This is more than a mere compilation of the words of the individuals who made modern India, says Sunanda K Datta-Ray, but the list is less than satisfying.
Montaigne’s claim to have contributed nothing “but the cord that binds them” to an anthology of poems (Other Men’s Flowers) cannot be applied to this fascinating book whose two crowning glories are the elegantly written prologue (“Thinking through India”) and epilogue (“India in the World”), 20 pages each.
In addition to this sandwich bread of prologue and epilogue, Ramachandra Guha seasons the filling of excerpts from the speeches and writings of his 19 “makers of modern India” with his own interpretative introduction to each of the five parts into which the book is divided as well as for each “maker”. That makes 27 pieces of original writing plus an 11-page “Guide to Further Reading”. A strong binding cord, indeed, that makes Guha author rather than only editor.
Readers will be grateful to him for bringing to their notice little-known but socially significant personalities like Jotirao Phule and Hamid Dalwai. Or, for that matter, the less publicised outpourings of better-known public figures such as B R Ambedkar and Ram Manohar Lohia. His spotlight might even illumine aspects of national icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore that may not have received sufficient attention.
But Guha’s own lyrical prose is what makes this an original work, distinct from potted biographies and popular histories. That also inhibits comment about the book’s ostensible subject — the people on whom he pegs his essays — for it would be unfair to evaluate them only in the light of someone else’s samples selected long after they died. Critiques based on a more comprehensive study of their lives would exceed the anthology’s parameters. However, even if the life and work of these 17 men and two women cannot be discussed here, their inclusion poses questions that bear asking.
It might plausibly be argued that their thoughts contributed to a collective national consciousness. But that alone cannot make Jinnah, the maker of Pakistan, also a maker of India, or vest the obscure 19th-century “subaltern feminist” Tarabai Shinde with responsibility for any aspect of the state we live in. Nor can today’s booming free market economy be said to owe much to Rajaji’s fulminations against the permit-licence raj. Much as one would like to share Guha’s faith in Jayaprakash Narayan’s legacy, his sampurna kranti foundered on the rock of political reality, as did his idealistic solutions for Tibet, Kashmir and Nagaland. The author must know that while JP would undoubtedly have approved of the 73rd constitutional amendment, the provenance for the panchayati raj law was embedded in the Congress party’s own Gandhian thinking.
I suspect Guha’s choice of personalities came first and the criteria for calling them “makers” (original thinking, mass appeal, activism, lasting influence, etc.) afterwards. That does not invalidate either the criteria or the choice. They were men and women of commitment, capable of philosophical reflection, with proven writing skills and a willingness (usually) to plunge into the fray. Given the power, some might have made a better India. They had the ideas but not the opportunity, especially if they died long before independence. Others with a single focus (female emancipation or abolition of caste) did not seek the burden of authority. Yet others felt strongly about governance and did propose changes but were ignored. A very few were in a position to make recommendations (Rammohan Roy on sati) that the first generation of India’s real makers noted and acted on.
As to who these makers were, unfashionable though it may sound, no objective analyst can overlook the part colonial administrators like Warren Hastings, William Jones, Curzon, Macaulay and others played in giving shape to the idea of India. As Jaswant Singh says elsewhere, India was not territorially defined until the colonial era. Guha does quote Marx’s claim that colonialism “was the unconscious tool of history” in modernising India but probably cannot reconcile any constructive outcome with what he sees as Britain’s “vile interests” (strong words for a historian!) in the subcontinent.
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But Philip Woodruff’s Founders and Guardians, “the men who ruled India”, helped to create the clay on which our own thinkers and activists — including these 19 worthies — left their mark. In the view of James Cameron, a distinguished British journalist and great friend of India, one of them, Nehru, soaring above the rest, “made India and lost it”. Guha cites Escott Reid, a Canadian high commissioner, to corroborate at least the first part of Cameron’s comment.
No one else exercised such power. Even Gandhi had no executive authority. Sardar Patel did, and his handiwork is still very much in evidence, but he is not included apparently because he did not “think” or “write”. It seems unnecessary to this reviewer to cite those criteria to justify Subhas Chandra Bose’s exclusion since circumstances denied him any hand in post-independence nation-building, however much he inspired a generation.
Indira Gandhi’s more surprising exclusion is not fully explained. It may have been because “the speeches and writings that carried her name were written by her staff” or because “her legacy remains controversial”. The latter also applies to others like M S Golwalkar. As for thought and sound, her actions proclaimed both; not only were they entirely her own but they had far-reaching impact. It would be a shabby denial of history to exclude her on the charge of being undemocratic which would also be a denial of Indian reality. The recent change of guard in Maharashtra hardly bears out the prologue’s claim (modified somewhat in the epilogue) that India’s political culture has changed from “feudal and deferential” to “combative and participatory”.
All the same this is an interesting and useful book. The information it does contain handsomely fulfils the author’s aim of making “Indians more aware of the richness and relevance of their modern political tradition”. There can be no quarrel with the book’s contents. The quarrel is with the title’s presumption. A less pretentious “Eminent Indians” might have been more appropriate.
MAKERS OF MODERN INDIA
Editor: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 549
Price: Rs 799