Uneven though it is, Christophe Jaffrelot’s magnum opus on independent India is the only real challenger to Ramachandra Guha and Bipin Chandra’s big books.
More than for most countries, Indian history since 1950 has been a prisoner of politics. Nation-building, identity-building, and economy-building have all been politically divisive projects; and thus history-building is, too. Narrative one: the Nehruvian apologia — glorious freedom, egalitarian ambitions, secular ethos, Congress’s strength, decline, and triumphant return. Narrative two: the liberal story — statist constriction, socialist drabness, a second independence, India unbound. Narrative three: Hindutva myth-making — Gandhi-Nehru conspiracies, tragic Partition, Ramanand Sagar, mandir-masjid, Pokhran, India Shining. It is difficult to imagine a book emerging from formal Indian academia, therefore, capable of presenting multiple points of view, of comprehensively and comprehensibly explaining the competing narratives — and, frequently, competing facts — about India since independence.
So it was with great hope that I opened India since 1950. It had much in its favour: it was produced outside India, and by academics you could imagine were relatively untouched by the scorched-earth campus politics that characterises Indian historiography; it was edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the sharpest observers of Indian politics writing today; and its 30-plus different authors promised to, over 900 pages, deliver a portrait of India’s contemporary history both varied and comprehensive.
Sadly, it does not completely live up to these promises. Where there should have been variation in perspectives, there is instead an unevenness in quality. Where there should have been an objective outsider’s gaze, there is instead a clumsiness of translation. (The last page announces “this translation has retained, wherever possible, the sentence structure and clauses of the original French, so as not to lose the flavour of the original writing”. In the opinion of this reviewer, the further you get from French clauses, the better.)
Where, however, it succeeds, is its enviable comprehensiveness. Jaffrelot, who bestrides French Indology like a solemn Colossus in rimless glasses, has assembled a set of very fine minds to talk about pretty much every aspect of contemporary Indian society you could want. Wherever you look, there are bits of history that speak directly to our headlines. The story of Ramoji Rao and Eenadu? It’s in here. The politicisation of classical Tamil? It’s there too. A comparison of how tribal identity has been mobilised in the North-east and central India? Over 10 pages. Musings on the future of civil-military relations? Sure. The link between Balaji Telefilms and maternal health? Incredibly, yes.
Unfortunately, not everything that is discussed is done so with elegance and erudition. A chapter on Indian Christianity that does not talk about the church in the North-east is, for example, surprising. The section of the book which deals with economic history, however, is the most conspicuously inadequate. In a gesture towards utopian radicalism that is either depressingly European or stereotypically academic, one of the chapters — there are only three, so it’s not as if there was ample space — is handed over to a lengthy screed from Mira Kamdar that repeats all the tiresome talking points one would expect on the tattered noticeboards of the average grad-school hostel. It is certainly well written and passionately argued. Even so, the presence in this “landmark volume” of what is essentially a bog-standard polemic — indistinguishable from a post on any half-baked blog — effectively undermines any pretensions it would have towards serious academic heft. Pages are given over to quoting dreary, compromised reports that claim to demonstrate “commercial agriculture cannot address the food security crisis” (without doing so), or to the old P Sainath nonsense about farmer suicides conclusively proving agrarian modernisation is bad for farmers — though that actually does deserve a place in this book, as the most prominent perversion of statistics in independent India.
Nor are the other two chapters on economic history good enough to make up. The chapter on the post-reforms period, for example, tells us that “it is estimated that the elimination of corruption in its diverse forms would augment growth by 1.5 per cent per annum”. There is no footnote for this impressive statement. That passive voice — so characteristic of the sentence structure and clauses of the original French! — does not quite tell us who estimates this, or how. The only memory I have of a similarly large figure is from a 1999 UNDP report — which had extremely dicey methodology, and assumptions which would in any case be outdated now. It would be nice to know if there was someone else who’d come to a similar conclusion. Ah, if only some of the space sacrificed to the jealous gods of elitist anti-capitalism had been dedicated instead to the somewhat more useful deities that govern footnotes.
But much can be forgiven a book that boasts the eye for the telling statistical detail that we associate with Christophe Jaffrelot. The chapters on political history, particularly those that he wrote or co-wrote, are magnificent. And they are, significantly, not in thrall to any particular telling of India’s history. Jaffrelot and his fellow writers on politics have no axe to grind, no dissertation advisors to prove wrong, no university system to scoldingly correct. These chapters tell you what you want to know — where caste still matters, why Muslims are still excluded, and how long the Congress has been co-opting, blackmailing and buying out its rivals in the states. They would, alone, make this volume worth buying.
For all its weaknesses and incoherence, this book is the only serious challenger to Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi, which eagerly brandishes the standard of the liberal narrative of contemporary Indian history. Guha’s book was itself the only real challenger to the stolid, serious India since Independence, written by Bipin Chandra (with Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee), which might as well be subtitled “the Authorised Nehru-Gandhi Version”. Chandra’s book suffers from an over-fidelity to the preferred Congress history. Guha’s book suffers, equally, from an ingrained contrarianism — and is too much a tribute to the author’s idiosyncratic enthusiasms to be taken completely seriously. Given the weakness of the field, India since 1950 wins handily. Till something else better and more evenly written comes along, Jaffrelot’s book will suffice as the best single-volume history of contemporary India. Sadly, given the state of Indian academia, we will no doubt have to wait a very long time for a comparable home-grown attempt.
INDIA SINCE 1950
Society, Politics, Economy and Culture
Editor: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Yatra
Pages: 913
Price: Rs 995