The exciting, multifaceted Ram

Book review of A Functioning Anarchy?: Essays for Ramachandra Guha

Full of gusto and facts. Excitable. Unable to stand still. These were my immediate impressions of Ramachandra Guha (Ram) when I first saw him at a Hindu-Stephen’s cricket match where he was leading the Mission College cheerleaders. I was studying at the Delhi School of Economics and Ram was probably in his final year at St. Stephen’s.

Thereafter, we cursorily kept in touch as Ram moved to Delhi School, then to IIM Calcutta for his PhD and then to various universities and institutes abroad as well as in India. He returned to my consciousness with a bang in 1989 when Oxford University Press published The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. It was long time since I had read such a brilliantly crafted work — one that was not just rich in details but written so wonderfully and persuasively. After that came a deluge of masterpieces.

1999 saw his magisterial book on Verrier Elwin, Savaging the Civilised. In 2007, he came out with India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, a tome of 900 virtually un-put-downable pages. Then came the two monumental classics on Gandhi: Gandhi before India (2014), and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-1948 (2018). In between, were books on environment, on cricket, a series of collected essays and several edited volumes.

This book’s title draws from John Kenneth Galbraith’s famously pithy description of India — where success depended not upon government but the energy and ingenuity (jugaad as it were) of the Indian people, a state that Ram himself called a “50-50 democracy”. Other than the introduction by Nandini Sundar and Srinath Raghavan, there are 18 essays arranged according to four themes: environment and equity; makers of Indian democracy; the making of Indian democracy; and on Ramachandra Guha.

The introduction is excellently written in that it effortlessly weaves the development of Ram, the writer, over the key exploratory themes of his work. Drafted with great clarity and wonderful use of words, it is devoid of academic jargon, so akin to Ram’s works in which you see little or none of it. It is a wonderfully crafted introduction, one that is rarely seen in an edited volume of essays.

Another essay that is sheer pleasure to read is Rukun Advani’s “The Unquiet Ram” which relates to his interactions as a publisher with an author who was “like an unstoppable force, a volcano spilling over with more ideas for books that he wanted to write than his brain was able to contain”. In editing several of Ram’s books, starting with The Unquiet Wood,  Rukun Advani discovered how rare it is “to find a genuinely archive-besotted scholar who can write attractive prose for a non-scholarly audience”.

A Functioning Anarchy?: Essays for Ramachandra Guha

Editors: Srinath Raghavan and Nandini Sundar

Publisher: Penguin Allen Lane 

Pages: 370; Price: Rs 699

Prashant Kidambi’s “Grocer, Tailor, Champion Wrestler: The Transnational Career of Buttan Singh, c.1900-1912” is another delight. Here is a Sikh, Buttan Singh, possibly from Jalandhar, who made his way to a xenophobically white Australia in 1899 or 1900; then went on to be a public wrestler at the age of 37; became the “national champion” and a box office draw; sailed to England in 1909 and tried his luck there, with less success; and then on to the USA where he managed to get nowhere; before finally returning to Australia in 1912 to take his compulsory dictation test. Mr Kidambi concludes his essay by writing, “As for Buttan, 1912 did not mark the end of his astonishing career. But what happened to him after his return to Australia is a tale for another occasion”. I eagerly await that tale.

There are other very readable essays in this volume. Among those, are Amita Baviskar’s excellent piece, “Nation’s Body, River’s Pulse: Narratives of Anti-Dam Politics in India”; an informative piece by Brototi Roy and Joan Martinez-Alier, “Weaving our Way Through Environmental Justice Movements in India”; Dinyar Patel’s “The Singing Satyagrahi: Khurshedben Naoroji and the Challenge of Indian Biography”; Jahnavi Phalkey’s essay on Hindustan Aircraft Limited (HAL) and aeroplane manufacturing, “Flights of Freedom: German Emigres, Aeronautics and Self-Reliance in India”; and Srinath Raghavan’s essay, “From Autonomy to Insurgency: Jammu and Kashmir in the Long 1970s”.

I have two critical comments on this otherwise excellent festschrift for Ram, however. The first is, notwithstanding Suresh Menon’s essay “What do They Know of History who only History Know”, there is an absence of a solid chapter on cricket — especially given Ram’s obsession for the game.

The second is more serious. Other than being brilliant academic, the power of Ram, particularly in today’s politically handcuffed India, is his constant and incessant ability to protest; be it in regular newspaper articles, television interviews, and in any way possible to make public the voice of dissent. Ram does this with extreme courage. He hits where it hurts. Tells the truth as it is. And doesn’t flinch one bit. That is what differentiates Ram — and Pratap Bhanu Mehta — from most other academics writing in English.

This festschrift should have had one solidly researched chapter on media and protests. From 1975 up to this day. Who protested? What did they protest about? How did media treat these people — as highly regarded column writers or subversives that one must occasionally accommodate to demonstrate freedom of the press? The volume would have been embellished with that extra essay. And it would have been apt because it is dedicated to Ram — a person whose fearlessness one could never have predicted.