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How do you think the Indian democracy will evolve in the next 60 years? Will India be more unlikely than what it is today? Will India become even more ‘exasperating’?
I don’t speculate about the future. It’s not just professional caution. In my book, I have showed some prophets of doom such as Churchill and Arundhati Roy. I don’t want to join them by speculating 60 years from now. I will tell you what happened in the past 60 years till now.
In the fifties and sixties there was an intelligent, visionary and honest political class who shaped the Indian democracy. But now it’s true that there has been degradation in the political class and the domain of party politics. Democracy works both within the state and outside. That has to be understood.
However there are compensatory forces at work and the democracy has deepened in the flowering of the civil society. It’s 50/50 situation as I have mentioned in my book.
I read in few of the reviews that you have virtually “ignored India’s cultural history nothing about literature, very little about music, and hardly anything on cinema (other than Bollywood and a pious aside on Satyajit Ray)”. Why was this so? Was this a deliberate exclusion?
That’s not true. Only two reviews have mentioned this. If I have given thirteen pages on Hindi film (and culture) and three paragraphs on Satyajit Ray, that’s not an aesthetic judgement. There is a role of Hindi films in uniting India. But there is a relatively less importance of high culture in making the Indian democracy what it is. My book is not a work of aesthetics. In the larger sweep of Indian history and shaping of the Indian democracy, the best of Indian writers whom we love to read otherwise and the high culture is of a relatively less importance. So this is a mistake in criticism. I don’t agree to this.
How do you view the role of the youth in the Indian democracy?
They are active in civil and entrepreneurial sector but not in the public sector. This is a pity. Not as a historian but I personally think this is unfortunate. The idealistic and patriotic in this country should be given Public sector as an option. In our times, the best of the lot used to get into the government jobs. But it’s not happening now.
Why is the book given the title, India After Gandhi? Is there a story rather a history behind that too?
It is what I argue in my Preface to the book, i.e., what happens after independence? Current historians are obsessed with the Raj – the interplay and dialectic between British colonialism and Indian nationalism. In this obsession, historians lose interest in what happened after. In my endeavour to write the book, I have gone beyond all these – the Raj, colonialism, nationalism and of course Gandhi.
What other books are you planning to write now?
India is a most interesting country. I am blessed to be living here and being a historian here. I will never be short of topics to write when the subject is India. I would be writing more books on India in future for sure.
What books on Indian history would you recommend for the lay reader?
1) A.L. Basham’s The Wonder that was India – It is the most accessible and elegantly written book on India.
2) Richard M. Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 – The book is a marvellous history of medieval Bengal because it shows a paradox – why did the mass conversion of Islam happen so far, from the furthest reach of the Mughal Empire?
3) Sanjay Subrahmaiyam’s The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama – A wonderful biography indeed!
4) Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India - The most interesting essay on contemporary Indian democracy and nationalism.
5) David Hardiman’s Gandhi in His Time and Ours – This is the most accessible and argumentative book on the subject and has been critically analyzed very well.
How was your experience at Oxford Bookstore Kolkata?
I enjoyed reading there very much. More importantly, I love the city and the people for their spirit of inquiry, hospitality and warmth.
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Ramachandra Guha was born in Dehradun in 1958 and educated in Delhi and Calcutta. He has taught at the universities of Oslo, Stanford and Yale, and at the Indian Institute of Science. He has been a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and also served as the Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. After a peripatetic academic career, with five jobs in ten years on three continents, Guha settled down to become a full-time writer, based in Bangalore. His books cover a wide range of themes, including a global history of environmentalism, a biography of an anthropologist-activist, a social history of Indian cricket, and a social history of Himalayan peasants. His entire career, he says,
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seems in retrospect to have been an extended (and painful) preparation for the writing of India After Gandhi. Guha's books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The prizes they have won include the UK Cricket Society's Literary Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History.
Courtesy: www.harpercollins.com
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