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Literary Review
PROSE
Against abstraction
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`These essays...have a keen sense of the way it takes all sorts of characters and ideas to compose a genuinely interesting society.'
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THE Last Liberal, a selection of Ram Guha's columns and essays, is a magnificent example of liberal learning on display. These essays are learned without being ponderous, have a moral outlook without being moralistic, are informed by an almost inexhaustible curiosity about the public lives of individuals and have a keen sense of the way it takes all sorts of characters and ideas to compose a genuinely interesting society. But this book is liberal, above all, because of two commitments that give these otherwise disparate essays, some unity: a commitment to individuality and a commitment to public reason.
One of the essays deals with the interesting question why biography is a genre that has been rarely well practised even in modern India. Amongst other things, the explanation for this lies in the fact that our dominant instincts are profoundly anti-individual and anti-humanist. We inevitably tend to read individuals as an expression of some larger collectivity: class, caste, national identity and so forth. Even our academic training prompts us to swallow individuals up in some larger abstraction. Individuals then are almost over-determined by outside forces. The idea of composing a life, authoring one's own actions, acting as an agent, makes little sense in this view. Ram Guha's writings are distinguished by its attention to individuality. The range of figures he writes about in this book is quite remarkable; it includes politicians, environmentalists, scientists, intellectuals and literary figures. Gandhi, Rajaji, Karnath, Koirala, Dhawan, Dharma Kumar, Anil Aggarwal, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, C.L.R. James, Sujit Mukherjee and even the encrusted Tamil Tigers come across as complex individuals, constantly making choices and negotiating their identities. Guha has an eye for the telling detail, the perfect anecdote, a taste for small ironies and an economy of expression that makes these short sketches bristle with interest. There is a texture to the lives of all of us, Guha seems to be suggesting, that no abstraction should be allowed to override. "No society is as large as an individual," Emerson, once wrote and this collection is testament to how individuals can open up worlds more complex than any collective narcissism ever will.
The second and related concern is solicitude for public reason. If indeed we see individuals as nothing but an expression of their collective identities or predetermined interests, then what will public argument, the exchange of reasons aimed at mutual understanding and agreement, be about? Part of the reason why public discourse and academic argument is often so rancorous is because there is little space for advancing reasons. Argument becomes a pure clash of wills. So anyone who might think there are genuinely principled reasons for opposing Mandal is written off as Brahamanical, anyone who might think markets can do some things better than states is written of as bourgeois, anyone who wants openness to the world economy written off as comprador or imperialistic. These essays, especially those on Gandhi and Rajaji capture a moment in the development of public life when people believed in reason and not name-calling. The differences between Rajaji and Gandhi, Gandhi and Nehru, Rajaji and Nehru, Rajaji and Patel, Gandhi and Tagore, Nehru and Ambedkar, were profound, but reading these little essays will give you a sense of how they could disagree without impugning each other's integrity; indeed they respected each other because of their disagreements rather than despite them. The stress on individuals in Guha's work comes not from a naοve belief in their power. Rather it is an attempt to clear a space for the thought that we can disagree without impugning each other's motives, that diversity comes from the numerously different ways in which individuals reason and braid together their intellect and character.
Guha is quite capable of wielding an acidic pen and has on occasion given in to the temptation of being polemical. But this collection is remarkably restrained and admirably unbullying. This peculiar genre that Guha has invented, a mixture of anecdote and analysis, personality and principle, may leave some dissatisfied. It is sometimes not probing enough and ducks a few hard questions about its subjects. The introduction in particular, where Guha identifies himself as a Nehruvian Indian committed to refusing any benchmarking of Indian identity, and a zealous partisan of diversity and pluralism, sometimes glosses over complicated questions much too quickly in a manner out of sync with the seriousness of the subject. That might be the inevitable price of writing short essays. But read The Last Liberal for sheer pleasure, for its ability to reflect brilliantly on the complex intellectual history of modern India, and for the sheer joy of getting acquainted with a diversity of important lives.
PRATAP BHANU MEHTA
The Last Liberal and Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha, Permanent Black, 2003, p.282, Rs. 495.
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