with a Ba’athist-inspired dispensation, historians are among the most exciting people to have as intellectual decorations. They tend to be witty, irreverent, erudite and, most important, quirky. A historian who can discuss corruption in India with a passing reference to Gibbon’s account of the ‘sale’ of the Roman Empire to Didius Julianus by the venal Praetorian Guard is the sort of person we’d love to fly with. In the old days, a savage book review by A.J.P. Taylor was an occasion that we all looked forward to.

Historians were very clever but they could also be rather nasty people, especially when bitching about fellow historians. I recall the casually devastating observation of the Cambridge historian, Eric Stokes, that someone must have thrust a copy of a Rajani Palme Dutt pamphlet in the hands of an ageing Sarvepalli Gopal. It was a not-very-subtle way of suggesting that Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru was riddled with dogmatic certitudes and, perhaps, was characteristic of the university he inhabited in old age.

Even ideological convergence didn’t automatically promote conviviality. I particularly recall Eric Hobsbawm’s carping observation in Interesting Times that E.P. Thompson was “a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts but two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass”.

Maybe it was Hobsbawm getting his own back on Thompson for his disavowal of the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the so-called ‘revolt of the intellectuals’. However, I detected a conflict of temperaments. Despite a commonality brought about by a shared vision of proletarian power, these were two different individuals. Hobsbawm was an austere, refined patrician, strangely reminiscent of the pre-war European man of letters. Thompson, by contrast, was emotional and excitable and very English. Hearing him declaim passionately about subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament and the Luddites, he often reminded me of a radical vicar, always at odds with Lambeth Palace but yet accepted in the Church of England.

The sheer versatility of the tribe, the ability to garnish academic rigour with individual eccentricities, have added value to the public standing of historians. Because the study of history is, by its very nature, riddled with tentativeness, historians have helped embellish the past with insights of human behaviour. Just as no two histories can be the same, no two historians should be or even aspire to be the same. There is nothing more unprepossessing than histories written by a committee or disputes involving the past being resolved through a show of hands.

Ironically, both these are routine occurrences in India. “Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec,” was the only advice that Winston Churchill, then prime minister, proffered his education secretary, Rab Butler, during the passage of the Education Act of 1944. How to tell the story of Empire was for teachers, historians and society to ponder: it was not something any government could speak for the nation. Yet, in India, history writing is a preoccupation of the State and the successful historians are the ones best able to translate political priorities into a committee version of history.

Where the stories of the past are, ideally, replete with question marks of uncertainty and tentativeness, the history-speak of India is over-stuffed with certitudes, the ‘correct’ views. Sometime in the early 1990s, the Indian History Congress decided to settle the question of whether a temple predated the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya through a show of hands. The display of professional democracy, unfortunately, told us more of the historians of India than it did about a dispute that divided India emotionally.

All this circumnavigation is in aid of an anecdote. Some three months ago, I was hugely excited after reading Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, a book I hoped many more people would buy and read. It so happened that I bumped into one of the pillars of India’s historical establishment at a dinner around that time. I couldn’t resist telling her about the book and about Ferguson’s earlier works. “That’s not history,” was the icy retort.

Ferguson, by the way, is a professor of history at Harvard and was also a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Yes, he does a lot of television but his scholarly credentials are very kosher.

Since it is rude to press a disagreement at a social occasion — I’ve had whisky thrown at my face for informing an earnest sociologist in 1996 that Uma Bharti was a personal friend — I left it that. However, interactions with students of history at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University resulted in two surprising discoveries. First, that Niall Ferguson was indeed shunned by the academic pundits, maybe because his books, like Heineken, reached parts that others don’t, and second, that it was just not done to blend the scholarly with the popular, a euphemism for the non-professional historian.

The envy part of the story is understandable but the rejection of the non-tenured historian is baffling. Earlier this year saw the publication of Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, a Briton of Ghanian origin who, apart from having a doctorate in history from Cambridge, is also the Conservative member of parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey. Kwarteng also wears an old Etonian tie which makes him triply suspect.

Kwarteng’s thesis is compelling: “The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture, but who had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in this imperial story. It was grand and colourful but it was highly opportunistic, dominated by individualism and pragmatism.”

Expressed in another way, Kwarteng has argued that there was no grand imperial project that led to half the world being coloured in red by 1918: the Empire resulted from a series of local decisions, some well-considered and others, such as the annexation of Burma, a consequence of impulsiveness.

In an environment of post- colonial angst, Kwarteng is certain to be regarded as another ‘revisionist’. This may not be an incorrect description if it is assumed that academic orthodoxies, like fashion, keep changing ever so often. But the more relevant point is that a revisionist challenge can only be mounted if the history establishment opens its doors and windows to let the outside air in. If historians choose to live in airtight compartments, they can wallow in their own correctness but with the associated risk of obsolescence and fossilization.

Centres of learning often have their origins in religious seminaries, what in India are called the ‘mutts’. A feature of this tradition is that knowledge is pursued for its own sake. But the self-enforced monastic insularity can also trigger hideous intellectual distortions.

At the heart of the kerfuffle over the inclusion and exclusion in the Delhi University history syllabus of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on multiple Ramayanas is the closed shop. India’s historians believe that to stroll outside their cloistered habitat involves the danger of falling off the edge of the world. No wonder they count for so little in the arguments over India.

Telegraph, October 28, 2011

Much ado about 'Three Hundred Ramayanas'

By Swapan Dasgupta

There is nothing like a good culture war to excite the intellectual imagination. The decade of the 1990s was dominated by the slugfest over the shrine in Ayodhya. It became obligatory for anyone with any pretension of being a ‘public intellectual’ to take sides on this controversy. Neutrality or, worse still, supreme indifference was automatically construed by the dominant intellectual group as tantamount to an endorsement of ‘fascism’.

Then came the kerfuffle over M.F. Hussain’s contentious depiction of Ram and Sita that had the defenders of the faith screaming ‘blasphemy’ and reaching for their trishuls. Here too, India’s cultural community were encouraged to link arms against the vandals.

Now comes a wonderfully contrived dispute over a Delhi University decision to omit an essay on the Ramayana from the prescribed readings for its undergraduate History course. The decision has particularly agitated those with a penchant for progressive pamphleteering: it has been denounced as “academic fascism”—a conceptually intriguing proposition.

The essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” by Indologist A.K. Ramanujan was never intended as an iconoclastic exercise. It spelt out the interesting variations in the Ramayana story in India and South-east Asia with a great measure of quiet reverence. In fact, Ramanujan concluded his essay with a tale of the mental and social elevation of a village dolt after he actually listened to a recitation of the Ramayana.

Yet, because some philistines had objected to the essay being in the list of prescribed texts, the culture war was transformed into a political war. The ‘progressive’ adherents of ‘scientific history’ felt obliged to celebrate the importance of mythology and the folk tradition—which they otherwise debunk—while the other side despaired of a text that injected potentially “blasphemous” and contrarian ideas in impressionable minds.

That such a puerile debate has come to dominate a discussion over the curriculum in a university may seem odd but not surprising. Over the years, the history wars have become a feature of the larger battle over national identity. A feature of this clash has been the tendency of the opposing sides to repose faith in something called the ‘correct’ view of India’s past. With their dominance in the history faculties, the ‘progressives’ have tried to fashion the curriculum in a particular way, using prescribed texts as the instrument of their ideological hegemony. Instead of being an open-ended inquiry into the past, the practice of history in India has been reduced to regurgitating a set of certitudes.

A Delhi University history graduate who won a scholarship to Oxford recently recounted the absurdities of the process. The medieval history readings, he told me, were replete with denunciations of the so-called ‘revivalist’ historians of an earlier era. What struck him as surprising was that none of these apparently flawed histories featured in the prescribed reading lists—not Sir Jadunath Sarkar, not R.C. Majumdar,  and not A.L. Shrivastava. In other words, rather than encouraging students to savour divergent ways of looking at the past, history became a set of acceptable truths and unacceptable untruths—hardly an approach befitting an open and argumentative society.

The problem, it would seem, arises from the dubious practice of listing prescribed texts. In the past, a history curriculum would identify broad themes for study, leaving teachers the independence to recommend readings for further study. A student would be tested in the examination for his ability to construct lucid arguments that would reveal their understanding of the subject. With ‘prescribed’ texts becoming the norm, the student’s scope for demonstrating independence of mind and even originality of thought are naturally at a discount. They are expected to imbibe and parrot prevailing orthodoxies—a process that can hardly be said to be conducive for the training of the mind.

What we are witnessing in India is not an assault on free speech but something far worse, an attack on the spirit of free inquiry. There is something fundamentally skewed with a system of higher education that posits two stark alternatives: a compulsory reading (and, by implication, acceptance) of a scholarly work or not reading it at all. The space for critical discernment is fast disappearing and we are turning into a nation of slogan shouters. 


Sunday Times of India, October 23, 2011