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History as our story

As Ramachandra Guha’s latest book hits the stands, he shares a glimpse of the wonder that is the Indian experiment, and the glory that is our unnatural nation

Photo: V. Sudershan

Flipping through the past Ramachandra Guha

Convention labels history as a boring subject, especially in schools, despite the obvious argument that the story of humankind should be fraught with interest. Thank goodness for writers like Ramachandra Guha.

Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy has just been released by Picador India. Flipping through its 900-odd pages is like putting the proverbial knife through butter. Are our schools, th en, doing a hopeless job of equipping youngsters to see the country’s past, present and future in perspective?

“I think professional historians write rather boring, dry books,” says Guha, who feels that if history has not come alive for Indian students, it is a “collective failure”. However, with the National Council for Educational Research and Training showing a change of heart, that aspect is gradually changing, he adds.

The main point, though, he emphasises, is, “history teaching cannot be boring if it is dealing with India.”

India After Gandhi approaches Indian contemporary history from the premise that this is an “unnatural nation” — one composed of disparate entities, divided by language, religion, geography, food habits and all the fin er and larger aspects of culture. That such an unwieldy political union should survive through six decades of nearly unbroken adherence to democracy is an abiding wonder.

“This scale of the Indian experiment” must be communicated to fellow Indians, he feels, as also the world, “in all its glory, as also in all its gloom and misery”.

As one reads Guha’s descriptions of the drama of the few years preceding and the decades following India’s independence, history certainly does come alive in technicolour. Rediscovering that “generation of extraordinary leaders,” as he describes them, makes us want to lament, where have all the good men gone?

While the author admits he wishes we had such leaders now, he is unwilling to take the pessimistic stand. Of the idealism of the Gandhian era, he says, “I don’t think it has vanished,” but feels it has moved to other spheres of society. “In the ’60s we had such high quality government leaders we got used to expecting the sarkar to do everything.”

Rather than despair, why not look at the positives, he asks. Take gender relations, caste predicaments, even the way the rich dispense their money: the old style industrialist family might spend money on a temple in the old days. Today they would spend it on some social cause. “There is a degeneration in the government, but there is an energy in civil society,” he asserts.

“Whoever would have thought that a Dalit woman would become the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh,” he says by way of example, quickly adding, “Whatever one may think of the woman.”

The election process, incidentally, is something he is satisfied with. “The hardware of democracy is quite okay. The problem is the software” — like corruption in public dealing.

Illiteracy and lumpenism, in his opinion, do not make a major dent in the electoral outcome. “There is very informed voting,” he insists.

“People vote as they want. Women are not voting according to what their husbands want.”

Yet in the same state that boasts having elected a Dalit woman as CM, the electioneering in reserved women’s wards routinely sees men campaigning for their wives, with the candidates being referred to according to who their husband is. “I won’t say it’s perfect,” he concedes. “It’s part of the churning.”

This “churning” is “the change from an agricultural to an industrial society, from village to urban, from a hierarchical to a democratic participatory culture.”

The “tumult” is inevitable. “These are all painful aspects to modernity,” he says, even as he remarks that today India is “on the cusp of the transition”. How long we will remain on the cusp is unclear to those who live today. But while we wait, we have 900 pages to share “the glory and the pain, the triumphs and the humiliations” of this “extraordinary experiment in the history of the modern world.”

ANJANA RAJAN

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