The third reason why even well-educated Indians remain unacquainted with these thinkers is the widespread nostalgia for the very distant past. There is one kind of Indian who thinks that it was when the Hindu scriptures were composed that his civilization was the most advanced in the world. This orients them towards the study of the sages and rulers of ancient times, in the belief that it may help the Hindus once more rule, or at least dominate, the world. If one believes more deeply in Hindu ideals, if one more vigorously affirms one’s love for the deities of the Hindu pantheon, the argument runs, then one is certain to (once more) conquer the world.12
Liberal and secular Indians who are uncomfortable with this kind of Hindu irredentism instead seek inspiration in ancient rulers and institutions that owed nothing to the Hindu faith. They thus claim that the Buddhist councils of the Mauryan period were the prototype of modern electoral democracy and that the syncretism of the Mughal emperor Akbar was the basis of Indian secularism.13
The fantasies of the Hindu supremacists are not appealing. At the same time, the argument that modern ideas of democracy and secularism have ancient origins is hard to sustain. The Indian electoral system is clearly based on the Westminster model. Further, as the sociologist Imtiaz Ahmad has pointed out, ‘the evidence of history does not support the view that secularism as embodied in the Indian Constitution is derived from ancient Indian traditions, or that there is a pre-existing place for secularism in the Indian system of values.’ He notes that under Hindu kings, the ‘system of justice in ancient India was founded on the principle of inequality’ and that ‘the religious policies of the Muslim rulers were characterised by bigotry and fanaticism’. Ahmad then significantly adds: ‘Akbar no doubt gave official encouragement to the spirit of religious tolerance, but the institutional separation of religion and state was probably as foreign to his political theory as it was to those of the ancient Hindu kings. In essence, therefore, the ideal of secularism as embodied in the Indian Constitution …constitutes a radical break with India’s past traditions.’14
In my opinion, there was little in the history and politics of the sixth or sixteenth century (not to speak of times even more remote) that could have aided Indians in interpreting and confronting the profound changes that came in the wake of colonial rule. The necessity of a free press, the equality of women, the abolition of untouchability, the rights of equal citizenship, the ending of mass poverty—these ideals and aspirations were beyond the experience and imagination of ancient or medieval scholars and rulers. Rather, they were the product of the national and democratic revolutions that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the urban, industrial and social revolutions that accompanied them.
What I termed (in the prologue) the ‘distant’ tradition of argument in India remains of interest largely to scholars; whereas the ‘proximate’ tradition should be of interest to ordinary citizens as well. For the five revolutions that I have spoken of are ongoing and unfinished. As the economy industrializes, it produces tensions between urban producers and consumers on the one hand, and farmers and rural artisans on the other. Despite sixty years of electoral democracy, the political culture of India is to a great extent marked by sycophancy and deference. Despite formal gender equality and the legal abolition of untouchability, women continue to be oppressed and lower castes discriminated against. Despite the official commitment to secularism, riots between Hindus and Muslims break out at periodic intervals.
As I write, the national unity of India is being challenged by secessionist movements in Kashmir and the north-east. The borderlands are disturbed; and so too are the countries in our neighbourhood. The plural, multiparty political system of India is being challenged by the rise of a Maoist insurgency that extends over a wide swathe of the country. This insurgency, which aims to construct a single-party state on the Chinese model, has its roots in the deprivation and dispossession of tribal people. The workings of Indian democracy are also undermined by the growing inefficiency and corruption of the political class, the civil service, the police and the judiciary.
To understand these (and other) problems, we may turn to those Indians who have seriously thought through these issues in the (comparatively recent) past. Thus, of the nineteen thinkers represented in this book, perhaps sixteen speak directly to the concerns of the present.15 Thus, for example, one might turn to Ambedkar, Lohia, Phule, Gokhale and Gandhi to continue the struggle against caste discrimination; to Syed Ahmad Khan and Hamid Dalwai to modernize Indian Islam; to Tarabai, Kamaladevi, Rammohan Roy, Nehru and E.V. Ramaswami to further the emancipation of women; to Gokhale, Gandhi and Nehru to sustain good relations between Hindus and India’s religious minorities; to Jayaprakash Narayan to promote understanding and goodwill between the Indian state and its still disturbed borderlands; to Phule to bring dignity and a secure livelihood to the farmer; to Gandhi and Narayan to promote the decentralization of political authority; to Verrier Elwin to protect the tribals from discrimination; to Rajagopalachari to reform the electoral system and to curb the excesses of a potentially overbearing state; to Tagore to cultivate a productive and open-minded engagement with other nations of the world.16 In this sense, the ‘Makers’ in the book’s title is appropriate in more than the past tense. These Indians undoubtedly made India the nation it now is, but their legacies may yet help make India a nation that more fully lives up to its (so far imperfectly realized) ideals.
H.L. Mencken once wrote that ‘politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance’.17 Here, as elsewhere, one admires the elegance of Mencken’s prose without endorsing his cynicism of outlook. These makers of modern India did not think that their life’s work was all show and rhetoric. Nor were they necessarily self-deluding in believing that they could contribute, in some measure, to the diminution of human suffering, the promotion of religious pluralism, a respect for the rights of the individual citizen. To be sure, India remains a less-than-united nation, a less-than-perfect democracy, a less-than-equal economy and a less-than-peaceful society. For those of us who might wish to close the gap between the ideal and the reality, the materials in this book may not be the worst place to start.
Footnotes
Prologue
Thinking Through India
1 One should perhaps make a distinction here between the ‘thinking politician’ and the ‘thinker-politician’. Of the leaders who came after the Founders, at least four American presidents have reflected deeply on questions of political and social reform—and then sought to act on their reflections. These are Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, most recently, Barack Obama. However, the first three did not leave behind a body of writing that has stood the test of time. The jury is still out on Obama: on the evidence of his two memoirs, he might yet, once he demits office as President, give us an original and insightful work on how democracy functions—or malfunctions.
2 See Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001), p. 31 and passim.
3 Escott Reid, Envoy to Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 227.
4 ‘Fog over Ferney’ (1958), reproduced in E.M. Forster, The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, edited by P.N. Furbank (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 149–54. As prime minister, Nehru was actually head of government rather than head of state, the latter being the president of the Indian republic.
5 The nineteen are Rammohan Roy (Part I); Syed Ahmad Khan, Jotirao Phule, Tarabai Shinde, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Part II); M.K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar, M.A. Jinnah, E.V. Ramaswami and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (Part III); Jawaharlal Nehru, M.S. Golwalkar, C. Rajagopalachari, Rammanohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and Verrier Elwin (Part IV); and Hamid Dalwai (Part V).
6 For the history and politics of the communist movement in India, see, among other works, John H. Kautsky, Moscow and the Communist Party of India (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956); Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); T.J. Nossiter, Communism in Kerala: A Study in Political Adaptation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India: Politics, Economics, and Society (London: Pinter, 1988); Marcus F. Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Sumanta Banerjee, In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980); Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008).
7 Anthony J. Parel, ‘Gandhi and the Emergence of the Modern Indian Political Canon’, The Review of Politics, Volume 70, Number 1, 2008, p. 62.
8 See Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1991).
9 Katherine Frank, Indira: A Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: Harper Collins, 2001); Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989).
10 Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Sarvepalli Gopal, Radhakrishnan: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
11 See Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12 On Iyothee Thass, see G. Aloysius, Nationalism without a Nation in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998). On the enduring legacies of Narayana Guru, see Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-being: How Kerala Became ‘a Model’ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Dilip M. Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
13 See R.P. Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939). The Harvard historian Dinyar Patel is currently working on a new life of Naoroji.
14 Among these ‘Makers’ would be some outstanding novelists who also happened to be political essayists, such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Mahasweta Devi (Bengali), Subramania Bharati (Tamil), Fakirmohan Senapati (Oriya) and Shivarama Karanth and U.R. Anantha Murthy (Kannada).
15 Brief biographical portraits of these individuals are provided at appropriate places in the book.
16 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948).
17 A sample of these works would include Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004); Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, translated from the French by Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)—the last being perhaps the most wide-ranging and thoughtful of them all.
18 Again, a representative sample might include Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
19 W.C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (1957; reprint New York: Mentor Books, 1959), pp. 263–64.
20 Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Reflections on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
21 These paragraphs carry on a conversation that began in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). See Ramachandra Guha, ‘Arguments with Sen, Arguments about India’, EPW, 20 October 2005; Amartya Sen, ‘Our Past and Our Present’, EPW, 25 November 2006; Jaithirth Rao, ‘Harking Back to the Past’, EPW, 14 April 2007.
1. The First Liberal: Rammohan Roy
1 Roy’s first name is sometimes rendered as ‘Rammohun’. However, ‘Rammohan’ is more accurate, phonetically speaking. I have also not used his title ‘Raja’ (awarded by the Mughals)—it can perhaps be dispensed with in this republican age.
2 From Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, edited by Dilip Kumar Biswas and Prabhat Chandra Ganguli (fourth edition: Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1988—originally published in 1900), pp. 94–96.
3 The excerpts that follow are from Collet, Life and Letters, pp. 390–93 and 406–19.
4 Collet, Life and Letters, pp. 420–24.
2. The Muslim Modernist: Syed Ahmad Khan
1 As with Rammohan Roy, I have used what I consider to be the most accurate of several variant spellings. Likewise, I have dispensed with Khan’s title, which in this case came from the British having awarded him a knighthood.
2 From Shan Mohammad, editor, Writings and Speeches of Syed Ahmad Khan (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1972), pp. 82–96.
3 That dispatch for the first time accepted the responsibility of the state for providing education to its subjects in India.
4 Reproduced from G.F.I. Graham, The Life and Work of Syed Ahmad Khan (1885; reprint Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1974), pp. 76–81.
5 A former governor of Madras and member of the viceroy’s Executive Council.
6 The town of Roorkee, in the northern part of the United Provinces, had extensive canals around it—it was also home to one of India’s oldest engineering colleges.
7 Mohammad, editor, Writings and Speeches, pp. 159–60.
8 The Vindhya mountains, running east to west in the middle of the peninsula, are generally said to divide north from south India. It is interesting that Syed Ahmad Khan leaves the area south of the Vindhyas out of his purview, this despite the fact that it was home to millions of Hindus as well as Muslims. This may have been because the Mughals (his frame of reference) had never really penetrated into this region.
9 Mohammad, editor, Writings and Speeches, pp. 181–86.
10 By ‘our nation’, Khan means the Muslims of India. The speech would originally have been in Urdu—where he most likely would have used the word ‘qaum’, which would more precisely translate as ‘community of believers’ rather than ‘nation’.
11 ‘Rais’ may be roughly translated as landlord. It refers to a class of Muslim gentry who were wealthy as well as cultured.
3. The Agrarian Radical: Jotirao Phule
1 Phule’s first name is sometimes rendered as ‘Jotiba’.
2 From G.P. Deshpande, editor, Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (New Delhi: Left Word Books, 2002), pp. 103–12.
3 From Deshpande, editor, Selected Writings, pp. 157–63, 167–69 and 179–82. Translated by Aniket Jaaware. Note that for ‘Brahmin’ this translation uses the equally acceptable ‘Brahman’.
4 The collector used to be the most powerful state official in a district.
5 Maharashtra, Phule’s homeland, had no indigenous trading caste, so the merchants and moneylenders were mostly migrants from Gujarat and from Marwar in present-day Rajasthan.
6 Containers to draw water from the well.
4. The Liberal Reformer: Gopal Krishna Gokhale
1 From Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (second edition: Madras: G.A. Natesan, 1916), pp. 1054–59.
2 Joseph Chamberlain was then Secretary of State for the Colonies in the British government.
3 From Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, pp. 1134–42.
4 Reproduced in D.G. Karve and D.V. Ambekar, editors, Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale: Volume 3: Educational (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), pp. 187–91.
5. The Militant Nationalist: Bal Gangadhar Tilak
1 From an article published in The Mahratta, 24 June 1906, repr
oduced in Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1918), pp. 28–33.
2 ‘Anglo-Indian’ then meant Englishmen resident in India.
3 From a speech made in Calcutta on 2 January 1907, reproduced in Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches, pp. 37–52.
4 Namely, Dadabhai Naoroji.
5 The Liberal Party had just come into power in Great Britain, raising the hopes of the Indian Moderates that their concerns would be more sympathetically addressed.
6 John Morley had written a celebrated life of the great Liberal leader W.E. Gladstone.
7 A well-known nationalist leader from the Punjab.
8 In 1858, following the rebellion of the previous year, Queen Victoria had issued a proclamation promising her Indian subjects good governance and respect for all faiths.
6. The Subaltern Feminist: Tarabai Shinde
1 From Rosalind O’Hanlon, editor and translator, A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 97–111.
7. The Multiple Agendas of M.K. Gandhi
1 From M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1958—hereafter CWMG), Volume 10, pp. 47–53. All through this chapter, I have used the standard edition of the Collected Works, edited by K. Swaminathan. There was a later, error-ridden edition (since withdrawn) and there are also versions on the Web—these follow a different pagination.
2 From The Hindu, 13 August 1920, as reproduced in CWMG, Volume 18, pp. 144–54.
3 E.S. Montagu, at the time Secretary of State for India in the British government.
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