Makers of Modern India — Edited & Introduced by Ramachandra Guha; Penguin Viking; Price: Rs.799; 549 pp
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Though he was a great engineer, automobile industry pioneer the late Henry Ford, who famously remarked that “history is bunk”, wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an intellectual. If he was, he would have appreciated that milestone events in the evolution of communities and societies need to be chronicled, analysed and interpreted because they are the DNA of nations and civilisations. Unless history is recorded and studied, future generations of scholars will not be able to identify the turning and tipping points of societies and nations and their establishments will be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Perhaps no individual in the Indian subcontinent is more aware of the importance of history — particularly of the impact of ideas in shaping the evolution and character of nations — than the Bangalore-based contemporary historian Ramachandra Guha. Researcher par excellence he is the author of several globally acclaimed works of scholarship including The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1990); Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India (1999); Environmentalism: A Global History (1999); The Last Liberal and Other Essays (2004), and A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (2003). Four years ago Guha broke with an unarticulated tradition of native historians ending narratives of Indian history with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (1948) by writing the widely acclaimed India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s largest Democracy (Harper Collins, 2007), the most authoritative contemporary history of independent India.
India after Gandhi is essentially a history of the Nehru dynasty which has dominated Indian politics for over 60 years since independence. It ends with the return to power of the dynasty and the Congress party as head of the UPA-I ten-party coalition government at the Centre in 2004, after a lost decade in the wilderness. Eminently readable and thoroughly researched (a stylistic combination which had hitherto defeated indigenous historians), India After Gandhi was greeted with great acclaim and highly appreciative reviews in the media including EducationWorld (July, 2007).
Now in a natural sequel to India after Gandhi, Guha has conceptualised and compiled Makers of Modern India, a brilliant collection of the best writing of 20 great thinkers and leaders whose philosophy and noble ideals have transformed the world’s most heterogeneous population — divided by religious antagonism, durable caste fault-lines, ancient gender prejudices, class chasms and political ideologies — into the world’s most improbable democracy, which has miraculously survived for over six decades. Despite chaos and confusion, the law’s delay, insolence of office, proud man’s contumely etc above ground, their lofty ideas of India seem to have struck strong roots in the ground beneath. In the learned author’s mind there seems little doubt that the idealism and moral power of the 20 makers of modern India profiled in this compendium, who went beyond arm-chair analyses and took the difficult extra step to state their case in writing, have shaped the idea of India and its evolution into a durable democracy.
A dominant merit of this anthology of the best writings of the architects of the uniquely pluralistic democracy that is India, is the choice of subjects made by the author which, although subjective, is by no means arbitrary. In the prologue Guha explains why certain leading lights of the freedom movement such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Dadabhoy Naoroji, Subhash Chandra Bose; philosophers Swami Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati and Auorobindo Ghosh and prime minister Indira Gandhi, are conspicuous omissions in this pantheon. “In each case the decision to leave them out was taken owing to the paucity of original ideas contained in their published work,” writes Guha, clearly expressing a preference for men of letters rather than people of action.
If one accepts the validity of the author/editor’s basic premise that the unlikely democracy that is modern India has been fashioned out of liberal and progressive ideas which have built strong foundations for the Indian state, there’s a rich feast of learning and insights in the wealth of historical material in this volume. It features brief, contextualised biographies of the 20 chosen nation builders additionally gifted with the will and propensity to articulate their beliefs and arguments on paper. Guha deserves the gratitude of the community for rediscovering this rich legacy of wisdom which has lodged within the collective sub-conscious of the nation, and has shaped its modernisation ideals and Constitution.
Unfortunately the column space available is too limited to highlight the brilliant insights and vision of any of the 20 social reformers (Rammohan Roy, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Gopal Krishna Gokhale); radicals (Bal Gangadhar Tilak, agriculture reformist Jotirao Phule and first feminist Tarabai Shinde); seers (Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, M.A. Jinnah; atheist E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, and socialist-feminist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay); democracy champions and interpreters (Jawaharlal Nehru, M.S. Golwalkar, Rammanohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and C. Rajagopalachari); tribals’ champion Verrier Elwin and Hamid Dalwai, described as the “last modernist”.
However your reviewer is wholly persuaded that the provisions of the Constitution of India — universal franchise ab initio; equality of all citizens before the law; gender parity; freedom of speech and expression; fundamental rights and affirmative action in favour of the historically dispossessed — have originated from the thoughts and written words of these extraordinary individuals handpicked by the author for inclusion in the fraternity of Makers of Modern India.
Only when one reads the best tracts and arguments of these great men and women in their own words, is it possible to appreciate the great erudition, deep understanding and broad wisdom of the builders of this nation, included in this valuable book which is mandatory for the library of every self-respecting education institution and individual. If only the political and academic successors of these visionaries of the idea of India who have had greatness thrust upon them were half as gifted, the nation would not be the endangered inegalitarian democracy wallowing in shallows and misery it is currently.
Dilip Thakore
Beyond journalism
The Flying Carpet to Baghdad by Hala Jaber; Pan Macmillan; Price: Rs.360; 298 pp
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Calamity, destruction, misery and tragedy are the inevitable outcomes of war. After World War II (1939-45), mankind has witnessed numerous wars and armed conflicts in which millions have vanished into thin air without their tragedies, misery, and agony being documented. Following the end of the Cold War of the 1990s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and triumph of America, the latter nation discovered a new enemy in Muslims who were perceived to be in dire need of discipline and the universal ideal of democracy. This civilising mission in the garb of operation democracy commenced clandestinely after the tragedy of 9/11 and overtly in its aftermath in the form of brutal invasions of Afghanistan, and later Iraq.
The media reported the invasion during its initial stages with great enthusiasm, and featured it regularly till the American forces captured Kabul and Baghdad, ousting the governments of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. During the first phase, the media professed to be objective but scarcely reported human loss and other costs of war. Journalists and reporters faithfully adhered to the editorial and corporate policies of their publishing and/or media houses. An exceptional case was Hala Jaber, author of the book under review.
A professional journalist of Lebanese/Arab extraction who covered the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the London-based Sunday Times, Jaber remained in the country as it struggled to establish itself as a democracy thereafter. But this book is not so much about this theatre of war, as it is about her emotional involvement with two children orphaned by the invasion and her exhaustive efforts to locate, rehabilitate and adopt them, thus pushing the boundaries of journalism beyond objectivity and statistics to human empathy.
Against the canvas of war and destruction, Jaber narrates the true-life story of two girl children — Zahra and Hawra — whose entire family is wiped out in a bomb explosion. Jaber, a Beirut-born journalist, disregards the journalistic norm of dispassionate objectivity and undertakes the futile task of saving the wounded Zahra from the clutches of death, with the help of Marla, an American relief worker trying to undo the wrongs of a brutish war that her nation imposed upon Iraq, and whose relentless mission is to save the innocent children of the invaded nation. The brave deaths of Zahra and Marla are gripping moments in the book, involving readers and bringing into sharp relief the human cost of armed conflicts, beyond media headlines and heroic notions of war.
Despite suffering the personal tragedy of the death of Marla and would-be daughter Zahra, Jaber once again secured an assignment in Iraq and mounted a nationwide search for Zahra’s younger sister Hawra. Traversing Iraq, she describes the havoc perpetuated by the war on ordinary civilians, environmental destruction and a new divide which, far from uniting the people of Iraq under a democratic system of government, has unleashed sectarian antagonisms, pitting the majority Shia Muslims against the hitherto ruling Sunni minority which lorded it over them during Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule of Iraq (1979-2003).
Given the advantage of her Lebanese-Arab ancestry, her marriage with an ideal Brit husband and her well-paid assignment as Sunday Times correspondent in Baghdad, Jaber is able to hunt with the American and British forces attempting to restore the semblance of order in post-invasion Iraq, and also run with the various Muslim militias who perceive her as sympathetic to their anti-Western causes, even if not as one of them.
With the resistance forces with whom Jaber travels, she learns of their convictions, fears, hopes, desires, ideology, sharing with them their vulnerabilities and reporting from their perspective of a fight against occupational forces. The author’s impressions of the war inspire vividly described passages in the book, most notably the siege of Fallujah and the resistance there, and how proposals to balkanise Iraq were seriously discussed by top- level politicians. But the poignant parallel story is of her unfulfilled desire and inability to bear children, her growing involvement with Zahra and Hawra and the need to aid, comfort and mother them.
A fine empathetic war novel, Flying Carpet to Baghdad graphically depicts how difficult it is for journalists on war fronts to remain uninvolved with innocent victims, especially children — the most vulnerable, brutalised and often orphaned casualties of war.
Sikander Mushtaq