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One of the things that bothers me about the discourse today is that too much of it is
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a discussion of people.
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We don't talk enough about ideas.
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And there too, we speak of people of the past as if they are caricatures, all good or all
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bad, not flesh and blood humans who contain multitudes.
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Jawaharlal Nehru is a classic example.
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In the discourse today, Nehru is either a visionary leader who made India secular and
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liberal or he is a foolish autocrat whose bad decisions stopped India from coming out
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Now, there is truth to both these pictures of Nehru and there is nuance in everything
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that is true about him.
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He was a complicated man who lived through complicated times.
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And unlike most leaders of today, he loved diving into debates of ideas.
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Those debates matter because those ideas are still relevant today.
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And if we embrace the richness of those exchanges of ideas, we can make a little more sense
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of this world that we live in.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guests today are Tripur Dhaman Singh and Adil Hussain, co-authors of a wonderful book
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called Nehru, The Debates That Defined India.
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This book focuses on four debates that Nehru had with Mohammed Iqbal, Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
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Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Shyamaprasad Mukherjee.
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Each debate is about a subject that lives on today.
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With Iqbal, Nehru argued about the uneasy relationship between nationalism on the one
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hand and religion and tradition on the other, in particular Islam.
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In the course of this conversation, Iqbal, finding Nehru's argument somewhat naive, gives
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him a master class on his religion.
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Nehru's argument with Jinnah was about the communal question.
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Jinnah wanted the rights of minorities to be safeguarded because he was worried that
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in a Hindu majority country, a Hindu Raj, as he called it, was inevitable.
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Nehru thought the communal problem was an elite problem and the only thing they should
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focus on is how to solve the colonial problem, get the British out.
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In his brief debate with Sardar Patel, Nehru argues that China is India's friend and India
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should spurn America's friendship and be close to China.
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Patel took a realist foreign policy position and especially protested the way Nehru basically
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allowed China to take over Tibet.
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As for the debate with Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, we discussed it the last time Tripur Dhaman
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came on the show to talk about his wonderful book, 16 Stormy Days.
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In that book, Tripur Dhaman had laid out what led to India's ghastly First Amendment, which
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killed any possibility of free speech in India.
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My big TIL was that the courts had struck down our sedition law in 1950 because it was
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unconstitutional and Nehru wanted to use it against his political enemies, so he just
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went and changed the constitution.
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And he did this repeatedly over the years.
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Every time Nehru or his successors wanted to go against the constitution, they just
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So much so that B. R. Ambedkar himself said that given what had become of the constitution,
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So this fourth section is of Nehru's debates with Mukherjee, when Nehru is arguing that
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we should not take our fundamental rights seriously as they are a Western import.
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And Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, the founder of the Jan Sangh, is making an eloquent defense
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Now, the best part of Tripur Dhaman and Adil's book is the structure.
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For each of these four sections, they write an introductory essay and then they let Nehru,
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Iqbal, Jinnah, Patel and Mukherjee speak for themselves.
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You will gain added admiration for all these men when you read their own words.
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And I recommend you buy the book and do so, instead of going by what others say about
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these people, read their own words for themselves.
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And of course, I disagree with Nehru's illiberal stance on free speech and he also messed up
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on China, as he himself realized painfully after the India-China war of 1962.
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He was wrong on economics also, though this book doesn't go there.
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But what is important is that Nehru entered the discourse, engaged with his opponents
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There is so much for us to learn from that.
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I find that whole period of our intellectual history so fascinating and I loved this conversation
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with these two wonderful scholars.
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Before we get to it though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Adil and Tripur Dhaman, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you very much for inviting us, Samit.
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It's an absolute pleasure and an absolute honor as always.
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I've recorded with you before Tripur Dhaman.
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But that was really back in the day where episodes weren't 19 hours long and we didn't
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spend five hours talking about somebody's childhood.
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So we didn't really talk much about the early part of your journey, which I'm going to get
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But I'll start with Adil since you're sort of new to the show and your background and
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the kind of academic background you came from before you came to this book is also really
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You were born in Sialkot in Pakistan, of course, but tell me a little bit about your childhood.
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What were your growing up years like?
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Did you have books around you?
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What were your early interests and your early conception of what you could go on to do in
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Amit, now that we are recording.
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So I don't remember reading much when I was in Pakistan, which mainly had to do that.
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I was really into sports and that's something that continued stretching forward all the
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way to my, I think until I was 15, I really decided that maybe I should pick up books
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and take this entire academic exercise more seriously.
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Before then it was really all the sports that I could play from cricket to soccer to basketball.
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But growing up in Pakistan, particularly in the late 80s, it was a strange time because
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it was a time where there was a lot of political instability, where violence was first emerging
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in the public sphere on a scale that we later saw in the 2000s.
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And then this stood in stark contrast to the 90s when my family moved to Germany.
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And I got to see what was then considered the success of liberal democracy.
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So this is a Germany in the 90s that had just reunited with the GDR.
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And here you have liberal democracies being able to manage and absorb the collapse of
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the Soviet Union and do this in such a way that the idea of the social welfare state
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was not threatened in the same way as it was, for instance, in the UK, which didn't have
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to absorb any other part of the Soviet Union, of course, but where reforms were going into
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that neoliberal direction, that things were being cut.
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So Germany pulled off this trick.
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And it was a very exciting time to be a child there.
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I mostly went to schools that were influenced by the philosophy and the teachings of Ignacio
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di Loyola, who was a Jesuit, and my schools were mainly Jesuit.
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Growing up, I remember that there was a stark inclination for us to perform well in the
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ancient languages that were no longer spoken.
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So Latin was big, Greek was big, English not so much.
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I remember the first English lesson that I had was given by a monk, by a Catholic monk
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who told us that the great thing about the English literature or English literature in
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general is that you can just read summaries and you don't need to read the actual works
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because it's a language that lends itself to compression.
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And it took me some years to find out that there's actually great English writing out
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In terms of early influences, and I'm just focusing on the English ones because I do
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think that most of your listeners would probably want to maybe look up one thing or the other.
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Where at that time mainly travel writings, and I think really travel writing got me into
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reading in general because travel writing opened up this entirely new dimension or this
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window into a new world where you could, or somebody was trying to describe something
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to you and mainly doing that in an enthusiastic manner.
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So I was amazed about the sort of magic that people experienced.
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There is a German writer called Karl May who wrote a series of books that were hugely popular
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in the late 19th century, mainly his travel writings, and they were all invented.
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He never left his village, but he wrote about how he encountered the Native Americans and
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what is today the United States and other places.
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Those really influenced my early reading habits.
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After school, I went to do civilian service, which is a mandatory year that you have to
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spend either in the military or you have to do the civilian alternative.
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It no longer exists because they've gotten rid of it three years ago.
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So now when you're a German citizen and you're 18 and male, you no longer have to either
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go into the army or do civilian service.
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I did civilian service in a hospice, so I was mainly working with people who were terminally
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ill and who could no longer be saved through the conventional wisdoms of medicine, and
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we were helping them trying to live the last chapter of their lives with as much dignity
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After that, I studied law, which you've probably seen.
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Studying law in Germany is an adventure in itself because they haven't really reformed
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much of the curriculum from the 19th century, which means that the curriculum is still from
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a time when university disciplines weren't fully formed.
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So this is before the emergence of history as a discipline, political science as a discipline,
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and what you get to do when you study law is spend five years studying everything a
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So you have politics, which is state law, where you learn about the mechanics of the
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You have legal history, which has always been big in Germany, particularly the history of
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You have law and society, so courses that try to go deeper into the ways in which the
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interaction between the making of rules and societies relate.
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And it all ends with a truly 19th century thing, which is a big examination, which is
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the only thing that counts in terms of grades and everything else is disregarded.
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And in conventional German fashion, half of the people who write this exam fail.
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And they usually take it at the age of 25, 26, which means that after you fail, you don't
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really have a degree apart from your high school diploma.
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All of that has now been changed.
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So I think five years ago, there was like a moderate reform, which said that after studying
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law at a German faculty for three years, they would just give you a bachelor's degree.
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So for the outside world, it looks like you're not falling back on nothing in case you fail
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After the state exam, I was lucky to win a scholarship that allowed me to study more
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or less whatever I wanted within the European Union.
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And that really got me to Cambridge.
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And since I could study whatever I want, I thought, hey, I'm interested in Indian history.
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So I studied Indian history.
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It was an exciting time at Cambridge, not only because I got to meet Tripu Dhawan, who's
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the co-author of this book, but also because in Cambridge, there was a merger happening
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One was Cambridge had always been big in imperial history.
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So they've always been big on the British colonies.
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And part of that is, of course, the colonial legacy.
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And it was called, I don't know, the chairs of imperial history.
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And you had old returning civil servants expounding wisdoms to the new ones who want to branch
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But it had undergone a conceptual shift towards studying the continent, not from a perspective
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So how can we from Britain govern India well, to a perspective of what actually happened
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And there were many people who were doing world history in that fashion.
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Foremost, Sir Christopher Bailey, who's written a number of books in this regard.
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The other tradition in Cambridge that was always big and that attracted me was intellectual
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That is the history of political thought.
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And Cambridge has always been doing that because they, early on, had the modesty of saying
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that the only thing that we can really know is not to answer the huge philosophical questions
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that life offers us, but the smaller ones and trying to understand why people thought
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And coming to the discipline as a lawyer was, of course, something that helped me in that
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because part of the civil law tradition has always been to understand what the legislator
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meant when he created that rule.
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So legal methodology, say, in the case law system is mainly precedent.
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So you try to understand a ruling that has been passed down by a judge.
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In the civil law tradition, it has always been more intellectually challenging in the
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sense that you always try to get into the head of the legislator.
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So something that you see in the originalism debates around the Constitution in the US.
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So for me, trying to figure out what people were thinking at the time and elucidating
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that for the present has always been something that I found exciting.
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And that was happening within intellectual history.
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Now, at the time that I was at Cambridge, these two disciplines were trying to meet.
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And they were trying to meet through a number of people who were doing research in both
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The foremost one, of course, is my supervisor, Shruti Kapila, who's recently published a
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book, Violent Fraternity, that really encapsulates possibly the decade that I've spent at Cambridge
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because it sort of summarizes many of the graduate students that were coming, not summarizes,
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but that in a way foreshadows the work of many of the graduate students that were being
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And Cambridge at that time was also unusual because there were so many of us.
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There were so many PhD students who were working on Indian history.
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And I don't think that's ever been repeated, either in the decades before or after.
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But that was just like, I don't know, like an incident of luck.
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So Cambridge was very enlightening in that sense.
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Yeah, and that's a very lucid summary.
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And I wouldn't want to compress it even a little bit, even though you spoke in English.
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That little anecdote reminded me of there was this recent thing that happened on Twitter
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where I happened to mention, you know, how many books I read last year.
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And someone without naming me per se just started this whole thread on how this cult
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of reading is harming people and people should not read, they should just experience things.
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And I remember one of the comments there was that I don't read books, I just read book
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But even if you read book summaries, you can just read one book summary a week.
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So how has this guy read so many books now?
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What can one even say to that?
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By the way, speaking of Shruti Kapila, I'll be recording with her next week.
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In fact, on Thursday, so exactly a week from now.
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I'm reading a book right now as well, and a big admirer of Christopher Bailey as well.
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So you know, good opportunity to speak to you guys now.
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You know, before we get to Tripur Dhaman, I just want to double click on a couple of
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And one of them is, you pointed out that one of the qualities of the law education that
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you got in Germany was that it was a very 19th century conception in the sense that
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a bunch of other disciplines were mixed in, in terms of understanding the society, understanding
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history, the economy, all of those things.
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And do you feel that in a sense that was a feature and not a bug, just in terms of how
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Because the people that I find to be the most interesting thinkers who bring insight on
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any one field are people who are really bringing interdisciplinary lenses.
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And you later said that, you know, your legal lens, for example, helped you when you were
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looking at intellectual history and so on.
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So tell me a little bit about that.
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And is this something that you've consciously thought of?
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Is this something that when you look around you at academics and, you know, maybe different
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departments somewhere, is it visible?
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Do these lenses make a difference?
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I do think that these lenses make a difference.
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And particularly speaking of the sort of German legal tradition, I think trying to produce
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universalists has always been more, it is always more interesting to converse with a
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universalist than it is with an absolute narrow specialist.
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But within that universalism, there's also a type of parochialism that has sort of crept
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And for Germany, that has always been the language issue.
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So German academia in general was very slow to adapt or adopt to the English language,
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which means that most German lawyers would still publish in German only.
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The concept of peer review hasn't really received widespread acceptance in the sense that most
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people still think that when they reach the level of a full professor, their work should
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no longer be peer reviewed, but just printed as they write it.
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So there is a specific tradition that also leads to a disconnection from the global conversation.
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Now, if that is a good or bad thing, I can't really judge.
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It is a good thing in the sense that German lawyers are still speaking to each other in
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a way that you see no longer happening within the splintering of the English academy, right?
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So there's many different strands that have now emerged, and it's more about building
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up disciplinary boundaries than it is about developing a fruitful conversation.
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So the good thing about German law is that everybody still can speak to each other, regardless
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if you're doing public law, if you're doing civil law or criminal law.
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So there's a conversation that is still taking place because everybody has undergone the
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But at the same time, I do think that the question around the German language that many
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refuse to publish in any other language has led to the specific parochialism.
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And you also see that in other disciplines, like in sociology.
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So somebody like Jürgen Habermas, his works were only published in English, I think, two
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decades ago, even though in Germany they have existed for, I don't know, four or five decades.
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So in the sense, you still see that there's only a very slow shift to contributing to
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these sort of global debates.
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And now that we're living in a very, very globalized world, that can be slightly awkward.
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And my other question to you before I get to Thrippur Dhawan, and this actually comes
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from something that I've been thinking about a lot.
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How do we form our conceptions of the world?
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And when I look at the way that I look at India, obviously, you know, you grow up having
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a particular idea of India in your head.
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And then as you sort of, you know, explore the world and explore the world of ideas,
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especially you kind of, you know, more and more nuance gets added on till you realize
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that the truth is deeply, deeply complicated, beyond the simplistic notions you might have
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had of what a nation sort of is.
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What were your sort of ideas of Pakistan and, in a sense, India also growing up?
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I mean, I know you spend a substantial part of your life in Germany and outside Pakistan
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But, you know, what is that process like where, to you, what did Pakistan mean?
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And, you know, over time, how did that kind of change?
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Was it easy to, at some point, then get dispassionate about it?
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Like when you write about, you know, India and Pakistan as a historian of ideas, you're
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not really, in a sense, at that point, writing about your country, you're writing about something
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that is abstract, that is up there, you're writing about it in the thirties and the forties
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Take me a little bit through that process of how the idea of Pakistan evolved for you
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I mean, going back chronologically, because that's what your question aimed at, I do think
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as a child, we are just excited about any theory that is sort of presented to us, that,
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you know, sort of breaks down the world in very simple terms, and we can adopt it.
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And if there's some type of passion that we can develop through it, be it some type of
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nationalism, etc., then, you know, we are automatically drawn to it, and I do think particularly
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men are even more drawn to it than women because it creates this sort of very tribal, ritualistic
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almost experience that we can have together.
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I don't really believe that my desire of trying to understand Pakistan has very much changed
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because the desire that I had to understand things deeper that were happening around me
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in Pakistan is still the same.
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So I do think it's basically curiosity.
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So for me, curiosity has always trumped a sense of tribal belonging, regardless of what
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And that has, in a way, not really made me immune because you can never be totally immune
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to sort of the society that you're sort of thrown into, as Heidegger would say, but essentially
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it has helped me to make better sense of what was going on around me.
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And I do think that that curiosity is still what is driving me in my attempt to understand
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what the ideological background was of the specific formation of ideas from separatism
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to liberal internationalism and constitutionalism in its different forms.
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So let's move on now to Tripur Dhaman.
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You know, we discussed very briefly, I think, your kind of academic background and so on.
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But tell me a bit about your childhood.
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And if you were to sort of answer the same question from a point of view of India, how
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you look at India differently as the years go on.
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And obviously, your engagement with the past becomes even more real in modern times, because
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as you've pointed out in your book, all of those debates are being relived all over again.
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And you know, the past is still so alive.
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Yeah, I mean, so I grew up in Agra and I also went to school here.
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I lived here till the age of 18.
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And I went to a bit like a deal, I went to a Catholic school and, you know, this sort
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of engagement with Christianity and Christian ideas was very much a part of my school life.
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And I, you know, always found history interesting.
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And so I read a lot, both in school and outside, and, you know, curiosity, of course, there's
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only really one way to deal with it, which is to kind of give in.
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And I also was very interested in politics now, partly that had to do with the fact that
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my father was a politician.
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So it was very much not something that you read about in the newspapers.
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It was something that, you know, was, you know, a big part of our lives.
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It was a part of dinner table conversations.
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And so I it and now when I look back, it's actually a very interesting way of growing
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up, because it gives you a kind of behind the scenes insight into so many things that
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people write about or talk about.
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And I always saw a bit of a disconnect as to how things, you know, what was really going
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on and how it was, for example, being written about in newspapers or commented on on TV.
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And so for me, that that sort of disconnect has been has been very, very crucial to, I
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guess, a lot of my intellectual habits as well, because for me, the subjects that really
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draw me in is where I feel that there is that there is a sense of disconnect between, you
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know, between how people are talking about it or perceiving it and, you know, what what
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really I feel like what what was really going on.
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So that's that's something I think that's fed into into into picking up the subjects
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that I that I do pick up because in a lot of them, that's you know, that's where my
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sense of curiosity or interest in it really comes in.
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So then after school, I went to university in in Britain.
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I studied politics and international relations as an undergraduate degree.
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Unlike Adeel, I wasn't initially drawn to political theory and philosophy, mainly because
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I often found it a bit too abstract.
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But international relations and politics, that sort of thing, really, it really got
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And mainly it was it was a steep uphill learning curve doing a degree in those subjects because
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I found myself quite unprepared.
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I had very little experience writing essays.
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I hadn't I hadn't really studied those subjects before.
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And so for me, there was and plus there was a sense of, you know, obvious cultural dislocation
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And so for me, that was a very formative experience.
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And I remember writing my first essay.
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I don't even remember what it was about, but I remember getting a grade and I got a first.
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And there was there was such a thrill to being able to produce a well argued and well structured
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You know, I realized that actually, you know, this is this is interesting.
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And it really, you know, in a way, scratches and itch you the ability to kind of think
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about and read about what you what you're really interested in and then to be able to
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argue about what you think and to be able to, even if you don't convince the person
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you're you know, who's grading it, who's looking at it, but you know, who appreciates just
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You know, that that that was a thrill.
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And like a deal, many, once you're exposed to the world of theory, once you know, you
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have the explanatory power of of theories and ideas at your disposal, you know, it's
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a bit like a light going off in your brain.
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You suddenly see, OK, you know, I can explain the world in this way or I can understand
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And once, you know, a lot of those things somehow accumulated in my head, I started
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to grow, go back to being much more interested in in India concurrently over those.
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I like, you know, along that time, I also had the chance to work into elections in India.
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So, you know, I that sort of an interesting engagement with Indian politics and the kind
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of what really sort of underpins the political debates and ideas in India when it grew manyfold.
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So I went to Cambridge and I did an MPhil in modern South Asian studies, which was the
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And it was my first real substantial engagement with with the world of Indian history and
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And of course, I'd had practical engagement with Indian politics to see my father.
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But this was the real, you know, the first real substantial intellectual engagement.
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And again, it was really interesting.
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And as I learned, I also, you know, I also the desire to learn a lot more kind of grew.
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And I had Christopher Bailey as my supervisor for my MPhil.
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And I was really interested in what I was writing about.
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I was at that point working on Rajput groups in the idea of sovereignty in 19th century
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And Chris suggested that, you know, I should maybe think about a PhD.
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And, you know, that was that turned out to be probably one of the best decisions that
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I've taken because it really now when I look back, you know, it really gives you essentially
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four years of your life, five years of your life to think and write.
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And that's that's a luxury.
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That's an absolute luxury.
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And as I mentioned, that was also a particular time in Cambridge where these two sort of,
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you know, imperial history, the traditions of imperial history and intellectual history
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were really trying to come together.
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And it was a time of intellectual ferment.
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We met so many interesting people.
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There was a collection of people who were there at that point in time, which you can't
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So it made for a very exciting intellectual environment.
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There was Chris Bailey, there was Shruti Kapila, there was Joya Chatterjee.
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And then there was there was Shailja Fennell.
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And then, of course, there were a whole load of postdocs and graduate students who were
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there off and on for a short span of time.
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I remember Audrey Truschke was there for a bit and our friend Ali Khan was there.
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And there was there was such an interesting group of people that you couldn't help but
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have develop a very wide range of interest even within your within your specialist field
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of South Asian history.
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So it was it was an intellectually very exciting time.
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And once having been through it, I realized actually, A, there was a lot that I didn't
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know and B, that, you know, it was something that I really enjoyed.
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And so that interest that kind of I still have that sense of enjoyment when I do research
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And there still is, you know, I still have that curiosity about wanting to know more.
#
Because A, as you mentioned, we see that the past is still alive in India in many ways.
#
But also India supplies a kind of almost inexhaustible intellectual stimulation, because it's a country
#
where so much is constantly going on.
#
And even when you for me, now that I've been in Britain for so long, I often people will
#
talk about British politics and I say, you know, it's just really boring.
#
And compared to India, it is because India never reaches a level of you can never say
#
Because the past and the present kind of melt into one.
#
And it's a sort of explosion of ideas that's constantly going on.
#
And so it's supplies and there's an almost inexhaustible supply of intellectual stimulation.
#
So I don't think my interest is ever going to run dry in that sense.
#
So here's something I'd love to ask you.
#
This common question keeps getting raised that hey, you know, pre independence, we had
#
such great leaders, such giants and all that and look at the politicians today and blah,
#
And that's a continuous lament that happens.
#
And I remember I'd written a column for Bloomberg Quint once about it from an economics point
#
of view, where I said that you got to look at the incentives that back when our freedom
#
fighters kind of came up and they got into the business, there was no power at the end
#
They were animated by principles.
#
So, you know, the kind of people who are coming in are the kind of people who are animated
#
And that's kind of what you get.
#
And that's reflected in the debates where the debates are about so much about ideas,
#
of course, tempered by practicality is, you know, you've given various examples of within
#
this book, but it's so kind of rich with ideas, whereas my point was that given that we kind
#
of took over the colonial apparatus of the coercive state from the British and given
#
that that's the kind of state we have, you know, anyone who enters politics today is
#
only motivated by the lust for power.
#
And therefore, that's the kind of person you will get as about incentives.
#
And obviously, it's slightly provocative.
#
And you know, as you're from a political family yourself, you know, not at all meant as an
#
insult to people who are in politics today.
#
But I'm just wondering that, you know, you've had dinner table conversations about politics.
#
You've kind of seen the world of politics intimately around you.
#
You pointed out that it's very different from what our people imagine otherwise in the popular
#
And at the same time, you've studied, for example, politics of the past, as you sit
#
down at your family table as a young boy and the elders are talking politics, you might
#
also be able to imagine, say, Jawaharlal Nehru sitting at the table with Motilal Nehru and
#
all the others and they are talking politics, right?
#
And do you feel that there is a change in the discourse, in the general political discourse?
#
Do you feel that, you know, politics is animated today less by ideas and more by the imperatives
#
of modern politics, which are electoral imperatives, you got to win elections, you got to get votes.
#
You know, I'm not passing judgment on either this or that.
#
It's just the way the world has changed.
#
So what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
That's completely true.
#
So the first kind of reason that you gave, the fact that actually there was no power
#
at the end of it, or there was no kind of presumption that there would be power at the
#
end of it, made anti-cadonial politics into a whole different game.
#
And you can see what in the way people stack up.
#
So at that point, what was considered a lucrative and attractive career was the civil service.
#
And so people who were, you know, really smart, interested in having a lucrative career or,
#
you know, a kind of well-paid, stable career would look at the civil service.
#
That's where power was, that's where honor was, that's where, you know, you gained respect
#
And crucially, a lot of very smart, very intelligent, also in some ways, very patriotic people ended
#
up going to the civil service because that's where, you know, that's what gave them what
#
The people who ended up in the nationalist movement were often tended to be those who
#
were not attracted by those things.
#
Because if they had been attracted by, essentially by money, by power, et cetera, they would
#
have gone into the civil service.
#
So you do have the odd person like Bose who gives up a career in the civil service.
#
And it's a big thing at that point in time to give up a career in the civil service and
#
join the nationalist movement.
#
But the vast majority were people who were either unsuccessful in that stream or completely
#
not interested in that side of things.
#
So it did attract a broad spectrum of people who were motivated by a kind of overarching
#
goal of achieving independence and not really interested in wealth, honor, power, et cetera.
#
Also equally, there was no guarantee that, as you say at the end of it, what would happen
#
independence may come 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line, 30 years down the
#
line as it did for many of these people, as I think Nehru is the one who said, you know,
#
when asked about questioned about partition and why they didn't fight harder, say something
#
to the extent of we were tired old man.
#
But on the other hand, if we talk about it purely when thinking about intellectual standing,
#
then I think the situation is not necessarily the idea that somehow there's been degradation
#
like a kind of bell curve like degradation where we reached the peak and then we just
#
I don't think that's true because there are plenty of, as Shruti Kapila, for example,
#
argues in her book, India was never really a world of ideas where ideas were, you know,
#
there were very few political theorists of that kind who just wrote ideas down on paper.
#
The thinkers were also the doers.
#
And so to understand modern day India very much is to take, is to look at political action
#
as a source of political ideas and political thought.
#
And so once if we were to accept that, I don't think you could legitimately argue that people
#
there's been a kind of straightforward degradation of intellectual standing because there has
#
been, there has been a lot going on and there are a lot of ideas that are expressed.
#
And I don't think they expressed any worse than what they were 70 years ago or 100 years
#
You know, unless maybe Adeel might want to jump in at this point.
#
Maybe just a little to add what Tripadaman said.
#
Every political generation has to answer the question of the time.
#
Now the question of the time that the founding fathers were trying to answer was one where
#
there was universal agreement and that is about independence.
#
That is about self-governance.
#
Now that agreement stretched over the very narrow sort of South Asian intellectual clique
#
and that was widely respected around the world.
#
So from the time of the enlightenment, there was the idea that, you know, legitimacy can
#
no longer be derived from these sort of higher up motives that you can have, like be it from
#
religion or from, you know, any other strands.
#
And it was generally agreed that it's sort of rationality that allows you to participate
#
in any political setting.
#
Now racism could stem it only this much, right?
#
The idea that, oh, but some people are better than others and therefore should rule over
#
others was a brief thing that most people had given up by the mid 20th century.
#
When you had a problem in England, the best doctor was an Indian.
#
You would go to that doctor, you would not say, oh, but I have this sort of racist idea
#
that white men are always going to be better because you've seen enough white men botching
#
So therefore you would go to the best who was recommended to you.
#
And I do think that the complexity that modern political life sort of throws at politician
#
just makes their job a lot more difficult.
#
The constant surveillance through mass media is just a completely different ball game.
#
So I'm not trying to play down the accomplishments of the founding fathers.
#
They were great, but in a way the main question that they were trying to answer was one where
#
there was wide agreement, not universal agreement, but wide agreement.
#
So it was clear that, you know, they had it much easier to position themselves, whereas
#
now it's just a lot more complicated with the geopolitics that sort of plays into it.
#
Yeah, that's a great point.
#
And also, you know, as far as the question of the time was concerned back then, one,
#
of course there are these larger, more animating things that, you know, everyone can kind of
#
So for Nehru it might be the independence of the nation, for Iqbal it is that, but it
#
is also about Islam and what's happening to it and community and so on.
#
And there are all these sort of different ideas they can agree on.
#
But I kind of suspect if you, you know, go to an Amit Shah or anybody in any party, really,
#
and ask them what is the question of the time for you, it will be something like how do
#
I win the next election?
#
You know, it's just that the incentives have changed and I understand that to a certain
#
extent politics is deeply complicated now and you can't play down the amount of skill
#
But when I sort of look at the discourse around me, like I was reading, for example, just
#
in the first section of your book when Nehru and Iqbal have that exchange, and my God they
#
write so well, especially in Nehru where he's writing from Almora jail and he's quoting
#
Bertrand Russell from memory.
#
And it's just such beautiful, fluid writing.
#
You know, I was chatting about it with a friend and I said, you know, like, you have to read
#
Nehru to remember what a fine writer he was.
#
One may or may not agree with a lot of his ideas.
#
I certainly have very mixed feelings about those, but such a fine writer.
#
And my friend asked me, so, okay, who in modern times writes like that?
#
And the thing is, I couldn't think of an Indian politician.
#
I had to say, you know, people like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ramchandra Guha, Suhas Palchikar,
#
they are the kind of people, you know, engaging with the world of ideas.
#
But our politicians today are thinking about different things, kind of obsessed with different
#
The nature of the discourse is completely different.
#
And I'll move on to my next related question with that, that while reading these letters,
#
one of the things that struck me, these letters that people are writing to each other, not
#
just, you know, these columns by Nehru and Iqbal, but even, you know, the letters that
#
say Nehru and Patel are writing to each other and so on.
#
And all of these letters and in the correspondences between Gandhi and Tagore, for example, they
#
are so carefully thought out.
#
People are sitting down, taking time, engaging with the subject.
#
You know, you have Iqbal quoting Gibbon, you have Nehru quoting Hazar people in different
#
letters, you have all of that happening.
#
And part of the reason for that, I suspect, is that there is, of course, you know, your
#
attention is not scattered in the million ways that it is today.
#
You know, if I want to talk to a political comrade, say if I'm Nehru and I want to write
#
to Jinnah, I can't send a to write email or an emoji or a message on WhatsApp.
#
I've got to sit down and draft a letter.
#
And Jinnah will also sit down and draft a letter.
#
And that's how the game plays out.
#
And both of you are obviously excellent counter examples of that.
#
But that is also a little bit of selection bias because you've done academics and you've
#
been through all of that.
#
But do you think in general, in modern times, that there are disincentives for that kind
#
of a well thought out reason, discourse to even develop in the first place, where everything
#
is instant comments on Twitter and all of that.
#
And you know, where are the conversations happening?
#
And the reason I ask is I'm very happy to be corrected by you guys on this, because
#
I realize that a lot of my perspectives come because I'm an English speaking elite.
#
And that's really the language in which I'm doing all my reading and even if I can speak
#
two or three other languages, whereas a lot of politics is simply not in these languages.
#
So it is possible that there is a richer discourse, which I might not simply be aware of, or there
#
is a discourse which is not happening in these long reason conversations, but dialogues happening
#
So you know, what would your responses be to that?
#
I think in one way, you're absolutely right, because the medium of writing lends itself
#
to thought a lot better than a 280 character tweet or a five line email or a WhatsApp message.
#
You are forced to think and the act of writing in itself forces you to clarify what you're
#
You can't send a two page letter if you're not able to clearly express what you're thinking.
#
What do you want to say?
#
So it lends itself to thinking, it also lends itself to clarity.
#
So in that sense, I guess there is already a kind of pre-existing bias if you take up
#
written letters or written documents against newspaper columns or so on and so forth.
#
But it's also my belief that very substantial, like anybody, any sort of substantial intellectual
#
output will come through writing or if not through writing, at least through voluminous
#
So if you look at, for example, Nehru's debates in the last chapter of the book, they're actually
#
all spoken, it's not written text.
#
But it's still, if you read it, it still looks like it's very well written.
#
But that really doesn't seem to happen or if it does, but I mean, I'll just draw your
#
I mean, the thing that I'd read by a politician most recently was because I've been looking
#
at the crisis or thinking about the crisis in Ukraine and it's actually Vladimir Putin's
#
note article on, I think it's like a three or four page article actually on how the Russians
#
and Ukrainians are one people where he lays out his sort of grand vision and his ideas
#
about Ukraine and Russia.
#
And so thinking along those lines, sort of substantive intellectual output will still
#
And if that isn't coming out from politicians, I think we kind of need to just stop and have
#
a look and think about it because that means that they don't see that sort of substantial
#
intellectual output as necessary.
#
It doesn't mean that they have no ideas, but it just means that they don't seem to think
#
that those ideas either need to be explained in detail or that anybody else needs that
#
sort of substantial intellectual engagement.
#
So it's very much either a one way sort of street where someone expounds just on their
#
ideas in the spoken form, or if there's engagement, then it's kind of dumbed down to these 280
#
character tweets and replies.
#
You know, one of the points you made is something I keep stressing in the writing classes I
#
conduct as well that, you know, the more you write in a clear way, the better your thinking
#
All the holes in your arguments and in your narratives are immediately visible to you
#
and you know, clear writing leads to clear thinking.
#
And I think it might just be one of the tragedies of our times and something that degrades the
#
discourse in the sense that there's not enough of that happening.
#
Most of the discourses, 280 character tweets, sometimes the IT cell sending something out
#
on your behalf, most of the conversations that we have is, you know, people talking
#
at each other instead of to each other, which is in fact, you know, a phrase that pops up
#
in the in this book as well, when Nehru and Jinnah are, you know, having their exchange.
#
So let's let's kind of get back to that linear narrative, which will eventually bring us
#
to this wonderful book, which is at what point do you guys then get together and decide to
#
write this book jointly?
#
Like, what are the things that you find interesting in this subject?
#
Like at one level, obviously, you're interested in intellectual history, Tripur Dhaman's already,
#
you know, written 16 stormy days on the First Amendment, which is, you know, the last section
#
But what prompts you to do this aspect?
#
And like, it really feels to me that it's a wonderful book.
#
And it almost feels as if it is a part of a larger kind of project.
#
And at one level, I guess, of course, it is a larger lifelong project of just understanding
#
intellectual history, understanding the world.
#
But what kind of led you guys to it?
#
And what made you think that you should do this, you know, together as it were?
#
Yeah, happy to go first in that question.
#
So my PhD project was now forthcoming in a book called Law and Muslim Political Thought
#
in Late Colonial North India.
#
And in that project, I mainly looked at, as the title says, Muslim Political Thought.
#
Now Nehru featured in many of the chapters as a sort of side character.
#
But he had these very, very exciting conversations with some of the main characters that I was
#
And the main characters, of course, as you can glean from the book, Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
#
So when I came from this experience and this exposure to Nehru, and Tripu Dhaman, of course,
#
had written his book Sixty Stormy Days and had moved into the post-independence era,
#
it was clear to us that if we were to do a project, it would be kind of cool because
#
we could juxtapose Nehru and his debates that he had with the Muslims.
#
And the Muslim question was one of the biggest questions that had to be answered in order
#
to acquire independence.
#
And we can move on and sort of do something post-independence.
#
And it was Tripu Dhaman who really suggested the book.
#
I was deep down writing My Second at that point, which is on blasphemy and the role
#
of blasphemy, particularly for law in Pakistan.
#
And he suggested that we should come together and sort of write a nice introductory volume
#
that would allow people to directly engage with history without any gatekeepers who are
#
sort of trying to tell them what to think, but just to say that this is the sort of conversation
#
that people were having about 100 years ago.
#
And we can still not just understand it, but we can still make sense of what their main
#
motivations were simply by reading some selected few letters.
#
That's what really drove us into this project.
#
I'm guessing a lot of the research for this effort was stuff that was already done for
#
And by the way, I love the format of letting their voices speak for each other with an
#
introductory essay in each of the sections, because that kind of really works for me.
#
Because otherwise, whenever you read a work of history at a meta level, every reader is
#
also confronting the question of what are the biases or what are the angles here and
#
And here, you don't really have to account for that when you're reading the words directly.
#
And of course, what you choose or somebody's words is also another way that comes into
#
So I just found the book extremely rich in that way.
#
So question for both of you, I can't remember if I asked to put them in this the last time
#
we recorded, but something I'm really fascinated by and I ask all my guests, especially my
#
historian guests, which is what kind of knowledge management systems do you then use?
#
Because part of the nature of what you do is just reading a lot.
#
Like every day, you're obviously reading tons, engaging with ideas, categorizing ideas and
#
events and all of that, building narratives, building narratives, again, breaking down
#
What kind of knowledge management systems do you kind of use to sort of keep track of
#
I'm actually very old fashioned when it comes to my way of working.
#
So I actually make handwritten notes.
#
And I found that the best way of retaining information.
#
And so I make handwritten notes on works that I read that are relevant to my research, etc.
#
And then I sort of file them, keep them in folders and find them away.
#
So I have I have very old fashioned ways of doing things.
#
And when I write, I kind of write, I type by hand and that I like, you know, to insert
#
footnote and insert a footnote.
#
So I actually don't use, I try to minimize the use of technology when it comes to something
#
like this, and I found writing, particularly writing by hand, helps me kind of retain information
#
So that, for me, that's kind of the go to way of of really of really kind of deeply
#
engaging with with a piece of writing.
#
How we went into this book was, you know, just to just a quick rundown for me was that
#
we wanted to we wanted to collaborate, we wanted to work on a project together.
#
And we have because we shared this sort of similar interest in in that period in history.
#
We we decided Nehru would be a good way of bridging both our interests and looking at
#
that period, that period in Indian history.
#
And this book really allows us to do that.
#
And we wanted to very much also speak to the present moment.
#
So we selected those debates that were not only hugely consequential at the time, but
#
in a way are still very much alive around us.
#
And that really narrowed everything, everything down.
#
And it was it was that way great to collaborate with Adil because we we share a good working
#
relationship and we've been friends since our since our time at Cambridge.
#
So I think that that really made for a good book.
#
And as you mentioned, we very much wanted the book is an invitation really to to everyone
#
to engage with with these conversations.
#
So we wanted to mainly provide us as we write in the introduction, intellectual scaffolding
#
rather than a kind of psychographic portrait of the protagonist.
#
And hopefully we've been we've been able to do that.
#
Adil, what about your sort of knowledge management systems?
#
Because more and more what I find myself using for everything that I do is something called
#
Rome Research, which is based on an old German system of Zettelkasten.
#
And you know, a side question that, you know, since it's occurred, I might as well ask it
#
is that there's a certain kind of essentialism, which is, of course, perhaps mainly flawed.
#
But there might be a germ of truth to it when people talk about how different languages
#
and different cultures have certain characteristics that affect everything that those people kind
#
of do and Germans are known for being so methodical and logical and rational and the best builders
#
of machines and all of that.
#
And do you find that, you know, there are maybe traces of that and that you've imbibed
#
from your education there and in the way that you look at the world.
#
And adding to that, of course, is that law itself is inherently a little bit like that.
#
So what's your response?
#
Just going into it, maybe I mean, I can understand that Tripadaman, of course, writes things
#
down because he has excellent penmanship.
#
My penmanship is horrible.
#
So I remember in the fifth grade when one of my teachers said, he returned one of my
#
one of the papers that I've written one of the exams and then said that it reads like
#
you've you would have tied a pen to the tail of a rabbit and chased it over this paper.
#
So I still remember that metaphor because it's very, very vivid.
#
And for me, it was always clear that I had to take notes digitally.
#
And that's been the case ever since.
#
So I type out everything.
#
My citations and my books and my papers that I need neatly categorized in Mendeley, maybe
#
according to the old Germanic tradition that Nicholas Luhmann perhaps perfected.
#
You should type in Nicholas Luhmann in Google when you have the time.
#
He was a big sociologist who was famous for having cards, little cards on which he wrote
#
But he filled up rooms with those cards.
#
So you see him in the middle of the room, just being overwhelmed by his Karteikasten,
#
And they're everywhere, possibly the most famous pictures of his are within within those
#
I think that there may be something Germanic to it.
#
But I also just think that it's the it's a neat way of sort of ordering things, because
#
I tend to not be very good to sort of categorizing them.
#
Whereas when it is digital, digital, it feels a lot more it feels a lot more natural to
#
me, because I can actually clean up things and, you know, have them have them in front
#
So that has been my method of choice.
#
And it's worked very well.
#
I also tend to use for the citations, it makes it so much easier if you go back and then
#
you have full word search, which is perhaps the best invention that technology has sort
#
So instead of having to go back and reading a book in its totality, if you know the keyword,
#
you can immediately jump to the relevant pages.
#
And I think it's a help to spread up the publication cycle of academics so they can write much,
#
much faster than they were able to in earlier times.
#
And speaking of technology and full word search, it reminds me that this is the second episode
#
in a row that I'm recording where an identical thing has happened to me, which is that, you
#
know, while I take notes, I also copy paste a lot of quotes, you know, under each category
#
and under each point that I'm making.
#
And for like the second recording in a row, Kindle told me that I have exceeded the publisher's
#
limit of how much I can copy, which is whatever, because, you know, and for my last episode,
#
I just immediately went and I downloaded a pirated copy and I used that.
#
And for this, luckily, your publishers will send me a PDF.
#
So that wasn't an issue.
#
So much for technology, you know, so before we get to the book, which I'm so excited to
#
talk about a final question, which is triggered by what Tripur Dhaman said about how you wanted
#
this book to be an invitation to engage.
#
And that's one, it's a lovely way of looking at it.
#
And while it's getting more and more possible in modern times, how far away is it from happening
#
in a much greater sense?
#
For example, you know, if I read these letters and I say, shit, I want to read all of Nehru's
#
letters now, you know, is there a way for me to do that?
#
Like I know the collected works of Gandhi are of course available in a hundred volumes,
#
which are online, so I can read them online.
#
But otherwise, the ideal way one would like to see the world ordered is that you don't
#
have gatekeepers to this knowledge at all, that everything is just available online.
#
I can look at Jinnah's letters, Nehru's letters, I can go through all of them.
#
So I don't need other interpreters of this material alone.
#
I can, you know, dive into it myself and kind of look at it.
#
So one, how far are we from that happening?
#
Are there barriers to it, which will make sure it never happens, for example?
#
And two, would you say that, you know, just as in other fields, you know, gatekeepers
#
are kind of dissolving gradually, you know, today anybody can be an artist or a filmmaker
#
or a writer without necessarily having to go to intermediaries.
#
You have the tools of production, you can directly reach your audiences.
#
Is there something like that that can eventually one day happen in academics?
#
So if somebody says, I want to write a book on ideas and I want to, you know, use all
#
of this great material, that they don't necessarily have to be fortunate enough to be able to
#
go to the right colleges and find their way to Cambridge, where they are, you know, lucky
#
to find themselves with stimulating people like you guys did.
#
The first part is a copyright question.
#
You know, the lawyer in me has awakened, and I just want to sort of jump into it and take
#
The truth is, it really depends on the copyright laws in your country.
#
So most countries will have, you would have open access to the letters of both Jinnah
#
and Nehru and many other people, especially stuff that has been published in the forties
#
So therefore going to places like archive.org, going to places like Google Books has been
#
very, very good at digitizing and putting up stuff that will allow you to access, in
#
fact, a majority, not all of them, because some of them were not included in the first
#
volumes because they took them out, but the vast majority of things.
#
So there's no longer gatekeepers who can keep you from, you know, the sources of knowledge,
#
And I don't really think that there was ever a time where good history was monopolized
#
at history faculties or where good legal thinking was monopolized at law faculties.
#
So therefore I would say that, yes, whereas there have been like institutional gatekeepers,
#
particularly maybe in the golden age of academic degrees, where people were really marveling
#
over your university education, it was only the latter part of the 20th century.
#
For the rest of the time, it wasn't really like the big requirement for you if you wanted
#
to put your ideas into the public sphere.
#
So I do think that today, as always, there can be amazing history that is written by
#
people who are not properly trained, as long as they have the ability to digest large amounts
#
of information and present them in a fair manner, which many of them do.
#
So some of the favorite people of mine who have written past and present were not academics.
#
So I mentioned initially when I was talking about the favorite people that I have in the
#
English language were people who were travel writers, like journalists like Emily Han,
#
who were not academically trained at a graduate level.
#
And they wrote some of the most beautiful prose and they summarized developments both
#
historically and contemporary that they were experiencing in faraway places like the international
#
settlement in Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s.
#
So all of that cool stuff has always been happening and it continues to happen.
#
So if anybody wants to sort of take these letters or other letters and, you know, sort
#
of write their history, then I very much encourage them because there are no barriers now with
#
Of course, it's led to the flood of books and then it becomes difficult again in order
#
to create a type of readership.
#
But I do think if social media is used in a responsible manner, then one can create
#
one's own sort of one's own audience and cultivate that and, you know, sort of write.
#
And in fact, India's best-known historian Ramchandra Guha wasn't trained in history
#
I think people within academic history circles still resent him a little bit for that.
#
It's kind of interesting.
#
And a couple of the books on Nehru I quickly skimmed over recently before this episode
#
were by Shashi Tharoor and MJ Akbar and they again aren't trained historians.
#
I mean, of course, it's all secondary sources and whatever, but still, I mean, you can take
#
that historical material and, you know, build your narrative and all of that.
#
Our final question, I promise that would be the final question before we go to the book.
#
But a final question that occurs to me is that in the process of writing, what does
#
one do about writing voice?
#
Like writers often tend to have completely different voices.
#
And you know, the two of you are writing this.
#
So do you make a decision that only one of you write so you have a uniform voice?
#
But of course, I mean, the content is this thing or do you find some kind of medium ground?
#
Like I did an episode with Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah, who wrote in Service of the Republic.
#
And the moment I read two pages, it was immediate that, you know, the whole book is written
#
in a sense by Ajay, but obviously, it's the ideas of both of them.
#
And that's a conscious decision they made so that it's just one person's voice and
#
Ajay is a writer with enormous clarity.
#
So one, how did you guys get past that?
#
And two, respectively, what were your writing models?
#
You know, who were the writers you kind of look up to?
#
Like Adil, you mentioned these travel writers, obviously.
#
But in terms of doing a specific kind of work that you're doing, not just for this book,
#
but even, you know, your other work, who are the kind of models you look at over a period
#
of time and say that, OK, I want to write like this?
#
OK, so I would say that in order to develop one's own voice, which, you know, is possibly
#
the most difficult thing for me, the process has been that I was for the longest time was
#
trying to copy voices of people that I really admired.
#
And those people are not really part of the sort of conventional canon, but I still consider
#
them to be like the greatest writers of their time.
#
And even today, the first one that I would name is somebody like not somebody like but
#
I don't know if you've heard of him.
#
So he was part of the early romantic movement, but kept himself at a distance from both Worthworth
#
He was living in London.
#
So this is late 18th century London, which is becoming modern.
#
It's becoming urbanized.
#
And at the same time, people are just taking or many of the writers are just taking it
#
for granted or trying to find an escape, which is like this romantic idea of, you know, going
#
back to nature, going back to other things.
#
And what he does is he just writes about everyday life in a way that is trying to capture the
#
anomaly of what is happening around him and his voice.
#
I think I've yet to come across a writer who captures it in the same type of brilliance.
#
The other thing that I've always admired about him is that from the earliest time, he's enamored
#
Now, this is not like a specific trait to William Hazlett.
#
This is a trait that many others had as well.
#
So even somebody like Hegel in Germany was excited when Napoleon conquered Prussia in
#
And, you know, Hegel ran to Jena in order to see what he called the world's soul on
#
I've seen Napoleon riding by the Welsil, it's appeared.
#
But what William Hazlett does is that he's trying to write a biography of Napoleon throughout
#
And he manages to write it only towards the end of his life.
#
And he finally publishes it in four volumes.
#
And it is the opposite of a success.
#
He bankrupts the publisher.
#
So his publisher is bankrupted by, you know, his writing.
#
And it's just so fitting because everything else that he does that he considers like a
#
side project and, you know, sort of a newspaper column that he writes about Indian jugglers
#
who've come to London in order to perform, all of these stories are amazing.
#
And then one reads the Napoleon books and one just goes like, wow, it was the impossibility
#
of writing, of writing those books that allowed him to produce possibly the most magnificent
#
And once he did what he always intended to do, he produced a work that was good, but
#
not to the same extent as his other works were.
#
So I do think that one, at least for me, it was trying to copy the voice of these people.
#
And then finally, you know, one gradually develops one's own voice.
#
Now the part is that Thibaut Laman and I have a similar writing style in the sense that
#
we took a different turn at the post-modernism junction, which was the turn towards writing
#
with clarity and trying to express in the limited ways that we are, that it is possible
#
in the clearest language.
#
And I think that led to both of us writing in a similar, not in the same way.
#
I don't think that's ever possible, but in a similar way.
#
But we, you know, still write the individual sections by ourselves and then have the other
#
person sort of go over them and, you know, we both like, at least I very much trust Thibaut
#
So I'm more than happy to adopt the changes that he sort of gives to me.
#
And before I turn to Thibaut Laman for his, you know, his writing idols, before you started
#
on Hazelight, you said there were a number of people who you admire greatly.
#
So tell me a bit about some of the others.
#
So the second one is a German philosopher.
#
He's rather neglected because he was the last one of the German idealist tradition.
#
And funny enough, this morning I was reading on the Economist Daily app that one of his
#
descendants, the descendants of his cousin, I should say, bringing up a case to the Supreme
#
Court of the United States that has the entire art world trembling.
#
The name of the philosopher is Ernst Kassira, liberal guy, German Jew, had to flee Germany
#
when the Nazi party came to power, taught briefly at Yale, then went to Columbia for
#
a bit and wrote mainly on Kant, Immanuel Kant, that was his subject.
#
But he wrote topics about human nature, about the mythology of the state.
#
So The Myth of the State is possibly his most famous work that is known in the English speaking
#
He has a book called The Symbolic Philosophy.
#
So he was really into symbolisms and what they meant.
#
And he, despite being shunned when Germany philosophy took the turn to Heidegger, to
#
Martin Heidegger, who was his big opponent, there was two interpretations of Kant essentially.
#
One was the Heideggerian, one was the Kassira, German philosophers at the time thought was
#
too boring and old and conventional.
#
So they went with Heidegger.
#
But his writings are crystal clear.
#
They really encapsulate 200 years of the finest German Jewish thoughts that one can imagine.
#
And I'm kind of sad that he hasn't received any type of revival, despite all of his works
#
being in the philosophical domain and people are not working on him.
#
And I'm not even standing in the tradition of the type of liberal internationalism that
#
I still find him to be one of the most intellectually honest writers of his time.
#
And the case at the Supreme Court, just to sort of conclude this entire story, is about
#
And the picture was bought in the early 20th century.
#
And in 1926, it was inherited by a woman who later had to sell it to the Nazis in order
#
So in order to get the exit visa, the Nazi officials said that you have to sell us this
#
work of Camille Pissarro, who's an Impressionist, late 19th century French Impressionist.
#
And he painted this view of this road in Paris.
#
So she sold that picture for pittance, got the ticket out, went to the UK, where her
#
new husband, so this is no longer the cousin of Ernst Casirer, the philosopher that I was
#
talking about, but this is a guy called Otto Neubauer.
#
So he had gotten a professorship there.
#
So they moved to Oxford later on.
#
They moved to the United States.
#
She always tries to get the Pissarro back.
#
And in order to do that, she filed a claim in Germany with the U.S. military in order
#
to get stolen or lost art returned.
#
And her art piece is not found.
#
But in the meantime, somebody had smuggled it back to the United States and sold it there
#
Later on, it's acquired by the Thyssen Foundation, who sells it to the Spanish Crown.
#
Now the painting is in Madrid and they are trying to get it back because they say that
#
it was taken away from us and we should be allowed to claim it.
#
Now if that Supreme Court decision goes in favor of the Casiras, then that would mean
#
that every single piece of art where you can't prove that you've acted in good faith, which
#
is quite tough to do, could technically be returned to the original owner.
#
So that would shake up entire collections, entire museums.
#
I mean, it's hard to speculate of where the Supreme Court is going to go with this.
#
But it's definitely going to be one of the most exciting cases in this year.
#
What a story that would be the journey of that painting would just make for an incredible
#
There's so many different stands to it.
#
And I can imagine people, some nationalists listening to this might say that I hope the
#
Supreme Court judgment gives a painting back, we will then ask for the Koh-i-Noor back.
#
So I'll come at both of you for the end of the episode for more reading recommendations
#
because I have a feeling that Adil will get more out of you.
#
But Tripur Dhaman, before we kind of go to the break, when you embarked upon your writing
#
journey, the previous book, this one, the one before that, who are the writers you've
#
kind of admired and thought, huh, I want to be able to write like that and so on?
#
So I think in terms of history writing, the writer that I admire the most at the moment
#
would probably be someone like William Dalrymple, because here's someone who essentially is
#
able to transcend this distinction between travel writing, history, politics, with ease.
#
He's able to evoke the atmosphere and feelings of 18th and 19th century India in a way that
#
almost no one else can.
#
And that, I remember the first time I read one of his history books, I think the first
#
one I read was The Last Mughal or something.
#
And it kind of blew me away because here's someone writing actually mainly about the
#
siege of Delhi and then the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar.
#
But he makes it so exciting actually.
#
And I have worked on that subject for my PhD and my first book.
#
And most of the writing that I'd read, nothing actually that I'd read, came anywhere close
#
to being as interesting and as exciting as something written by Dalrymple.
#
So Dalrymple, I really, really admire for his ability to evoke the atmosphere about
#
the time and place that he's writing about.
#
And that's something that I always kind of really, really kept in mind.
#
And then I've also really admired theorists who are able to write with clarity, who are
#
able to really put forward complex ideas and make them intelligible to people who, like
#
me, haven't come from a background in law or political theory.
#
And for that, I've really admired people like someone like Sigmund Bauman, for example,
#
who is a very famous, actually was, he sadly died a few years ago, sociologist who wrote
#
And his writings again, they deal with very, very complex subjects.
#
But he's able to simplify it to an extent where, for me, it was always like, I agree
#
with a lot of his ideas, and my own ideas are very similar, but they were always garbled.
#
In a way, reading his books was like, you read and you go, aha, that is what actually
#
And here's someone who's able to make sense of it for me.
#
And I think most of my writing kind of tries to straddle both of those worlds in a way.
#
So I would say those are two big influences.
#
And others, I might add, I really like people like Barry Anderson, again, is the first time
#
I read, when I read Barry Anderson's essays, it was very early on in my sort of academic
#
and intellectual journey.
#
I think it was when he wrote these essays on there, it was around 2012 or something.
#
And it was for the first time where I realized I was like, yeah, actually, you can write
#
You can write something that's very critical, very scathing, without necessarily making
#
It's still something that you would read and you would engage with.
#
And it's an engagement that is fruitful and that gives you something.
#
So I think those are quite three kind of pretty big, big influences on my writing.
#
Apart from that, I've read a lot and I've always been drawn to kind of very fluid writing
#
So I think that kind of comes across in my own writing.
#
I think that's made it easy to work with Adeel as well, because as he said, we both have
#
similar sort of influences on our writing.
#
We've kind of missed the turn towards postmodernism and postcolonialism.
#
For both of us, the aim of our writing is to make things clearer and not to make it
#
more obscure or not to necessarily make it more convoluted than it needs to be.
#
And so that kind of really brings us to one page.
#
And each of us is happy to let the other read their stuff and edit it and change it around.
#
So by and large, our writing kind of fits together and that's how we worked on the chapters
#
You know, Adeel took the ones on Iqbal and Jinnah and I took the ones on Patel and Mukherjee.
#
But we were also very happy to then send it to the other person and say, look, you know,
#
why don't you edit, change it as you see fit?
#
That kind of working relationship really helped bring the book together.
#
In that way, our voices are similar and it also helps that we kind of have broad agreement
#
So we don't disagree on that much, which often makes it hard to write or to collaborate.
#
And yeah, all of that is to our advantage.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and when we get back, we'll dive straight into Nehru.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen, I'm chatting with Adil Hussain and Tripur Dhaman
#
Singh on their wonderful books about Nehru's intellectual dialogues or debates with four
#
interesting people on four really crucial questions that still have resonance in these
#
I want to start by asking about Nehru and the role of contingence in a sense and what
#
makes you what you are in terms of the things that you believe and all of that.
#
Like I recorded a couple of episodes on Mahatma Gandhi with Ram Guha and I've kind of been
#
a minor Gandhi buff in terms of reading a lot by him and of course a man contains multitudes.
#
But one of the things that you realize about Gandhi is that his influences are very different
#
from any of the other Indian freedom fighters in the sense he's not reading the British
#
Liberals and Mill and Bentham and all of that.
#
But instead he's reading Ruskin on the importance of village life which is where he gets those
#
views from even though as Guha points out he's not spent any time in a village until
#
that point and he's influenced by later Tolstoy which is all this vague spirituality kind
#
And looking at Nehru you see one that he's got a very privileged background, two he's
#
been to good public schools in England, he's got a great education but everywhere in his
#
education he's remarked upon as someone who hasn't brought any attention upon himself,
#
never showed signs that he would do much.
#
And his intellectual influences in that way are of the kind that you can almost predict
#
For example, Harold Lasky being a big influence on him and from that you can talk about the
#
post-independent direction India took and that kind of thinking on economics and all
#
So what is your sense of this?
#
On the one hand you can see that he's a very well read man, he's quoting things from memory
#
when he's sitting in prison, he has deep knowledge on a variety of subjects but at the same time
#
there are these strange kind of skews, not as noticeable as say in the case of Gandhi
#
who in Hind Swaraj which was written when he was in his forties rants against railways
#
and doctors and modernity in general.
#
So what is your sense of that?
#
Does a person become who he is because there are certain inherent parts to that person's
#
personality or do circumstances really make a big difference?
#
And I know it's a combination of both and the question also arises because in the case
#
of someone like Jinnah it seems to me that contingency played a huge part, that you know
#
Sirka 1918 he's a guy who's going to take over the Congress next, you know Tilak is
#
dead, Gokhale and Feroz Shah Mehta died recently, he is a last standing great moderate along
#
with Muthilal Nehru, he's going to lead the party, 1920 comes, Gandhi takes over the party
#
with what Jinnah regards I think correctly as an incoherent sort of association with
#
the Khilafat movement and then Jinnah goes off into this other direction and of course
#
we'll talk much more about Jinnah later but it seems to me that contingency played such
#
a huge role in that, you have a little bit of a counterfactual and say Gandhi doesn't
#
even appear on the scene and Jinnah is a different person and he's still in the Congress.
#
So what is your sense when you look at Nehru, when you look at characters of that time,
#
that one you have a limited pool of people that you're really picking from because very
#
few people have the kind of privilege that Nehru did to have that kind of education,
#
to Jinnah in a sense, so sorry it's a bit of a long-winded question but you get that
#
No, true, true, true, Nehru had a very privileged upbringing, he had a very privileged education,
#
he went to Harrow, he went to Cambridge, you're right that he, many people do disparagingly
#
say that he showed no promise, you know Perry Anderson very famously writes he got you know,
#
he had a third class degree from Cambridge and so on and so forth and he never made much
#
of a success of himself as a lawyer either but Nehru was, I mean Nehru had a great aesthetic,
#
you know sensibility, he was interested in literature, he was widely read, he developed
#
a very wide range of interests as well so you know he had some preconceived notions about
#
India when he came back etc but he was also very much willing to kind of explore and learn
#
and you'll see these through his debates as well.
#
He is both well-informed about stuff and you know equally interested in having conversations
#
about those things as well and you see this very openly in the conversation that he has
#
with Iqbal because it's ultimately a conversation about you know something that to a kind of
#
cosmopolitan like Nehru should be quite parochial, it's about like Muslim orthodoxy, Muslim Islamic
#
theology about which he is neither particularly well-informed or should have any great interest
#
in but he does enough you know that from Almora jail where he's locked up he's willing to
#
engage in this kind of quite long dialogue that he has with Iqbal over many months.
#
In terms of the counterfactual that you presented is interesting because you say if you know
#
if Gandhi doesn't appear you know Jinnah is a whole new man, I think you could also say
#
the same about Nehru because if Gandhi doesn't appear Nehru is also you know almost quite
#
certain to have not become the man he did because the hand of Gandhi behind it you know
#
In a sense Nehru was groomed almost prepared for the position, all of his political life
#
was really preparation for the top job, his father helped line him up for presidency of
#
the Congress and Gandhi helped tip him you know make his presidency a big success by
#
making him the president at the time because Motilal etc had been many people not just
#
Motilal but many others had been demanding you know demanding that the Congress go you
#
know pass a resolution raising the demand for complete independence, Poon Swaraj and
#
Gandhi kind of dimmers and says initially he doesn't want it but then he agrees that
#
if the British don't grant dominion status within a year then you know the Congress will
#
demand complete independence.
#
So Nehru is you know made president at a time that the Congress will raise the demand for
#
complete independence and that really kind of makes him into a pivotal figure because
#
you know he's the one who raises the Congress flag on 26th January 1930 and raises the demand
#
for complete independence.
#
So Nehru is in a way groomed for the top job by essentially the top people.
#
His intellectual influences are varied but when he first comes back to India from Britain
#
apart from you know you mentioned Lasky and he is you know he does kind of go in that
#
direction but when he comes to India he's very much on the lookout for intellectual
#
influences for someone to kind of intellectually explain India to him.
#
He goes and he you know he wants to discover it but he also really wants to be guided into
#
it and Gandhi ends up playing that role and even though Nehru doesn't agree with Gandhi
#
on many things and he you know often doesn't buy into a lot of Gandhi's fads, he very much
#
does look at Gandhi as guiding him into explaining Indian politics in a way.
#
So he some people would you know go a lot further again you know I mentioned here I
#
had mentioned Perry Anderson but also someone like Meghna Desai you know people like that
#
will often explain Nehru's relationship with Gandhi to be you know almost like a son to
#
a father where you know he's very much looking for someone to guide him along the political
#
path to explain the political path to him.
#
And so Gandhi's intellectual influence I think has always been understated.
#
It's overshadowed by the fact that Nehru repudiates Gandhi after independence once
#
executive power is within his grasp but he very much understands he seeks to understand
#
at least India through these people around him because he actually he doesn't have a
#
sense of organic engagement with with the real sort of bottom rung in the way that in
#
the way that many people have he hasn't lived there he you know he can't speak the language
#
well initially when he comes back his his sort of formative influences all come from
#
outside and so for him the engaging in these conversations with mainly with Gandhi but
#
also with others is an intellectual exercise that helps him form his own sort of conception
#
of India and of his role of his role in India.
#
Maybe maybe I can just add a little bit to what Tripodaman just said the the one thing
#
that I find very fascinating about Nehru is the very idea of how he sees himself almost
#
eternally even when he's taken hold of the congress party post independence and there's
#
hardly any opposition he still sees himself as a student both of history and of India
#
and that curiosity really drives him so he has an openness to ideas that is usually played
#
over by people saying that oh no he learned a little bit of communism while he was in
#
the UK and then he comes back and tries to oppose it you know try to impose it upon the
#
population regardless of what the cost so the people who usually take these sort of
#
take the first from from Cambridge those were the people who went back with a specific type
#
of confidence that they were sort of here in order to rule and they've had the best
#
concepts so maybe Nehru took away more from his Cambridge diploma than most other people
#
with better degrees or with better grades than him because he took away the idea that
#
he's going to be a student primarily and if he remains his curiosity intact then he can
#
open up to an entire continent that he doesn't have an immediate connection to and I do think
#
that that sets him apart of many of the other figures that we see in the nationalist moment
#
many of the other founding fathers so let's take somebody like Jinnah so Jinnah a lot
#
more successful excellent grades a lot more successful you know he comes back he's immediately
#
put in the position of in the imperial courts he immediately goes into dispute resolution
#
he has a law firm incredibly successful law firm makes a lot of money but for Jinnah he
#
would at a very deeper level understand himself as having understood India mainly through
#
the concepts that he studied and his success is a proof of that so he goes and engages
#
with much of the Muslim public in a more dominant way whereas Nehru goes to the public as a
#
student and says I'm going to be I'm going to be a student and you teach me and that
#
works out when he encounters somebody like Gandhi who says that I've been waiting for
#
a pupil finally you know I'm the guru and I'm going to explain you know how I see India
#
and this is my vision but when Nehru tries to do the same to somebody like Jinnah Jinnah
#
doesn't really know how to react to that he just says like you want you know what is there
#
to learn so why don't you just go back and do your homework I'm not going to be your
#
guide like I'm not going to play the role as a guide in trying to explain my vision
#
of India to you you should have known that by now and I do think that I admire the sort
#
of approach that Nehru takes because that's what you really want in a leader somebody
#
who's open to new influences regardless of what later happens but I think the basic sort
#
of point that Nehru sort of brings to the table is a very intriguing one.
#
Right so I'll move on to a question but before that an observation you know when Gandhi came
#
to India from South Africa he met up with his mentor GK Gokhale and whom he had long
#
admired that I think first met in 1894 in fact the first time they met they took a walk
#
on the lawns of my alma mater Ferguson College in Pune little bit of trivia but anyway so
#
in the mid 1910s Gandhi comes back meets Gokhale and Gokhale is kind of aghast he's also read
#
Hind Swaraj he says listen you know I like your attitude but you don't know India yet
#
so for one year I don't want you to take part in politics just go around the country and
#
immerse yourself in life and shortly after that Gokhale dies and Gandhi continues his
#
one year journey and for some reason he decides not to wear any footwear in honour of the
#
departed Gokhale I don't know where that logic came from.
#
So a question that I asked Ram Guha and I found his answer very illuminating the question
#
that I asked him was that Gandhi was wrong on so many things and that's partly because
#
of his influences were so limited and all of that but he was wrong on so many things
#
like his distrust of railways of doctors of modernity and this and that and many things
#
but he was right on the one big thing that really mattered at least in my eyes which
#
is the means being more important than the ends the whole notion of non-violence and
#
satyagraha and whatever you know on the big things he's someone you need to study and
#
learn from a lot of the small things he got completely wrong completely wrong but so why
#
Ram's answer was that that was because he learned that by doing because one after the
#
other in South Africa he went on the satyagrahas and they all failed he had half a success
#
right at the end which was enough of a face saver for him to come back and in a sense
#
they all failed in their proximate means but he really understood that because he learned
#
by doing the rest of the stuff he didn't know he just had you know random views that
#
he's got from wherever and the doing made him special and the doing came from actually
#
going out there among the people living among them being one of them so it is resonant to
#
me when you say that Nehru looking at him as a mentor he's you know been educated abroad
#
comes back wants to understand the country who is a better person than someone who's
#
actually going out there and living among the people so whatever else he teaches you
#
that's a great approach to pick up now my question is this like there is a duality that
#
I see to Nehru one is of course this openness this curiosity this flexibility you guys talk
#
about it in your book where you speak about how his thinking is instrumental as much as
#
ideational when you write quote you know his engagement with other political actors was
#
as instrumental as it was ideational as personal as it was public if Nehru the visionary was
#
an idealist when Nehru the political actor was as much a hard-nosed realist stop quote
#
and of course there are examples are given the book and elsewhere of how this is true
#
but at the same time the other side of his nature is that in many ways he seems extremely
#
rigid and hard-nosed to change his mind when he strongly believes in something the debates
#
with Patel on China are of course one example where he's completely wrong and he only realizes
#
it because something happens in the real world which shows him he is wrong which for many
#
of the other abstract debates would not necessarily have happened there are of course his famous
#
debates with Raja ji maybe you can expand on that in a future book his famous debates
#
on the free market with Raja ji where Nehru's got this association from 1920s onwards that
#
you know colonialism and capitalism go together so therefore markets are bad and always exploitative
#
and a zero something and that's his whole approach and his adherence to that top-down
#
thinking his adherence to social engineering to the extent that even you know in that last
#
section where you guys talk about the first amendment Nehru's talking in that eloquent
#
speech where he tries to get the first amendment through and is arguing for it where he talks
#
about how the you know social objectives matter rights don't matter so much right so my big
#
question here is that on a big question not a small matter of practical exigency but on
#
a big question where did Nehru change his mind like is my reading correct that as far
#
as a big ideological questions are there not only was he firm in his head about them and
#
arrogant that he knew the answers but he also would not listen to others like you see this
#
even in the debate in the section with Iqbal for example where a debate is happening and
#
you can see in Iqbal's reply this kind of patient explaining of the history and context
#
of Islam because he feels that Nehru is speaking from a place where he has no idea what he's
#
talking about at a very surface level which is the impression I think a reader would get
#
as well similarly when you know Jinnah berates him for being arrogant because Nehru is saying
#
there is no communal problem right and Jinnah is like listen you know there is you got to
#
be open to that you can't just condescend and say oh you these guys are talking about
#
a problem there's no problem so you know is this a view of Nehru you would largely agree
#
with or would you say that there are big instances where he did change his mind where you know
#
what would your response be?
#
I think one big issue where a shift is very discernible is Nehru's engagement with Islam
#
for example and partition and the kind of violence that is unleashed on partition really
#
does shake him up so even though it doesn't shake him up enough to change his kind of
#
views of religion per se it does really force him in a way to change his attitude towards
#
Muslims so you can see that he kind of makes an almost 180 degree sort of change from the
#
views that he's expressing when he's talking to Iqbal to the kind of views that he expounds
#
when the Indian constitution comes into force and when he kind of crafts what we now call
#
Indian secularism that is very much crafted on the idea that there are sort of separate
#
religious or cultural rights which need to be defended and he sort of is very happy to
#
let those kind of be embedded in the constitution and to allow Indian Muslims that space that
#
he believes they need in a way to kind of join the Indian mainstream so that is one
#
of the kind of big shifts in his thinking that does happen.
#
In the others I guess there are two ways of looking at it in one way he is rigid and his
#
ideas don't you know they don't shift easily he's also very good actually at not necessarily
#
expressing his ideas in very stark terms until he is in a position to make sure that they
#
prevail and that's one of the reasons why Nehru succeeds in kind of staying atop the
#
Congress hierarchy and someone like Bose fails is that Nehru never allows himself to be even
#
though he you know he is part of the Congress sort of left he never allows himself to be
#
placed in a position where he kind of becomes the figurehead of the radicals.
#
Nehru's ideas only really explicate themselves towards the latter part of his career and
#
that's because he is very conscious that he needs to maintain dialogue and engagement
#
with all spectrums of opinion to be able to keep himself aloft and that kind of that's
#
Bose kind of really loses he loses essentially to the Congress right there's the idea everyone
#
has is that Gandhi effectively dethrones Bose in 1938 which in a way he does but it's also
#
a consequence of Bose being unable to maintain working relationships with those on the Congress
#
right people like Tandon Patel so on and so forth and Nehru is actually very adept at
#
doing that of course it helps that he has Gandhi's blessing but he himself never really
#
positions you know when we say that the ideas are you know his debates are ideational and
#
instrumental in a way they are also about positioning himself vis-a-vis his contemporaries
#
and his opponents and so the big kind of positioning with his opponents with his colleagues someone
#
like Patel or Mukherjee only really happens around independence or after.
#
Before independence the kind of big arguments that happen are with the other side and there
#
even though Nehru is not may not be you know completely open to changing his views he is
#
willing to see how much kind of working ground can be found at least that's very much the
#
impression that I have unfortunately he's not kind of he doesn't really engage in enough
#
self-reflection to see where he is inhibiting the kind of appearance of any common working
#
ground but he is quite earnest in his desire to find it so that's where you know you have
#
to see that this engagement is both ideational and instrumental so at one level yes it's
#
a kind of ideological conversation at another level it's also a conversation that's very
#
practical there he's very much a practical politician he wants you know he wants things
#
to be noted down in points to say okay well you know out of ten points we have convergence
#
on three maybe that can you know give us space to work out some sort of common working program
#
or something to that extent so that's very much where where he's coming from and that's
#
also why you know I always say there's you know there's idealism and there's realism
#
because it's not it's not just a cerebral exchange it's also a very practical exchange
#
and yeah I think I think that's that's really the point that I would make.
#
And perhaps just to just to add to that I would say that there's a general shrinkage
#
of the political imagination that comes with the exercise of political power so I wouldn't
#
sort of single out Nehru and say that oh look at Nehru and you know why is he so I mean
#
if you have political power and you try to convince other people that you have the best
#
recipe to alleviate poverty and that's this socialism that you've that you've sort of
#
flashed out then that's what you're going to do you're going to come across a lot more
#
rigid it's no longer this sort of open student type relationship that he had within the in
#
the 20s and 30s but it comes with political power and I do think that political power
#
doesn't really lend itself to excellent thinking so once you carry a specific burden of course
#
you do no longer have the time and the attention span to actually focus and you sort of sit
#
down and evaluate all the positions carefully as you were in a time where political power
#
is wielded by somebody else the burden of governance is carried by somebody else those
#
are the great times of of thought and you see that not just with Nehru but bringing
#
in my own assessment of the political thought of Indian Muslims in the 19th century you
#
can really see that once the British take over Muslim political thought really springs
#
up and they start thinking about hey we just lost power but now we also have a space in
#
which we can think because when we when you're ruling you don't really have those spaces
#
of thought and I do think that Nehru sort of falls into that category.
#
The other thing that I wanted to remark is that once Nehru sort of identifies poverty
#
as being like this big issue that he tries to get rid of he really levels all of his
#
intellectual and political capital that he has behind that question and that could be
#
seen as a sign of sincerity like whatever else it is and it has catastrophic consequences
#
for the development of India as we all know because it stays arrested into that frame
#
of thinking for much of the 20th century when other countries are sort of taking off but
#
at least there's some type of sincerity that one can appreciate.
#
I feel at times it also you know and there are instances of that in this book where it's
#
also a good way for him to deflect talking about other issues that he does not want to
#
talk about like you know while talking to Jinnah he's like or even Iqbal you know at
#
different points he'll break into this whole thing of you know why are you stuck on the
#
communal question religion won't get you out of poverty we need to think about poverty
#
starvation blah blah and all of that and it's really a bit of a straw man because none of
#
those other gentlemen are saying that we should not do anything about poverty but it's just
#
a useful way for Nehru to kind of also deflect away from that and yeah Tripurthaman that's
#
really interesting and one area where he did change his mind and I noted this quote down
#
when I came across it in your book is when he's responding to Jinnah and of course like
#
you point out he's constantly asking Jinnah to itemize his grievances and Jinnah is saying
#
I'm not petitioning you you meet me in person I will tell you but eventually he does get
#
a sense of those grievances and one of them is personal laws and in response to that Nehru
#
writes quote as regards protection of culture the congress has declared his willingness
#
to embody this in the fundamental laws of the constitution it is also declared that
#
it does not wish to interfere in any way with the personal law of any community stop quote
#
and of course what happens in our early years is that congress in power and Nehru SPM does
#
interfere with the personal laws of one community which is a Hindu community with the Hindu
#
court bill which is still debated and the argument against that is that listen you know
#
if you have to interfere with personal laws then do it with everyone you know the right
#
to equality treat everyone equally why only us is there a sort of hardening against a
#
Hindu right as the years go by or was he you know not being entirely sincere when he wrote
#
these words to Jinnah in the you know in the 30s or would he have you know changed his
#
mind over a period of time and if so why to start from where Adil just finished there
#
was I mean Walter Crocker one of his biographers for example says the great majority of Indians
#
always had the feeling and they never really lost that you know Nehru was sincere and and
#
this sort of sincerity was very much part and parcel of both of his popularity and of
#
his of his engagement with people as well as far as personal laws go actually we can
#
say with a large degree of confidence Nehru was not really interested in religion he didn't
#
really think it was worth engaging with or it was a category of any importance and even
#
even the kind of cataclysm of partition doesn't really change his mind to that extent but
#
he does come to appreciate especially for for Indian Muslims the role that sort of religious
#
and cultural rights play and he's very conscious of the fact that he has to provide for there
#
to be a secular state it has to rest on the consent of of of India's Muslim minority and
#
he's very much willing to give that space that they really need for them to feel comfortable
#
and safe in in the new interior he's he's building as far as the Hindu right goes actually
#
Nehru really despises the Hindu right Walter Crocker calls it you know one of his pet peeves
#
actually he says Crocker goes as far as saying you know Hinduism is one of his pet peeves
#
along with you know poverty and the Maharajas and the feudals and so on and so forth so
#
Nehru really despises organized religion and the question of reforming Hindu law is
#
is something that's always really there he backs he does it to the furthest extent that
#
is possible without jeopardizing his his own position so he goes far but he again doesn't
#
go as far as as some of the more radical elements wanted or as far as someone like Ambedkar
#
wanted he doesn't do it for the Muslims for the simple reason that again these are all
#
sort of interconnected things he wants the state to be secular for the state to be secular
#
it really has to have a Muslim minority in India's claims to secularism because everyone
#
knows sociologically kind of the Indian state and the Congress itself before it rested on
#
Hindu society it was only the kind of ironclad backing of the vast majority of Hindus that
#
made the Congress so powerful an organization that it could say to you know someone like
#
Jinnah well we're not we're not willing to you know put all of these sort of concessions
#
that you that you want towards towards minority rights you know whether it was sort of more
#
power to the provinces or you know inclusion of weightage in terms of representation and
#
so on and so forth so for it very much for for the state to be secular very much needed
#
a Muslim minority for that Muslim minority to remain in India it very much needed to
#
be given the space that it need that that would you know make it feel safe and India
#
comfortable as a home and so Nehru was very conscious of that and he was very conscious
#
of giving them that space equally Nehru also wanted India to have a seat at the high table
#
he was a global statesman he had that stature it's a stature it's a position that he had
#
and it's a position that he prized very greatly and he had that position because he was a
#
Democrat because India was a secular state all of these things went into making Nehru
#
the global statesman and so those were also points that he that were very much at the
#
back of his mind that he to kind of retain that position of India as a kind of secular
#
democracy and you know his own position as a global statesman he needed India to be secular
#
he needed India's Muslim minority to be content and comfortable and so he's willing to in
#
a way create that space and that's that's that's basically it it's a very practical
#
question I'm sure you know personally Nehru really didn't have that much time for Muslim
#
orthodoxy either as you see with in his conversation with Iqbal but it's it's very much a very
#
practical decision that he has to take once as Adil says he has to once he's sitting
#
on in in a sort of executive chair decision making undergoes metamorphosis we were joking
#
before we started the interview about how many on the furthest sort of on the spectrum
#
that you could imagine of the Hindu right often call Modi Mulana Modi sorry it's and
#
it's a bit the same thing once you're sitting in in a kind of in in in the chair you decision
#
making ultimately does tend to involve a number of practical considerations and that was also
#
the case with Nehru and then aside I mean you've you've spoken in the book as well
#
about Nehru's sort of the importance that he gave his global image and you know one
#
reason that Indira Gandhi called of the emergency many people say is that she was concerned
#
that the rest of the world would lose respect for her the foreign press was writing bad
#
things she also wanted to be seen as a Democrat and of course she was but she thought she
#
would win so you know despite Sanjay Gandhi's misgivings she called it off and and thank
#
God for her delusions a last general question on Nehru emerging from what you just said
#
before we dive into his debates one by one is that you mentioned that he always despised
#
the Hindu right now you know just looking at the Congress many of the tall leaders if
#
not practically all the tall leaders with a couple of exceptions at that time were in
#
a sense people of the Hindu right within the Congress you know whether it's Patel or Prasad
#
or Malviya or Lal Bahadur Shastri and there's a very sort of telling demonstration of that
#
in a book called The Dark Knight co-authored by Dhirindra Jha which is about the placing
#
of the idol in the Babri Masjid in 49 or 50 or sometime like that and when that was done
#
and news went to Nehru Nehru immediately ordered his people that you know get the idol out
#
of there and they just refused I think Pant was CM of UP Lal Bahadur Shastri was Home
#
Minister of UP and they didn't and the idol stayed there and you see the repercussions
#
of that in modern times and you read narratives like that it almost seems that in a sense
#
he was not just a man apart but also a man alone that people believe different things
#
than him there are of course fascinating counterfactuals of what if someone else had been PM what if
#
Patel was PM or whatever you know Nehru at one point in 1950 when the Bangladesh stuff
#
was happening you know even wanted to quit at one point threatened to quit at one point
#
so what if he had done that so we don't know those counterfactuals so would you agree that
#
in a certain sense he was a man apart that what got him there like as much as he became
#
President of the Congress in 2930 because of Gandhi's insistence in Gandhi's force
#
that in a sense that catapulted him all the way to the Prime Ministership as well and
#
you know in 1929-30 of course it is generally sort of felt that Patel was you know the popular
#
choice at that point in time you know and in your book Nehru in fact gets angry with
#
Patel because you know why did you talk to this 50 MPs and you were apparently criticizing
#
me and Patel explains that listen they wanted to meet me once they asked me twice they asked
#
me thrice I couldn't say no you get the sense that in the rank and file of the party or
#
at least among its MPs Patel is a popular guy and Nehru is a man apart and in a sense
#
a man alone as well so what is your sense of this and how does this then shape the view
#
way that he views his work because I would imagine that if you feel alone where you are
#
that he nobody agrees with me and all these other tall guys you know feel so differently
#
that they can be self doubt in this case perhaps there was you know a more adversarial attitude
#
so what role does all of this play in you know Nehru's sinking?
#
I think it's very important actually yeah and again I talk about Crocker because Crocker
#
writes about this extensively in his book Nehru is a man alone not only and especially
#
after you know he is after Gandhi's death because Gandhi very much was a figure he could
#
approach for guidance for advice after Gandhi's death he really is alone and that's what Crocker
#
writes you know he's a man with really no friends and his kind of singular focus in
#
life is his work and by the time that Nehru's prime minister is especially once you get
#
to the latter part of his reign you know past 1955 he has no confidence he has no friends
#
so in some ways it's he's quite a sad sort of figure sad old lonely figure at that point
#
in his life and I assume that that that would kind of really feed into how you think and
#
how you perceive things he's he's very isolated he's very dependent on the few kind of people
#
around him for information and a lot of them are not really as you say as you mentioned
#
in the case of the Babri Masjid the appearance of the idols etc is that they're not reliable
#
and Nehru is Nehru had always been a bit a bit of an outlier that way because the Congress
#
as I said sociologically rested on on Hinduism it's and it's very interesting and it's now
#
become really unfashionable to talk about the growth of Indian nationalism and the Congress
#
in that way but the Congress grew very much through an engagement with with local politics
#
and that revolved around you know some you know temple agitations or kind of you know
#
getting agitations of a contract small-time contracts once municipal government became
#
a thing so it the Congress organization the rank-and-file very much came from those backgrounds
#
Nehru was unlike any of his colleagues either and even someone like Patel even though he
#
had gone and studied in Britain etc was not a being sophisticated cosmopolitan man like
#
like Nehru was and that's part of the reason that made Patel very appealing to to the rank-and-file
#
of the Congress was that he you know he he was one of them he was like them he came from
#
having worked as a lawyer and you know really worked his way up through the Congress hierarchy
#
by being Gandhi's foot soldier doing the admin and organizational work Nehru on the other
#
hand is is not really like that Nehru never really holds a job until he becomes Prime
#
Minister and he's also more in a way he appeals to the Indian public over the organization
#
there's a very revealing lecture that Krishna Menon once gave in Britain where he spoke
#
about Nehru's kind of way of relaxation you know it's it sounds funny now when you say
#
it and he and he says you know when Nehru wanted to relax he he went and gave a speech
#
to the crowd because nothing energized him as much as you know adoring crowds so Nehru
#
in that way was very much a man of the people and very much the heir to Gandhi's legacy
#
rather than the kind of man who held held Congress together and it's interesting that
#
people somehow assume that Nehru stole the Prime Minister from Patel actually Nehru became
#
Prime Minister because very cleverly after all of these people came out of jail Azad
#
had been Congress President for I don't know five or six years it was clear that the British
#
were going to leave Gandhi had Nehru made Congress President because you know that's
#
that was the that was the top job that's what would allow him really the kind of surest
#
shot for the top job and it did though it does Nehru is invited to be the Vice President
#
in Council to the Viceroy in the interim government and he's invited to be that by virtue of being
#
Congress President and so it he doesn't really steal it he is being lined up from for it
#
from from day one and Patel always has the possibility of saying no but he doesn't and
#
part of it is to is due to you know really his his loyalty to Gandhi but part of it I
#
think also is that Patel realizes that he's he doesn't have that kind of charisma and
#
popularity that that Nehru seems to everyone who meets Nehru is charmed by him everyone
#
kind of sees the effect that he has you know on crowds and how the Indian public really
#
adores him so you know he's that there's there's obviously really two sides two sides of looking
#
at that but he does make a very isolated figure as as Prime Minister and there's no doubt
#
about that as soon as and the more time goes on he the more ill-informed he gets as you
#
know many of his close friends and colleagues pass away the more isolated and lonely he
#
gets to to the extent that by the late 50s and early 60s even people are kind of openly
#
don't think you know they openly think he really doesn't have it in him to to continue
#
as Prime Minister but it's just by sheer force of personality because he's Nehru the man
#
who led the country to independence that he's still there and nobody can really dream of
#
By the way just just an a question as an aside since you mentioned the phrase the man who
#
led the country to independence you know there is a school of thought that holds that regardless
#
of the entire freedom struggle colonialism would have ended anyway it wasn't economically
#
feasible that you know the British were just so hammered by the Second World War that for
#
economic reasons they would just have left in any case so when you say that oh Gandhi
#
got us freedom and Nehru got us freedom or oh so and so you know that's a sort of a post
#
facto narrative that is not entirely false but also perhaps embellished by the victors
#
so what is what is your take on that.
#
No I think you're completely right I mean colonialism was going to collapse but crucially
#
it was going to end anyway right from the 1930s the British were openly declared that
#
actually Dominion status was was the end goal India was invited as a participant at the
#
discussions that drafted the statutes of Westminster which gave Dominion status to Australia New
#
Zealand Canada etc and South Africa so yeah that was very much the idea that was the idea
#
behind the government of India Act and if not now then maybe if not in 1947 maybe you
#
know it would have taken another 10 years but the British at that point were quite clear
#
that they were eventually going to leave and the the hold up even to the government of
#
India Act the reason that the central part of the Act didn't come into fruition was
#
not because the British didn't want a central legislature which is what was going to be
#
created but it was because the Indians couldn't agree on themselves among themselves as to
#
what they really wanted the central part of the government of India Act to look like the
#
princes couldn't agree on whether they wanted to whether they were agreeable to federating
#
with the with British India which is what again the British were trying to do and Indian
#
politicians themselves couldn't really agree on what the sort of mechanisms for representation
#
of the central level were were going to be as well so you know there was a lot of the
#
delay came up came about because of lack of agreement amongst crucial stakeholders in
#
in India now we kind of look over it and say well you know actually and this is again a
#
narrative that has come from the Congress that the Congress was essentially the representative
#
of the nation and everybody else was kind of an interloper who didn't really deserve
#
a seat at the table so power should have been handed over to the Congress that is one way
#
of looking at it and you know maybe the Congress did represent a large majority of opinion
#
in in India but it equally didn't represent all of it so I think there's considerable
#
force to the argument that actually colonialism was well well on its way out if it if not
#
1945 probably would have been 1955 but it's hard to imagine the British staying on any
#
longer than that maybe maybe just to jump in and add a couple of things the the first
#
is that people generally when they sort of look back at the founding fathers especially
#
but Dale etc they don't really see that despite anything there was a great amount of reform
#
mindedness amongst Hindus which has again seemingly disappeared in the latter parts
#
of the 20th century so many of the people who were sort of populating the Congress party
#
and who were active in Hindu movements were active in Hindu reform movements this is very
#
different from Hindi Orthodox institutions which try to uphold some ancient code that
#
they've distilled in in places like Banaras so these are people who are influenced more
#
by Punjab Gujarat and North Indian places than they are by some deep Brahmanical culture
#
which you know they seek to preserve so the reform mindedness was much easier to implement
#
for Nehru at that time than it would be for any leader regardless of how much a party
#
stands today all of these things seem impossible today so when we look back we are seeking
#
other people who may have given resistance to it but we don't really allow for a space
#
where there was agreement amongst large parts of the reform minded population amongst Hindus
#
which also thought to do away with many of the excesses that they saw in the personal
#
law that the British had granted to Hinduism and the second thing that I wanted to add
#
is that it was very much a dispute so Nehru does not just misread the communal question
#
but he also misreads the big political question and that is how sovereignty is passed on between
#
the British Raj and independent India now Jinnah the constitutionalist is much better
#
equipped so in order to see a specific form of continuation where he sees an act that
#
is implemented in Britain that gives sovereignty to India and then the question that Indian
#
politicians then have to engage with is how do they distribute how do they distribute
#
that and then for Jinnah of course it becomes a question of two nations that are distinct
#
and that therefore require specific assurances in order to operate or function under specific
#
form of governmentality of governance whereas for Nehru what he sees when he sees the constituent
#
assembly is essentially the birthing place of sovereignty so he sees the Indian constituent
#
assembly and he says we are giving birth to sovereignty itself and of course that leads
#
to his big dispute with Jinnah in 47 where Nehru says that all the assurances and all
#
the agreements that we have worked out the congress and the Muslim League can now be
#
changed by the constituent assembly because the constituent assembly is sovereign and
#
when something is sovereign they can do whatever they want and Jinnah is saying that I'm not
#
going to go into a constituent assembly if anything can happen because I need assurances
#
I represent a minority and then when the constituent assembly is finally called in what happens
#
is that the Muslim League boycotts it and for that reason because they say we don't
#
want to go and enter a debate where everything is up for grabs because that would leave us
#
that would leave us exposed to potential harm that could happen because we do not represent
#
the majority and if the majority disagrees with the tracts that we have signed in order
#
to secure our safety then we leave with nothing and then we can also no longer challenge it
#
but that's the essential crooks of this matter presented in a brutally broken down and simplistic
#
way but this is really where the moment of the birthing of Indian independence comes
#
into play and if one follows that narrative and says well yes it was this magical moment
#
that the constituent assembly suddenly birthed sovereignty and then created this wonderful
#
nation then one could run with that and one could run with Nehru's narrative and he becomes
#
this larger than life persona who led the Indian people against the struggle against
#
the colonial struggle into independence but the very sober story is that there was no
#
way that colonialism could have continued and I'm not just thinking about the economic
#
story which is one in many but also because globally there was no way that anybody could
#
legitimize colonialism in this raw manner as it was implemented in Britain over India
#
at that time so whereas we have pockets where colonialism tends to continue it's in a slightly
#
changed form as we see with the apartheid system in South Africa it's no longer this
#
sort of rigorous civilization mission colonialism that we had in Britain so that narrative has
#
died and it has died with the two world wars I mean where is European civilizational advantage
#
when you see them you know slaughtering themselves in two world wars so that story can no longer
#
be told in any credible manner so after the second world war and the decimation of European
#
states that civilization that civilizational narrative has died and that is what backed
#
up much of colonialism so it was clear that colonialism was going to disappear I think
#
there's very few people who would actually challenge that yeah I mean in a in a sense
#
it was clear that colonialism would disappear but in a sense it lives on like you know what
#
was a key quality of colonialism that people objected to it was the oppressive state and
#
we just took over at oppressive state and is there and but you know I've done an episode
#
on VP Menon for example how he you know helped Patel put you know get the union together
#
convince all the states and that whole process seems to me to be a kind of fast track colonialism
#
what the British did over hundreds of years you know Patel and Menon managed in a few
#
months or you know two or three years they kind of managed to do and I always feel you
#
know when I read that portion of our history I feel so uneasy over what it was done the
#
force the coercion the violence broken promises often so today I can you know sit and say
#
that hey I love my beautiful country but the point is there are you know people in Kashmir
#
or the northeast who would who would say that colonialism lives on so you know these are
#
complicated arguments that still carry on because you know the past never really dies
#
maybe just to add so when I said colonialism was dead in its classical form I meant as
#
racial superiority and civilizational superiority that argument died the concentration of executive
#
power and you know top-down state things that continues to today that I mean that's a that's
#
a bigger question if that will ever disappear or not absolutely so let's talk about the
#
first of the debates in your book which is really fascinating because there is this larger
#
question behind it now when I sort of read the history of that period and one thing I
#
constantly have to remind myself is to put aside the hindsight bias it is easy to look
#
at the history of India and think that oh India in the form that we know it always existed
#
but of course it did not it was an idea it was an idea that had to be given shape in
#
some sense Nehru's discovery of India was also an invention of India in a manner of
#
speaking this whole notion of India at that point was something abstract something up
#
in the air the notion of Islam was not you know Islam was a real thing history over hundreds
#
of years and one of the debates which I'd like you to kind of fill me in on a little
#
bit and how that debate evolved is on how you know Muslims in India see themselves like
#
you spoke about how after the British came they got the space to think about stuff and
#
all of that Iqbal himself writes about the evolution of Islam and how you know after
#
1799 which was a low point then you know there is a sort of a brave new wave of thinking
#
he points to Wahhab as being one of the people who started that but it seems to me that one
#
of the fundamental sort of conflicts that there must be in an Indian Muslim pre-independence
#
pre-India therefore is that what is your primary identity as such if you are to pick one of
#
the two is this India which doesn't exist this nationalism that you know Nehru keeps
#
talking about or is it Islam itself and is there this larger Islamic Ummah and you're
#
part of that and a nationality is just like a nation state is just happenstance of where
#
you happen to be geographically located but your actual allegiance is to this larger entity
#
and how is this playing out and this is one of the reasons I kind of think about Gandhi's
#
alliance with the Ali brothers for the Khilafat movement to be so weird and incoherent because
#
what the Ali brothers are asking for is a restoration of the caliphate and the larger
#
Islamic Ummah and what Gandhi of course wants is the smaller cause of nation India as an
#
independent country and it just seems that you know I mean obviously they come together
#
for political exigency and it's just a practical alliance which works out so well for Gandhi
#
but give me a sense of how within Islam that notion is kind of developing and you know
#
how is thought kind of developing along those lines like through the 19th century and you
#
know leading up to independence because really the debate between Iqbal and Nehru seems to
#
be a continuation of a larger debate right.
#
I'm trying to answer this is a big question but I'm trying to answer it backwards and
#
I go to the to the big moment in the early 20th century which is the Khilafat movement
#
so the Khilafat movement is a movement that appears in India where many Muslims rally
#
together and go onto the streets and say they want to preserve the Ottoman caliphate.
#
Now Indians and the Ottoman caliphate in general don't really have that much in common because
#
the Ottoman Empire expanded in different directions and therefore had no direct connection.
#
There were a couple of intermarriages between Muslim noblemen and the family of the Ottoman
#
ruler but by and large regular Indians didn't really didn't really converse about topics
#
that were happening in Turkey and here we're talking about the end of the First World War
#
where the Ottomans had joined the side of the Germans and are therefore now occupied
#
because they've lost the war and because they occupied Britain which is now the occupiers
#
thinking about splintering up the Ottoman Empire and also changing some of the structural
#
things that are happening in this country.
#
But Britain of course has always been very very of touching anything that has to do with
#
religion so they don't really think about doing away with the system of the caliphate
#
that is the system that had been in place under the Ottoman rulers.
#
But there's a big big big reform movement around Mustafa Kemal who's a Muslim nationalist
#
leader and like many Muslim nationalist leaders of the early 20th century he wants to change
#
One of the things that he wants to get rid of is the caliphate so he and the young Turks
#
which is the entire movement that is sort of gathered around him rebelling against the
#
what they see as an archaic system that is governing them and they seek modernity they
#
want to be governed with the Swiss civil code and they want to you know write in the alphabet
#
as the with the same alphabet with the Latin alphabet that the Europeans are using and
#
get rid of the the Arabic script and what really happens is that that message is received
#
in very different ways in India and it's received in a way as Britain interfering with religion.
#
Now because Britain is also ruling over India they think that well if they start meddling
#
with religion there it's not far that they will may start meddling with religion here.
#
And people who have become some type of spokesperson for the Muslim population are sort of going
#
out on the streets and saying that oh my god religion is in danger, Islam is in danger.
#
The Ummah which is this conceptual body of all Muslims regardless of where they live
#
is in danger of being splintered up by imperial forces and we have to prevent that.
#
And that's an odd thing because there's no immediate interest like there's a secondary
#
interest that this may also happen in India but there's no immediate interest for them
#
to do so and that's of course an idea that appeals to Gandhi.
#
He loves anything that is disinterested action.
#
So he says wow okay so you have a cause that is not related to you but you're doing it
#
in a sacrificial manner.
#
That's an argument that is beautifully outlined by Faisal Devji in his book on the impossible
#
Indian and book on Gandhi and he says okay you're doing that over there in Turkey which
#
has no connection and no immediate connection to what's happening in India so I'm going
#
And that's really the holy slash unholy alliance depending on where one stands on the development
#
in Indian history that happens between Gandhi and the Khilafat movement which leads to people
#
who are moderate like Muhammad Ali Jinnah who really joins the Muslim League and becomes
#
the leader there to not engage with this movement which they see as something unleashing forces
#
that can later on no longer be controlled.
#
So when we look at you know sort of that development we see that there's a specific form in which
#
emotions are aroused amongst many of the Muslims and may have been even though Jinnah doesn't
#
engage with it directly it's a technique that he goes on to use later on in the 1940s when
#
he's trying to whip up a specific support for the idea of Pakistan and Muslim separatism.
#
So if we go further back there's many other things that happen and that sort of inform
#
the debate that Nehru is having with Iqbal.
#
And one of the most interesting thing that I found about the debate that Iqbal is having
#
with Nehru is that the movement that they're discussing the Muslim reform movement that
#
they're discussing is a movement that is quintessentially Indian.
#
So it's born in Qadian as a man in the 19th century by the name of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
#
who claims to be a messiah.
#
So he says that I've come to reform Islam and I'm a messiah but I'm also a reformer
#
So I'm also coming as an avatar of Vishnu.
#
So I come in many faces and I bring all of these faiths together and we will start a
#
new great age like a millennial vision of sort of the future of humanity.
#
Now he receives very much like the Arya Samaj and other Hindu reform movement a type of
#
following that consists of many civil servants.
#
So these are people who have moved to cities who are now occupying positions of smallish
#
power but taken together they form essentially the cluster of people who can move big things
#
within the colonial apparatus and many of the people in his movement early adapters
#
to his movements like his ideas because his ideas say that hey we can adapt to modernity
#
in a better way we don't have to return to Islam as it was sort of written in the earlier
#
ages but we can you know sort of do new things with it you know sort of comply with British
#
colonialism it's one of his messages is that colonialism isn't all that bad as long as
#
we have religious freedom why should we really splinter away.
#
And people like Muhammad Iqbal are also taken by that movement so many of his family members
#
have very favorable views of what's happening and what's coming out of Qadian and Iqbal
#
is also never speaks out in any negative manner throughout his life apart from the 1930s when
#
suddenly he comes out with a couple of pamphlets where he's saying that we have to fight back
#
against the innovations that are happening within Islam's and that are sort of threatening
#
the specific the core of Islam to disappear and that puts him in a somewhat awkward position
#
because now he has to identify what the core of Islam is and that's a question that many
#
Muslim theologians have fought over hundreds and hundreds of years but Iqbal comes up with
#
a new answer to that old question and the new answer is that there's two elements that
#
constitute Muslim identity one of them being Tawheed which is the oneness of God okay monotheism
#
and all of that which may not come as a surprise the second one is which essentially means
#
that the prophethood of Muhammad peace be upon him is the last one so nothing can come
#
after that no direct form of communication can occur between the divine and humankind
#
Now that has always been an Islamic doctrine so Iqbal is not inventing it but he's putting
#
it on a pedestal of saying that this is the most important one and he centers his entire
#
political theory around that so later on the exact development of Iqbal's thought it's
#
something that I discuss again in my in my book but everything becomes geared around
#
that question and for Nehru when he comes into that debate and he sort of converses
#
with Iqbal over this topic he doesn't immediately understand the gravity of things because he
#
says well here's a reformer who's come with a new message and he's articulating
#
it he's not calling people to pick up arms and you know cause great damage to society
#
so what really is Iqbal's problem of writing so harshly against them and saying that they
#
should be excluded from Islam because they've adopted a new prophet and that's really where
#
it takes off so the debate between two of the biggest thinkers that we have in in India
#
in the 20th century really erupts over a smallish reform movement from Punjab.
#
This whole debate really was so incredibly fascinating for me and it's also fascinating
#
because it makes one think about nationalism because the debate is really about two things
#
about religion and about nationalism and you know at one point Iqbal writes and I'll quote
#
the student of history knows very well that Islam was born at a time when the old principles
#
of human unification such as blood relationship and throne culture were failing it therefore
#
finds the principle of human unification not in the blood and bones but in the mind of
#
man indeed a social message to mankind is deracialize yourself or perish by internecine
#
war it is no exaggeration to say that Islam looks askance at nature's race-building plans
#
and creates by means of his peculiar institutions an outlook which would counteract race-building
#
forces of nature stop quote and later he clarifies that what you know the objection that he has
#
to a particular kind of nationalism he sort of tries to break down what it means to him
#
and he says quote nationalism in the sense of love of one's country and even readiness
#
to die for its honor is a part of the Muslims faith it comes into conflict with Islam only
#
when it begins to play the role of a political concept and claims to be a principle of human
#
solidarity demanding that Islam should recede to the background of a mere private opinion
#
and cease to be a living factor in the national life stop quote and this is of course how
#
Nehru defines his nationalism per se that the nation state is everything the laws of
#
the nation state will be the laws that the citizens obey and religion is in your personal
#
domain and Iqbal is really saying that no you need to get a reality check society is
#
complex you can't just assume that society is a blank slate and put a state on top and
#
you know all of that we have to we have to take this into account you know and and the
#
first of the letters from Iqbal in that where he's responding to Nehru seems you know it
#
seems like he's patiently you know without saying it in so many words he's saying listen
#
you have no idea let me explain to you and then he goes into his notion of Islam which
#
is incredibly fascinating so one is that a sort of a correct summation or understanding
#
that you know of what Islam's core objection to Nehru's point was and two would you then
#
say that these views are completely incompatible that you know the way that it played out in
#
modern India is of course more based on Nehru's nationalism and I think we'd all kind of agree
#
with that kind of vision in the sense that you know religion recedes to the private space
#
but Nehru seems to take it to an extreme and imagine that it is not an issue at all you
#
know society is a blank slate so what are your sort of thoughts on that?
#
I mean just briefly to continue from the train of thought I'm so sorry I thought you finished
#
before no no no I had finished but then you know with your question it sort of opens up
#
in like 50 different dimensions the important thing is to again to look at the type of century
#
that we're in so in the 20th century the basic idea of the nation-state where the nation
#
is sort of united through the sort of Blut and Boden variety of Herder and the other
#
German philosophers where they say it's essentially about soil and you know ethnicity etc that
#
had all failed right so that has failed and quite miserably and what happens here is that
#
Iqbal the modern being the modernist that he is goes on to say that well if this type
#
of living together and constituting a nation doesn't work the only way it can work is through
#
any type of idea is in the realm of ideas where it's no longer something material that
#
can unite people but it's something spiritual that can unite people and here he moves on
#
and says that well Islam solves that problem for us so we can be a nation we can be together
#
and have that conception without falling into the same fallacy of saying that it must be
#
territory or it must be ethnicity or it must be language or it must be any of the other
#
factors that sort of European states had used in order to come to terms with their nationhood
#
and here I do feel that Nehru for Iqbal is making the mistake of not taking anything
#
else but it's at least taking territory as the idea of nationhood it's people who occupy
#
this specific land and they can belong to any group any ethnicity any religion but the
#
constitution will turn them into subjects and citizens of the Indian Republic and for
#
Iqbal that is a possibility so that could happen of course but he says that at a deeper
#
level people would always require more they would require sort of spiritual pondant and
#
that he sees being written out of the modern state practices that Nehru tries to implement
#
and he's pushing against that.
#
Iqbal says and this was so fascinating because I was learning so much and it gave me kind
#
of rabbit holes to go down at a later point in time and in one of them he talks a lot
#
about the three forces ruling Islam which need to be countered and he talks about you
#
know Mullahism where he talks about how Mullahs are extremely conservative would not allow
#
any freedom of Ijjihad that is you know the forming of independent judgment in matters
#
of law and so on he talks about mysticism where he says quote the masters of Islam was
#
fed by the kind of mysticism which blinked actualities innovated the people and kept
#
them steeped in all kinds of superstition stop quote and the third factor he talks
#
about is Muslim kings where he writes quote the gaze of Muslim kings was solely fixed
#
on their own dynastic interests and who as long as these were protected did not hesitate
#
to sell their countries to the highest bidders stop quote and he sees you know progress happening
#
against all three of those and one of those you know as he points out is materialism where
#
he says quote materialism is a bad weapon against religion but it is quite an effective
#
one against Mullah craft and Sufi craft which deliberately mystify the people with a view
#
to exploiting their ignorance and credibility the spirit of Islam is not afraid of its
#
contact with matter indeed the Quran says and now he's quoting forget not thy share
#
in the world stop quote and you also see this in the 20th century where reformers like Saeed
#
Ahmad Khan are you know setting up universities focusing on education and this makes me wonder
#
that whereas someone like Nehru you know his point of view would just have that one focus
#
how do we get independence right and how do we get rid of colonialism but for a Muslim
#
who's looking at Muslim society for example the focus is different the focus is on you
#
know as a society how do we progress as Muslims perhaps you know some might even say the British
#
Empire is a good thing because if they weren't there then we are outnumbered massively and
#
here at least on paper they treat us equally and in many places we are the elites and so
#
on and so forth so is there also a sort of tension here where Nehru has a uniform focus
#
you know which is the independence of India and as a secondary thing getting Indians out
#
of poverty and so on and so forth in fact I forget whether it was just one of them or
#
both of them but his response is to I think perhaps both of Jinnah and Iqbal in this book
#
kind of talk about that that people are poor you should be worried about that what is this
#
shit about you know taking religion so seriously so is this an issue that in a sense you know
#
they are coming at it from really different places like you know there's that old saying
#
about where you stand depends on where you sit so you know does that kind of become a
#
factor which means that the dialogue and lightening as it is for people like me reading it after
#
so many decades doesn't achieve anything because they are talking at cross purposes.
#
Just to connect this point to a sort of broader point which is to say that minorities have
#
always fared better under imperial conditions than they have under the nation state because
#
the nation state logic is something that doesn't really deal well with small numbers and they
#
very quickly can be turned into internal enemies that then have to be pushed out of the borders
#
which explains many of the big movements that happened when the nation states were implemented
#
around the world in the 19th and 20th century mass movements of people being driven out
#
of their of their lands and essentially the minority question is a modern question so
#
when we start thinking about what a minority is it's a modern question so for Muslims once
#
they understood in the early 20th century that in any democratic republic that they
#
would be participants in they would be in a permanent minority things for them started
#
to look very very different than for somebody like Nehru for Nehru the important you essentially
#
summarized it so beautifully that I don't even know if I should add much more but essentially
#
his big problem was independence whereas the big question for Jinnah wasn't independence
#
that was a given that it was going to come but it was safeguards what are the constitutional
#
safeguards that you can give me you who speak for the majority that I know that my people
#
will be safe and these are very fundamentally different questions and that changes their
#
in the entirety of the outlook an interesting aspect of you know that chapter where he's
#
talking about Iqbal is talking about the Ahmadiyyas and his objection to them and one of the
#
ways in which he states it is he talks about the pre-Islam situation where you know essentially
#
you would have different dispensations in power at a different at different points in
#
time and what he terms as one religious adventurer would come and everybody would follow him
#
and then another religious adventurer would come and everybody would follow him and it
#
would you know that's kind of what was happening and therefore he gives that particular tenet
#
of Islam so much importance he calls it world-changing that there is a prophet and he's a last prophet
#
so that's an end to religious adventurers you have a continuity there and along that
#
line you can proceed and in fact you know the definition you pointed out that there
#
is only you know those two aspects there is only one god and there was a last prophet
#
and there will be no others and he says that anyone who accepts these two is a Muslim and
#
then within that you can go in different directions you can have arguments on different things
#
these two are the only fundamental things and of course the Ahmadiyyas fail on the second
#
count where they say that no I'm not just an avatar of Vishnu I'm also your prophet
#
and so on but I was struck here by the phrase that he used for those pre-maginistic times
#
as it were the phrase being religious adventurer and could it be the case that in a sense in
#
a manner of speaking Iqbal could have looked at something like Nehru as also a religious
#
adventurer like of course he's an atheist and he's secular and all of that but he's
#
also coming with an ideology with its own dogmas with its own certainties and all of
#
that and therefore Nehru is in a sense you know and I'm just thinking aloud as much of
#
a threat as you know the Ahmadiyyas are that nationalism is as much of a threat therefore
#
to Islam as a breakaway sect or a reformist movement could be.
#
For a believer the big difference of course would be the difference between revelation
#
and rationality with revelation being something that trumps everything that is unchangeable
#
and that is eternal so once you have somebody who comes and says that I've received this
#
as eternal wisdom directly from the divine there's no debate that is that is to be had
#
so I don't think he would really classify Nehru in that category because whatever Nehru
#
does wherever his socialism comes from it's not a revelation but he's basing it on rationality
#
saying that hey here I have specific economic reforms that we can implement and once we've
#
implemented them you know there's going to be good things that will come out of it we
#
will alleviate poverty we will make and then of course all of the all of the promises that
#
he makes but he has to make these promises you don't have to make these promises when
#
you receive revelation then the conversation is a very different one then then you come
#
with commandments then you say this is how it's going to be right like like Moses of
#
course and other other other prophets but so Iqbal is very fearful of having that type
#
of pre-modern thinking still prevalent in Islam because he sees it purged with the arrival
#
of the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him because he says now it's finished so it's
#
it's done and now what we can do is only use rationality so we agree on the medium of exchange
#
which is rationality and within that Nehru's opinion despite his atheism comes as but one
#
other truth that you have to engage with and that you have to construct but that you can
#
also deconstruct whereas a revelation cannot be easily deconstructed in that way and that's
#
really Iqbal's big problem with the as he called it the prophet of Qadian who comes
#
and says that oh these are messages that I've just received from God and Iqbal says now
#
there's no other engagement that I can have with these because it's eternal it has to
#
be true so the only thing is that I can say that no this is false and I can push it back
#
and I can exclude it from the Islam that I consider traditional and open to modernity
#
but with Nehru he can very well engage and this is what he does right so he actually
#
engages with him it's an engagement that he doesn't have with members of the Ahmadiyya
#
community many of which are his personal friends but he doesn't have that long conversation
#
with them but he has it still with Nehru because he thinks that his opinion is still based
#
That's a great point and I agree with you but I would also point out that I think modern
#
humans often tend to mistake rationalization for rationality you could equally say that
#
hey Nehru got a revelation from Lasky or Nehru got a revelation from so and so but he instead
#
couched it in rational language and said this is how society should be ordered for the good
#
of blah blah blah without perhaps knowing himself that that's kind of what he was doing
#
but leaving that aside I mean the entire debate was really fascinating and what's interesting
#
is that you point out that in a sense both of them were proved wrong so can you elaborate
#
on that a little bit I found that so fascinating that it's such an enriching debate firstly
#
and if you come from each person's priors you kind of have to agree with them and yet
#
so there's a lot of truth in what they both say but they were both kind of proved wrong
#
by history let's elaborate on that a bit.
#
The first thing is of course that Nehru is right because he says that once we adopt the
#
view that Iqbal is proposing the state ends up just trying to prosecute people who've
#
blasphemed so the state is just put in a very awkward position where it has to sort of constantly
#
go after people who are violating any type of eternal law.
#
So the important thing here that I forgot to mention earlier is that Iqbal is pushing
#
the crowns of the colonial state in order to implement constitutional reforms for the
#
exclusion of Ahmadis so he's not just saying is that they should be excluded from Islam
#
and that's a critical point but he's saying that modern state structure should come in
#
and exclude them for us so it should be written down in the constitution that these people
#
cannot call themselves Muslim it's a very big change and Nehru of course says that well
#
that would mean intervention of the state into religion which is something that Indians
#
have fought very hard for that it wouldn't happen and it's one of the spaces that Indian
#
had relative freedom to express themselves one of the reasons that so many reformist
#
movements are popping up in India in the late 19th century is because this space is fairly
#
unregulated and people can still go out and express themselves which they can't in the
#
political sphere because there's a fear that they will be slapped with sedition charges.
#
So Nehru is of course right if we look at Pakistan for instance which is a state which
#
is repeatedly put in a position where it has to prosecute people for blasphemous issues
#
and they come or the judges come in the difficulty that they have to revert back to a precedent
#
which they don't really have so then they have to enter Sharia law and then they have
#
to bring up arguments in order to say why what has happened accounts for blasphemy which
#
is difficult for a state structure to do because these are essentially theological questions.
#
On the other hand we also see that with the rise of the BJP in India where blasphemy has
#
now started to become a thing again which it wasn't for much of the say from the 50s
#
to throughout the 80s so Nehru was very perceptive and correct in his assessment that once we
#
open this Pandora's box where we allow the state to take over essentially theological
#
questions it's very it very quickly spills over into violence and purges and much of
#
the things that we now see in happening in Pakistan and in India and Iqbal was correct
#
that in a sense if one doesn't protect anything within a religion but exposes it entirely
#
against the sort of modern backdrop of progress and transformation then it's very easy that
#
one loses the core and has nothing that remains through which one can unite people so in a
#
sense what happens is that the Nehruvianism which was not rooted within anything specifically
#
Indian but it took its cues from many things that were imported from the outside and you
#
know if you want to be very blasphemous Amit as you were earlier you would say they came
#
from state as a revelation from Laski into into the Nehruvian thought but if you want
#
to go down that route then it becomes clear that such that such a construction will always
#
lead to a backlash a nativist backlash and then you could make the argument in order
#
to support Iqbal's case that if Nehru would have been more open towards the religious
#
forces and accommodated them better then it wouldn't have led to the sort of nativist
#
backlash that we've seen with the BJP and the Hindu right because he would have been
#
able to bring both of them together so it's interesting because both of these thinkers
#
say something that is truthful but at the same time both of the visions you know taken
#
taken apart lead to these very sort of different consequences yeah because the world is complex
#
and there are multitudes and everything let's talk about Jinnah now now one there is of
#
course you know we discuss the you know the accidents of happenstance which we often say
#
where you stand depends on where you sit and again they sat in really different places
#
because of events and Gandhi had a lot to do with that and we've sort of discussed that
#
I read the letters that you reproduced and one of the interesting things there is I'm
#
just trying to put myself in Jinnah's mind that here is a guy who you know a couple of
#
decades before this was a leading light of the Congress and expected to take it over
#
and now he's having to talk with a guy who was just a kid then who has what he might
#
consider to be simplistic notions who is a follower of a man he really doesn't like which
#
is Gandhi who basically cut his ticket in the party and this guy is lecturing to him
#
that hey the Congress does this Congress does that I am so generous so I will speak to you
#
and we will discuss it and there is that kind of dynamic which is really interesting and
#
what also strikes me in the letters is that Nehru is you know trying so hard to be gracious
#
in the sense of tell me what your problems are listen let's talk about them I want to
#
talk I want to meet I want to do all of that and Jinnah initially in the exchange is just
#
like no no it's you know I'm not going to do this over a letter I'm not a petitioner
#
we have to meet in person and so on and so forth and he's just basically being difficult
#
and Nehru is saying no tell me tell me tell me what you want and you know we'll discuss
#
about them bit by bit and then Jinnah eventually alludes to it and he puts a couple of articles
#
out there and you know one of them has these eight points he alludes to a 14 point program
#
and then Nehru really gets into the weeds and kind of starts talking about it so one
#
what were the principle differences and two was the argument really in good faith on either
#
side maybe I can just come in on that question briefly before I'm sure Triputaman has stuff
#
to add on this as well but the main way in which Jinnah is reconstructed in much of the
#
in much of historical books regardless if they happen to be scholarly accounts or not
#
and regardless if they if they are very fond of what of Jinnah as a politician or antagonistic
#
to Jinnah as a politician one of the things that everybody agrees upon is that Jinnah
#
approached the entire debate that happened at the eve of independence between the Congress
#
and the Muslim League as a hard-nosed constitutional lawyer showing no emotions and being completely
#
almost detached from the topic that he was arguing and then the sort of basic thinking
#
goes that Jinnah has always been like an amazing lawyer and he's always fought cases and you
#
know one of the ways in which you fight cases even in things that you don't believe in is
#
to just argue the best possible case for your client Pakistan being the client Jinnah being
#
you know the person that has grown larger in statue simply because it's just reflective
#
of the sort of bigger movement that is kind of behind him and I've always found that very
#
troubling because there must have been an emotional side to that man as well and that
#
emotional side is very easily easily to discover when we see his sort of love marriage that
#
he has with a with a Barthi Barthi woman that we see on the way in which he tries to cultivate
#
his personal relationships so clearly there is this emotional dimension that nobody really
#
wants to engage with and simply do away with Jinnah as a constitutional lawyer you know
#
arguing bickering over point one point two point three so part of the reason we selected
#
this conversation because we could have also selected other conversation that he's having
#
with Nehru in the in the in the in the 40s is to show that it is not Jinnah who's the
#
person who's bringing up point one point B and point two and point three and you know
#
paragraph six but it's actually Nehru who's the one that oh we have a debate here so let's
#
just you know structure it in this legalistic manner and then let's try to solve it whereas
#
Jinnah says that this is not a legal question this is not a constitutional question this
#
is a question of minorities and majorities this is a question of democracy and these
#
questions cannot be solved through simplistic legalistic thinking and the moment that Jinnah
#
sort of transcends the law and the constitution I think we get a much better picture of him
#
as a person of him as a thinker and of him contributing to the emergence of the two nation
#
states because inadvertently he gave birth to both India and Pakistan because otherwise
#
it's conceptually not possible but the main purpose of bringing in these lectures was
#
to show that there's the larger sort of human side to Jinnah that of course there is it
#
just boggles my mind that for seven decades it's just this one figure who as I read in
#
a recent biography cried only once when his wife died so once he's never done it otherwise
#
because clearly otherwise the biographer would have known so the very assumption that these
#
historians had who wrote about Jinnah is for me just violates like common sense and as
#
a first sort of contribution we wanted to bring in that debate in order to open it up
#
and say like hey who's he as a person and can he be a person that thinks beyond the
#
law and that is not tied down by the law.
#
Yeah and just to just to kind of briefly jump in after Adil it's also important to remember
#
the backdrop to this conversation so one of course is as you mentioned putting yourself
#
in Jinnah's shoes you know you're the big leader who essentially has the Congress taken
#
away from him and you know he has an upstart who isn't particularly well qualified hasn't
#
really doesn't really have any achievement to his name is young is also the son of someone
#
who had been your colleague you know Moti Lal and Jinnah had very much been colleagues
#
and so for that for Jinnah is also in a way you know coming up against a brash upstart
#
and he you know anybody would sort of bristle a bit at that point but equally there's the
#
political backdrop which is you know as important if not more important than the sort of personal
#
relationship which is that there have been elections in the provinces under the Government
#
of India Act Congress has won mostly but in UP where the Congress has won there has been
#
a proposal to have a coalition ministry which Azad has gone and set up and the Muslim League
#
is eager to enter and then Nehru basically torpedoes the proposal by going and saying
#
well you know why don't the party wind up and just join the Congress why should there
#
be a coalition so essentially that proposal is torpedoed Nehru is also the brains behind
#
what comes up as the Muslim outreach program that the Congress launches and for which it
#
actually piggybacks a lot and a lot more so than Jinnah on the Muslim clergy on the on
#
the sort of Deobandi clergy who they wish to use as a sort of conduit to Muslim public
#
opinion and so ultimately of course that drive fails and you know the rest is history as
#
we know but so those are two very very important political backdrops and so this conversation
#
is happening at the time where Jinnah basically feels that Nehru and the Congress are also
#
mounting a sort of effort in a way to kind of existentially challenge the Muslim League
#
and in a way that also threatens Muslim political rights because once you accept the argument
#
that the Congress effectively speaks for all Indians so it's the only it's the only kind
#
of legitimate body to which the colonial state can transfer power it is to accept the argument
#
that the Muslims do not require these sort of mechanisms to protect their political rights
#
and equally for personally for Jinnah it's it's it would mean accepting redundancy which
#
neither he nor the Muslim League at that point are willing to accept and so I think a lot
#
of the kind of icy tone that this conversation carries almost where you feel that they're
#
talking across purposes comes from the fact that there is at that point an existential
#
threat for the Muslim League from from the Congress and that's even though it's not
#
really it's never really talked about explicitly in those terms that very much informs where
#
the two men are coming from because for Nehru the Muslim League what the elections have
#
demonstrated is that the Muslim League is a spent force that it doesn't really have
#
that much political relevance so you know why you know why should they really be treated
#
in a way as a sort of equals at a bargaining table and for Jinnah the idea is that well
#
if you can you know go back on your word as you've done in UP that's what will happen
#
in democracy is that you know you'll say well we don't need you you know go and sit in a
#
corner or do as you're told then how can essentially can can Muslim political rights be guaranteed
#
in in a democracy where the Congress will always hold the whip hand structurally hold
#
the whip hand so that political backdrop really really informs this conversation and it's
#
worth it's worth really keeping in mind as well.
#
In your book you've also mentioned for example the 1937 provincial elections which of course
#
was a big win for the Congress but not so much for Jinnah where you're right court Jinnah
#
suffered a crushing defeat his All India Muslim League secured less than 5% of the Muslim
#
vote although the slim vote share amounted to some 108 seats from 485 reserved for Muslims
#
under the communal award Jinnah had failed to move voters in Punjab and Bengal with his
#
plea that Indian Muslims had to stand under the political flag of a single party and he
#
scored seats primarily in Muslim minority areas in Bengal Muslim voters flocked to the
#
local Krishak Praja party in Punjab they resorted to Sikandar Hayat Khan's unionist party in
#
droves both the Muslim League and the Congress had failed to make significant inroads to
#
Muslim voters and and therefore the question is that you know at one level of course you
#
know Jinnah leaves the Congress because he's just pissed off at what the hell is happening
#
Gandhi and Khilafat and this upstart Jawahar and all of that so he quits and then he goes
#
in this other direction and you wonder whether it is happenstance upon happenstance in the
#
sense that once he has locked himself into this position where he's part of the Muslim
#
League and he's fighting for Pakistan the rest of his life in a sense regardless of
#
what he believes really becomes this legalistic battle to ensure this one outcome whether
#
or not he actually has the people with him because he's not in that sense a man of the
#
masses I mean the other big change that kind of happens with Gandhi's emergence is that
#
the nationalistic movement actually becomes a national movement with leaders like Gandhi
#
and then his acolytes like you know Patel and Nehru being able to gather large crowds
#
and becoming mass leaders which Jinnah really wasn't and so one can understand sort of Nehru's
#
frustration with that like at one point you know in this section he also talks about how
#
this is really an upper-class thing this whole communal problem is an upper-class thing and
#
there's nothing really down there to what extent is this true like how representative
#
were Jinnah's views of what Muslims in India actually felt and even if the causation didn't
#
come that way did it begin to go the other way did his stances and the stances of the
#
Muslim League kind of move it in a slightly different direction.
#
I mean speaking simply from the elections that happened yes he grasped the spirit of
#
the vast Muslim population because otherwise he wouldn't have gained the majority that
#
he does later on so the insult that Nehru is sort of levelling against Jinnah saying
#
that this is purely like an upper-class elite problem and that doesn't really affect the
#
agriculture and workers which make up the majority of the Indian population it's tied
#
to the history of the Muslim League the Muslim League is an association that is primarily
#
funded and that is created by Muslim noblemen and you know taluk dars of the UP and people
#
like the Aga Khan so these are the people who sort of come together and constitute this
#
but on the other hand when we look at Sikandar Hayat and we look at the Punjab agricultural
#
parties these are also feudal organizations these are not organizations of the common
#
man and the common agriculturist sort of casting their vote freely but these are big landholders
#
that have essentially monopolized over vast trajectories over the Punjab and that control
#
the vote so it's with the death of a big leader of that party Sikandar Hayat himself that
#
essentially Jinnah can swoop in so as opposed to thinking of Jinnah as you know getting
#
the political question wrong he gets something really right and that is that he doesn't believe
#
that this feudalism is going to continue so therefore I would say that Jinnah actually
#
reads something into the Muslim population which Nehru neglects and that is that there
#
is a fear that majoritarian rule will hollow out any type of advantages that they can make
#
in a free democracy and that is a fear as Tripu Duman just pointed out that is further
#
stoked when Nehru refuses to bring in people from the Muslim League when he's formulating
#
his cabinet which of course objectively he should have done like there's no excuse for
#
that so even the biggest sort of fan of Nehru here has to say that that was just a big big
#
big blunder because that could have taken out the sail from the the wind from the sail
#
of the Muslim League because once he would have accommodated the Muslim League properly
#
he would have shown goodwill that this is a potential constellation through which united
#
India could be run and by shunning that of course he gives away that possibility and
#
then with the death of some of the big feudal leaders of course the Punjab is completely
#
opened up and you know stands behind Jinnah and his project.
#
Just to and sort of just to add it's actually not just as Adil says it is a mistake to kind
#
of spurn that offer of a coalition especially after Azad agrees to it and but it's also
#
the launching of this sort of Muslim outreach program which really stokes which really kind
#
of essentially really irks the Muslim League because it it's a bit like okay you know now
#
we're going to go for the jugular you haven't won any seats let's see if we can wipe the
#
party out altogether and that causes it brings about this odd alliance with a very orthodox
#
sort of Muslim clergy with the with the Jamaat that that between the Congress and the Jamaat
#
on whom essentially because the Congress doesn't really have Muslim leaders there's a handful
#
and you know Azad is the most prominent among them and Jinnah you know derides him as a
#
Congress showboy so for for this sort of Muslim outreach program Muslim mass contact program
#
that you know narrows the driving force behind they latch on to the Jamaat creating a kind
#
of very strange alliance really between this sort of organized supposedly secular Congress
#
party and this kind of Islamist this sort of Islamist Jamaat on whom the Congress really
#
wants to depend to to really you know move into the Muslim masses and wean them away
#
from the Muslim League and this in itself also creates a kind of backlash because actually
#
it turns out most Muslims do not really want to be associated with the Congress and it
#
kind of spurs the Muslim League to really embrace this kind of this sort of mass mass
#
politics as well and partly I know a lot of people including Adil disagree with the arguments
#
presented by Venkat Dhulipala in in his book but there is there is little doubting that
#
actually the sort of misguided Congress attempt to kind of ride on the coattails of the Jamaat
#
to to you know kind of mount an existential battle against the Muslim League really backfires
#
because it essentially provokes the Muslim League to to kind of take the battle to the
#
people in a way that it hadn't before.
#
Yeah and the Venkat Dhulipala book of course is in search of a new Medina which is also
#
interesting I'll link that from the show notes there are historians who contend that the
#
Quit India movement was a blunder from the Congress because the entire Congress ended
#
up in jail and you know in those years and the Muslim League really strengthened itself
#
and while it was an insignificant force before that you know by the time you know the war
#
ended and all the pieces fell where they were the Muslim League were at the table they were
#
big players again and partition may not have happened that Quit India with some kind of
#
blunder had not happened.
#
What's your take on that as an aside I mean I know it's not relevant to the book at all.
#
I know that Triputaman has a passion for what if history so I'll let him answer that one.
#
So I mean well not just me many figures including Nehru thought Quit India was a blunder Nehru
#
Some like Raj Gopalchari actually defied Gandhi to say well he was going to support the government
#
and at that point actually it was a blunder a because of course as you say this the Congress
#
got crushed etc. but also because it didn't really reflect it allowed the it kind of gave
#
a very easy sort of excuse because once the British were locked in a kind of existential
#
struggle against the Axis powers it made very little sense really to kind of mount this
#
kind of movement because there was broad support even within the Congress especially amongst
#
the sort of Congress radical wing there was broad support for the war effort because everyone
#
saw that it was a kind of global struggle against fascism and so it didn't really it
#
didn't achieve much but beyond that it also what it did was it made it was very violent
#
there were riots there's destruction of government property etc. and what it did was that it
#
made the situation far worse once the war ended not just because the leaders had been
#
jailed but also because political action had sort of really shifted gears into this sort
#
of quite riotous activity and actually I'd perhaps go even a step further I would say
#
even the non-cooperation movement was actually a blunder it achieved nothing a lot more would
#
have been achieved if the Congress had gone to the roundtable conferences and shaped the
#
formation of the Government of India Act rather than simply saying well we're going to continue
#
to to boycott it so yeah I mean that's that's essentially my argument and just to add to
#
that so we've mentioned a number of scholarly books there's another one that has really
#
impressed me it's written from the ground up by one of the early organizers and founders
#
of one of the Congress chapters in the late 19th century 80 80 I think is when he creates
#
the first chapter is a guy called Swami Shradhanand he later becomes famous as the sort of Hindu
#
monk and then he disagrees with Gandhi over non-cooperation and he disagrees fundamentally
#
over the Congress treatment of Muslims not because he's anti-Muslim but because he thinks
#
that this is not a way to include people into the party and he speaks about all types of
#
perks that Muslims are given in the different Indian National Congress meetings that happen
#
and that he of course partly organizes partly participates in and he sort of follows that
#
trajectory because he lives I think he passes away in 1926 or something but he really sees
#
the development of the Congress party like from the beginning to the very end and he
#
has two chapters on this and they're fantastic because he's writing it as he sees it and
#
of course he's later one of the one of the people one of the few I think Hindus sannyasis
#
who speaks at the Jama Masjid and manages to unite Hindus and Muslims in a number of
#
efforts but essentially like his disagreement with Gandhi also comes over non-cooperation
#
and over a very basic matter of the burning of cloth of foreign cloth that Gandhi is propagating
#
and he just says that we have so many people who are literally walking around without proper
#
clothing and we are here deciding to burn them up in big piles because we want to send
#
a political message so the radical wing of the Congress party of which Gandhi of course
#
is a member always had that sort of backdrop of a more rationalistic set of ideas that
#
didn't necessarily come in the sort of suited way as we would expect like one with the degener
#
with his sort of nice suits but it also came with people who were wearing saffron robes
#
but who were articulating a message of communal harmony and unity that seemingly was acceptable
#
to many Muslims at least in New Delhi where he was very popular an interesting bit of
#
trivia about Swami Shraddhananda is that he was actually the first Mahatma he was given
#
the moniker of Mahatma before Mahatma Gandhi I think he was called Mahatma Munshiram or
#
something I forget the exact moniker but he was the first Mahatma and he was in fact the
#
first non-muslim to be allowed to speak from the Jama Masjid I think in 1918 if I remember
#
correctly and eventually he got murdered in his home by you know so there's another counterfactual
#
what if this Mahatma survives and becomes a dominant force and you know earlier when
#
Tripur Dhaman was talking about the non-cooperative movement not working or Quit India not working
#
or you know you mentioned the whole thing of why should we burn all these clothes when
#
you know people don't have clothes to wear and it led me to the thought about how you
#
know sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between posturing and principle defiance though
#
I think if it's Twitter you can just assume it's posturing so it's to get back to you
#
know you had one kind of passage where I felt that you really sort of nailed Nehru's approach
#
and the way that he looked at Jinnah and I'll again quote from your book where you write
#
quote in Nehru's unspooling of history taking the occasional cue from Marx and Hegel the
#
forces of progress were constantly rubbing against the forces of reaction yet for most
#
people it was difficult to draw a line between the two because there are so many middle forces
#
these middle forces of vested interests muddied the picture by appealing to earthly emotions
#
and urges speaking directly to Jinnah Nehru identified the communal question as a conservative
#
reaction to the progressive forces employing religious identities as a primary drivers
#
in politics as Jinnah did with his Muslim League and made him petty minded it had also
#
distracted him from and these are Nehru's words from the real problems of the country
#
stop quote and strikes me that one if Nehru then thinks like this that means he's already
#
passed judgment he slotted himself as someone for the forces of progress he slotted Jinnah
#
as someone for the forces of reaction and how is any debate possible and there is a
#
little bit of this sort of condescending language in his letters as well which are beautiful
#
and eloquent as always but Jinnah comments on the arrogance where he says quote you start
#
by saying I was somewhat surprised to see this list as I had no idea you wanted to discuss
#
many of these matters with us some of these are wholly covered by previous decisions of
#
the Congress some others are hardly capable of discussion Nehru's words end here and
#
Jinnah continues and then you proceed to your conclusions having formulated the points according
#
to your own notions your tone and language again display the same arrogance and militant
#
spirit as if the Congress is a sovereign power and as an indication you extend your patronage
#
by saying obviously the Muslim League is an important communal organization stop quote
#
and so on how much of this and you have you guys have obviously read much more of Nehru's
#
letters and I have I haven't read too many of them besides what is in the book so how
#
much of the dialogues or the debates that Nehru enters into are at the same time colored
#
by the judgments that he's already passed this notion that he is right he's decided
#
he's right and therefore he just has to convince the other person or patronize them or whatever
#
the case might be and do you think this was an impediment in these quote and quote debates
#
I mean speaking favorably in in for for for Nehru I would say that he he does have an
#
open mind but you know with the acquisition of more and more power there's a shrinkage
#
of his imagination and that is something that one can say is excusable or one can say being
#
purely idealistic he shouldn't have done that but the main thing that really erupts off
#
the wrong way is that he thinks that Nehru has already assumed that he is the colonial
#
state and now he's put in a position to petition and prove to him that something is different
#
from his imagination because whatever he has thought is already the standard and everything
#
else is a deviation and needs justification whereas his position doesn't need justification
#
I wouldn't go that far I don't think really that this is what um what what Nehru is thinking
#
or how is he how he how he is approaching that problem and of course Thibaut Demenolier
#
said that Nehru does change his position regarding the Muslims particularly after partition but
#
that means changing your position after millions of people have um undergone great great great
#
tragedies so anybody who wouldn't change their position after seeing the massive onslaught
#
that took place during those grim days would I don't think there's any human who who could
#
do that I do think that Nehru was also more nuanced and that he would have been able to
#
be convinced differently if the argument would have really pushed him to engage with the
#
Muslim population at large that seemed to not have entered his basic realm of people
#
that were surrounding him so why he was surrounded by Muslims I do think that there was a deep
#
disconnect between him and um what was what was happening and the changing of the popular
#
opinion that was happening amongst Muslims he just totally misread that
#
I mean just as an aside to what Adil said about how Nehru misread uh Muslim opinion
#
I mean a very famous incident is when Nehru goes to the against the advice of the viceroy
#
and government agencies uh you know he goes to the northwest frontier province because
#
he thinks that you know the because there is a communist government there you know everything's
#
great and the Muslims they love him and actually they don't and they throw stones at him and
#
he gets injured and that kind of really sort of colors him and then he says you know the
#
demonstrations organized by muslim deeks thugs and so on and so forth and that's so that
#
really colors him against muslim mass politics as well um because he thinks it's essentially
#
being run by muslim deek thugs and that that sort of caricature builds itself in his mind
#
and perhaps actually Adil is right that more mass engagement would perhaps have convinced
#
Nehru of some of of some merit in what what Jinnah was saying um and just to add to that
#
thought because I have it and I want to get it out when you said that you had trivia on
#
Shradhanand that he was a mahatma the real trivia would probably be that he was the first
#
mahatma to also get a gun license because when he created the schools his gurukuls in
#
the jungle far away from civilization in order to educate indians that would not be immediately
#
um that that would not stand immediately under the shadow of um imperial control which he
#
also saw as extending to mind control um there were constant attacks of panthers on the on
#
the food that he was storing so in order to get rid of those panthers he asked the colonial
#
state to grant him a gun license so he can scare them away that's that's a fascinating
#
story I mean this is another movie along with that painting you could also kind of do a
#
movie around this guy the other mahatma uh or the mahatma that never was or whatever
#
when you hear the debate play out and it's still really relevant right it's relevant
#
to modern india because there is sort of a criticism that what the hindu right-wing forces
#
in india are doing today is really trying to be a hindu pakistan you know like a few
#
years back you know advani went to pakistan praised jinnah and immediately got sidelined
#
in his own party because how dare you praise jinnah you know the enemy but the point is
#
that you know in many fundamental ways they would they would perhaps agree with jinnah
#
that you know the whole notion that a nation state cannot be secular for example that if
#
there is a dominant majority then yeah hindu rashtra is sort of inevitable and in those
#
letters in fact you see um nehru fighting back against the notion that he wants a hindu
#
raj where he's saying that hey no way no way you know this is what the congress has done
#
and said and all of that so these sort of debates are alive again and when i think of
#
jinnah frankly i i think of him as a king lear kind of tragic figure at that scale because
#
i i think so much of his interior life would have been so stunted and full of pain and
#
i think you know he lost that he lost the congress in 1920 and after that i don't think
#
it really mattered there was no winning for him it was just a really dark and of course
#
a very interesting story but is that debate still alive today you know and if so you know
#
which way do you think is likely to go and do you feel that that debate was inevitably
#
going to you know be around today because it wasn't settled and you know so what's
#
what's your sense of that i'm just going to start i know i'm trip with them and would
#
really come in with like the better counterfactuals but what i want to i want to say is that okay
#
so if we so if we say that gandhi wouldn't have appeared but jinnah would have also not
#
taken over the congress party some of the people next in line would probably be have
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been swami shradhanand swami shradhanand enjoyed like great rapport amongst the arya samaj
#
reformists um he was wearing saffron but he was an acceptable figure amongst the muslims
#
too and he was moderate so he was also trained as a lawyer so he would have gotten he wasn't
#
that far apart from jinnah's position of course he would have opposed the separation for pakistan
#
but he would have also been willing to allow for specific conditions to emerge that such
#
a separation would have not been necessary right so for him giving more safeguards to
#
muslims in order to assure them would have come more naturally from a sacrificial standpoint
#
than from a contractual standpoint and a democratic standpoint that nehru espouses so i do think
#
that when we think about the reformist hindu right so not the orthodox hindu hindu right
#
that you know seems to be mushrooming now everywhere but the reformist hindu right definitely
#
had overlaps with jinnah and perhaps could have accommodated somebody who's arguing for
#
the protection of religion better than somebody who's saying that one person one vote um and
#
there's a good um intellectual case to be made for all of these positions there's also
#
a really good case to be made for for nehru even though i'm brutally overlooking him here
#
and you know sort of framing him as the sole reason that that partition took place because
#
he couldn't get rid of his democratic inclinations that would have asked him to count votes
#
um evenly without looking at where these votes were coming from but essentially i do think
#
that all of these positions have really good merit and if we're really indulging in counterfactuals
#
i do think the non-existence of gandhi is the biggest one because i don't think that
#
jinnah would have been able to control the league um in the same way as somebody who's
#
coming from the majoritarian community because there would have been a backlash against him
#
and that would have come from the mahasabha other ariya samaj closed institutions um and
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i do think that one of their leaders would have been more acceptable somebody like shradhanand
#
if he had not died and been killed by a muslim who accused him of blasphemy against the prophet
#
then things could have could have looked um very differently
#
no i think i don't think it's true that i come up with very good counterfactuals because
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um as much as i like dabbling in counterfactual history i i do also recognize its um its limitations
#
otherwise i would be writing some books called what if and they would probably sell a lot
#
more than than my current ones do but no but just sort of branching out a bit from from
#
what adil says uh is that we have to recognize that indian nationalism in itself the sort
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of there was always this sort of secular mobilization uh you know and and the sort of radical wing
#
but the kind of right the the sort of cruder elements uh that you know that we now identify
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with the hindu right were always there this was this sort of trait of referring
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you know of mobilizing indian society around uh around sort of religious festivals you know
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tilak and the sort of ganpati festivals are are a good example um or gandhi kind of uh appealing
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to the uh to the idea of ramraj or uh you know in in sort of public life the britain's the british
#
people being derided as you know cow eaters or you know uh mlechas or yavans or this sort of
#
quite charged terminology so this sort of um element has always been a part of internationalism
#
and and i would argue quite a significant part of indian nationalism because congress mobilization
#
uh we really look at the top layers but when you really look at local politics as it kind of played
#
out which is where the real mobilization was happening the people kind of really engaging with
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with sort of indian with mass politics were really doing the groundwork if you you know wanted to
#
have a demonstration and you wanted a hundred thousand people at the demonstration the real
#
groundwork would be done at at this sort of level and at this sort of level indian nationalism was
#
very much uh symbolized by uh you know by this sort of terminology and so that element um always
#
existed in a way what one might say was that really someone like neru was uh sort of riding
#
a tiger even to begin with and so this this debate was inevitable whether whether gandhi
#
appeared or or not this this this real debate of what it meant really to be indian and who could be
#
accommodated uh in this definition uh was always you know really really going to appear but i i
#
would agree with uh with a deal that figures like swami shradhanand um would have been a lot more
#
palatable to all shades of of political opinion and many of the points that jinnah raised had had
#
had had merit and the reason um there's a there's a funny quote in lord wavel's diaries where he
#
says you know actually there is there is something to be said for both sides and they can come to a
#
conclusion if only it was someone else doing the negotiations and not jinnah and neru because uh
#
there was ultimately as adil says a very convincing uh case to be made for all sides so it's it's hard
#
to really pick and say well here's someone who was right and here's someone who was wrong and i think
#
that sort of negotiation could have been conducted a lot better uh by other people whether it was
#
swami shradhanand or even if we were to pick someone else who essentially understood the
#
fundamentals of the muslim position a bit better than neru two uh two contradictory thoughts come
#
to mind that on the one hand thank god you had sort of neru and jinnah arguing because at least
#
we get to see the eloquent debate play out and you have these letters and they're expressing
#
their views and today if you look it's still a life question today but you no longer have a discourse
#
on this you just have shouting on all sides and rhetoric on all sides and there is really no
#
reason debate that there are reasoned laments from people who are on the outside but from actual
#
stakeholders there isn't that much talking to each other but like you pointed out that i would
#
assume that a lot of this was just personal like but like you said if it was anyone other than
#
these two guys maybe it would have worked but there was just too much baggage there and it's
#
kind of that it happens to be these two people you know just thinking aloud i mean there was a
#
you know again on the road of happenstance but this time in modern politics there was an essay
#
by kesava guha where he was talking about how untimely deaths have changed recent indian
#
politics for example had pramod mahajan not died it might not have been modi who was an ex-leader
#
of the party it could have been you know mahajan as prime minister he wouldn't have really perhaps
#
let modi come up in the way that he did really a steward guy and a fine political sense and
#
equally in the congress you had people like jitendra prasad and madhav rao's india and rajesh
#
pilot all poppet which basically meant that there was no you know second rung of leadership that
#
could you know challenge the current leadership you know which which just feels so defiant today
#
so kind of moving on from the jinna section you know to the patel section which is really
#
interesting and and it's also interesting that you chose you know foreign policy as a particular
#
debate to highlight in a sense a whole china question what what kind of made you choose
#
that particular issue because in a sense one could say that that is like out of the four
#
debates that are happening in this book that is the one which in a sense is no longer live
#
in the sense that kind of foreign policy which basically every government now takes up is a sort
#
of a realist foreign policy where you know it's not tinged by the kind of ideology that nehru's
#
foreign policy quite obviously was and also the china question itself is in a completely different
#
place that that debate doesn't really happen anymore so given all the things that the differences
#
that the two might have had what kind of prompted you to pick this i think i don't think that
#
question is over so when we were writing it of course the matter of coincidence when we were
#
writing it that's when the sort of whole clash of the galban valley kind of took off and one thing
#
was that it demonstrated that there's still no consensus on india's relationship with china
#
but even more so um nehru and patel's clash it it when when they talk about the broader contour as
#
a foreign policy it's also very much a kind of difference about how they conceptualize
#
india and its place in the world for nehru as uh you know we alluded earlier on during our
#
conversation where adil mentioned how nehru saw the constituent assembly as the birthplace of a
#
new sovereignty in the same way nehru saw india's birth as a sort of break with the past as the
#
creation of this year of this you know new country is almost a bit like if you read how nehru writes
#
about it it's not that far off from from a kind of the american idea of manifest destiny because
#
for nehru you know this is going to be the sort of beacon in asia it's going to it's going to kind
#
of essentially show the way towards peace and socialism to as he calls them the smaller brothers
#
and that's a funny term in itself because he doesn't use the term younger brothers
#
he uses the term smaller brothers to refer to the other asian countries and for patel india is very
#
much the legal successor to the british raj that's how he defines its role in world affairs and that's
#
also how he wants india to conceive of itself it's the sort of recipient of the sovereign powers
#
prerequisites and responsibilities that uh that the british raj enjoyed and that's what really
#
plays out in this larger debate of foreign policy which is well does india have these sort of
#
this sort of manifest destiny kind of role to play in the world as the birth as a sort of birthplace
#
of the first you know country to have thrown off the shackles of european colonialism and to lead
#
asia and to sort of you know create this sort of third way in some cases or is india a sort of
#
repository of of an earlier sovereignty with an identity and role already defined where you know
#
it it's it's somewhat much more mundane as you say real politic kind of understanding of our
#
foreign policy and that debate hasn't really ended it's still very much going on and you can very
#
much see it in the foreign policy of the current government which sort of seesaws between between
#
this kind of idea of manifest destiny of you know interplaying this sort of larger-than-life
#
role in the world or uh between you know those who who who kind of prescribe a more pragmatic uh
#
uh kind of you know more essentially more materialist foreign policy keeping in keeping in
#
mind the sort of economic and material constraints that india faces and of of essentially looking at
#
it in in these sort of very essentialist materialist sort of terms and because that debate is very
#
ongoing and those two poles are still uh i you know they they might have morphed a bit but
#
and ideologically that sort of idea of manifest destiny may not be i guess driven um by the idea
#
of socialism as nerus was but it's still a very sort of powerful idea that india is and should be
#
playing uh this sort of huge role in in world affairs and how it should be playing that role
#
in world affairs or what image it should kind of carry really uh around its shoulders when it when
#
it is playing that role is also very very much a life question because for nehru that very much
#
what gives him that position is democracy secularism you know um so on and so forth and
#
whether that position still stands whether to play uh that sort of role or to have that sort of global
#
stature whether democracy secularism minorities matter all that much for the indian prime minister
#
to be a figure of global importance or not these are this is you know this is very much still
#
uh still a matter of debate so i think um for us if these questions um seeing as they still exist
#
uh very much deserve even more importance than the sort of debate that patel might have had with
#
nehru on the question of muslims or on secularism which in a way we've we've we've all sort of read
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about it's uh it's a bit more um common
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um so maybe just to add to that what nehru also does is completely misread china because he's a
#
man of his time and what nehru has seen of china isn't really what china was because from say the
#
treaty of nanking so mid 19th century china began the what is called in in china the 100 years of
#
humiliation so that is the century of humiliation so they are defeated by the brits um by the british
#
empire um through um the superior technology and sea warfare that the british are able to mount
#
and then the british carve out smallish colonies flexed around the the chinese continent and what
#
then happens is a period of exploitation everybody has heard of the opium wars this is where big
#
british today we would call them pharma companies but big british companies are shipping in opium
#
and um essentially pushing it um upon the people making huge huge profits and it's not just um
#
british companies to do that it's also um companies that have a very close connection to india the two
#
big families are bhakti jewish who have a close connection to bombay of course the kathuris and
#
the sasoons and they um essentially go and china takes about a century to recover and it recovers
#
through the coming of the communist party under mao which manages to purge a the nationalists and
#
the colonialists out of their country right so they retake shanghai which is where many of the
#
communist party leaders are sort of educated and they manage to sort of get control of the
#
entirety of the country of course with the nationalists being um um now in in in taiwan
#
where they still are under um a disputed disputed sovereignty and um once china finds itself the
#
last thing that it wants to be called his little brother and you know envision a new century under
#
indian leadership so anybody who's read the history and seen the impact that china has had on global
#
trade throughout um throughout world history for at least a millennium would say that it would be
#
natural for china to return to its place of dominance and to india to be um in the position
#
of uh of the smaller brother so nehru essentially misreads of what's happening in china and doesn't
#
really understand that this is uh this is going to be a global powerhouse that is going to dominate
#
because the way in which they have engaged with technology has always been very very sophisticated
#
and superior to many other asian countries so i do think that that misreading really leads nehru to
#
make these concessions that he does and but deal being the hard-nosed realist of course he sees
#
that um this is not merely um like a small flame that has emerged in asia but this is the reawakening
#
of a mighty dragon i think what i mean adil is really really hit the nail on the head
#
um and and this is one of the reasons why this uh this chapter is so interesting is because it
#
provides quite like important sort of clues towards nehru's thinking and nehru and nehru's character
#
which in a way sort of adds a moment where he is holding executive power and on his way to kind of
#
almost you know sort of being the all-powerful figure that he's about to be and it provides
#
you know very interesting uh ways of of really gaining insight into how nehru's thinking
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and how he's behaving at at this time which i think make uh uh make this chapter particularly
#
interesting as well yeah it's a fascinating chapter and and you know you also point out how
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since 1927 nehru was seen as a foreign policy guy because you know he's on the executive committee
#
of the league against imperialism along with albert einstein and you know so mixing with some
#
big folks there no photoshop pictures that's actually them together and then you sum up his
#
beliefs and assumptions about china in this way where you write quote these goals and interests
#
were underpinned by many of nehru's own beliefs and assumptions an exaggerated sense of india's
#
importance as a cultural fountainhead of the new asia an instinctive affinity for the notion of
#
asianism that he axiomatically assumed was shared by china and southeast asia a sentimental and
#
cultural xenophilia a sympathetic attitude towards communism and an ambivalence about if not active
#
distrust of the united states these beliefs in turn inform nehru's conception of his own and india's
#
place in the global arena as a self-appointed leader and spokesperson of asia and the third
#
world more broadly against european imperial domination with a self-anointed obligation
#
to mitigate conflict on the asian continent and as a big brother helping and guiding uh smaller
#
brothers stop quote and you also point out that india did not have the military might and the
#
economic resources to actually play the part that nehru wanted it to play but the one thing
#
that at least uh you know could make it seem uh possible was nehru's own self-image as this leader
#
who took this country out of colonialism it's a democracy huge population all of that so a lot of
#
that foreign policy then became about projecting nehru's image would that be a correct summation
#
um yeah yeah that is that is quite a correct that is an excellent sort of uh some i just
#
realized that i quoted you for most of the summary so no no because um well here's me
#
patting myself on the back um but uh no for for nehru a lot of foreign policy does eventually
#
become about promoting and protecting that image as well because that image is essentially what
#
allows india to bridge uh the material gap um you know that's why um you know that's how india is
#
playing a role in korea uh and all of these things um because well at the end of the day india really
#
has no real locus standai in korea it also has no real material power that it can bring to bear
#
but uh nehru's sort of own uh standing on the global stage is um is is big at that point and
#
it only ever it only takes a blow in 1962 because what happens then basically shows to the world
#
that actually nehru you know doesn't really know what's going on the sort of intellectual
#
foundations of his foreign policy are shown to be um not very strong and there's an interesting
#
quote by uh jonath kennedy to whom nehru turns at that point for uh help and he asks for american
#
air squadrons to start bombing china um and kennedy basically says at that the cuban missile crisis
#
um is on at that point and kennedy basically says he finds nehru's inability to kind of think about
#
kind of think about what bombing china means uh for the world during uh during the cuban missile
#
crisis when he's locked in a sort of um you know he's one step away from nuclear war with this
#
with the soviet union um and he comments uh and i think he says something like you know nehru has
#
lost both his uh nerves and with them his senses so a lot of nehru in foreign policy it's hard to
#
separate the sort of personal from uh from the institutional because at one level yes there's
#
an ideological element um but another level there's also a personal element of keeping the
#
you know the nehru the global statesman bolstered up but that bolstering up at some level is also
#
i guess uh useful because if you it's it's the only real thing that india has on the global stage it's
#
ultimately um a really poor third world country which nobody seems to really realize because
#
there's an unstated assumption in letters they say india will obviously uh soon play a great role in
#
world affairs and we've been saying that for um for 70 odd years and um whether or not india is
#
playing a great role in global affairs or is still open to question and and maybe just a book
#
recommendation that if people are excited about this and they want to learn what's happening on
#
the flip side so what's happening in china itself because there i mean a lot of things are happening
#
with the nationalists and the communists and you know the people who are living in the international
#
settlement there's a there's a fantastic book by rana mithir that was published last year
#
rana mithir is an indian brit brit british indian academic um who teaches is a professor at oxford
#
and it's called china's good war it was published by harvard last year and it's
#
an outstanding book just speaking of this sense of manifest destiny and i'd say china probably has
#
that i don't know you know when we speak of india's great place in the world i think nehru was a true
#
believer and that was that led to his downfall but i think anyone who speaks about it today is
#
really just posturing i mean come on they know i mean surely the default foreign policy today
#
has to be kind of realist but then on the other hand you think of our prime minister wearing his
#
name on his suit when he's meeting president obama so you know who knows one of the sort of
#
misconceptions that you point out you point out that there are three misconceptions about
#
nairo's foreign policy one that he remained unchallenged in the foreign policy domain he
#
basically decided what congress foreign policy was by himself second there weren't colleagues
#
who could inform foreign policy and third that the flaws in his approach only became visible
#
after you know 1959 when the china thing started erupting and all of these are not true you know
#
you speak about how ministers like kc neogi shama prasad mukherjee john mako mathai ambedkar when
#
all of them quit they pointed to you know deep misgivings about the direction and orientation
#
of india's foreign policy as you put it what were the key moments at which nehru sort of got it
#
wrong like we know that he romanticized uh the notion of the the relationship with china that
#
whole indi chini bhai bhai and all of that was romanticized and he thought that you know china
#
will be friendly with us and all of that he also had a an ambassador in china km panikar who seemed
#
incredibly blind to the chinese cause and was constantly sort of talking it up and what was
#
sort of the the places where you start realizing that he's made a mistake i mean one of the
#
interesting sort of points of contention that you see for example is tibet where patel's realist
#
position is that we have like like you said his approach was that india should see see itself as
#
a successor to the british empire and therefore that old accord that was that the british empire
#
made with tibet we should stick to that and we should respect them accordingly and we should
#
help them defend themselves and all of that and nehru kept getting it wrong on tibet in the sense
#
that he didn't allow them to declare independence he didn't you know allow the u.s to arm tibet and
#
send military there and then whatever happened happened so what were the sort of arguments
#
around this and what are the other sort of critical moments during this period you pointed out the
#
korean war of course what were the other critical moments during this period and when did patel
#
kind of start expressing himself like was this disagreement on foreign policy something that
#
only happened around this time reached a flashpoint in november 1950 as you point out in all those
#
cabinet meetings or was there you know the way that we've seen that many of these debates go
#
back years if not decades you know and beyond these individual people but over here you know
#
did this go back did or was it simply never relevant because hey india is not an independent
#
country and it only becomes relevant when we gain independence this was very much a question even
#
before independence nehru calls the asian relations conference in march 1947 so even before independence
#
he's really thinking about where to position india and in india at the conference he very much talks
#
about you know how a new dawn is coming for asia it's it's you know imperialism is on its way out
#
india is very much the sort of as the first country to become independent is very much the
#
leading light and he also refers to china a great deal as you know this great country to which
#
uh you know a lot is owed and which is you know soon going to take its place in the sun and so on
#
and so forth so he's very much thinking about these questions even though ostensibly not that
#
many people are interested in the congress it would be wrong to say that they uh you know that
#
that no one else was interested because obviously people were and uh this sort of starts coming to
#
ahead vis-a-vis pakistan because many niyogi and bukhartji of course most obviously but also people
#
like pateo believes that nehru's stance towards pakistan is too accommodative because hindu
#
refugees are being pushed out of east pakistan into west bengal and many see that india should
#
essentially be taking military action to either defend them or some sort of quite you know
#
militarist types on the right even demand that india carve out a piece of then east pakistan as
#
pakistan as force east pakistan to c territory where hindus from that country can be could be
#
resettled um to live in safety so there is there's a lot of uh and they're very much interprets this
#
as something as you know he says public posturing intended to bully him into into war create you
#
know public pressure on him push him towards uh military action um so this sort of debate really
#
is is uh is already going on and then vis-a-vis uh china it kind of kicks off once of course a
#
communist takeover is there and people are forced to confront the question of of having a united
#
china and also a china that's interested in exporting communism um on its uh on its borders
#
and this continues for for for a very long time uh you know even when i was looking at the debates
#
around the first amendment you still had parliamentary conversations throughout the 50s
#
where people talk about what's happening in tibet and eru keeps you know telling them that actually
#
you know nothing wrong is happening in tibet um etc etc so this is very much a live question
#
throughout the 50s now there is a flashpoint over east pakistan in early 1950 ultimately neru has
#
his way uh he has a conversation with diya katari khan and they devise all these things like the
#
minority commissions in both countries and those sorts of mechanisms to try and deal with the
#
problem you have another flashpoint once the chinese do march into tibet initially in
#
september october 1950 even though throughout 1950 this question you know has has come up again and
#
again you have conversations between neru and raj gopal chari actually even before the cabin
#
infamous exchange with pateo there's a furious sort of exchange of letters with uh with raj
#
gopal chari on this question um and then again as you um go through the 1950s there's there's
#
actually several points at which uh i mean then you have ambedkar's resignation very famously
#
ambed it's remembered for um for ambedkar's criticism of neru when it for not supporting
#
him with the hindu court bill and so on and so forth but actually ambedkar or devote a substantial
#
part of his speech to foreign policy he literally says um and in this he is not that far off from
#
what patel has been saying which is a that india has essentially been taking a stance that is
#
isolating itself from from global political currents we're ploughing a kind of lonely
#
furrow uh india is having to spend far more than necessary on uh on security and defense because
#
we have no friends since we've uh effectively turned our backs on everyone courtesy uh neru
#
of foreign policy with its ideological moorings and he uh ambedkar thinks it's disastrous and
#
he says you know i i forget the quote um exactly but he says uh you know it's something that's a
#
cause of great anxiety to him as to where indian foreign policy is um is taking india and then in
#
the 50s of course tibet kind of continues to bubble away you have the high point with the
#
signing of panchshil and hiti chini bye bye and then it's pretty much all downhill from there
#
the big challenge of course though comes comes at this moment with patel because what we see
#
with patel's letter is patel actually says that india should of course uh be doing something
#
and what that means is but patel right you know recognizes that there are material limitations
#
he recognizes that this means you know and he kind of hints at it by saying you know this will
#
bring us to the question of how india's uh manages this relationship with the u.s and uh you know
#
at the broader question of where india stands vis-a-vis the cold war and so for him you know
#
there is recognition that that involves a closer alignment with the u.s that it which necessarily
#
involves a kind of break for neruvian socialism which very much involved and neruvian socialism
#
is really the sort of guiding light of everything that neru does so it it is actually the the clash
#
that's happening at a on a very superficial level it's just about what to do with china
#
but on a deeper level it's actually many of these things coming together as to what where does india
#
stand how does it conceive of itself and what it's doing and there um patel is articulating
#
a radically different uh position so a u-turn here means uh not just saying okay well now we
#
were being friends with china but you know instead we'll we'll start being stern with them it actually
#
involves turning their uh you know really turning our back on neruvianism entirely aligning with the
#
u.s which inevitably means um also uh the kind of end of neruvian socialism so what patel is so
#
and he's he's willing to fight it out everyone believes the diplomatic sort of circles in delhi
#
believe that actually this showdown is going to cause a u-turn in indian foreign policy
#
which is obviously going to have repercussions uh you know as i as i mentioned this clash actually
#
is is as close really you it's the kind of moment where you really would wonder what if
#
because it's the closest that india really comes to challenging neruvian orthodoxy
#
and what's kind of interesting here which you point out is that china all this time was dissing
#
india and dissing nehru at one point they called him quote a hirling of anglo-american imperialism
#
stop quote and nehru's reaction to that is to want to prove them wrong by going overboard and
#
supporting them so he's supporting them for a place in the permanent place in the uh in the u.n
#
he general assembly he's uh you know letting tibet unravel the way that it kind of did you know all
#
of these things are happening and patel sort of took the hard-nosed stance that listen before we
#
recognize this government as alleged government which as you point out india was the second
#
non-communist country to do after burma slash mayanmar before we do that let's tell them that
#
okay don't mess with tibet and we'll recognize you and at least you know you draw those lines
#
in the sand and then they're drawn forever but nehru didn't kind of do that because he had this
#
excessive romanticization or trust or whatever and this seems to me to be sort of a classic example
#
of being incredibly dogmatic on an issue and simply not changing his mind i'm intrigued by uh you know
#
you're saying that and of course of course what he's also doing is he's driving the u.s further
#
away from himself perhaps again the ego came into play because they invited liya katali khan first
#
and he's like what is this you know our manifest destiny we should have gone there but he drives
#
them away and i mean it's anything but non-aligned therefore right from the start and uh you you said
#
that you know he he had to do that otherwise neruvian socialism would have been under threat
#
and i didn't understand that part can you elaborate on that because it's perfectly possible to ally
#
with someone in terms of foreign policy but leave every aspect of your identity the way that it is
#
like the way for example saudi arabia aligns with the u.s without compromising on what they do
#
internally so why would it have been a threat to neruvian socialism or are you saying that
#
uh his world view as articulated uh you know there would have been a fissure within it from the way
#
people outside saw it so his credibility would have suffered uh no i'm saying both things um so
#
first and foremost what would have happened uh is the stature of nero the global statesman um which
#
was uh you know dependent on uh him being the champion of uh uh you know of against imperialism
#
against colonialism uh and essentially you know leading india down the socialist path
#
would have suffered if you know india had aligned with the u.s to to kind of check chinese ambitions
#
in tibet so that's point one point two was that effectively it would also have uh dented his image
#
because you know it would have proven what the soviets and the chinese were saying which is that
#
nero is uh there's a high link you know as as as i quote in the book of anglo-american imperialism
#
this was not just a kind of soviet slash chinese charge it was also white it was also a charge made
#
by um by the communist in india by their slogan you know meaning that this freedom is somehow
#
false and fake and actually uh the sort of structures of colonialism are still being maintained
#
um so for nero there wasn't this sort of stark divide between the national and the international
#
um as we see it now because he saw internationalism as very closely tied to nationalism and the bridge
#
there uh was what was to be provided with uh to be provided by socialism since uh socialism by itself
#
meant peace and as you mentioned you know colonialism and capitalism came together
#
in in sort of one great package he you couldn't be um in his mind you know that it would be
#
not just fissuring it's a kind of cognitive dissonance which you know he would find hard
#
to wrap around if you could be socialist but essentially how could you be socialist if you
#
supported uh capitalism abroad which is what essentially brought war and uh violence um which
#
is essentially the root cause of war and violence um secondly aligning with the u.s i mean it is
#
possible for south arabia to align with the u.s and continue essentially with this sort of quite
#
closed system a because it's not a democracy and b because it of natural resources and wealth
#
ultimately india was a poor country essentially turning your aligning with the u.s would it kind
#
of destroyed the intellectual foundations of neruvian socialism as i said because there was
#
this sort of boundary between the nationalist and internationalist sort of versions um
#
didn't really exist that firmly in their whose mind so it would have destroyed a one crutch
#
of the neruvian socialist project in india and b it could well have destroyed the second crutch
#
as well because we do know that aligning with the u.s necessarily uh well not necessarily but
#
generally means aligning with the market and most u.s allies at least at that point in time
#
i mean essentially that's how that's how the east asian economic miracle sort of happened was uh
#
was aligning with the market and that's not something um never really was down with
#
yeah i mean in fact perhaps his biggest mistake though not a mistake that he saw play out during
#
his lifetime like he uh saw china play out now you've described the events really well in the
#
books and things happen really fast so you know uh he has an exchange which rajgopalachari on
#
november 1 on november 2 it's a verbal thing where you know instead of exchanging notes at
#
the cabinet meeting and meanwhile siddharth patel is kind of chilling hanging in the background
#
he's getting reports made for him from the intelligence bureau and so on and then he writes
#
this uh magisterial letter which you've reproduced in your book on november 7th and i'll quickly
#
quote you on that where he says in his celebrated uh letter of 7 november 1950 patel deprecated the
#
pathetic state of indian diplomacy and called for a comprehensive review of sino-indian relations
#
a military and intelligence evaluation of the chinese threat a long-term reconsideration of
#
india's defense needs in terms of supplies and infrastructure and the twin threats from china
#
and pakistan examination and redisposition of forces to guard important areas that may
#
be subject to dispute improvement of communications in these areas political and administrative steps
#
to strengthen frontier governance and an end to india's advocacy of china's entry into the un
#
recent and bitter history also tells us patel observed that communism is no shield against
#
imperialism stop quote the in the sense that i got from reading the letter and the hard-nosed
#
approach and the kind of details that he went into is that look internally as home minister you see
#
what he did that he went in there in a cold calculated way and he brought the princely
#
states together and of course we can and i will dispute the means of doing that but he got the
#
job done and you can see him take that same kind of approach to the question of foreign policy and
#
to the question of china at an early stage when you know tibet had not yet been taken over and
#
everything was still kind of for grabs and the irony is that as you point out the cabinet would
#
have been against nehru and with patel in this you write quote in a showdown with the prime minister
#
patel believed he could count on the strong support of rajgopalachari km munshi baldev singh
#
jagjeevan ram and sri prakasa while he expected nehru to be backed by maulana azad gopalswamy
#
ayangar and rafi amit kedwai it is likely that ambedkar given his views would also have lined
#
up behind patel in fact ambassador henderson believed nehru to be almost the only person
#
in the government who still believed in friendship with communist china and patel's letter is written
#
on november 7th the cabinet meeting that is to follow is on november 21st patel falls ill he
#
misses it so only rajgopalachari speaks up but nehru prevails and then shortly after that patel
#
dies and another counterfactual obviously and we won't really go there because one can go on
#
forever with this particular one and and this is also a tragedy in multiple ways not just because
#
it sort of condemns you know india down this sort of the part that it takes but also that it condemns
#
nehru to being a man alone where you know the one guy who would have jostled with him and fought
#
with him is kind of out of the picture now earlier in this they had in the exchange of letters that
#
you reproduce you know they are talking about how you know when sort of gandhi was an interlocutor
#
between the disputes gandhi made them stay together he said that why don't one of you
#
form the government one of you be outside both of them volunteered to step down and let the other
#
guy take over but you know in this matter of courtesy they both kind of end up in the
#
government and it almost sounds as if they're treating the governance of india as a personal
#
affair you know where they can hand out sort of all of these things rather than something that
#
is way more important than that how likely if patel hadn't fallen ill would he have been to
#
prevail could there have been a realistic different direction or would nehru have you
#
know prevailed anyway because he was prime minister and he you know might have said oh i
#
will quit and do his emotional blackmail thing what what different direction was possible at
#
this moment in time so i mean this this motion of quitting is something actually that happens
#
multiple times in nehru's career so he does it at relatively frequent intervals
#
you know he doesn't need to do it after really after 1952 but it happens you know every few
#
months between you know 1948 and 1951 it's sort of you know there are at least three or four
#
occasions where this comes up and i don't think either of them actually meant the offer to quit
#
the government in in a kind of in any sincerity it was the kind of political move that you play and
#
say okay you know i would leave i'll be the magnanimous person and leave but actually
#
nobody has any intention of leaving so that's point one the the second point is that i think
#
there was a quite a strong likelihood that patel would prevail because from what we know is for
#
patel this was actually the drawing of the line he'd been very content to leave foreign policy
#
entirely to nehru to almost let nehru run it as a personal fiefdom but something like this which
#
actually really jeopardized the nation's security sort of really forced patel to sit up and take
#
notice now the assessment that sort of ambassador henderson and and uh that you get from ambassador
#
henderson and from patel's daughter's diaries uh money burn patel's diaries is a bit like actually
#
patel was quite likely to prevail it may not have been a kind of out an outright fight where you
#
know patel forced flamboyantly forced a u-turn but as henderson believed is that the u-turn would
#
happen and then it would kind of people would pretend that it wasn't actually a u-turn so it's
#
not likely that he was it's unlikely that he would dethrone nehru and you know make him make him you
#
know sort of humiliate him in public but it's quite likely that he would have forced a u-turn
#
and that u-turn would have come with as i mentioned all of these repercussions which is what you kind
#
of notice if you read nehru's reply because nehru's reply doesn't come in the form of a letter
#
which he could quite easily have written to patel but it comes in the form of a note prepared to
#
the cabinet because that's actually where the fight is happening this these letters are in a
#
sense um he it's it's meant to be a performance for the cabinet this this sort of argument between
#
the two um and you get the sense from nehru's note where he basically dismisses many of patel's
#
concerns and he dismisses them mostly because he he he's kind of aware of what the implications of
#
such such a u-turn are i was also struck by the bits where you talk about what happens when it
#
all falls apart like at the start of that section you write about how nehru was shattered by the
#
china war you write quote in the words of his critic and parliamentary colleague hv kamath
#
the debacle not only shattered nehru physically and weakened him mentally but what was more
#
galling to him eroded his prestige in asia and the world dealt a crippling blow to his visions
#
of leadership of the newly emancipated nations stop quote and later you write it was a blow from
#
which he never recovered accused of cravenness vanity and negligence his foreign policy in a
#
shambles his illusions of asianism shattered the his self-appointed mantle of leadership of asian
#
nationalism in tatters his policy of friendship towards china at all cost shown to have been a
#
dangerous misjudgment the shock of the defeat is said to have precipitated his death in 1964
#
though not before he had been forced to jettison his much-wanted non-alignment
#
fall swallow his pride and beg kennedy for direct military intervention uh stop quote and he of
#
course you know quoted kennedy on what he said about that and i'm sort of struck here by a broad
#
question about leadership and politics in general that is it the case that when you ascend to high
#
office that you have been sort of so performative and so strong on a certain set of principles
#
which you might have espoused and so on that in a sense you you have no choice but to stick to them
#
and be dogmatic like you know a deal like you pointed out that high office can lead to a
#
narrowing of the imagination and therefore once you are in power you then have to maintain whatever
#
self-delusions that you might have which really makes every leader a little bit like a kinglier
#
i suppose especially if you kind of die like nero did and and obviously this is one event that
#
completely shatters your illusions you have to admit you were wrong because you were obviously
#
wrong but most of the time you don't have to admit you're wrong you know even in modern times you
#
can go on and say no no demonetization was good we got rid of black money you don't have to admit
#
to your sort of mistakes at all so you know in all your study of all of these you know great
#
intellectual figures you know some have ascended to power some haven't would you say that there is
#
a greater tendency for those who haven't ascended to power to kind of keep the dialogue going the
#
dialogue with themselves also not just with the rest of the world and that once you sort of ascend
#
to a position of power have having taken certain positions you're kind of stuck or was it just
#
that nero was particularly rigid and that everybody doesn't have to be like that
#
maybe i can just come in on that question so i do think that you touched on a very deep truth
#
that is self-evident to nero to an extent that he never critically reflects it and that's not
#
the basic notion of a specific socialist state that espouses specific anti-capitalist reforms
#
and therefore naturally allies with with an emerging power like china's but the basic
#
juxtaposition that nero sees is one of white people who are the imperialists and of non-white people
#
who are resisting that and they tend to be poor etc what nero doesn't understand that in the 19th
#
century through chinese eyes imperialism looks very different and it looks very indian so when
#
they lose the first opium wars they're fighting against indians who are of course employed by the
#
british east india company and therefore you know sort of dispatched in order to fight that war for
#
them same for the second war that the chinese lose against britain when you look at places like hong
#
kong and chinese a large portion of the population is indian and indian traders who are running some
#
of the biggest companies who are running the hotels and therefore through chinese eyes imperialism
#
has always looked indian and i think narrows really shattered when he realizes that what he stood
#
against was maybe you know the sort of simplistic color coding which he took for granted and it
#
looked very different through chinese eyes because for the chinese it was either indian or it was
#
japanese these were the two people who were sort of coming and invading their countries and sort
#
of chucking out large portions and who were implementing the capitalism and of course there
#
were white people too but it wasn't as simplistic as it was in nero's mind so that when that came
#
crushing down i think something deeper within him um realized that the basic truth on which
#
he has based much of his political philosophy on didn't really function and he was deeper than just
#
the sort of socialism that we usually ascribe to to to him so you know i've taken up more than
#
three hours of your time and there's a fourth section of the book but the fourth section of
#
the book in a sense is covered in a separate book that throughput daman is written and that i already
#
have a two and a half hour episode on uh which i really enjoyed doing and in fact i keep referring
#
to that episode and other episodes so i'll just point my listeners to that you know the the the
#
reason i keep referring to that episode is to point out how history is not simple that it people
#
contain multitudes and there is so much sort of nuance to everything with you know people tend
#
to paint nehru in these extremist ways he destroyed india or he was a great liberal and the point is
#
of course the truth is neither of those he was a very complex man who got a lot right and who got
#
a lot wrong and one of the things he wasn't was a great liberal like the first amendment which he
#
kind of carried out was you know his argument against fundamental rights as it were which among
#
other things you know hid the right to free speech really hard like we talk about how the sedition law
#
is misused today and we talk about how it's part of the ipc we should never have had it but the
#
point as you know throughput daman pointed out in his book is that it was declared unconstitutional
#
in 1950 and then nehru brought it back because he wanted to you know suppress the press for example
#
and he of course had eloquent justifications of that which are in the book but even more eloquent
#
shama prasad mukherjee's defences of personal liberty which i found really inspiring and which
#
is against you know the traditional views of him as sort of the founder of the precursor to the bjp
#
the jansang and therefore he must be a hindu nationalist but it stands out as a fine liberal
#
thinker actually embodying rationality at least in these particular debates but for that i'll just
#
point people to the the episode that i had with ripper daman i'll end with not end with this is
#
let's say the penultimate question because i leave one about books for last but my penultimate
#
question is this that what your book is about and what a lot of your study is about and what
#
you said animated you at cambridge and made that a special time for you is intellectual history is
#
the importance of ideas and this book is about ideas this book is about debates over ideas that
#
mattered then and matter now but what we see in the public discourse is not ideas what we see is
#
narratives narratives that oh this happened and therefore we must do this so therefore we must
#
take revenge or therefore they are bad and we are good we see narratives about people so when people
#
you know when nehru is mentioned it is either either he's all black or he's all white and and
#
so on down the line when savarkar is mentioned he is either a coward who apologized to the british
#
or he's this great hero and all of these people you know whether it's nehru gandhi savarkar watch
#
by all of these people uh contained uh multitudes and there is so much debt but no one gives no one
#
really cares and my stand always has been that i don't know why we discuss these people so much
#
and i've heated ideas over people i would rather have conversations about ideas why talk about
#
savarkar when you can talk about hindutva you know why talk about nehru when you can talk about
#
this aspect or that that aspect and all of that and of course you guys are talking about it in
#
the historical context of how ideas evolved and affected real life but does it feel sometimes or
#
if you could react to the possibility now that this is a bit of an anomaly that we live in an age
#
where people just care about narratives and not about ideas and therefore it's great that you guys
#
are doing what you're doing but do you sometimes feel that hey you know what's the point who's
#
listening if i if i can just answer that because it's a methodological question and the
#
methodological question is not so much about the narrative versus ideas but it's about context
#
um context in the sense that if you do history and not philosophy then what you care about is
#
the specific context in which ideas are embedded in because you think that we can understand
#
ideas better once we understand what the other modes of existence of these ideas were now you
#
can do intellectual history in many different forms so you can just focus on the ideas and
#
how they're engaging with other ideas in a sort of abstract world of ideas or you can sort of
#
make it more personal and write a narrative that is gripping that sort of takes the reader along
#
and shows him how specific ideas may have emerged i do think that this there's a specific kind of
#
modesty involved in doing the letter because it means that you're essentially trying to
#
contextualize things in such a way that are palatable to people if you start doing the
#
engagement of pure ideas like a guy who used to be at half as a hundred years ago called
#
arthur lovejoy then you end up writing very dense accounts where there is a specific normative
#
strength of idea that you're trying to work out and if other people agree with that normative
#
idea or not of course depends on you know what kind of perceptions they bring to this this very
#
debate but i do think that for historians the important thing is to sort of capture a specific
#
way in which the ideas were formulated and formed and the other way in which we try to
#
anchor those ideas is then in legal provisions so as you could probably tell by reading the book a
#
lot of it is anchored through the law and that again gives us a kind of a kind of way through
#
which we can make those ideas appear in a concrete form for the reader to understand of why it matters
#
that people thought about things because you can see them implemented in black and white in things
#
such as the constitution and other forms of legislations so that's how i would answer the
#
question but of course we could go into in in depth and you know talk about the big debate of
#
philosophy versus history in the 18th century and you know why it is that the discipline sort of
#
departed from standalone philosophy no just to clarify i didn't mean it in that sense i
#
wasn't talking about ideas versus narratives in an abstract sense i mean we make sense of the world
#
through narratives so we only understand ideas also through narratives like your wonderful
#
narratives what i kind of meant was that people today don't care about ideas at all that you know
#
just to give a concrete example of what i mean you know if we debate nationalism for many people
#
today for many on the hindu right for example nationalism today would be about that oh the
#
muslims came and they oppressed us but now we will have our hindu rastra and that is our narrative
#
and that is that is what therefore becomes prescriptive and it flows out of the narrative
#
and doesn't flow out of any ideas whereas at the level of ideas the you know the debates like there
#
were you know between Nehru and Iqbal and so on would be about what is nationalism really how do
#
we define it you know what kind of nationalism is good for us rather than go into these narratives
#
of victimhood or oppression or whatever so that's kind of what i meant that you know you guys should
#
do it much more of exactly what you're doing and you will certainly have many readers like me but
#
in the larger context of what is actually happening out there ideas aren't being discussed
#
you know Nehru and Iqbal and Jinnah and all of these people whether you agree with them
#
or don't agree with them and i think in all of these people we can agree with aspects and disagree
#
with aspects but those debates and discussions are taking place you know which is not somehow i don't
#
see them taking place at that level today i would agree but at the same time i would probably give
#
it a more sort of optimistic spin because what i see is thousands and millions of people entering
#
into these debates and yes they're entering with simplistic sort of narratives that you know sort
#
of explain everything to them but at the same time they can't shield themselves from the type
#
of exposure that they're getting from your podcast from other people and i do think that once that
#
exposure sort of you know penetrates their own idea and sort of challenges that then you know
#
they're faced with the very simple complexity that we discussed here in this podcast so i do
#
think that one can see that also optimistically because whenever you have a big chunk of the
#
population sort of entering into a public discourse as many million indians and pakistanis did with
#
the emergence of the internet and other means of communication that entirely changed the sort of
#
paradigm that was existent before then of course you know there will be people who will be swayed
#
by simplistic narratives but at the same time you know there's exposure and i do think with
#
time people will also discuss ideas again as they as we as we write as they did in the from the 40s
#
to the 60s no that's a fantastic point and i i buy that optimism because you know if i was alive in
#
say neru and jinnah's time i would not have known of the debate or had a way to enter it or been
#
able to inform myself to take part in it and now at least millions of people like you said can take
#
part in these debates and perhaps if i was sort of lamenting i'm committing the mistake of you know
#
not taking sturgeon's law into account sturgeon's law of course is 98 percent of everything is crap
#
so you know you can romanticize the past and just see the best discussions that happened then
#
and today you can see all the nonsense that is around but hey it's always kind of been like that
#
my my final question for both of you is uh you know one of the sort of it's almost become a meme
#
on the show that people build scene in the unseen bookshelves and all of that so i'll end by asking
#
both of you to recommend as many books as you want you know m3 to 5 or whatever whatever comes to
#
your mind recommend books that you feel everybody must read you know not just for purposes of
#
illumination but even books that you've just enjoyed or been entertained by or that make you
#
want to stand in a soapbox and say hey read this this is great um i can i can i can go first um
#
since i already spoke so much about william hazlett i do think that um um he his book on
#
shakespeare is possibly the best thing that i've read and it actually introduced me to shakespeare
#
before that i felt shakespeare was the sort of stuffy guy because the way in which you
#
encounter shakespeare in the german education system is through this guy called schlegel
#
also known as the uh inventor of the proto-indoeuropean languages and all that
#
kinds of system right so he's the sort of systematic guy and he discovered shakespeare
#
translated into german and then really harped on about like the mythical dimension of shakespeare
#
so wherever you know you could leave the leave the abode of humanity behind and go into a different
#
sphere schlegel would do that and that shakespeare i didn't really like that much and and um with
#
hazlett he really opened up to the humanistic everyday shakespeare so the the characters of
#
the play you know what were what were they about what were their worries and it remains to me
#
possibly one of the one of the nicest accounts and the good thing is it's a book that you can
#
probably download from google books because it's in the in the public domain and it has been for
#
at least a century and of course he comes also against the other big shakespeare interpretation
#
because 19th century was very much about the rediscovery of the genius and you know they were
#
all sort of going on about shakespeare but the other one would be the samuel johnson one the
#
guy from the dictionary who also wrote a very meaningful and big interpretation of shakespeare
#
um but the hazlett one is really the one for me in a that i do think everybody should read in order
#
to at least for me it opened up the ability to appreciate shakespeare the other book that i would
#
recommend is because we've spoken so much about china is something that emily harn wrote that i
#
also mentioned is the american travel writer that i really enjoy reading and she wrote a book on the
#
soong sisters now the soong sisters were three women born to a methodist preacher who all happen
#
to have very exciting careers one of them becomes the vice chairman of the communist party
#
that rules over the people's republic the other one marries cenk czech so becomes madam cenk
#
czech and you know goes with the nationalists on the other side and it's a really really interesting
#
portrayal of the relationships and the emotional life worlds of those three sisters that emily
#
harn writes it's called the soong sisters which i really think people people should read in order
#
to really encapsulate the spirit um the the spirit of china at the time which was one of great
#
transformations where literally these things could happen that you could have somebody who's um at
#
the highest levels of the communist party and at the same time um also closely related to the
#
nationalists the books that i read more recently um that i've really enjoyed since we've spoken
#
about the opium war so much is uh empire of pain um by patrick um by patrick o'keefe who's um was
#
just patrick keefe who's written about the sackler family and the way in which they accumulated
#
their wealth through the marketing of opium essentially um as oxycontin in the latest um
#
variation and that book really for many of the readers will bring back like the old debates of
#
the opium wars because essentially many of the arguments that it can be used for you know specific
#
purposes in the initially for recreational purposes etc is almost like the same script
#
playing over again only in a democratic setting whereas early on it had played on in an imperial
#
setting it's a book that i greatly enjoyed and since we're staying with the topic of china the
#
other one that i really enjoyed reading is the last kings of shanghai it was written by jonathan
#
kaufman i think he's a financial times um he's a journalist who works at the financial times
#
and he essentially wrote a comparative um narrative about barda the jewish families and
#
the way in which they in which these families managed to keep a specific tradition intact
#
while completely opening up to the capitalist forces of the 19th and 20th century and it's
#
nice because it really begins in bardat where they're sort of advising the sultan and then it
#
moves all the way forward to i think it ends in the 1960s or 70s so it's really a fantastic book
#
because it gives you a multiple hundred years of history condensed in one volume so yeah
#
yeah i can't wait to dig into these through put them on um uh yeah so before i before i
#
get into the books just sort of two quick two quick asides one was when uh about the narratives
#
and that was i think it's something that i've all that i've felt quite a lot is um one of the
#
reasons is that actually a lot of good scholarship and good writing is just simply not available in
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vernacular languages and you know if you're a university student or if you're a kind of
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journalist in the vernacular languages etc it's actually you you are never really going to be
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exposed in any meaningful sense to uh to a lot of writing and scholarship both about forget about
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the rest of the world but even about india a lot of the most of the writing at least in history and
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in political theory is done in english it's completely inaccessible to uh uh to the uh to
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the sort of average university student in india so um it's uh it's not a surprise that all of these
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sort of uh sometimes even when i look at them talking about history uh it's a bit like the
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debates or the kind of intellectual shifts that have happened in the past uh 70 years have really
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passed them by um in a way uh just because they've all happened in english and none of them are really
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available to uh to the vast majority of uh the indian public so i think that's one of the big
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reasons that a lot of kind of intellectual shifts and arguments are just are just you know never
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make it past the small um chaturati class um in india and then just because adil mentioned
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chiang kai shek there's a really funny incident um and uh ramanar loya writes about it in his book
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um when uh about the fact that there was once a banquet um in viceroy's house uh when chiang
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kai shek visited india and lord linus goh actually complained um about the amount of attention that
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madam chiang kai shek was paying um nehru and he said um you know disparagingly said oh madam
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only has eyes for her boyfriend uh so yeah there you there you have it i think about books that
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some of the books that i've i i think um recently that i've really read top of the list for me
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because i keep going back to it all the time is um sigmund bauman's liquid modernity and for me
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that's you know nothing really kind of explains the modern world in the way that uh that bauman
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does um he's able to kind of put you know i their garbled thoughts that i would have about about
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the kind of disjunctures that modernity really creates and bauman is able to explain that you
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know with such finesse that um that you know that's a book that i just keep keep returning
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to all the time the second uh i think and again um i mentioned william del rempel again del
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rempel's anarchy and that has by far been the best book in history that i've read in a long long time
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um and by like such a huge distance that uh you know i keep it on my bookshelf as a reminder
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about how history can be written about how it can be how it can be you know it can be both
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rigorous and really fascinating so that's that i'd say is is the second something that i really
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enjoyed recently was jose joseph's silent coup mainly because i think it touches on again a
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hugely important completely neglected subject in india it's the kind of dark underbelly of uh of
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the indian security establishment which we neither want to admit to nor engage with most often we
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don't even want to know about it but i found that both you know sort of revealing and disturbing
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in equal measure and all credit to jose for uh for writing it especially at a at a time like this
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when you know you know that's writing something like this can uh ruffle um ruffle feathers apart
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from that something else that's i it's always a classic in my head is um is great expectations
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um i that's another book that i you know keep going back to um i i love how dickens can construct
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um that sort of story um and it it kind of provokes uh it provokes a lot of you know thinking
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and emotion in me an indian writer who's who's writing that i've actually really come to enjoy
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is siddharth dhanvant sanghvi and um i've read his book the lost flamingos of bombay which i really
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like but he came out a couple of years ago um with a illustrated book called i think it's called the
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squirrel and the rabbit and the illustrations are beautiful but it's um it's it's the writing it's
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some of the cleverest writing that i've ever read and i found it profoundly moving it's you know it
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looks like a children's book but it's you know anything but and i found the writing you know
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very lyrical very elgaic very moving and um actually if someone was to quiz me on what's
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what's the best book that i'd read in the last three four years five years uh i would definitely
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pick that um i've i've given about 10 of them as presents and it's uh it's possibly the best
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book that i've read in uh in in the last few years well fantastic suggestions i think i'm
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going to spend the rest of tonight just kind of getting these books and uh beginning to read so
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guys thank you so much for your uh patience it's been uh great i love reading your book i hope
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i hope you know you know hope to continue reading your books for many many years to come so
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more power to you guys thank you so much thank you so much for having us amit
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yeah thank you for having us amit absolute pleasure
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
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and pick up nehru the debates to define india by tripur daman singh and adil hussein you can
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follow tripur daman on twitter at tripur daman you can follow adil at adil h693 you can follow
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me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene
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unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen
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