Ramachandra Guha - Savaging the Civilized

Copyright owners have been credited below within brackets.

(between )

1. Baby Verrier with Bishop and Mrs Elwin (OUP)
2. Verrier, aged five (British Library)
3. Dean Closes prize student, 1919 (OUP)
4. A gent with a dog collarthe Vice Principle of Wycliffe Hall Seminary, Oxford, 1926 (Wycliffe Hall)
5. Elwin with Gandhi, Sabarmati Ashram, 1931, the dutiful Mirabehn following (OUP)
6. Elwin with his fellow followers Jamnalal Bajaj and Pyarelal (in spectacles), Dhulia Jail, 1932 (OUP)
7. Mary Gillet, in the courtyard of the Ashram of St Francis, Tikeri Tola, 1933 (Verrier Elwin/British Library)
8. Shamrao Hivale, sometime in the mid nineteen thirties (Verrier Elwin/British Library)
9. Kosi Elwin, c. 1940 (Verrier Elwin/OUP)
10. A Baiga veteran (Verrier Elwin/OUP)
11. Muria chelik and motiari outside the ghotul (Sunil Janah/OUP)

    (between )

12. The Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India, on the balcony of his Calcutta home, 1949 (Sunil Janah)
13. Lila Elwin, c. 1963 (Sunil Janah/OUP)
14. Kumar Elwin, somewhere on the Frontier, c. 1960 (OUP)
15. The sahib and the scholarElwin with Professor C. von Frer-Haimendorf, Shillong, 1954 (OUP)
16. A Konyak Naga girl (Verrier Elwin/OUP)
17. Jawaharlal Nehru visiting Elwins house and museum, Shillong, 1955, with Jairamdas Daulatram in the background (OUP)
18. Cover portrait of the Indian edition of The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin (OUP)
19. Elwin receiving the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, New Delhi, 1961 (Nehru Memorial and Museum Library)

A writer is not supposed to discriminate between his books, just as a parent is not supposed to favour one child over another. As a father of two I hope I have been moderately impartial. On the other hand as an author I am less than even-handed. Savaging the Civilized is, and shall always remain, the favourite among my books. For one thing, reading Verrier Elwin changed my life. For another, researching about him took me to parts of India (and England) I might otherwise never have visited. For a third, writing about Elwin meant engaging with that most challenging of literary forms, the biography.

As I relate in the Acknowledgements, I first heard of Verrier Elwin from an Oriya veterinarian in the summer of 1978. I was then doing an M. A. at the Delhi School of Economics. I was, in academic terms, somewhere near the middle of the class, but still hoped to make a career in research. When I returned to Delhi from Orissa, I found two of Elwins books in the college libraryhis Wodehousian diary Leaves from the Jungle, and his evocative autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin. Reading them encouraged me to move to Kolkata for a Ph. D in sociology, a shift described by one of my erstwhile professors as a Pareto Optimum: good for me, and better for economics.

In Kolkata, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the social history of forests, in the course of which I encountered Elwin again. In his ethnographies he had written with feeling about the destructive impact that colonial forest laws had on tribal livelihoods. Reading books like The Baiga and The Agaria deepened my admiration for Elwin, and my interest in his career. I was attracted by the fact that he was an engaged rather than detached scholar, and that he wrote so uncommonly well.

Through the 1980s I worked on environmental themes. I had published two books and a dozen research papers before I decided to write a book on Elwin himself. Even so, I began gingerly. The discipline of sociology is antithetical to the biographical method, since it privileges the individual above society. So I framed my project as being about larger issues, giving it the rather grand title The Tribal Question in Modern India. The more I read, however, the more I understood how central Verrier Elwin was to debates about tribal policy before and after Independence. Within a year of my beginning focused research on the subject, the project title had been changed to Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in Modern India.

My academic training had oriented me towards thinking of castes and classes rather than character and beliefs. Then again, I was raised a Hindu, and Hinduism does not privilege the singular individual with a finite span on earth (why memorialize a life when the fellow has already been reborn?). Finally, at the time I was deeply influenced by Marxism, which likewise disparages the role of the individual in the making (and unmaking) of history.