We all know that Ramachandra Guha writes exceedingly well. His prose is seductively engaging and intimate. He is also a terrific raconteur. In the range of subjects Guha covers and in the interesting, but now largely forgotten, personalities he restores to centre-stage, Guha’s book, Democrats and Dissenters is reminiscent of the late English historian AJP Taylor’s small volume of confidently illuminating essays, Europe — Grandeur and Decline .

Like Taylor, Guha introduces us to interesting people, fast receding in popular memory, such as Eric Hobsbawm whose brilliance as a historian was constrained by his membership of the Communist Party, and Benedict Anderson, an authority on Indonesia best known for his scholarly work Imagined Communities: Reflections on The Origin and Spread of Nationalism , on how the printed word brought together people, ‘with no connection to one another,’ to give them a sense of common nationhood.

Guha is a master of the literary ambush, compelling the reader to slow down and pick his way carefully through one essay after allowing him comfortably past another; a deeper piece on democracy and violence in India and Sri Lanka follows one on Pakistan which fails to get the measure of an insecure neighbour, unable — as I discovered from my own visits to that country around the same time Guha made his — to get over its defeat and dismemberment, by India, in 1971.

Congress concerns Guha’s book opens with a ruthlessly candid analysis of the decline of the Indian National Congress Party and its mutation into a shady family concern. While he does not add much to what is already known about the degeneration of a once mighty political party under Sonia Gandhi, Guha’s well-argued criticism with the weight of history behind it, is refreshingly different from the rants we all are now used to.

Democrats and Dissenters has a captivating essay on the well-known historian, DD Kosambi’s father, the Harvard scholar and Gandhi acolyte, Dharmanand Kosambi.

In his biographical sketch of Kosambi-senior, Guha transfixes us with a moving account of the life and work of an erudite and stubborn intellectual who deliberately starved himself to death in a corner of Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram. Compared to this, Guha’s appraisal of the late UR Ananthamurthy, figuring later in the book, is much less of a read.

In by far the best essay in his volume, Tribal Tragedies in Independent India , Guha highlights the ongoing exploitation and silent suffering of the country’s, disadvantaged, powerless and voiceless, tribal communities spread over much of its central and eastern regions and who are much worse off in every respect, than even the Dalits.

Guha’s sixteen-essay book, with a richly autobiographical preface, includes an anecdotal piece on China and a laboured one on the threats to freedom of expression in India. A speculative essay on India’s worst year is surprisingly inconclusive. But these are among the very few that come short.

In his reflective, and thoughtful, concluding essay, ‘Where Are the Conservative Intellectuals in India,’ Guha highlights an insurmountable deficiency in the Indian intellectual scene that has its ramifications in the politics of our country. Sadly, given the medieval mindset of much of the Right, it is unlikely we’ll see a Niall Ferguson or a Francis Fukuyama emerge in our country.

Differences with Sen Three essays in Guha’s volume demand to be read together but not in the same order they appear in his book. It will be useful to run through Guha’s accounts of Dharma Kumar and Andre Beteille to better contextualise his ‘Arguments with Sen’.

The historian, Dharma Kumar’s research, Guha informs us, established that the Mughals, contrary to popular perception (and in Sen’s The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity as well?), were not as good as they have been made out to be, taxing their subjects far more harshly than the British ever did.

His take on Andre Beteille starts with an interesting comparison with Amartya Sen; what is unmissable is the hint of a suggestion, that of the two, home-bred Andre Beteille is the more authentic voice on India.

‘Arguments with Sen’ is Guha’s hard-hitting review of Amartya Sen’s book, ‘The Argumentative Indian’ which first appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2005.

In it, Guha challenges Sen’s credentials as a historian and questions his penchant for drawing on India’s deep past as well as Akbar, to establish the roots of India’s pluralistic, disputatious traditions while ‘comprehensively ignoring the debates initiated and carried forward by Gandhi’s political successor, Jawaharlal Nehru.’

He could well have included Sen’s combative yet unsatisfactory response, which came a year later, if only to share a great exchange in which Guha clearly comes out on top. Someday, one hopes, he expands on his differences with Sen, much as the latter did with Rawls, in his book, ‘The Idea of Justice.’ In several of the essays in his book, especially ‘Debating Democracy: Jayaprakash Narayan versus Jawaharlal Nehru,’ Guha dwells on the culture of democracy, free debate and discussion Nehru fostered.

Distressingly, he ignores the many unsavoury things that happened under his watch as Prime Minister. More Muslims lost their lives in the pogrom following the 1948 takeover of Hyderabad state, than in all the communal riots that occurred since Independence.

A report, commissioned by Nehru, on that humongous massacre remains officially suppressed till now. In 1953, Nehru had Sheikh Abdullah peremptorily removed from power and imprisoned for eleven years — the longest political incarceration in free India’s history. He also had an elected government in Kerala dismissed in 1959. And lest we forget, the Babri mess started in Nehru’s time.

‘Democrats and Dissenters’ has its infirmities. In a book, which is unsparing of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and takes apart Amartya Sen, Guha is too soft on Nehru. He also does not pass Edward Carr’s test of ‘having the future in his bones.’ Guha looks back much too wistfully, and in vain, for a gone-forever era of long leisurely exchanges of letters and polite debate.

Sadly, for all of us, there are no comebacks. Mass-literacy, and the electronic media, has forever taken argument and discourse out of private spaces and on to the street and the small screen, the world over. Having said that, Guha’s latest, is a volume of beautiful, reflective and thoroughly enjoyable writing that is well worth owning.

Meet the author:

Ramachandra Guha’s books include a pioneering work of environmental history (The Unquiet Woods, 1989), an award winning social history of sport (A Corner of a Foreign Field, 2002), and a widely acclaimed work of contemporary history (India after Gandhi, 2007). Guha’s awards include the R.K. Narayan Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Ramnath Goenka Prize and the Padma Bhushan.

The reviewer is a visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

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