Unfairly ignored

Rediscovery of India by Meghnad Desai; Penguin Books India; Price: Rs.699; 512 pp

Way back in 1942-46 while in prison for participating in the Quit India movement, Jawaharlal Nehru — a patrician Harrow and Cambridge-educated politician who parachuted into top echelons of the Congress party and into the vanguard of India’s freedom struggle mainly on the strength of his father Motilal being one of the country’s most successful lawyers — wrote his highly acclaimed Discovery of India. In this treatise which has sold over 5 million copies, he advanced the thesis that the 550 kingdoms, princedoms and principalities of the subcontinent south of the Himalayas and extending downwards up to Cape Comorin (aka Kanya Kumari), albeit distinguished inter se by ethnicity, language, castes and faith, were historically, philosophically and culturally connected, and therefore ready to emerge on the world stage as a united, self-governing nation.

The arguments forwarded for this motion were not entirely convincing. Nevertheless, they proved politically useful because by then through a succession of  brilliant stratagems including armed conflict, divide-and-rule alliances and law, justice and education initiatives, the ruling class of  imperial Great Britain — a tiny island thousands of miles away —had already amalgamated and consolidated the aforesaid kingdoms, princedoms and principalities into India  — the brightest jewel of the British Empire, which in its heyday measured by territorial acquisitions and geographical spread was argu-ably the mightiest in world history.

Discovery of India served the useful purpose of legitimising the British consolidation of India and using liberal British arguments for self-determination and freedom, advanced the case for India’s independence. In the event Nehru’s treatise played a major role in persuading the British establishment to concede India’s independence, wind up its expensive empire and revert to its little England status. And not least it helped Nehru’s ascent as independent India’s first prime minister with suzerainty over the largest consolidated territory in the subcontinent’s history — a nation larger than the Mughal empire at its zenith.

Against this backdrop, it’s a conundrum why Rediscovery of India, Meghnad Desai’s follow-up history of post-independence India hasn’t received the attention and encomiums it richly deserves from Indian academia and the media. First, against the tradition of all written histories of the subcontinent abruptly ending with the assassi-nation of the Mahatma, it’s only the second historical narrative of independent India after Ramchandra Guha’s brilliant India after Gandhi (2007), and is distinguished from its precursor by deeper analysis and assessment of free India’s economic development record.

Which is inevitable given that Desai is a distinguished economist who taught the subject at the London School of Economics for almost four decades (1965-2003) for which valuable service to the crown, he has been conferred the title of Lord Desai of St. Clement Danes and appointed a life peer of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the mother of all parliaments. Secondly, Rediscovery of India is thoroughly contemporary, narrating and interpreting the history of this struggling nation right up to the electoral victory of the Congress-led UPA-II government in 2009.

One possible reason why this exceptional and intelligent political and economic history of ancient and modern India hasn’t received the attention it deserves is because it  has been comprehensively — and unfairly — trashed by the Oxford-educated, fearsomely vituperative Congress party loose-cannon Mani Shankar Aiyar in the weekly Outlook (March 1).

Undoubtedly it’s Desai’s objective assessment of the economic mismanagement of the high-potential Indian economy by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which has ruled India from the New Delhi imperium for over four decades which has aroused Aiyar’s ire and prompted his dismissive review. It’s hardly a secret that for the past half century that Aiyar has been in public life, he has been a faithful servitor of the dynasty which has rewarded him well for his loyalty. First as a ‘committed’ bureaucrat and enthusiastic architect of the control-and-command regime, Aiyar rose to the top of the bureaucratic heap. After retirement from government service, he was promptly inducted into the Congress party and awarded a safe Congress Lok Sabha constituency which he lost in the May 2009 general election. Despite this, he wasn’t obliged to surrender his palatial and heavily-subsidised residence in Lutyen’s Delhi and has recently been re-inducted into Parliament through the Rajya Sabha. Unsurprisingly, his formidable intellectual firepower has always been at the disposal of the Congress party and the dynasty, not necessarily in that order.

But lest this essay transforms into a review of Aiyar’s review of Rediscovery of India, it needs to be boldly stated that this is a work of rigorous scholarship, objective in its scope and depth. Without being a eulogy of British rule in India, it acknowledges the positive contributions of liberal elements within imperial Britain who played a major role in enabling the unification, development and crystallisation of the polyglot subcontinent into a nation state. Desai’s unsparing praise for Nehru for uniting the country, deepening democracy and infusing society with modernisation ideals enriches the narrative. But he also laments, rather than criticises, the great man’s flawed vision which prompted him to opt for the Soviet-inspired heavy industry “military-industrial” economic development model which benefited the emerging middle class, but excluded the great majority of the population from the development process.

To make this point, Desai repeatedly contrasts post-independ-ence India’s capital-intensive heavy industry economic development with the light-industry, labour-intensive and vocational skills development model of South-east Asian countries which have prospered mightily, and left contemporary India trailing way behind in the UNDP’s human development index.

The purpose of written history is to highlight the mistakes and wrong-turns of rulers and leaders in the global race for national and societal development. Errors and misjudgements of the great and the good — who let’s readily admit, have to make decisions on the run and often in the heat of the moment — are inevitable. With the benefit of hindsight, reflection and research, the historian’s mandate is to craft an engaging narrative which warns future generations that to ignore history is to repeat the past. This mandate has been competently discharged by the author of this valuable, updated history of the world’s most populous democracy.

Dilip Thakore

Extraordinary friendship

Victoria and Abdul: The Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant by Shrabani Basu; Rupa and Company; Price: Rs.395; 229 pp

Victoria regina imperatrix — that’s the impressive title that Queen Victoria, regnant monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837, assumed after she became Empress of India in 1876 until her death in 1901. In history, Victoria is usually portrayed as a dignified matriarch who became a symbol of an era defined by unprecedented industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military progress within the British Empire. Shaped by aggressive colonisation, the dimensions of the empire also expanded globally and it was claimed that the sun never set over its far-flung dominions. When she died, Lord Curzon noted, “No successor to the Queen, however genial, tactful and popular… can ever win from the Indian people the feelings of personal devotion which assisted by her great longevity, and the glory of her reign, Queen Victoria aroused.”

In this non-fictional reconstructed story of a human relationship that is explored in the book, Victoria’s legendary majesty and authoritarianism is contrasted with her domestic scenario which provides an insight into her warm emotional persona. A peek into the private life of Queen Victoria which will particularly interest Indian readers, is provided by this narrative of her interaction with a 24-year-old Muslim youth from Agra transported to Britain in Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year (1887) as a khitmatgar, to wait at the queen’s table in the royal residences of Windsor Castle, Balmoral and Osborne House. Suddenly Abdul Karim found himself promoted from his mundane job as a clerk in Agra jail into the royal household of a powerful sovereign, who ruled over a quarter of the world’s population.

Abdul Karim together with Mohammad Buksh, was the first of a growing retinue of Indian servants employed in the royal household. Senior officials were put in charge of them and their salaries were paid from the queen’s privy purse.

Victoria never set foot on her Indian territory, but hosted the first ever Indian durbar at Windsor Castle as part of the Jubilee celebrations. This was perhaps the beginning of her fascination with India — its customs and lifestyles, its exotic cuisine, especially curries cooked by Abdul — and her interest in learning Hindustani. The young and present-able Abdul Karim was elevated from servant to munshi, her Hindustani teacher and official Indian clerk.

Victoria was very serious about her lessons: “I take a little lesson every evening in Hindustani….It is of great interest and amusement to me,” she wrote to her daughter Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, Empress of Germany. The queen was a quick learner and soon enough, she was leaving signed instructions to Abdul to be passed on to her Indian servants, often constructing full sentences in Urdu on her own.

Mining archival material extensi-vely, Shrabani Basu — a London-based author, historian and correspondent of the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika group of publications — presents a rich and engrossing narrative of the human interactions and intense crosscurrents which were created in the royal house-hold following the growing closeness between Abdul and Victoria, who conver-sed with Indian natives in their own language.

Basking in the sunshine of royal favour, Abdul soon forgot his station. And as he rose in royal esteem and privileges granted to him kept mounting, his demands increased. Within the stiff British aristocracy, Victoria and her ‘dear Abdul’ generated seething resentment. Little wonder that days after Victoria’s funeral, on orders of the King, trusted guards raided Frogmore Cottage where Abdul lived with his family, demanding that all the letters Victoria had written to him be contributed to fuel a bonfire outside. The munshi stood defenseless, his family distraught and bewildered as the establishment treated them as common criminals to be extradited to their native country.

Munshi Hafiz Abdul Karim was only 46 when he died, eight years after Queen Victoria. In the absence of private correspondence, bureaucratic archival material, portraits, and private photographs resurrect Abdul Karim’s history through the book. In Agra, situated off the beaten tourist track lies the forgotten grave of Abdul, his wife and father, the ruins of Karim Lodge and the erstwhile estate lands gifted to her loyal retainer by the imperious Empress of India.

Jayati Gupta