Ramachandra Guha - Democrats and Dissenters

This is the fourth in a series of books exploring the creation and subsequent career of the Republic of India. The first, India after Gandhi, presented a narrative social and political history of the country since its founding in August 1947. The second, Makers of Modern India, was an anthology of the writings of nineteen influential thinkeractivists, who helped argue the republic into existence. The third, Patriots and Partisans, contained fifteen essays of my own, each exploring a different dimension of the Indian experience.

In terms of genre, Democrats and Dissenters is akin to its immediate predecessor, in that it too is a collection of (in this case, sixteen) essays. But in theme and tenor it is very different. While Patriots and Partisans focused quite sharply on individuals and institutions within the country, this book often moves beyond India to consider parallel processes in South Asia and beyond.

Although I now consider myself a historian, I was originally trained as a sociologist. mile Durkheim famously remarked that comparative sociology was not a branch of sociologyit was sociology itself. While using materials gathered in the archives, Democrats and Dissenters is nonetheless more comparative in intent and presentation than the other books I have published on democracy and nationhood in India.

The essays in this book have all been written while living in Bangalore. Bangalore is my wifes home town, and a sort of second home town for me too. I grew up in Dehradun, but came south every summer to visit my grandparents, who lived in what was then a Garden, and not yet a City. I moved permanently to Bangalore in 1994 after some enormously stimulating years in that centre of political power and scholarly research, New Delhi. I owe our capital much; I was morally and intellectually shaped by my years as a student at the University of Delhi, and without the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), I would not be able to go about my professional business. Some of my closest friends, and the scholar whom I most admire, still live in that city. But I do not think I could have written as I did had I continued to live in Delhi, as I briefly explain below.

I studied in Delhi University between 1974 and 1979, and worked there between 1988 and 1994, first at the Institute of Economic Growth, and later at NMML, in the heart of Lutyenss Delhi. In November 1993 I was appointed to a professorship at the sociology department of the Delhi School of Economics, a department founded by the great M.N. Srinivas, and then commonly acknowledged to be the best in India (and perhaps Asia), its glamour and prestige enhanced by its being part of the Delhi School itself. I was just thirty-five. My wifes design practice was flourishing. This, the countrys capital, was where, it seemed, we would spend the rest of our working lives.

A month before I had to join the Delhi School, I travelled to Pun to speak to an environmental group. I returned to tell my wife that it was time we went back home to Bangalore. My hosts in Pun were warm and welcoming; the traffic (in 1993) was manageable; the people courteous and civilized. It was in these respects much like Bangalore. I persuaded my wife that our (then small) children would be far happier in our home town; besides, our ageing parents needed us close at hand.

Here, I was being slightly disingenuous (as Indian husbands often are with their wives). There was a familial reason for us to move back to Bangalore; but there was also a personal, professional reason so far as I was concerned. For, I was increasingly disenchanted with Delhis academic world. In the department I was to join, M.N. Srinivass emphasis on the field-view of Indian society no longer held sway. French theory was all the ragedoctoral students had to quote Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida and Deleuze whether their own research was on the peasantry, the working class, the aged, the young, or whatever. As for the university in the other side of town, it was pervaded by a mechanical form of Marxism. A group of economics students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University had invited me to speak at their department. I asked them to check with their professors first. They did, to be told that they saw no point in my speaking to the students, since environmentalism was a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.

When I was offered a professorship at the Delhi School I was enormously chuffed. But as the joining date came closer I was consumed by fear and dread. Would I get into endless arguments with my colleagues about the relevance of French post-structuralism to Indian realities? Would I have to begin to say important things in obscure language? I was then working on a biography of Verrier Elwin, an anthropologist who wrote lyrical prose (perhaps because he lived among the Adivasis of central India, and because he never held an academic post). My intellectual hero was E.P. Thompson, the British social historian (and superb prose stylist) who also mostly worked outside the academy.

Shortly after I moved to Delhi, a Tamil friend came visiting, and noting the signs of excitement and self-regard in one who was now at the centre of things, dryly remarked: Delhi is a capital in search of a country. By the time of my visit to Pun five years later, I had come to see the wisdom in that throwaway line.

In the end, I did not join the Delhi School. But I did extend my NMML fellowship for a year, so as to give my wife time to wind up her studio and allow her colleagues to either find new jobs or shift to Bangalore with her. We moved back in 1994, and have been in Bangalore ever since. Like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather before me, I shall most likely die in this city too.

Moving to Bangalore meant a shift in location and a shift in profession, since after ten years in salaried jobs I became a full-time writer. Finally, it also meant a shift in intellectual focus. For almost two decades I had worked on environmental subjects. However, shortly after moving to Bangalore I began research on a history of independent India, and, when that was done, commenced work on a two-volume biography of Gandhi. I am now more a political and social historian than a scholar of the environment, although residues of my earlier training (and interests) are not entirely absent in the pages that follow.

Living outside Delhi made me realize afresh how diverse our country wasand is. As a student and young researcher, I had often taken long train journeys across India. Now, I resumed those travels, sometimes in search of materials for the books I was researching, at other times to give talks. The newspaper columns I was writing (and making a living from) were appearing in several languages, and the feedback from Kannada or Marathi readers was often more instructive (as well as less abusive) than those who read me in English. The diversities of language, religion, ethnicity, music, architecture, dress, cuisineand, of course, of nature and natural landscapesall this was brought home to me far more vividlyand directlythan it would have been had I been an academic in New Delhi.