SHORT BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA

Ranajit Guha is 90 years old on 23 May 2013. We give below the first of several short birthday tributes to him.

 

90^th BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA

Richard Price

Richard Price is Ranajit Guha’s first PhD student. He is at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

      

I first encountered Ranajit Guha as a second year undergraduate at the University of Sussex in 1964.  I had always been interested in the history of the British Empire, and when he offered a class on “European Imperialism from 1870” I enrolled.   He became my mentor;  he served as my D.Phil. advisor, even though my topic (British working class attitudes towards imperialism in the late nineteenth century) was far from his main area of interest in Indian History. 

            From the very start Ranajit held a charismatic attraction for me.  Part of this, it must be admitted, lay in the exotic aura that he projected.  He was the first person I had ever encountered who had been part of the struggle for colonial freedom; he had been jailed by the British; and for many years he was active in the Young Communists of India.  More than this dramatic personal history, however, was the scholarly intellect that he modeled.  There were five key qualities that Ranajit Guha the historian embodied that were formative for my own thinking and for the way I try to practice history.  

            The first was how he treated history as something that could be thought about conceptually, as a process, and not as just a narrative progression.  His undergraduate course on  European Imperialism, for example, was not the usual course that began with the age of explorations.  It began instead with the theorists of empire and then went on to study the British, French and German cases within that context.  Ranajit was the first person to teach me that the problems of history could be conceptual, rather than being a problem of events, 

            Second, was the suppleness and rigor of his intellect. Ranajit demonstrated how theoretical conceptualization and rigorous archival investigation were not separate activities, but necessarily intertwined.  His own historical writings have provided elegant examples of that lesson.  A Rule of Property for Bengal is thus both an intellectual history and a study in the history of political economy.  And the rich social history of Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India provides the foundations for a typology of subaltern rebellion.

            Third, there was a spare asceticism to Ranajit’s intellectual being.  I remember how he told me that he had spent one cold English Christmas shut away in his apartment grappling with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  I was not surprised.  Ranajit was perhaps the first person I met who privileged the world of the mind over virtually everything else; who demonstrated that being an historian was in itself a full-time profession.

            Fourth, and related to this, was an independence of mind and position that Ranajit projected.  He conveyed the importance of following one’s own star and standing as much apart as was possible from the seductions of professional pressures and fashions.  Ranajit is one of the few people I know whose stature in the world of professional history has been attained entirely on his own terms.  He has followed his own path throughout his life.

            And finally the single most lasting lesson I took from Ranajit was both small and large.  It was the importance of clarity and precision in writing.  The first essay I submitted to him was returned covered with red ink corrections of grammar, syntax and style.  I had never experienced such criticism before, and it was a salutary lesson in the significance of writing for thinking.    Until very recently, whenever I picked up a pen the memory of that experience come flooding back.  It was as if Ranajit was there to remind me that the business of writing history was no light or frivolous matter, but was a serious duty and responsibility.  

           

PERMANENT BLACK MARK for HISTORY AT DELHI UNIVERSITY?

Delhi University’s vice chancellor, Dinesh Singh, was once a well-reputed mathematician. His career suggests that there was a time when he knew things add up, that there are good and bad ways of getting things done. When he was a teacher of mathematics he listened to people, or at least managed a decent impression of possessing the capacity for hearing. So, when he became vice chancellor, even people who know that power corrupts were cautiously optimistic. Dinesh Singh, it was felt, might buck the trend. He seemed interested in wielding a sensible broom to improve things on the ground for students and teachers. There was no hint, at the time, of what was to ensue—that the broom in his hand would go between his legs and become a witch’s. Now, in the opinion of virtually every respected academic and teacher at the University of Delhi, and close by at JNU and Jamia as well—see the opinion HERE of the economist Jayati Ghosh at JNU, and HERE of the historian Mukul Kesavan at Jamia (incidentally, Mukul Kesavan, Jayati Ghosh, and Dinesh Singh were exact contemporaries as Inlaks scholars in Britain thirty years ago)—the clear consensus it that all it takes to destroy an entire institution is the missionary zeal of one fanatic mathematician who seems to listen to no one except those to whom he is beholden for his authority—or, to say it straighter, authoritarianism.

It would be difficult at the moment for bookies to offer decent odds on which of Delhi University’s teaching departments loathes the vice chancellor most. The likelihood is that if they offered the best odds for, say, the English Department—where the soundest faculty members will soon hate him enough to write papers comparing him to that earlier fallen angel, Milton’s Satan—the History Department would immediately be up in arms at having been insulted for insufficiency of venom. And they would have a point. 

One of the most academically dispiriting things to have happened to history teaching at Delhi University is the removal from the course of A.K. Ramanujan's classic essay on the multiplicity of Ramayana tellings in South and South East Asia, an event this vice chancellor supervised, disavowed responsibility for, and did nothing to reverse. We keenly await the papers on Milton’s Satan vis-a-vis Dinesh Singh, staking a claim for the English Department's supremacy in the loathing stakes; but the record suggests it is the History Department that, as Wodehouse may have said, gets the biscuit. 

This is very far from being only our opinion; it is much more clearly HERE that of Nayanjot Lahiri, she being a professor of history who, alongside her colleagues, has watched the spectacular emergence of Dinesh Singh’s fascist inclinations with dismay. Professor Lahiri’s outstanding colleagues include Professor Upinder Singh, Manmohan Singh’s daughter, whose integrity is manifest from her keeping clear of attempts to stop Dinesh Singh in his tracks despite the strength of her agreement with the History Department. Public intellectuals who have expressed much the same hostility to Dinesh Singh's seeming contempt for history and calculated obliviousness to the functions of a university include Ramachandra Guha and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, alongside the very many who have blogged this subject and written about it in various fora.

In order not to mimic Dinesh Singh, it is important for the repositories of sanity in the teaching community to listen to the vice chancellor’s views and arrive at their opinion of him after carefully considering them. His argument is that the times have changed, students need to learn different things in new ways, and since teachers resist change there is no option except for him to wield his broom as an axe. This message has been heard and digested by the best within the university, there being no shortage of fine teachers who have themselves argued the need for improving and modernizing old courses. Instead, the VC has handed them new ‘foundation courses’, framed by conspicuously ignoring all opinions that reputed and respected teachers may have wanted to give on what ought to constitute these courses.

It takes two to listen. When it is apparent that the party asserting power is deaf and cannot be bridled, the time has arrived for open and all-out war. This seems to be the state of affairs in Delhi University. It is, unluckily for the best minds at the university, a war they will lose. A little Constantinople will crumble; in 1453 it caused an exodus. In 2013 it may lead to early retirements and the movement of teachers to other universities. Having created all the conditions conducive to this, the VC is perhaps keeping his fingers crossed that this is what will happen next. The difficulty, both for him and the teachers, is the sheer number of teachers in Delhi University: there is nowhere for so many to go, or they'd go.

Writing on the value of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the larger context of the Great War and its aftermath, E.M. Forster said: "For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except the slighter gestures of dissent?" The battle lost, it becomes even more important for the scholars affected to record the fact that they dissented and were swept aside, rendered subaltern. At some point, these slighter gestures of dissent, this voicing of alternative visions at the approach of insanity, will, if nothing else, show up precisely what kind of vice chancellor Dinesh Singh has been. To be scrupulously fair-minded, it is necessary to concede that, first, not everyone who teaches at the university is opposed to the vice chancellor's vision of the university's future: he has a claque of substantial proportions; second, it is reasonable to argue that as no course is cast in stone, each will with the accumulation of experience be improved; and third that, however unlikely it may now seem, at a time distant from the present the university may conceivably take a turn for the better, making this mathematician look very far from satanic. However, there are times when one's inclination is to say to the scrupulously fair-minded, 'Up Yours', and this seems one of those times.

So here, in the end, is a little homework exercise for future students of the new history foundation course at Delhi University, specially prepared by Permanent Black. It may be somewhat tough for university students, in which case the vice chancellor will, naturally, step in and dumb it down further:

1.    Using your own words, compare and contrast the career of your vice chancellor, Professor Dinesh Singh, with that of the Indian mathematician who became a famous historian, D.D. Kosambi. What lessons, if any, can you draw from the comparison? Try to find out why D.D. Kosambi failed to become a vice chancellor and why he failed to ruin the teaching of history. Does his failure in these respects suggest he must also have been a useless mathematician? (Remember to use your own words and for God's sake don't reproduce straight from Google.)

2.    Who was A.K. Ramanujan? Was he same guy as Srinivas Ramanujan? Or was he some different Ramanujan? In your own words, compare and contrast the two Ramanujans. After that, try to visit the Indian and foreign cities where these two Ramanujans were born and educated. There, please do your best to trace their descendants, if possible. Then interview all descendants which you encounter (one by one). Then, in their own words (since it is interview, you are allowed to use other people words), you write down all the interviews. Carry your phone with you and try to take picture of all descendants. Finally, try to explain in your own words why it is important for Indian vice chancellors to distinguish between Many Ramanujans.

RECENT PAPERBACKS

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PRACHI DESHPANDE

Creative Pasts










PARTHA CHATTERJEE
The Black Hole of Empire

 

 

DHARMANAND KOSAMBI

The Essential Writings

REMEMBERING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

Reviewed in THE TELEGRAPH, Kolkata, on 10 May 2013

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130510/jsp/opinion/story_16879271.jsp


RETHINKING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

REFORMULATING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

RE-FORMING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

REMAKING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

RE-CREATING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
RECASTING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
REVISITING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

RECONSTRUCTING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

REJIGGING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

REBOOTING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
READJUSTING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
REMEDYING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
REINCARNATING SARVEPALLI GOPAL
RESURRECTING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

RE-JADUFYING SARVEPALLI GOPAL

(at this point we've run out of 'Re' titles so beloved of Indian historians, so why don't you just read on below while we think up some more)

The rare exception apart, the dead Indian historian is a forgotten Indian historian. Paradigms shift. Footnotes follow the new fashions: very soon not even Foucault will feature in them, never mind Subaltern Studies. So, Sarvepalli Gopal is dismissed all the more easily for inhabiting a framework that went out of fashion when Gramscian and feminist and Foucauldian perspectives became the new hegemonies. Can one still read a biographer of individuals and elites, viceroys and viceregal tenures? Ha ha ho ho, you must be joking! The very interest in Ripon, Irwin, Nehru, Radhakrishnan, and suchlike betrays the gatekeeper of a Jurassic Park, a Jadunathian thinly decked up as a liberal.

The bathwater thrown out, someone happens to notice there was also a baby. Sifting through bulrushes, he pulls out something that still looks good. This is what Srinath Raghavan, the author of War and Peace in Modern India, has just done. The result of his substantial ferreting in archives and the S. Gopal papers is the book shown above.

   
Is the resurrection worthwhile? Why should we read S. Gopal today? Here are some reasons offered by Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani:

In several respects, Sarvepalli Gopal stood out among the historians of his generation. First, by his industry. With rare exception, professors of history in our universities—even the most influential, the kind who become President of the Indian History Congress—do not publish more than one or two serious books each over the course of their professional career. Gopal published as many as seven: three on Nehru, one on his father, a book on British imperial policy, and separate studies of the viceroyalties of Ripon and Irwin. All were based on solid research into primary materials. Aside from these, Gopal initiated and was the first editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, a multi-volume project indispensable for an understanding of twentieth-century India. He also engaged in public debate, particularly in later life, and in the 1990s edited a book of essays on the Ayodhya controversy.

            Second, the English prose of most Indian academics is wooden. Gopal, who had immersed himself in the literature of the language, was by contrast a stylist with a wry turn of phrase. Though his mother tongue was Telugu and he spoke Tamil fairly well—as well as an Oxford-educated Brahmin could—he wrote almost entirely in English, crafting his sentences fastidiously and never doubting the continuing value of this imperial import in free India.

            Third, Gopal’s natural historical lens was the individual life, not impersonal structures and processes. Biography is a genre Indian writers by and large avoid, one reason being that it is exceptionally demanding and requires very hard work. Another is that the story of a life is just that—a story. Gopal relished long hours among old manuscripts in the archives and could write with flair: both traits essential for the biographer.

            Fourth, Gopal showed a willingness to learn from his own errors, an ability altogether rare among scholars of any nationality. His Nehru trilogy, majestic though it is, had two flaws. It was somewhat unfair to Nehru’s colleagues and opponents (most especially C. Rajagopalachari), and it was excessively discreet about his personal life. Edwina Mountbatten got all of one sentence, Padmaja Naidu not even that. Yet when he came later to write the life of his father, Gopal was completely candid about his subject’s extra-marital affairs: ‘I have shirked nothing’ was how he put it. Perhaps more important, the son was fair to Radhakrishnan’s intellectual adversaries. These included a Bengali who had accused the philosopher of plagiarism, and an English writer who had dismissed him as a windbag. 

Backing up the reasons above, some choice samples of Gopal's writing appear below. They are meant to make you salivate.

 

On Lord Mountbatten as a prize ass
‘The shortcomings of the admiralty and the loss of a toothbrush were to him of equal importance.’

From Gopal's essay titled ‘Gandhi: An Irrepressible Optimist’
The white American singer, Joan Baez, in her autobiography published in 1966, reports a dialogue between her husband and their daughter aged 11:

‘Did Gandhi have a penis?’ she asked.
‘Yes’, he answered.
‘Did he have a vagina too?’
‘No,’ said Ira. ‘He was a man, and men just have a penis.’
‘Well’, she said, pausing in the doorway, ‘it’s just that he was so nice … I thought he might have had both.’

From the essay ‘History and the Search for Identity’

‘When Descartes said that the most eminent scholars of Roman history knew less about what had happened in Rome than Cicero’s housemaid, his intent was to denigrate the discipline of history as a whole: but in a way he was, without meaning to do so, recognizing the value of contemporary history. He was, one may say, echoing Thucydides, who had held that the historian could write with confidence only about events that he himself had experienced. Descartes was also, and again without deliberation, stressing the importance in historical testimony of such lowly creatures as housemaids. Great men, being prone to emphasise their role in destiny, tend to exaggerate their own importance both in their private papers as well as in their oral record; but ordinary men and women, by just being themselves with no self-deceiving memories, help in the building of social and economic history. Especially in our country, where illiteracy robs us of documentation at this level of society, oral evidence is of added value and provides a dimension to contemporary history which is lacking for the history of other periods; for illiteracy is not inarticulateness.’

In defence of the writing of contemporary history

‘As for the need for objectivity, it is possible, as much in dealing with the recent past as with any other period, to adopt a scientific approach, to collect and collate the evidence systematically, and to assess such evidence by rigorous and recognized methods. To the extent that a historian is aware of and can, in the examination of evidence, subdue his subjective elements, he can do this as much in contemporary as in any other history. Detachment is a mood born of self-discipline and not a matter of remoteness in time. Some of the most partisan historians in India and the world today are those writing of centuries long gone by … The study of history is, by its very nature, an incomplete discipline with ever-fading margins, not just in the shallow sense that new evidence is always coming to light, but that every generation has fresh interests and is putting new questions to the past. It is in this sense that Croce’s oft-quoted epigram, that all history is contemporary history, should be understood. The task of the historian is perpetually to re-examine, and even to re-judge, the past in the changing light of the present. He suggests novel hypotheses, establishes new connections, poses fresh problems. He does not seek an illusory finality but opens the way to further discussions. Acton, it will be remembered, set out to write a definitive history and ended by writing a few articles. On the other hand, because the civil war of the seventeenth century is still being waged in England, research and writing on the subject continue in an unending flow.’

From ‘The Crisis of Secularism in India’

‘It is easy to find instances in the history of ancient and medieval India of the desecration or demolition of institutions of religious significance. But such actions were not the monopoly of the followers of any one particular religion. A Hindu ruler of the eleventh century, Harsha of Kashmir, melted images in Hindu temples, and a Hindu general cut down the Bo-tree in Bodhgaya. Shaivites and Vaishnavites, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, Sunnis and Shias quarrelled and frequently pillaged each others’ shrines. When the Sikhs conquered Sirhind in 1764, they deliberately destroyed all buildings, including the mosques. There is no room for generalizations about bigotry applicable only to Muslims.’

From his review of E.M. Forster’s The Hill of Devi

'Relations between the maharaja and the paramount power were unhappy, and Mr Forster writes with subdued bitterness of the officials of the political department who, he says, were on the whole "an unattractive body of men" lacking courtesy, kindness, and sympathy. The maharaja finally fled to Pondicherry in French India, defied all orders of the Government of India to return, and in 1937 died in self-imposed exile and poverty. Mr Forster, ever a critic of the world of officialdom and power, blames the Government of India. "They were", he says in a magnificent sentence, "impeccably right and absolutely wrong." But it is difficult to see what else the government could have done. … But even if Mr Forster’s estimate of the maharaja cannot be unqualifiedly accepted, The Hill of Devi remains a book of intrinsic worth. It is written—this goes without saying—in prose of gossamer quality. To the social historian it is a valuable study of an India that has now disappeared. An interaction of private and public history, it gives vivid pictures of life in an Indian state, with its servility and intrigue, its backwardness and obscurantism.'

On cricket writing

‘To me, as no doubt to many others, the game and the English language have helped each other to increase the sum total of fascination. I still remember, for example, reading a long time ago a comment of Cardus on Duleepsinhji. “It is one of the delights”, wrote Cardus, “of an English summer afternoon to watch Duleep’s bat flash in the sun.” That sentence, with all that it leaves unsaid, has haunted me through the years.’

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS? WELL, ALMOST ...

Incisive review of 
CITIZENSHIP AND ITS DISCONTENTS 
by Niraja Gopal Jayal 

here

http://caravanmagazine.in/books/who-indian-citizen

Niraja Gopal Jayal, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, 
John Harriss, and Ramachandra Guha

in conversation about Citizenship and its Discontents.
IIC, 6.30 p.m. All are welcome.

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Citizenship and Its Discontents

AN INDIAN HISTORY

Breaking new ground in scholarship, this is the first history of citizenship in India.

Unlike the mature democracies of the West, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion.

Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analysing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity.

The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity.

Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

“The idea of citizenship in India promised inclusive community, but the country's enlivened politics have transformed that promise into a more fragmentary, divisive reality. In this magisterial analytic history, Niraja Gopal Jayal maps for the first time the concept's vicissitudes, and makes an essential contribution to our understanding of contemporary India and of political theory.”—Sunil Khilnani, 

King’s India Institute

“A contribution to our understanding of citizenship and democracy in India that is empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated.”—Amrita Basu, Amherst College

Hardback / 376pp / Rs 795.00 / ISBN 81-7824-371-7 / South Asia rights

Copublished with Harvard University Press

INFLUENTIAL INTELLECTUAL HITTING NINETY ...

One of Permanent Black's blogspots in January 2013 focused on Ranajit Guha turning 90 on 23 May 2013, and asked people to email felicitations, messages, anything they might want communicated to him for that auspicious day.

That invitation stands till 20 May 2013: messages to him, emailed by that date to Permanent Black , will be forwarded to Ranajit Guha and as many as possible will also subsequently be blogged.

RG IN 1986

Short pieces have been received from the following scholars and friends of Ranajit Guha:

CHRIS GREGORY
DAVID DARDIMAN
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
HOMI BHABHA
MILINDA BANERJEE
NONICA DATTA
RICHARD PRICE
SHAHID AMIN

These contributions will shortly be blogged. A birthday booklet with most of these has been printed by Permanent Black and couriered to Mechthild Guha. She will give it to her husband on his ninetieth birthday.

Further contributions (not more than 600 words) from other friends and well-wishers are most welcome.

The Habit of Winning

We're delighted that Ramnarayan S. Rawat's Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Permanent Black, 2012) has received an honourable mention in the 2013 Association of Asian Studies Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. This coveted prize  "honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first single-authored monograph on South Asia". Past winners include Farina Mir, whose book The Social Space of Language, was also published by Permanent Black.

Reconsidering Untouchability earlier won the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, American Institute of Indian Studies. It is copublished by Indiana University Press, and the selection committee for the Cohn prize comprised John Kelly (Chair), Daud Ali, and Leela Fernandes.

ROLL OVER, E.H. CARR

The great academic book often gestates for a very long period before it appears in print and, like wines of a high quality, acquires body, maturity, and distinction as it ripens in the author’s mind. In the high-calibre territory of history-writing informally referred to as Ancient India, Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (700pp; published by the University of California Press, copublished by Permanent Black) is the most recent work of this monumental variety. For the obvious reasons, such books appear only once in a very long while. The scholar’s intellectual stamina needs to be exceptional. The book needs to be driven by big ideas. The end result needs to show massive scholarship, elegance in thought and style, and a range far beyond the capacities of normal human beings.

The next one in this genre of great books, originating at Permanent Black and copublished by Harvard University Press, is Romila Thapar’s The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (776pp).

At some point in the early 1990s a series called ‘Themes in Indian History’ was initiated, and among the book possibilities discussed for that series were three historiographical volumes, one each for the ancient, medieval, and modern phases of Indian history. They were envisaged, at the time, as edited volumes: Romila Thapar, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Chris Bayly being thought of as the people to edit them. As is common in publishing, the editor proposes but the author disposes. About forty edited volumes appeared in the series, but they did not include surveys of historiography.

Meanwhile, the interest in answering a key question—does South Asia provide evidence of historical writing amounting to a historical tradition?—took several directions, all implicitly disputing James Mill's imperial disdain. Among the many works tackling the idea, several appeared from Permanent Black, including Textures of Time by V.A. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam; Creative Pasts by Prachi Deshpande; Assam and India by Yasmin Saikia; and History in the Vernacular, edited by Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee.

Some years back the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, inheritor of the chair which Bertrand Russell once occupied, was asked to edit a volume called The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Instead of the considerable bother involved in inviting contributions from distinguished scholars, Blackburn simply wrote the whole damn Companion all by himself. This is roughly what Romila Thapar seems to have done—not bothering with a ‘Themes in Indian History’ editorial job, she preferred to make the whole blessed thing with her own sweat and blood. 

This took a mere twenty-five years of making notes, cannibalizing from her earlier papers, rethinking historical issues written up in different formats, and writing large chunks out for the first time. Not a long time, given that Ancient India stretches over twenty-five hundred or so years. Perhaps not even a long time for Romila Thapar, in her early eighties now, hale and hearty and feisty as ever. 

The years spent in thinking and writing the book show to good effect: very little is missed out, virtually everything you can think of in relation to the subject finds a place in here. Greek and European History. Chinese History. Islamic Historical Traditions. Herodotus to Hinduism, Iliad to Indica. The range is fascinating and unusual because South Asian historical forms and traditions are seen in relation to forms and traditions thrown up by other contexts. The result is a mindstopper that's also a doorstopper. The original script weighed in at 240,000 words; it cost Romila Thapar blood, sweat, and a lot of tears to trim it down to 200,000 words. The exercise of shortening involved her and Permanent Black in several months of mutually wonderful consultation and editorial work (all supervised by her lovely white labrador Amba) splicing, excising, mauling, chopping, discarding, rewriting, tweaking, restitching. Whole sections within chapters were pushed down (what Partha Chatterjee might call) The Black Hole of Ancient India. Hands were thrown up in the air at several points. Do the seams show? We think not.

Romila Thapar raises this theme—Did My Earliest Forefathers Do What I’ve Been Doing?—to an entirely new level. Her book is a colossal survey of every kind of writing in early India that might be said to be an attempt to record the past. The first four pages, reproduced below, indicate a work that will be ‘necessary reading’ for anyone with a serious interest in Indian history. The questions asked are so fundamental, and the interpretive magnificence with which they are discussed is so compelling, that this isn’t a book which any of Ancient India’s pigeonholes and caves can accommodate. Medievalists and modernists are warned that they too will need to clear 52 millimetres (two full inches) in their bookshelves to allow for its girth. They will think it worth the while: it isn’t every day that you get to buy the first edition of what will soon be recognized as a classic.

THE FIRST FOUR PAGES

Generalizations about the nature of a society or civilization, when they take root, spread adventitiously. A couple of hundred years ago it was stated that Indian civilization was unique in that it lacked historical writing and, implicitly therefore, a sense of history. With rare exceptions, there has been little attempt since to examine this generalization. So entrenched is the idea now that one almost hesitates to argue for a denial of this denial of history. I would like to suggest that while there may not in the early past have been historical writing in the forms currently regarded as belonging properly to the established genres of history, many texts of that period  reflect a consciousness of history. Subsequently, there come into existence recognizable forms of historical writing. Both varieties of texts—those which reflect a consciousness of history and those which reveal forms of historical writing—were used in early times to reconstruct the past, and were drawn upon as a cultural, political, religious, or other such resource at various times, in various situations, and for a variety of reasons. To determine what makes for this historical consciousness is not just an attempt to provide Indian civilization with a sense of history, nor is it an exercise in abstract research. My intention is to argue that, irrespective of the question of the presence or absence of historical writing as such, an understanding of the way in which the past is perceived, recorded, and used affords insights into early Indian society, as it does for that matter into other early societies.

       Historical consciousness begins when a society shows consciousness of both past and future, and does so by starting to record the past. “There is no more significant pointer to the character of a society than the kind of history it writes or fails to write.”  To argue over whether a particular society had a sense of history or not on the basis of our recognition of the presence or absence of a particular kind of historical tradition—one which has been predetermined as being properly historical in perpetuity—seems somewhat beside the point. It is more purposeful to try and ascertain what each culture regards as its historical tradition and why it does so; and to analyse its constituents and functions as well as assess how it contends with competing or parallel traditions.

       Historical traditions emanate from a sense of the past and include three aspects: first, a consciousness of past events relevant to or thought of as significant by a particular society, the reasons for the choice of such events being implicit; second, the placing of these events in an approximately chronological framework, which would tend to reflect elements of the idea of causality; and third, the recording of these events in a form which meets the requirements of that society.

Such a definition does not necessarily assume that political events are more relevant than other sorts of events, although as issues of power they tend to be treated as such. If the above definition is acceptable, then it can in fact be said that every society has a concept of the past and that no society is a-historical. What needs to be understood about a historical tradition is why certain events are presumed to have happened and receive emphasis, and why a particular type of record is maintained by the tradition.

        A distinction may therefore be made between the existence of a historical tradition and a philosophy of history. The latter may follow the former. An awareness or confirmation of a philosophy of history may make a historical narrative more purposeful. But such a narrative does not thereby necessarily express greater historical veracity: narratives based on the theory that history is determined by divine intervention are fired by purpose rather than by the sifting of evidence. On the other hand, a historical tradition may not concern itself with either divine purpose in history or any other philosophical notion of history and yet be an authentic record—if not of actual events, certainly of believed assumptions about the past.

       A historical tradition is created from the intellectual and social assumptions of a society. Consciously selected events are enveloped in a deliberately created tradition which may only be partially factual. An attempt to understand the tradition has to begin by relating it to its social function, to ask the question: “What purpose was served by creating and preserving this tradition?” And, flowing from this, to see how a changing society made use of the tradition.

      Historical traditions emerge from and reflect their social context, and the context may produce and extend to a broad range of social forms. Within these forms, history is generally the record of recognizable socio-political groups. Historical writing in such cases tends to incorporate a teleological view, even if it seems to be only a narrative of events. So, cultural symbols and stereotypes have a role in delineating the past.

      Studying  a tradition involves looking at a number of indices: first, the point in history at which the need to create and keep a tradition becomes imperative; second, the social status of the keepers of a tradition; third, whether the tradition was embedded in sacred literature to ensure its continuity; fourth, the genres that emerged in order to record the tradition independent of other literary forms; fifth, the social context in which the historical tradition was composed and the changes that it underwent when society itself changed; sixth, the audience for which any specific text of that tradition was intended; seventh, the social groups which used or manipulated the tradition, and their reasons for doing so; for, above all, such a tradition legitimizes the present and gives it sanction. 

Together, these constitute the broad framework of analysis for the texts and traditions that I examine in the book. Flowing from the framework, certain key questions recur or are implicit during the examination of a text or tradition: does it provide an instance of a past authorship looking further back into a more distant past in order to record or interpret that past? Can it be seen as outlining a sense of time and/or a fresh chronology of past and sometimes a future time? Can we detect in the material the deployment of historical events or the construction of narratives that are at bottom historical for hegemonic purposes or for cultural and political legitimation?

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The recipe for a sparkling evening

Three brilliant speakers. One exceptional book (details here). 

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THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING SUDIPTA?

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

‘Tannoy’ is not a word you’d expect to encounter in an academic essay. If the essay is by a Bengali academic, you might think it a typo for ‘Tanmoy’, or a misspelling of ‘to annoy’. Tannoy is not even a word that most people know: in fact those short of forty are quite likely never to have heard it. Like xerox and frigidaire, it began life as a manufacturing corporation and was driven by the singularity of its success into becoming a common noun—or, according to Wikipedia, a genericized trademark term for a public address system. Given the number and loudness of tannoys in India,  the nearness of the word with ‘to annoy’ seems serendipitous and might have excited Saussure no end. But we only know for a fact that it once excited a happy memory in Sudipta Kaviraj, for it features in an academic essay by him entitled ‘Reading A Song of the City: Images of the City in Literature and Films’.

The dry intellectual march of the standard academic essay is, once in a while, tripped up and enlivened by a different kind of narrative. The author digresses, dips into Wordsworthian reminscences of childhood, and recalls those days long ago when the need to earn his living in a university hadn’t stuffed his head so full of high thoughts and a specialized vocabulary. Evocatively episodic nostalgia of this type, in which the author allows memory freedom from filtration through Foucault & Co., is not infrequent in Kaviraj’s essays and hugely increases their readability. Permanent Black has published three superb ‘Ideas and Politics’ essay collections by him (The Imaginary Institution of India; The Trajectories of the Indian State; The Enchantment of Democracy and India), all now available in reasonably priced paperback editions. A fourth collection, comprising essays on ‘Literature and Ideas’, is under preparation and includes this essay which, temporarily keeping at bay Bankim and Rabindranath in the manner that Moses kept back the Red Sea, begins with this charming personal contextualization of subsequent politico-philosophical analysis:

… Nabadwip was a historic religious centre for Bengali Vaishnavas as the place of birth of the fifteenth-century bhakti saint Chaitanya. Nabadwip in the 1960s was a strange but lively mixture of the traditional and the modern. The town’s main reputation came from its association with Chaitanya’s birth. Though others with deeper knowledge of Bengali cultural history would have known that it was the great centre of Sanskrit knowledge—particularly in Navyanyaya logic and in Smriti. It was a major centre of Vaishnava pilgrimage, particularly on significant occasions of the Vaishnava calendar—like the ceremonies of the jhulan purnima, the raslila, or janmashtami. Like other great religious centres, it was a centre for thriving commerce, and the modern railway made it more accessible to pilgrims.

Its second claim to fame as the traditional centre for esoteric Sanskrit learning, and the seat of a highly specialized system of ritual legality, was by then completely dwarfed, almost forgotten by its ordinary people. Few inhabitants of the city felt any pride in great logical schools. Also unnoticed by its pilgrims, and behind the spectacular religious aspect, it was by this time a considerable centre for the production of cotton sarees. The commercialization of its religious life fed directly into modern developments like cinemas, and a booming business in speakers and tannoys, which local shops and businesses used for advertising their wares, or announcements of upcoming films by cinemas, of public meetings by political parties, and municipal announcements by the local authorities. Aurally at least these tannoys and their blaring sounds were, in a literal sense, an inescapable part of our existence.

This sociological structure produced a very specific economy of sounds in the town—of various, different, often conflicting parts—and in this the tannoys played an indispensable role. That was the ubiquitous technological link between the blandishments of commercial advertisements, the enticement of the romantic films, and the exertions of the police to control the vast crowds streaming through the narrow streets at times of festivals. But this sound was distinctively modern, demonstrating the power and vulgarity of modern things. In a crowd of other sounds, they always pushed their way through. Because there were many other sounds in the town, Nabadwip was among other things a city of unceasing music. The Vaishnava sect around Chaitanya had developed a new communal form of worship, which took two unusual forms. On festival days there were religious processions in which devotees sang, played a drum called the khol, and collectively danced on the streets, which set this sect apart from most other Hindu worshippers. When Chaitanya first initiated this form of collective dancing and singing, it created a scandal among the orthodox brahmins of Nabadwip, who complained to the Qazi and implored him to suppress the uproar. But more routinely, in hundreds of small local temples, round the year lower-level performances called palakirtan went on. In these, a small troupe of kathaks (literally, tellers of tales) or performers enacted segments of the stories of the love of Krishna and Radha through a fascinating combination of simple narration, mimed enactment, sung passages recounting their famous trysts or verbal exchanges, and dancing.

It was an immensely powerful aesthetic economy—a combination of various narrative and interpretative media, held together tightly by a single theme, animated by a rasa aesthetic that the audience knew intimately and enjoyed in endless re-enactments. The average Vaishnava was strongly urged by his religious sensibility to use aesthetics—visual images, narrative forms, music and dance—to enliven and ennoble his quotidian existence; in other words, to have a fundamental attitude towards life that was aesthetic.

A part of this aesthetic reception of everyday life was a simple custom of singing a standard tune early in the morning. Except in the rainy season, despite its transcendent connections, the town experienced an acute shortage of municipal water supply; but that was offset by the ‘divine’ supply of water from the Ganga. Most people, for most of the year, went for a bath in the river early in the morning, as later in the day, especially in summer, the sand on the wide banks of the river became unbearably hot. One interesting technique of communal worship in the Vaishnava religion was that most of the songs sung in the morning had identical or very similar tunes, generically called prabhati (from prabhat, early morning). Early in the morning, from sunrise to mid-morning, the town hummed with this general melody of morning worship—gentle, pastoral, expressing a sense of restrained and elegant joyfulness.

Those were Nehruvian times, and the ability of authorities to enforce legal rules had not crumbled. Apparently, the municipality had a rule that banned the use of tannoys before eight in the morning. (I might be wrong about the exact hour; it may have been half past eight or nine. But in that town eight in the morning was quite late in the working day); at that exact hour, all the ‘mike shops’ (maiker dokan) on the main street started their tannoys, which usually carried the currently fashionable Bengali and Hindi popular music, instantly reordering the aural economy. This immediately introduced a different music with a very different reading of the nature of human existence.

Hindi film songs used to be vastly popular, despite the widespread belief among older family members that they were corrupting. In some ways this was rather strange. The Radha-Krishna stories were often deeply erotic; compared to them, the Bengali adhunik (literally, modern) songs and the Hindi film lyrics simply expressed a vague sense of romantic longing, in most cases narratively frustrated by immovable and unforgiving family obstacles.

Yet these songs were considered dangerous precisely because they were romantic. Eroticism of a kind was a recognized part of traditional culture. Romantic love was a modern moral ideal. Against the iron laws of arranged marriages, these songs advocated, however vaguely, the individualistic principle of the romantic choice of partners, and described this as a state of divine emotional fulfilment. Family elders might be faulted for their moral principles, but they acted on a highly accurate perception of the sociological implications of this relatively pedestrian poetry. Our family did not even own a radio through which such moral enticements might infiltrate the home. Listening to songs from Hindi films was disapproved of even more strongly, because the disapproval of romantic behaviour was compounded by the Bengali disdain for the general lowness of North Indian culture. They came under three degrees of prohibition—they were romantic, they were from films, and they were in Hindi. I first heard this song in that context.

Ironically, just as the religious music had a compelling repetitiveness, coming back to your hearing every morning and making it impossible to forget that that was the proper way to start the day (in a gentle and subtle attitude of thankfulness), this film music also had its own answering repetitiveness. Since the songs were immensely popular among the young, the shops played them often, many times a day, often during festivals when individual marquees would hire an individual tannoy with a supply of gramophone records. They were additionally often carried by popular music channels of the Delhi-based AIR (All India Radio), and for some curious reason by Radio Ceylon. Thus these songs were not an episodic musical experience; they had their own structures of repetition, which made it impossible to forget them. In a sense, they also came back every mid-morning or afternoon to remind you how to face life in the city. Long before I encountered sociological theories of modernity and tradition or heard of Max Weber, I learnt, vaguely but vividly, through this undeniable line across the musical experience of my everyday, that these two types of tunes represented two immense principles of organizing experience, or the life-world.

The book will quite likely be called THE INVENTION OF PRIVATE LIFE: LITERATURE AND IDEAS. It will be worth waiting for. We hope to publish it before the year is over.