India's first decade

Book review of 'A Republic In The Making'

A REPUBLIC IN THE MAKING 

India in the 1950s

Gyanesh Kudaisya

Oxford University Press

232 pages; Rs 595

The title of this book is unmistakably that of a MPhil or PhD dissertation that separates a decade in the life of a nation, political party or movement. But given the methodology and tools the author uses, India in the 1950s is not a dull academic account of a significant period in the evolution of the Indian republic. Engagingly written, the book revisits well-known episodes in the nation’s history but with fresh perspective on the immense task that the builders of modern India were up against. The book takes readers through predicaments and worries that Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, and other stalwarts faced in consolidating political institutions, establishing political processes, and providing coherence to the idea of India and Indianhood. 

At the outset, the writer, a reputed historian, elucidates that India’s first decade cannot but be viewed and assessed in conjunction with overlapping years beginning 1947 with India attaining freedom and ending with the first national humiliation or setback in the 1962 war with China. But although he provides narratives and analyses events before the adoption of the Constitution, the book does not examine events leading to Nehru’s biggest error of judgement in foreign policy and defence. India’s non-alignment and the stellar role Nehru played in shepherding other nations emerging from colonialism after the Second World War, forms one of the cornerstones of Nehruvianism. The writer has consciously chosen to exclude discussions on the foundations of India’s early foreign policy and whether its principal concerns shaped the domestic discourse and impacted the emerging notion of Indian-ness.

Early on, Mr Kudaisya offers an unexplored idea that this reviewer had not considered: The tough task of cobbling a coherent idea of being Indian in a land mass dominated by “pre-existing identities” based on not just sub-national characteristics but also on princely states. After all, the challenge for people to consider themselves as Indians first and thereafter adorn a regional and religious identity was greater in the early years than now. The task cut out before the first batch of political leaders was clear: Ensure that a common civic identity was given greater value by people in their self-imagination as citizens than pre-existent identities. The experience over the past seven decades demonstrates that this remains a work in progress but gains on this front are rooted in the early leadership’s efforts in this direction.

The book has five lucidly written chapters of which the first two, Unfinished Business of Partition and Cartographic Reconstruction, dwell on a subject that has found little attention among historians — the process of dividing British India, reshaping the internal map and the crises the processes triggered along with extent of human agonies that was unanticipated. The other three chapters focus on the uncertain journey as leaders tried to ensure India remained democratic, how the idea of being Indian emerged, and how questions of minority anxiety and insecurity was tackled alongside other conflict points over language and, most significantly, the issue of citizenship. The book also traces the economic challenges that governments of the time faced and the approach for steering through them.

In 2000, Mr Kudaisya co-authored an exceptional book, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. It examined in great detail the fallout when a barrister by profession, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India and was clueless about the cultural and political complexity of the land and its people, was given the task to divide British India into two separate nations in just six weeks. The biggest ever transfer of population in history, ironically, remains one of the lesser explored areas of Indian historiography and the writer again contributes greatly, but extremely concisely, in presenting an understanding of not just the human tragedy but also the political challenge of drawing lines within India to demarcate one state from another, and placing territories of more than 550 princely states that merged into India, into one state or the other. 

The early part of the book confronts readers with violence and trauma of people uprooted from their homes and land, their apprehension and trauma after moving to unfamiliar territory, the mortification of acquiring the “refugee” label and how the government went about the arduous task of rehabilitating them, coping with a greater influx when compared to the “outflow”. Readers get vivid account of how the situation in Bengal contrasted that in Punjab, how Calcutta's circumstances altered differently when compared to Delhi, the two cities which changed most inexorably due to Partition. 

This book is a quick introductory text on complex issues ranging from the evolution of the Indian Constitution, devolution of powers between Centre and states, and debates over the concurrent list, the resolution (or non-resolution) of the linguistic question, how the genesis was sowed for Kashmir to become a seemingly never-ending conflict.

The book is interspersed with several boxes providing “asides” on topics ranging from the Nehru-versus-Patel debate, power of regional satraps (significant in the current milieu when ruling parties are conspicuous by the absence of strong regional leaders with a capacity to question national leadership). 
 

Perhaps the wisest decision was to include a separate account of Shankar, the cartoonist. Besides pictures from that period, the book includes several cartoons. Mr Kudaisya writes that Nehru took the man, whom he requested to be unsparing towards all including him, to the Soviet Union for a state visit as media representative. Nehru’s encouragement to political cartooning is in sharp contrast to contemporary media policy during foreign tours.