Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.

  II

  I have long believed India to be the most interesting country in the world. This is the impartial judgement of a historian, not the partisan claim of a citizen. India may also be the most exasperating and the most hierarchical and the most degrading country in the world. But whatever qualifier or adjective one uses or prefers, it remains the most interesting, too. For one thing, India is very large and contains one-sixth of humankind. For another, its territory is astonishingly diverse, with its peoples differentiated by religion, language, caste and ethnicity, as well as by ecology, technology, dress and cuisine.

  Beyond the size and the diversity, what truly makes India interesting is that it is simultaneously undergoing five dramatic transformations. The Indian economy was once very largely based on agriculture; now, it increasingly depends upon industry and services. An overwhelming majority of Indians once lived in the villages; now, hundreds of millions of Indians live in cities and towns. India was once a territory ruled over by Europeans; now, it is an independent nation-state. The political culture of India was once feudal and deferential; now, it is combative and participatory. The social system of India was once governed by community and patriarchy; now, it has had increasingly to make space for the assertion of individual rights as well as the rights of previously subordinated groups such as women and lower castes.

  There were, and are, five revolutions simultaneously occurring in India: the urban revolution, the industrial revolution, the national revolution, the democratic revolution and the social revolution. The key word here is simultaneously. In Europe and North America, these revolutions were staggered. Thus the United States proclaimed its national independence in the eighteenth century, urbanized and industrialized in the nineteenth century, and became democratic only in the twentieth century, after women and African Americans were granted the vote. In Europe, which was a continent broken up into many different nationalities, the pace of these different revolutions varied greatly across countries. Crucially, in every country the national revolution preceded the democratic revolution by several decades or more. That is to say, the residents of a certain circumscribed territory came together under a single flag and single currency well before they were allowed to choose the leaders who would govern them.

  India has three times as many people as the United States. It has as many major languages as Europe, with this significant difference—each of these languages has its own, distinctive script. It has far greater religious diversity than either the United States or Europe. And it became a democracy at the same time as it became a nation, this in contrast to the countries of Western Europe and North America, where nationhood came long before democracy; and in contrast also to its great Asian neighbour, China, where nationhood has been sustained only by the repressive regime of a one-party state. In any event, the industrial and national revolutions would have produced major conflicts and upheavals—as they have elsewhere in the world. Notably, in India these conflicts have been articulated on the one hand through armed insurgencies or secessionist movements, and on the other hand through street protests, legal challenges, press campaigns and parliamentary debates: that is to say, through the processes of political mobilization and rhetorical expression that a democracy permits and even encourages.

  The size of its territory plus the diversity of its people plus the simultaneity of these five great revolutions—this is what makes India the most interesting country in the world.

  The individuals featured in Makers of Modern India lived through these revolutions, struggled to facilitate or reshape them and—the aspect of their careers that is of most interest to us here—wrote about their impact on themselves and their compatriots. Their writings probed deeply into each of these five revolutions. They explored, for example, how to harmonize the interests of city and countryside in the transformation of the economy; how to promote national unity amidst religious diversity and discord; how to advance the rights of women and low castes; how to reconcile the sometimes competing claims of individual freedom and social equality. The orientation of some of these thinker-activists was outward as well as inward; in seeking to unite their country and make it more democratic, they also looked at the most productive ways in which India could engage with other nations in an increasingly interconnected world.

  The men and women featured in this book did not speak in one voice. Their perspectives were sometimes complementary and more often competitive. But they were always instructive. Their writings were (and are) not merely of academic interest; rather, they had a defining impact on the formation and evolution of the Indian republic. The essays and speeches excerpted here take us from the subcontinent’s first (and unasked-for) engagement with modernity through the successive phases of the Indian freedom struggle, on through the now six-decade-old career of the world’s largest democracy. Through them, we can track the course of two centuries of Indian history, as seen and interpreted by the men and women who themselves helped shape and define these most interesting times in the world’s most interesting country.

  III

  This book features nineteen individuals in all. It begins with Rammohan Roy, who was perhaps the first Indian thinker to seriously engage with the challenge of the West. Born in Bengal, the first province to come under British rule, Roy saw in the presence of the foreigner an invitation to re-examine the presuppositions of his own society. On the one hand, he sought to reform his native faith of its ugly and exploitative aspects; on the other, to demand of the white-dominated East India Company democratic rights that were granted at home yet denied in the colonies. In both respects, Roy set the tone for the reformers and activists who were to follow.

  From Roy we move on to a quintet of thinkers active in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. In 1857, there was a major uprising against colonial rule, led by disaffected soldiers who drew very many peasants and preachers into their fold. After suppressing the revolt, the British Crown assumed direct responsibility for the Government of India from the East India Company. In 1885, as the new regime was consolidating itself, a group of city-based and well-educated colonial subjects came together to found the Indian National Congress.

  In mediating between the rulers and the ruled, the Congress sought (in Mukul Kesavan’s felicitous phrase) to serve as a ‘Noah’s Ark of nationalism’.2 As its name implied, the party made room for all kinds of Indians, regardless of language, religion, region, race or gender. In this effort it was substantially but not entirely successful. While many intelligent and ambitious Indians joined its ranks, others stayed away, claiming that the Congress represented a sectional, elite interest that was inimical to other (and often less advantaged) kinds of Indians.

  Of the five thinkers profiled in Part II of the book, two were long-standing members of the Congress, whereas two others were opposed to it. (The fifth was agnostic.) All, however, articulated original and distinctive arguments on how India might best get its freedom from colonial rule, or on how it might most effectively deal with the divisions and schisms within.

  Part III of the book is oriented around the debates inspired by the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1915, Gandhi returned to British India after two decades in South Africa. By 1920 or thereabouts he had become the acknowledged leader of the Indian National Congress. In subsequent decades he organized three major campaigns against colonial rule, initiated various social reform measures, and w
rote ceaselessly on the problems and prospects of the nation-in-the-making.

  Even in his lifetime, Gandhi was hailed as the Father of the Nation; but he was equally the mother of all battles concerning its future. No modern politician was as ready to be criticized as Gandhi. His daily activities were open to public scrutiny, while his campaigns were always intimated in advance to his adversaries. Nor were the latter always (or even principally) British. Among the Indian critics of Gandhi were colleagues who worked alongside him but could not follow his word entirely, as well as rivals who set themselves up in political opposition to him.

  All his life, Gandhi engaged in arguments with friends and rivals. These debates are presented here, in Gandhi’s words and those of his principal interlocutors. Of the five other ‘Makers’ included in Part III, two were critical admirers of Gandhi; the three others, hostile adversaries.

  Part IV is oriented around the statecraft of Jawaharlal Nehru who, as prime minister for the first, formative years of Independence, had an influence on modern India that was arguably as great as Gandhi’s. In 1957 a Canadian scholar and diplomat wrote of Nehru that ‘there is no one since Napoleon who has played both so large a role in the history of his country and has also held the sort of place which Nehru holds in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. For the people of India, he is George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one’.3

  No modern statesman, not even Winston Churchill, was as much of a thinking politician as Nehru. Like Churchill, Nehru had a deep interest in history; unlike him, he also had an interest in political ideas and ideologies (and hence a special fondness for intellectuals). In 1958 the British writer E.M. Forster imagined Voltaire being reborn and composing a letter on the fate of humankind. However, the philosopher did not know whom to address, since there was now ‘not a single crowned head who would wish to receive a letter from him’. Forster, and Voltaire, scanned the world, to see only amiable but poorly read monarchs (such as Queen Elizabeth II who was ‘so charming, so estimable, but no philosopher’; so unlike Frederick of Prussia or even Catherine of Russia, ‘both Greats’). The rulers in uniform were as philistine as those who sat on thrones; Voltaire could scarcely bring himself to write to living generals such as Ayub Khan of Pakistan or Tito of Yugoslavia. Forster, speaking through Voltaire, quickly reached the conclusion that ‘only one head of a state would welcome a letter from him, and that was President [sic] Nehru of India. With an exclamation of delight he took up his pen’.4

  Like Gandhi, Nehru’s ideas were controversial, not least among his countrymen. Of the five other ‘Makers’ featured in Part IV, one was a lifelong opponent of the prime minister. A second was an admirer. The remaining were sometime colleagues and friends. Before Independence, as fellow Congressmen they had been incarcerated in the same jails and for the same cause; now, with freedom finally won, they parted ways on how best to serve the interests of the Indian people.

  Of these three friends-turned-rivals of Nehru and the Congress, one was the main ideologue of the socialist left; a second the founder of the party of the libertarian or free-market right. The third critic chose to reject the party system altogether, offering instead a model of grass-roots democracy based on village councils. Like Nehru, all were thinker-politicians, with the sophistication of their arguments and the depth of their beliefs manifest in their writings.

  The last part of the book, like the first, foregrounds one individual alone. Unlike Rammohan Roy, however, he is quite obscure, his name wholly unknown outside India and unrecognizable even to most educated Indians. But, as I hope the excerpts chosen from his work shall show, as the ‘last modernist’ of Indian politics he remains a figure of much interest and relevance.

  IV

  Why were these nineteen thinkers chosen?5 And who or what got left out?

  One important strand that is not represented here is Marxism. In 1920, a few radical exiles in Moscow proclaimed the formation of a Communist Party of India (CPI), although the party actually started operating in India only in 1925. Ever since, Marxism in one form or another has had a substantial presence in Indian politics. Through the interwar years, communists were among the sharpest critics of the Indian National Congress. The achievement of political independence in August 1947 was dismissed by them as a sham, a mere transfer of power between elites, with a brown comprador bourgeoisie said to have replaced a white metropolitan bourgeoisie as the ruling class of India.

  In February 1948 the CPI launched an armed insurrection against the infant Indian state. It took the better part of three years for the insurrection to be contained. Finally, and in part due to the influence of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (then keen for the Soviet Union to befriend former Western colonies such as India), the revolutionaries came overground and swore allegiance to the Indian Constitution.

  Through the 1950s, the CPI fought and even occasionally won elections. Then, in the early 1960s, the party split into two. The breakaway group, called the Communist Party of India (Marxist), wished to cultivate close ties with both Russia and China, whereas the parent body identified with Russia alone. Towards the end of the decade the CPI(M) itself broke up into two. While one group stayed (for the moment) within the system, the other sought to overthrow the Indian state by armed struggle. Their model was Maoist China; as indicated in one of their chosen slogans, ‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman!’

  The Indian Maoists are commonly known as ‘Naxalites’, after the north Bengal village of Naxalbari where their struggle began. From the late 1960s, they have been active in central and eastern India. In the past decade they have greatly expanded their reach and influence. Attacking police stations, beheading public officials, the Naxalites remain committed to an armed revolution resulting in the eventual capture of state power in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the CPI and the CPI(M) live on in an uneasy compact with bourgeois democracy. While they participate in elections, and even run provincial governments, in theory they still subscribe to an ideology that promises India an authoritarian political system to be run by a single party, their own.6

  Aside from its not inconsiderable presence in politics, Marxism in its various forms has had a major impact on intellectual life in India. This impact persisted through the last century and promises to continue well into this one. The appeal of Marxism has much to do with the pervasive inequalities in Indian society. Admittedly, there is also a lack of knowledge of, or a wilful shutting of one’s eyes to, the horrors and errors of Communist states themselves.

  I have not included any Indian Marxists in this book because their work has been mostly derivative. As Anthony Parel has remarked, Indian Marxists ‘were and are bent on changing India on Marx’s terms; they simply refuse to change Marxism on India’s terms’.7 That is to say, they have hoped to create on the subcontinent’s soil a system closely modelled on the Russian or Chinese experience. As a consequence, there have been no novel contributions by Indian thinkers, no expanding or deepening of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao.

  Despite their formal absence, Marxists and Marxism remain an ‘absent presence’ in this book. Their work and legacy has powerfully influenced the ideas of many of the thinkers featured here, who have sought, in more democratic and incremental ways, to contain or transcend the divisions within Indian society.

  I should also explain a few other omissions. At least two great, iconic leaders of the Indian national movement are not included here. These are Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel. In the crucial decades of the 1930s and 1940s, Bose inspired many young men and women to join the opposition to foreign rule. As for Patel, he both built the Congress party machine before 1947 and secured the unity of the Indian state in the early years of Independence. They were both considerable figures, Patel especially. In each case, the decision to leave them out was taken owing to the paucity of original ideas contained in their published work. Both were out-and-out ‘doers’, whose writings were either insubstantial or humdrum.8

  Like Bose
and Patel, Indira Gandhi was also known principally by her actions. As prime minister of India between 1966 and 1977 and again between 1980 and 1984, she had a profound impact on the history of her country. Her legacy remains controversial—while some venerate her for her qualities as a war leader and her concern for the poor, others criticize her authoritarian tendencies and her populism. At any rate, the speeches and writings that carried her name were written by her staff. In this (and perhaps other respects) she differed from her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a widely published author before he became prime minister, and whose speeches and writings as prime minister were almost always drafted by himself.9

  Some other individuals not included here were known principally for their writings. These include the revolutionary-turned-spiritualist Aurobindo Ghose and the philosopher-turned-public figure Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Both wrote prodigiously; while Radhakrishnan wished to make Hinduism compatible with the modern world, Aurobindo sought to spiritualize literature and politics on the basis of classical Indian ideals and traditions. In their lifetime, both had a considerable following among English-speaking Indians. However, that influence never really extended beyond the middle class; nor did it last much beyond their death.10

  I have also not included spiritualists such as Swami Vivekananda and Dayanand Saraswati, who represented a muscular brand of Hinduism that sought to meet the challenge of the West by breaking down caste barriers and consolidating the community as one. Both were, in their own day, quite influential; yet (as with Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo) their influence has passed. It could also be said that they were superseded by Gandhi, who took on (and deepened) their reformist impulses while practising a more catholic and dialogic form of Hinduism.11