Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  13 See Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Reflections on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

  14 Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘Secularism and Communalism’, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, July 1969, p. 1139, emphasis added.

  15 The three I leave out are Tilak, Jinnah and Golwalkar—for different reasons. Tilak’s radical nationalist politics lost its relevance with the achievement of Indian independence; so too Jinnah’s Muslim separatism with the creation of Pakistan. As for Golwalkar, the subsequent career of Pakistan itself acts as a warning to those who might wish to merge Faith with State. A Hindu Rashtra would be both inimical to democracy and lead to even more strife between religions.

  16 This list, of course, is merely illustrative. Readers will, I trust, find other things that appeal to them in the work and legacy of these sixteen men and women.

  17 ‘On Government’, in H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, edited by James T. Farrell (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 182.

  Guide to Further Reading

  In what follows I have, where necessary and relevant, cited books recently published and quite easily available. That said, this guide is biased towards older works, for the reason that political history and biography have for some time now been out of fashion within the academy. For those who do not have access to a decent library, I should note that the out-of-print books that I recommend below are available—albeit in limited numbers—from online stores such as Amazon and Abe Books.

  Part I

  For overviews of British rule in India, see Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India (London: George Duckworth, 1989), which is especially strong on military and administrative matters; Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (second edition: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), a cool, judicious treatment of a complex and controversial subject; C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and John F. Riddick, The History of British India: A Chronology (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006). On the British impact on Bengal in particular, see P.J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); A.F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 1818–1835 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965); and B.S. Kesavan, History of Printing and Publishing in India: A Story of Cultural Re-awakening: Volume I: South Indian Origins of Printing and its Efflorescence in Bengal (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1985).

  The most exhaustive biographical study of Rammohan Roy remains 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). A useful shorter work is Bruce Carlisle Robertson, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Robertson is also the editor of The Essential Writings of Raja Rammohan Roy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Roy’s political ideas are the subject of a recent essay by C.A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, Modern Intellectual History, Volume 2, Number 1, 2007.

  Part II

  On the different trends in Indian politics between the founding of the Congress and the onset of the First World War, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983); S.R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (New Delhi: Vikas, 1971); Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); and Briton Martin, Jr., New India, 1885: British Official Policy and the Emergence of the Indian National Congress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). On the history of Maharashtra (home to four of the five individuals featured in this section of the book), see Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968); D.D. Karve, editor and translator, The New Brahmans: Five Maharashtrian Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); B.G. Gokhale, The Fiery Quill: Nationalism and Literature in Maharashtra (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1998); and G.P. Deshpande, The World of Ideas in Modern Marathi (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009). On Muslim politics and identity in the late nineteenth century, see M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967); and David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

  Among the more valuable of the many older biographies of Syed Ahmad Khan are Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i-Javed: A Biographical Account of Sir Sayyid, translated from the Urdu by K.H. Qadiri and David J. Matthews (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1979); and G.F.I. Graham, The Life and Work of Syed Ahmad Khan (1885; reprint Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1974). For a recent assessment of Khan’s legacy, see Faisal Devji’s essay ‘Apologetic Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History, Volume 2, Number 1, 2007. For a selection of Khan’s own writings, see Shan Mohammad, editor, Writings and Speeches of Syed Ahmad Khan (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1972).

  Jotirao Phule is the subject of a model work of intellectual biography: Rosalind O’Hanlon’s Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Some valuable information is contained in Dhananjay Keer, Mahatma Jotirao Phooley: Father of Our Social Revolution (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1964). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Maharashtra government issued several volumes of Phule’s writings; these are now scarce, but for a more recent selection, which is carefully annotated as well as elegantly produced, see G.P. Deshpande, editor, Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (New Delhi: Left Word Books, 2002).

  Gopal Krishna Gokhale is the subject of two excellent biographical studies: B.R. Nanda’s Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and the British Raj (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), also available in an omnibus edition of the author’s works published by Oxford University Press in 2004; and Govind Talwalkar’s Gopal Krishna Gokhale: His Life and Times (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2006). To read Gokhale in the original, one should consult Speeches of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (second edition: Madras: G.A. Natesan, 1916), a thousand-page-plus volume which I own (and which the Web informs me has been recently republished in a four-volume edition by a Delhi publisher); or the equally substantial three-volume selection edited by D.G. Karve and D.V. Ambekar, Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967).

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak is a once-famous but now neglected figure. Perhaps the most serviceable of the older biographies is D.V. Tahmankar, Lokmanya Tilak: Father of Indian Unrest and Maker of Modern India (London: John Murray, 1956). Also useful is Stanley Wolpert’s Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (1961; reprint New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). For this book, I have used Bal Gangadhar Tilak: His Writings and Speeches (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1918), a few copies of which seem to be available on www.abebooks.com.

  For Tarabai Shinde, see 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), which prints the translated text of Shinde’s sole book, prefaced by a biographical introduction. For perspectives on the status of women in modern Maharashtra, see Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007). For a broader sampling of feminist or proto-feminist literature, see Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, editors, Women Writing in India, two volumes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  Part III

  For overviews of the politics of the interwar period, see D.A. Low, Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929–1942 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, op. cit. Useful studies of the Congress in its regional
dimensions include D.A. Low, editor, Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, 1917–47 (second edition: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh (1978; reprint London: Anthem Press, 2002); and David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981). Gandhi’s transformative impact on the Congress is the subject of an old but still valuable essay by Gopal Krishna, ‘The Development of the Indian National Congress as a Mass Organization, 1918–1923’, Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 25, Number 3, 1966; and of a superb and enduring collection edited by Ravinder Kumar, Essays on Gandhian Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). On Muslim political trends in the 1930s and 1940s, see David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India (1946; reprint Delhi: Usha Publications, 1985). On left-wing trends, see Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959).

  For the economic context of interwar politics, see Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). For the social impact of colonialism, see M.N. Srinivas’s Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Geraldine Forbes’s Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) is an informative survey of an important but still too often neglected subject. The critical role played by the press in the development of Gandhian nationalism is dealt with in Milton Israel, Communication and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1921–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  On Gandhi, the most accessible and readable single-volume life remains Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, first published by Harper and Row in New York in 1950 and continuously in print ever since. For the more dogged and devoted admirer, there is D.G. Tendulkar’s eight-volume Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (second edition, 1963; reprint New Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1990). Among the very many thematic studies of Gandhi’s ideas, I would especially recommend David Hardiman, Gandhi: In His Time and Ours (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Denis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Non-Violent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); J.T.F. Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion: A Home-Spun Shawl (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); Bhikhu C. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1989); and Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1995). To read Gandhi in the original, those with more time and greater interest would want to consult the print or Web editions of the Collected Works; for those seeking a sensible shortcut, I would recommend, among the existing anthologies, either Raghavan Iyer, editor, The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, in three volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), or Gopalkrishna Gandhi, editor, The Oxford India Gandhi: Essential Writings (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). For those interested in specific themes, Gandhi’s own publishers, Navajivan Press, have from time to time issued volumes of his writings and sayings on caste, women, non-violence, communal harmony, etc. These can be obtained at Gandhian bookstalls across India.

  On Rabindranath Tagore, see the readable and well-researched life by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). A representative selection of his writing is contained in Sisir Kumar Das, The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, three volumes (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996). On Tagore’s relationship with Gandhi, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, editor, The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997). Finally, Tagore’s seminal tract, Nationalism, was republished in 2009 as a Penguin Modern Classic with an introduction by the present writer.

  B.R. Ambedkar has been the subject of a number of reverential studies in English in recent years. However, none can match, for sheer mass of detail, the older biography by Dhananjay Keer, Dr Ambedkar: His Life and Mission (third edition: Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1971; reprinted several times since). Valuable analytical studies of his thought and legacy include Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001); and D.R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India and Other Essays, edited by Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010). Ambedkar’s collected writings were published in a now scarce multi-volume edition brought out by the Government of Maharashtra. A handy one-volume selection is available in Valerian Rodrigues, editor, The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  The two best studies of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, albeit from contrasting perspectives, are Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For this book, I have used an edition of Jinnah’s speeches from the 1940s; a more recent effort in this direction is S.S. Pirzada, editor, The Collected Works of Qaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, three volumes (Karachi: East and West Publishing Company, 1996).

  There is no proper biography of E.V. Ramaswami in English. However, his ideology and legacy have been treated in, among other works, Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity and Popular Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); and V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998). A selection of his writings and speeches in translation is contained in K. Veeramani, editor, Collected Works of Periyar E.V.R. (Chennai: The Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution, 2007).

  Despite her being arguably the most remarkable Indian woman of the twentieth century (as well as the most influential apart from Indira Gandhi), the literature on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s life and career is surprisingly scarce. She seems to have kept no letters or papers, which is why her biographers rely so largely on anecdotes and interview material. But worth consulting nonetheless are Reena Nanda, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Sakuntala Narasimhan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Romantic Rebel (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1999). Kamaladevi’s own memoirs, written or dictated towards the end of her life and hence somewhat fragmentary, are entitled Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces (New Delhi: Navrang Publishers, 1986). Her later assessment of the position of women is contained in Indian Women’s Battle for Freedom (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1983).

  Part IV

  For a political and social history of India since Independence, see Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2007). The major political trends are also analysed in the contributions to Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, editors, The Oxford Companion to Indian Politics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010); and in two important books by André Béteille, Society and Politics in India (London: Athlone Press, 1987) and Chronicles of our Times (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000). The changing dimensions of the caste system are best followed through the work over five decades of India’s pre-eminent sociologist, M.N. Srinivas—see especially the essays reproduced in A.M. Shah, editor, The Oxford India Srinivas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). Granville Austin has written outstanding studies of the making and working of the Indian Constitution respectively: The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) and Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Debates on economic policy are discussed in A.H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–1964 (London: Oxford University Pr
ess, 1966); and in Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy: The Gradual Revolution (second edition: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). On secularism and religious identity, see, for the period just after Independence, D.E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); and, for later decades and debates, Rajeev Bhargava, editor, Secularism and its Critics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). For insights into the predicament of India’s largest minority, consult A.G. Noorani, editor, The Muslims of India: A Documentary Record (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  For the serious student of the life and legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the three-volume biography by Sarvepalli Gopal, published by Oxford University Press between 1975 and 1984, is indispensable. Michael Brecher’s Jawaharlal Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1958) remains valuable. An excellent shorter study is Walter Crocker, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (1966; second edition: New Delhi: Random House India, 2009). Nehru also looms large in Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1997) and in my own, India After Gandhi. The three books Nehru himself wrote (all published before Indian independence) are available in Penguin Classics. Of these, the one most relevant to understanding his thought is The Discovery of India, written in prison, and first published by The Signet Press, Calcutta, in 1946. The serious student must go beyond these to his writings after Independence, especially the five volumes of his Letters to Chief Ministers, published by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund between 1985 and 1989. A representative selection of his writings before and after Independence is contained in Sarvepalli Gopal and Uma Iyengar, editors, The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, two volumes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).