ManagementV V: Rediscovering the history of India
Christopher Hill (1912-2003), the brilliant British Marxist historian, reminded us that history and politics were two sides of the same coin. Which meant that historians were primarily interested in ideas not only because they influence societies but also because they reveal the societies that give rise to them. It also means that since politics is always in a state of flux, history had to be rewritten in every generation because, although the past doesn’t change, the present does; each generation asks questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors. Some such motivation has given rise to the recent crop of “revised” Indian histories from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, Sunil Khilani’s The Idea of India and Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India. And now we have Meghnad Desai’s The Rediscovery of India (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, Rs 699) that traverses the same passage of India from colonialism to a modern state.
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First, Meghnad Desai as the historian before we study his history. Desai is first and last a political economist, to begin with distinct Marxist sympathies which have mellowed over the years but still bear traces in his selection of facts and his observations in the book. Desai has divided his story into two parts after a long introduction, India at Sixty. The first opens with the coming of Vasco Da Gama (1500), the consolidation of British rule and rapidly comes down to Gandhi, Irwin and Churchill, the beginnings of Partition and the Road to Pakistan, and closes with the Political Economy of Empire and Nation. It is cobbled history at best which is suitable for the general reader but not for a student even slightly familiar with British rule and the rise of nationalism in the 20th century. In fact, class 12 students would get all this and more from a standard NCERT text.
It is the short second half of the book that deals with contemporary India in five long chapters that would interest the common reader. These chapters are: Independent India: The Nehru Years, Heirs and Successors, Search for Stability, 1989-2004, Globalizing India and Whose India? Which India? That would be of principal interest to some of us. But this is essentially journalistic writing, gossipy in most parts, and for someone who has followed the ups and downs of Indian politics, much of it is familiar stuff.
What are of perennial interest for the Indian reader are two questions: the nature of the national movement and the road to Partition. Specifically, was the national movement really a mass movement that involved broadly inclusive politics, embracing all sections of society with its linkages to caste, community and region?
No doubt there was an emotional and ideological surcharge of nationalism with the Non-cooperation (1920), the Civil Disobedience (1930) and the Quit India (1942) movements, but how long did the emotional involvement last and how many participated in these movements? (Numbers matter in history.) Desai doesn’t give a background to the ideological underpinnings of these movements, and nor does he tell us why the fervour fizzled out?
But more importantly, why did the national movement with its secular ideology fail to move the backward sections, SC/ST/OBCs, or even sections of the Muslim community that finally led to Partition? What could be of interest is how the Second World War impacted the movement and whether it accelerated the movement towards Independence? Did American pressure to grant Independence also play a role because the US was no longer prepared to foot the bill for the British Empire? Recent researches have suggested as much, but it would have been interesting to know Desai’s reactions to the latest researches based on archival sources.
Instead, Desai veers off to pose a number of counterfactual questions, ifs and buts of history. Could India have escaped western rule as China did? “Yes in 1700, but perhaps no by 1750, and definitely not by 1800. What would India have been had the 1857 rebellion succeeded? Could Gandhiji have delivered Swaraj within one year as he promised in 1921? Could India have been a single entity on the lines of the 1935 Government of India Act, or as per the Cabinet Mission plan?” These are interesting questions and add some zest to the book, but it detracts from the main objective of the book, that is, to provide a running history of modern India from the coming of the West down to the present, even if it means a potted history of colonial and post-colonial India.
At the end of day, it is clear that the book has been written for a western audience and it falls between two stools: the serious common reader or the semi-academic and the common reader who wants to know the salient features of colonial rule and move on. It won’t satisfy either because it is too serious for the common reader and doesn’t have enough for the more sophisticated reader. For someone who had provided such excellent studies like Development and Nationhood: Essays on the Political Economy of South Asia, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism and The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound, this work disappoints.