Makers of Modern India
Page 58
M.S. Golwalkar is best studied through his own words, especially his Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan, 1966). A fine short study of his ideas is Jyotirmaya Sharma, Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007). For broader analyses of the development of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its associated organizations, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (second edition: New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999); B.D. Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1987).
For Lohia, see Indumati Kelkar, Dr. Rammanohar Lohia: His Life and Philosophy (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers and Distributors, 2009), a reverential yet informative work. Also useful is Chitrita Chaudhuri’s Rammanohar Lohia and the Indian Socialist Thought (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1993). Lohia’s writings have been collected and published in thematic volumes by a group of his admirers based in Hyderabad (Rammanohar Lohia Samata Vidyalaya Nyas, 4–5-46, Sultan Bazar, Hyderabad 500001). A one-volume selection, to be published by a more ‘mainstream’ press, is currently being prepared by Yogendra Yadav and Rajaram Tolpady.
Lohia’s one-time comrade Jayaprakash Narayan is the subject of two biographical studies: Allan and Wendy Scarfe, J.P.: His Biography (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975) and Ajit Bhattacharjea, Unfinished Revolution: A Political Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2004). Also worth consulting is Madhu Dandavate, Jayaprakash Narayan: Struggle with Values (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2002), an affectionate appreciation by a latter-day socialist politician. Narayan’s writings have been brought out in seven volumes issued under the imprint of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and edited by Bimal Prasad. A handy one-volume selection is Jayaprakash Narayan, Nation Building in India (Varanasi: Navachetna Prakashan, 1975), edited by JP’s long-time secretary Brahmanand.
C. Rajagopalachari is the subject of a thorough biography by Rajmohan Gandhi, Rajaji: A Life (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1997). An insightful recent study of his thought is Vasanti Srinivasan, Gandhi’s Conscience-Keeper: C. Rajagopalachari and Indian Politics (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009). The credo and career of the party he founded are treated in H.L. Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). As for his own writings, those from the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s are contained in C. Rajagopalachari, Satyam Eva Jayate: A Collection of Articles Contributed to Swarajya and Other Journals from 1956 to 1961, in two volumes (Madras: Bharathan Publications, 1961), and in Dear Reader: Weekly Colloquy of C. Rajagopalachari with the Readers of Swarajya, 1961–1972 (Coimbatore: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1993).
Verrier Elwin is the author of a charming autobiography called The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1964). Among his other books, I would recommend especially The Baiga (London: John Murray, 1939) and A Philosophy for NEFA (second edition: Shillong: Adviser to the Governor of Assam, 1959). Elwin’s life and thought are the subject of Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). A selection of his writings is contained in G.N. Devy, editor, The Oxford India Elwin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Part V
The religious politics of the 1950s and 1960s is treated in Donald E. Smith, editor, South Asian Politics and Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) and in Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Hamid Dalwai’s political essays are reproduced in Muslim Politics in India (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1968). This work has been edited and translated by Dilip Chitre, as has Dalwai’s novella about small-town life in coastal Maharashtra, published in English under the title Fuel (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2002).
Acknowledgements
I first broached the idea of this book to Ravi Singh of Penguin Books India in a Bangalore restaurant in the summer of 2008. Ravi gave the project his enthusiastic endorsement; as did Sharmila Sen of Harvard University Press, when I sent her a proposal by email a few months later. Between them, the quiet and understated Ravi and the effervescent and bubbly Sharmila have sustained this book from start to finish.
Beyond these proximate debts lie some more distant ones. My interest in the Indian political tradition stems from two sources: time spent commenting in public on current affairs, and time spent more reclusively in the stacks and manuscript collections of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi. Despite Establishment apathy (and worse), the wonderfully gifted and committed staff of the NMML have helped and encouraged me for some three decades now—as they have many other scholars for lesser or longer periods of time. Makers of Modern India is based in good measure on books and pamphlets read or first encountered in the NMML. I am also grateful to two individuals who have supplied me a steady stream of out-of-print materials—Vijay Kumar Jain of Prabhu Books, Gurgaon, and K.K.S. Murthy of the Select Bookshop, Bangalore.
In constructing this anthology and drafting its prologue and epilogue, I have had the benefit of the advice and support of Michael Adas, Rukun Advani, Rukmini Banerji, Millicent Bennett, Deepa Bhatnagar, David Gilmour, Keshava Guha, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Sunil Khilnani, Enuga S. Reddy and Nandini Sundar. These have been friends and counsellors. In another category, of mentors, fall the wisest man in India, André Béteille, and the Catalan polymath, Joan Martinez-Alier. Professor Béteille has made me less deficient in my understanding of Indian society and politics; Professor Martinez-Alier made me more aware of political developments in other parts of the world.
I am thankful to professors G.P. Deshpande and Rosalind O’Hanlon for permitting me to reproduce translations supervised or conducted by them (of Jotirao Phule and Tarabai Shinde respectively); to Professor A.R. Venkatachalapathy for freshly translating some speeches by E.V. Ramaswami for this volume; and to Ravela Somayya for sending me some very scarce materials on and by Rammanohar Lohia. Veena Soans expertly rendered hundreds of pages of xeroxed materials into soft copy fit to edit (and, in time, to print). Nandini Mehta sensitively edited the final manuscript; I am grateful to her for that and for her friendship and encouragement over the years.
My final debts are to my wife and children, without whose indulgence I would not have begun this book (or any other); and to my agent, Gill Coleridge, whose counsel has, as always, been critical.
Copyright Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint material from published works: Mrs Lila Elwin for the excerpts from The Aboriginals and A Philosophy for NEFA by Verrier Elwin Mrs Meherunnisa Dalwai for the excerpts from Muslim Politics in India by Hamid Dalwai
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for the excerpts from India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 by Jawaharlal Nehru Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund for the excerpts from Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–1964 by Jawaharlal Nehru, edited by G. Parthasarathi While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
NEW FROM RAMACHANDRA GUHA
PATRIOTS AND PARTISANS
‘I am a person of moderate views,’ writes Ramachandra Guha, ‘these sometimes expressed in extreme fashion.’ In this wide-ranging and wonderfully readable collection of essays, Guha defends the liberal centre against the dogmas of left and right, and does so with style, depth and polemical verve. The book begins with a brilliant overview of the major threats to the Indian republic. Other essays turn a critical eye on Hindutva, the Communist left and the dynasty-obsessed Congress party. Guha then explores the co
ntemporary relevance of Gandhi’s religious pluralism, and analyses the fall in Jawaharlal Nehru’s reputation after his death.
The essays in Part II of this book focus on writers and scholars. Guha explains why bilingual intellectuals, once so dominant in India, are now thin on the ground. He presents sensitive portraits of a magazine editor, a bookshop owner, a great publishing house and a famous historical archive.
Whether writing about politics or culture, whether profiling individuals or analysing social trends, Ramachandra Guha displays a masterly touch, confirming his standing as India’s most admired historian and public intellectual.
Non-fiction
Rs 699
FORTHCOMING IN REVISED EDITIONS
A CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD
The Indian History of a British Sport
Winner of the UK Cricket Society Jubilee Award and the Daily
Telegraph/Cricket Society Book of the Year Prize
‘An excellent and ground-breaking book’—The Financial Times
A Corner of a Foreign Field seamlessly interweaves biography with history, the lives of famous or forgotten cricketers with wider processes of social change. C.K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this book, but so, too, in unexpected ways, do B.R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi and M.A. Jinnah. The Indian careers of those great British cricketers, Lord Harris and D.R. Jardine, provide a window into the operations of Empire. The remarkable life of India’s first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, provides an arresting new perspective on the struggle against caste discrimination. Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the destructive passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan.
For this new edition, Ramachandra Guha has added a long epilogue bringing the story up-to-date to cover, among other things, the advent of the Indian Premier League and the Indian team’s victory in the World Cup of 2011, these linked to social and economic transformations in contemporary India.
A pioneering work, essential for anyone interested in either of those vast themes, cricket and India, A Corner of a Foreign Field is also a beautifully written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large.
‘[A] fluent and entertaining social history of Indian cricket’—The Economist
‘[A] wonderful book . . . an original, scholarly and highly entertaining work’—The Spectator
Non-fiction
SAVAGING THE CIVILIZED
Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India
‘[A] vastly enjoyable book . . . an excellent biography, the best example of the genre by an Indian for many years’—The Times Literary Supplement
This evocative and beautifully written book brings to life one of the most remarkable figures of twentieth-century India. Verrier Elwin (1902–64) was an anthropologist, poet, Gandhian, hedonist, Englishman, and Indian.
Savaging the Civilized reveals a many-sided man, a friend of the elite who was at home with the impoverished and the destitute; a charismatic charmer of women who was comfortable with intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and Jawaharlal Nehru; an anthropologist who lived and loved with the tribes yet who wrote literary essays and monographs for the learned.
Savaging the Civilized is both biography and history, an exploration through Elwin’s life of some of the great debates of our times, such as the impact of economic development, and cultural pluralism versus cultural homogeneity. For this new edition, Ramachandra Guha has added a long new introduction, stressing the relevance of Elwin’s work to current debates on adivasis, Naxalites and Indian democracy.
‘A wrenching and grand biography in the classical mould . . . In the largeness of the theme, in the writer’s tireless efforts to get into the mind and soul of his subject . . . in the finesse of language and execution, this book is beyond all other Indian attempts at life-sketching’—Outlook
‘A brilliant achievement . . . neither history, nor sociology nor psychology, but all in the right measure . . . must be made compulsory reading for every educated Indian’—Seminar
Non-fiction
ENVIRONMENTALISM
A Global History, c. 1800–2000
‘This is the first truly global history of environmental thought and activism. Superbly crafted, it deserves to be read by all concerned with the well-being of the environment’—The Hindu
An acclaimed historian of the environment, in this book Ramachandra Guha draws on many years of research in three continents. He details the major trends, ideas, campaigns and thinkers within the environmental movement worldwide. Among the thinkers he profiles are John Muir, Mahatma Gandhi, Rachel Carson, and Octavia Hill; among the movements, the Chipko Andolan and the German Greens.
Environmentalism: A Global History documents the flow of ideas across cultures, the ways in which the environmental movement in one country has been invigorated or transformed by infusions from outside. It interprets the different directions taken by different national traditions, and also explains why in certain contexts (such as the former Socialist Bloc) the green movement is marked only by its absence.
Massive in scope but pointed in analysis, written with passion and verve, this book presents a comprehensive account of a significant social movement of our times, and will be of wide interest both within and outside the academy. For this new edition, the author has added a fresh prologue linking the book’s themes to ongoing debates on climate change and the environmental impacts of global economic development.
‘Guha has written a compelling and highly readable history of the environment’—Contributions to Indian Sociology
Non-fiction
THE BEGINNING
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2010
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