Eric Hobsbawm's proud assertion that "as an Englishman" he thinks of South Asia when immigrant influences are being discussed recalls Harold Abrahams, the Cambridge undergraduate in Chariots of Fire, who ran to overcome anti-Semitic prejudice. Hobsbawm was only technically right about himself. His father was a Jew from London's East End but he was born in Alexandria of a Viennese mother and spent his early years in Austria and Germany. When Hobsbawm died last year, New Statesman noted that "the gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as 'completely continental and German speaking'". He learnt "to speak English properly", joined Marylebone grammar school and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge.
To question his Englishness is not to diminish one of the most outstanding thinkers and social commentators of our time but to argue that someone who spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catala could not be imprisoned in the narrow confines of a roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding identity. As these 22 essays, written between 1964 and 2012 and which he selected before his death even though the anthology was published posthumously, show, he soared above petty labels. His friends at Cambridge, where he was a member of both the legendary Apostles and the Communist Party, would say, "Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesn't know?" It wasn't a question. It was an affirmation of the vast range of interests with matching erudition reflected here.
Who would have thought, for instance, that the sombre Communist historian was a Duke Ellington aficionado, jazz critic of New Statesman in the fifties and author of a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, under the pen-name Francis Newton? His essays are peppered with nuggets of unexpected information. Indian readers will be interested to know that Hobsbawm regards Bollywood as the only art form in the world to flourish without official patronage. He pays tribute to Jewish-Malayali mathematicians between the 14th and 16th centuries whose work remained unknown until the late 20th century. His autobiography Interesting Times had some delightful tongue-in-cheek observations about fashionable Indian (mainly Bengali) fellow-travellers.
As someone once wrote, the "militant and historian [in Hobsbawm] remained separate identities". Jargon doesn't mar the beauty of his lucid prose, and though the word "bourgeois" crops up rather too often, it's used in the continental European sense of a sound middle class with no hint of either aristocratic contempt or the ideological disapproval with which Indians have invested the word. When he wrote that everyone "thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism", it was a statement of fact rather than wishful thinking. Hobsbawm was man enough to admit "it was not".
But there is no denying his romanticism. "For all of us," he wrote in The Age of Empire, the third of four majestic volumes on the story of man, "there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one's own life." He is nostalgic about the art and culture of the "bourgeois society" that disappeared after the First World War. He is nostalgic for what he calls the "long 19th century" (roughly from 1789 to 1914) which marked the lingering death of the Habsburg empire and is evoked in the seven chapters devoted to the "culture of the bourgeois world" that form the centre piece of this book. He gently deplores the contemporary world in which art is compelled to "walk the tightrope between soul and market".
Imagination reigns supreme in that twilight zone between history and memory in which Hobsbawm's creative genius flourished. All his examples are taken from his own "cultural background - geographically central Europe, linguistically German" and, of course, Jewish. The best essay in this collection is on the "emancipation of Jewish talent" in central Europe. There is hardly a single native English reference anywhere in the book. It can be argued that his subjects transcended England, but, then, he chose his subjects. Marlene Schwarz, a music teacher he married in 1962, was also a Viennese refugee. Their daughter Julia once said that "some Jews go for assimilation as an unconscious form of survival" while others make a defiant point of "keeping the faith". Her family's solution "was to effectively put it behind them". It's a commentary on the race prejudice of even the liberal, indeed permissive, 21st century that a Jew of Eric Hobsbawm's stature should need a strategy for survival.
FRACTURED TIMES
Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century
Eric Hobsbawm
Hachette; 336 pages; Rs 699
To question his Englishness is not to diminish one of the most outstanding thinkers and social commentators of our time but to argue that someone who spoke German, English, French, Spanish and Italian fluently, and read Portuguese and Catala could not be imprisoned in the narrow confines of a roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding identity. As these 22 essays, written between 1964 and 2012 and which he selected before his death even though the anthology was published posthumously, show, he soared above petty labels. His friends at Cambridge, where he was a member of both the legendary Apostles and the Communist Party, would say, "Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesn't know?" It wasn't a question. It was an affirmation of the vast range of interests with matching erudition reflected here.
Who would have thought, for instance, that the sombre Communist historian was a Duke Ellington aficionado, jazz critic of New Statesman in the fifties and author of a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, under the pen-name Francis Newton? His essays are peppered with nuggets of unexpected information. Indian readers will be interested to know that Hobsbawm regards Bollywood as the only art form in the world to flourish without official patronage. He pays tribute to Jewish-Malayali mathematicians between the 14th and 16th centuries whose work remained unknown until the late 20th century. His autobiography Interesting Times had some delightful tongue-in-cheek observations about fashionable Indian (mainly Bengali) fellow-travellers.
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The largely secular middle class Austro-Hungarian Jewish milieu to which Hobsbawm's mother belonged was disappearing by the time of his birth. Most of the essays here - even those that discuss the challenge of technological progress and the "democratisation of aesthetic consumption" in the early 21st century - convey a "melancholy empathy for an irrecoverable past" which was Hobsbawm's own phrase for a book on the "lost world of British Communism". Hobsbawm's Communism never impinged on his historical or critical judgement. His Marxism developed out of an attempt to understand the arts which led to a fascination with the social and historical significance of high culture. It set him apart from other distinguished members of the Communist Party Historians Group of the early 1950s like Christopher Hill and E P Thompson.
As someone once wrote, the "militant and historian [in Hobsbawm] remained separate identities". Jargon doesn't mar the beauty of his lucid prose, and though the word "bourgeois" crops up rather too often, it's used in the continental European sense of a sound middle class with no hint of either aristocratic contempt or the ideological disapproval with which Indians have invested the word. When he wrote that everyone "thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism", it was a statement of fact rather than wishful thinking. Hobsbawm was man enough to admit "it was not".
But there is no denying his romanticism. "For all of us," he wrote in The Age of Empire, the third of four majestic volumes on the story of man, "there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalised record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one's own life." He is nostalgic about the art and culture of the "bourgeois society" that disappeared after the First World War. He is nostalgic for what he calls the "long 19th century" (roughly from 1789 to 1914) which marked the lingering death of the Habsburg empire and is evoked in the seven chapters devoted to the "culture of the bourgeois world" that form the centre piece of this book. He gently deplores the contemporary world in which art is compelled to "walk the tightrope between soul and market".
Imagination reigns supreme in that twilight zone between history and memory in which Hobsbawm's creative genius flourished. All his examples are taken from his own "cultural background - geographically central Europe, linguistically German" and, of course, Jewish. The best essay in this collection is on the "emancipation of Jewish talent" in central Europe. There is hardly a single native English reference anywhere in the book. It can be argued that his subjects transcended England, but, then, he chose his subjects. Marlene Schwarz, a music teacher he married in 1962, was also a Viennese refugee. Their daughter Julia once said that "some Jews go for assimilation as an unconscious form of survival" while others make a defiant point of "keeping the faith". Her family's solution "was to effectively put it behind them". It's a commentary on the race prejudice of even the liberal, indeed permissive, 21st century that a Jew of Eric Hobsbawm's stature should need a strategy for survival.
FRACTURED TIMES
Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century
Eric Hobsbawm
Hachette; 336 pages; Rs 699