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I've reached a stage in my podcasting where I find people more interesting than subjects.
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I might be speaking to an expert in this subject or that field, but my favorite part of the
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conversation is about the personal journey that my guest has taken.
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I want to know the person behind the work, the evolution towards a view of the world
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rather than the view itself, the things that shaped them, the things their family and friends
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will remember them for, the private moments behind the public work.
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I've been lucky in the way that so many of my guests have opened themselves up to me
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and in doing so have become more than names on a page or faces on television for all of
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you, but real people, flesh and blood people, people with emotional lives and material worries.
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When I speak to a historian these days, sure I want to know the history they have written
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about, but I also like to dig deep into the history of the historian.
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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 guest today is a great historian, Ramachandra Guha, making his fifth appearance on the show.
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In our first two episodes, we spoke about Mohandas Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi.
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Then we did an episode about this Republic and the last time we chatted, we discussed
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I'll link those episodes from the show notes.
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When I came to Bangalore and we decided to record this time, we figured we'll talk about
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this new book, Rebels Against Siraj.
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But when we met up, Ram was like, Amit, I've been talking about this book so much.
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And I was like, yes, let's just talk about yourself.
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I want to get to know you a little better.
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And I enjoyed it so much, as I'm sure you will as well.
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Before we start though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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And by now, you know that actual commercials don't come often in this labor of love of
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So what, I can still give you public service information, as I will now.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs rupees 10,000 per GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Ram, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
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It's such a pleasure to have you on again.
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You know, in our past episodes, we've kind of discussed themes and issues.
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We spoke about Gandhi on a couple of episodes.
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We did an episode for Republic Day where we spoke about India, and your last episode was
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of course on the excellent book you wrote and cricket and all of that.
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And I want to sort of get more into the personal now and get a sense of sort of, you know,
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where you come from and what shaped you.
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And to begin that, I'll begin by reading out a quotation from Amitav Kumar's recent book
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which came out, which really spoke to me.
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And there is a question at the end of it.
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And he's talking about Rahim Azam Raza's story, Aadha Gaon.
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And he's talking about this incident where this bunch of well-educated Muslim students
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go to a village to tell the Muslims there that there's going to be partition and you
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come to Pakistan with us.
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And this is Amitav's quote where he writes, in Raza's Aadha Gaon, the protest against
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a nation is being made in the name of the village.
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When the fiercely well-educated Muslim students come to Ganguly to preach about partition
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and the necessity for the creation of a new nation of Pakistan, the Muslim villagers are
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One of the villagers is a young man called Tannu who has returned from battle fighting
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for the British in the Second World War.
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He argues against the urban visitors in the name of his village.
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And now these are Tannu's words.
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He says, I am a Muslim, but I love this village because I myself am this village.
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I love the indigo warehouse, this tank and these mud lanes because they are different
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On the battlefield, when death came very near, I certainly remembered Allah.
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Instead of Mecca or Karbala, I remembered Ganguly.
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And I found this beautiful and moving.
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And a question that I asked Amitav and that I'll now turn to you is what is your Ganguly?
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And when I mean what is your sense of home, one, I ask this question because I myself
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feel that I can't place a sense of home in terms of geography.
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I know where I was born.
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I know where I grew up and all of that.
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But when I think of it in an impressionistic way, it will be people, the way they speak,
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the thing may be sitting in a living room sometime, things that bring me comfort.
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But a lot of things which have since dissipated.
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And Amitav had a similar sort of sense of it.
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So when I say, where is your Ganguly, I'm not asking you for a specific place.
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And I'm not even asking for a biological recounting or an intellectual.
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I'm asking more for a sort of an impressionistic account of what are the things and places
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and memories that feel to you like home?
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So I'll answer it in a slightly long-winded way.
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You know, Amit, the last time we met, we spoke about cricket.
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And I grew up with cricket.
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But the older I have got, and it may seem heretical to say this to some of my friends
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and readers, Hindustani classical music has replaced cricket as my first and main and
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And every evening I listen to a lot of music.
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Before I give a talk, not a nice informal conversation like the one I'm having with
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you, but some, you know, staid, serious academic talk, I listen to music.
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And quite often, the composition of my choice before a talk I give is Kumar Gandhav's Jamun
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And that appeals to me because there is only one Kumar Gandhav.
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It's short enough to, you know, you don't have to listen to a whole khayal of one hour
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before going in for a meeting.
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And because I realized much later, I mean, it's a really beautiful composition.
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It's also been sung by Mukulshir Putra, his son, by Prabha Atre, T.M.
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Very recently I started singing it.
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And also in his own very distinctive and fine way.
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But Kumarji is, as Krishna would agree, somewhere up there.
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I mean, thinking about why that matters to me so much.
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And it's not just the music, it's not just Kumar Gandhav.
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It is because Jamuna Ke Nare Mero Gaon.
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I was born in the watershed of the Jamuna, not in a village, in a place called the Forest
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Research Institute, which was set up in the early 20th century by the British.
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And when my father and grandfather both worked as scientists, they were not members of the
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Had they been there to come on deputation, they were research scientists running the wood
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And my maternal grandfather, my father, I was born there, my mother was born there.
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And it's on the watershed.
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So by home, we live in a series of homes on the watershed of a river called Tons, or as
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they would say in the local dialect, Tans.
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And Tans is a very common name for a village in that part of Garhwal.
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And the Tans joined the Asan, which joined the Jamuna.
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So actually, that's among the reasons I'm so sentimentally attached to the song, I suppose,
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I was born in Dehradun in 1958, when it was still part of Uttar Pradesh.
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The creation of Uttarakhand was for decades and more in the future.
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Very beautiful wooded campus with 400 species of birds, lots of playgrounds, friends to
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hang out with, play cricket with, smoke cigarettes with, listen to music with.
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So in a sense, Dehradun, and particularly the Forest Research Institute, is my go.
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I often dream about it.
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It's one part of the town that has not been disfigured by the changes in the last 30 or
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And yes, so I'm a Uttarakhand by birth, Tamil by blood, Bangalore by domicile, Kolkata in
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terms of my education and intellectual formation.
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But I do feel a deep attachment to Dehradun and the campus of the Forest Research Institute,
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and the woods and valleys and rivers and birds and trees of that landscape, an attachment
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that is much deeper than I have to any other place.
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And when you say you dream about it, do you dream about being young in it or do you dream
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I dream about walks in it, really.
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I have some very interesting dreams.
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I wonder whether we've talked about this before.
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But I have dreamt, this is deviating from what you want to talk about.
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I want to deviate from everything.
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Now, so I dream about Dehradun, particularly the FRI, but also other parts.
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You were telling me this dream.
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You were telling me this dream.
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I'm going to tell you about the dream now.
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A particular dream which tells you about my attachment, also about problems writers have
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only write books and want to shape society, is that in 2014, in the month of April, I
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was in the city of Houston in Texas, going to speak about the second volume of my Gandhi
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biography at a wonderful independent bookstore in Houston.
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And that night, this is March or April, 2014, right?
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I had this dream, you know, elections were coming, the Congress was discredited, I had
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a lifelong detestation of the BJP and Indutva, I had seen Modi in operation in Gujarat, I
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had no illusions about him and I dreamt, I can't remember the exact date, but about March
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or April, 2014, I dreamt that I was going to contest elections on behalf of the Ahmadi
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Okay, now I had two dreams.
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I first dreamt that I thought that at that stage, the Ahmadi party had a certain romantic
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My friend Yogendra Yadav had joined it and I saw other people and I dreamt that I was
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going to join and fight from Dehradun.
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In my dream, you know, the landscape of Dehradun, the eastern valley with the Thano forest and
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the western valley with the Jamuna and, you know, Ashokanidhi, all that was coming in
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And I said, I have to fight.
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It all happened in the dream.
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And Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who is a notoriously austere, reclusive intellectual, as far from
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the world of combat as anyone could be, told me, Ram, I am thinking of fighting from Jaipur,
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you should fight from Dehradun.
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Now, I got up in the middle of the night and it was like 2 a.m. and I was kind of gobsmacked.
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And so I called my wife and she said, your jet lagged and weary, just go back to sleep.
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I went back to sleep in April 2014 and I had a second dream that night in which, again,
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I was considering joining the Ahmadi party to fight from Dehradun and this time the person
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encouraging me to throw my hat in the ring was my esteemed elder colleague Rajmohan Gandhi,
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who had actually decided to fight on an Ahmadi ticket from East Delhi.
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So it was even much more credible than Pratap.
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So I got up, I called my friend Keshav Desi Raju, the late Keshav Desi Raju, the biographer
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and she said, Ram, you've been away too long now.
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So then I lay awake from Houston, I flew to, I gave my talk, then I flew to San Francisco
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and I decided, you know, I mean, I'm a writer and I write books and obviously I can't shape
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society in the way a politician can.
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I can't really improve people's lives in the way a doctor or teacher can.
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But what I can do, I will do honestly and sincerely and I disregard the dream.
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The dream went out of the window.
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In 2019, February, I was in this city where we are talking, Bangalore alone.
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My wife and children were out of town and I dreamt again that the 2019 election is coming
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and you know, the BJP and Modi had consolidated itself further.
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The social fabric was being torn apart.
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I had written the book that we're going to discuss a little bit.
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I had written the draft.
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I had no other intellectual ambitions and I had a dream saying I'm going to fight again
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from Dehradun and again the landscape came alive for me and this time my wife was overseas.
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So at 2 a.m. it was like 6 p.m. in London, I called her and she said, if you pursue that
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dream, I will divorce you.
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So I went back and in that dream, I even had a kind of, you know, in between my waking
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hours, my sleeping hours, I even realized that I have an interesting time.
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I'll never win, but I'll see parts of the valley that I have not seen and I would even,
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I would do what the very great writer Maria Vargaso had done, what the election had lost
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and I would get a book out of it.
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And I even had a title for that book, Doomed in the Dune, middle-aged writers quixotic
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dream to change and failed dream to change this country.
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So I think what these dreams tell you is two things.
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One is the sense of inadequacy any writer who writes on politics and society does, that
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he's merely documenting, interpreting, analyzing, reflecting, but he's not really changing anyone's
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So that I think is something, and writers can compensate for it in different ways, sometimes
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they join a political party and so on.
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And the other thing it tells you about is, the answer to your question is, though I left
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the Gharud in 1984 when my father retired, that is still my ground.
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So I want to take you upon that you realized at this point, you told yourself that, hey,
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writers can't change society, writers can't shape society, right?
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And one of the realizations that has come to me as I have reached my late 40s and something
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that I have discussed with guests on the show is our changing conceptions of time.
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That when you're 20, it looks like 25 is a long way away, 30 is an old man, right?
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And equally, when you look back in the past, the past seems distant.
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It's another country, as the cliche goes, right?
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So you look at, say, the 1857 mutiny, and it's like a century and a half ago from that
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But then the decades just quickly pass in your own life.
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And you realize that shit in the blink of an eye, like a friend of mine uses very resonant
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phrase yesterday when I was having coffee with him where he said that the days are long,
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but the years are short, you know?
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And that struck a chord with me about how quickly time really moves, though it sometimes
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And what that also then made me realize is that what seemed like distant history was
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not distant history after all, you know?
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If 20 years in my own life have passed in the blink of an eye, then 60 years in a country's
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history is also the blink of an eye.
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And when I take that step back and look at things with that perspective, it seems to
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me that as in my life, in the history of people, because history is just a lot of collected
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lives like that, a lot of things that happen happen by accident, they are kind of happenstance.
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It's very tempting to later look back and put narratives and think of it in a teleological
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But there's so much accident, so much randomness.
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So when going back to your phrase of writers cannot shape society, you know, what shapes
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Like is it just accident?
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Number one, what shapes society?
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Is there a class of people who shape it more than others?
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And secondly, what is then the role of intellectuals?
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Like, do you believe that in the long arc, you know, intellectuals, public intellectuals
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can make changes in small and unseen ways that they may not realize at the time, but
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they have to believe in the long game and keep on playing it?
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So first of all, I mean, chance and contingency plays a very important role in history, but
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also in the life of the historian, I mean, we can talk about that later if you wish.
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How I became a historian was a series of absolutely random accidents.
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But you know, I think what really changes society much more than the ideas of a historian
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or sociologist are the inventions of a scientist and an engineer.
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You know, I think this is one of Karl Marx's great insights, that technology is an autonomous
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You know, what the laptop or the computer has done to you.
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I mean, Marx understood what the steam engine and the railway line were doing and the large
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factory were doing to transform social relations in good and for bad.
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You know, but again, I have a lifelong engagement with Marx, not with Marxists and communists
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whom I've usually come to dislike and detest almost as much as I detest the Hindu, right?
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Not as much, but almost as much.
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But Marx was a great visionary thinker and got some things very right about technology,
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He got some things wrong, and one of the things he got wrong was in his inversion of Feuerbach's
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When Feuerbach said, you know, in his thesis on Feuerbach, he said, Marx said famously,
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philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world, the task, however, is to change it.
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And Marx saw himself as a philosopher changing the world.
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Lenin saw himself as a philosopher changing the world.
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Mao saw himself possibly to some extent as a philosopher changing the world, right?
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And you know, Dindayal Upadhyay and so on, also, and I think, I don't think that's,
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I think the job of a thinker is to interpret the world, to analyze it, interpret it using
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his tools, his analysis, his research, his autonomy, his independence of judgment, all
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What other people make of it is their business.
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Now, it's important that there are several things that are important in doing your job
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truthfully and honestly if you're an intellectual.
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One is, of course, absolute independence from political parties.
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You may have a philosophy and ideology.
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You may be on the left, but don't join the Communist Party.
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You may be on the right, but don't join the BJP, and above all, never be seen with politicians
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in public and have your photographs taken with politicians or have dinner with them
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But the other thing that's really, I think, very important is truthlessness to academic
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fidelity, rigor of research, you know, scrutinizing your sources from different points of view.
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And then for a historian, someone in the humanities more broadly, writing excessively and clearly
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I think that's very, very important because history and anthropology are two disciplines
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in which the complexity and depth of the research and the nuance of the argument can be expressed
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You do not have to dumb down, unlike a mathematician or a physicist or a geneticist who will have
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to, who cannot convey the complexity of his findings and the depth of his research to
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you and me without using technical language.
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So I think these are things that guide me in my work.
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I myself do, I mean, one should not, everyone has the right to look at somebody else as
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So if you call me a public intellectual, I won't tell you not to call me a public intellectual,
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but I never call myself a public intellectual.
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I think a public intellectual is a misleading term, it's a pompous term, it's a self-regarding
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I'm a historian and writer.
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You can say historian and cricket writer, historian and environmental writer, historian
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and columnist, all that is fine.
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But public intellectual is a term I personally don't like.
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Many strands in the, like one, of course, I'll double down on what you said about, you know,
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that writers don't have to dumb it down.
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And when I teach my writing course, I tell everyone that as far as your prose is concerned,
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you have to keep the reader in mind, make sure that, you know, many of us, when we write
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into our laptops, we imagine that the job of writing is to get what is in your head
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And what I am at pains to explain is no, you have to have the intended effect on the intended
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So she has to be at the forefront of your consideration.
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But while you tailor your prose for the reader, you never tailor your content in that way.
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Your content is what it is, you never compromise, you never dumb it down.
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And it is possible to write like that.
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Now that leads me to think that on the one hand, you say that the job of a historian
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But it also seems that this imperative for clarity comes because you want this history
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to reach more people to make it to the discourse.
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And therefore there is another purpose.
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It is not just writing history for the sake of history, but it is writing history because
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it is good for society in a sense.
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So I would say good for society.
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I mean, it's one wants as many people as possible to read what you write.
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So my newspaper column comes in 10 languages.
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It comes in not all the main Indian language, but most of them.
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And if you want your writing in English to be understood in Bangla or in Urdu, you can't
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write like a French postmodern theorist, or an Indian postmodern theorist.
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I won't take any names, but the kind of people I have in mind.
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And I think that's very, very important.
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In some ways, the most curious compliment I've ever got was when I wrote an essay in
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the EPW many years ago, I think it was in 1996.
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It was a critique of the linguistic turn in subaltern studies.
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Subaltern studies, as many of your listeners will know, was a school of history writing,
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talking about the oppressed people, peasants, workers, Adivasis, and so on, and documenting
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That was social history at its finest when it began.
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And then it became postmodern naval gazing, critique of colonial power, kind of second
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grade literary criticism.
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So I wrote a piece, which was an analysis of this, which I called Subaltern and Bhadralok
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studies, how subaltern studies had become Bhadralok studies.
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And I bumped into a JNU professor at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library who liked my piece.
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And he told me, you know, I'm already a piece in the latest EPW.
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And I gave it to my students to read.
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And then he added, I gave it to my students to read and I told them, don't be confused
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by how well it's written.
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It's still saying important things.
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That's the most curious, bizarre compliment I've ever got.
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Don't be confused by how well it's written.
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It's still saying important things, which means JNU students are taught, if it's clear
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and accessible and readable and eloquent, it's not important, you know.
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So I think it's a commentary on what we made of scholarly writing and this is not true
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I mean, certainly historians, even the sociologists have admired, always wrote clearly.
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I mean, I mean, I didn't agree always with what he wrote, but he expressed complex ideas
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and such, you know, clear prose.
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So I think that is something, and of course, the older you get, maybe your prose gets
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In my case, this is an argument I have with my son, Keshav, you know, and with younger
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I believe printing out drafts is important and correcting a piece of paper with a pen
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I think that's something I do even with a newspaper column.
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I think that's for young writers, as I said, my son disagrees and maybe some of your writing
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people will also disagree with me, but I believe it's very important to print out drafts and
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go over them with a pen, set them aside.
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In my case, I probably think, and I can't explain this, I mean, I think a lifetime of
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listening to music has probably made my prose clear.
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I can't explain how, why this is so and how this is so, but I think that's probably part
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It is true that a historian, because he writes about real people, a historian would write
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in a more accessible everyday language than a philosopher would.
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So it's a privilege that, it's a rare privilege that historians enjoy.
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You know, they are not truly original in their thought in the way a philosopher or a mathematician
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or a physicist is, and I have no illusions about in that regard.
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I mean, they are over, those three, I mean, philosophers, mathematicians and physicists
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are, and biologists are at a different level of intellectual achievement than historians,
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but at least what they find, they can reach out to a wide audience and they must make
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So a couple of themes I want to kind of double click on.
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And the first of them, like, first of all, I'll tell you in what manner I use a phrase
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public intellectual and why it fits and why, in fact, you validated my argument for using
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that phrase and what you just said, which is that by making your writing clear and accessible
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in a way that other historians don't, you are making it public, you're reaching out
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And of course your subject is intellectual.
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So I use it purely those words in that functional sense without the other connotations that
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come in with fancy phrases like that.
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And the first theme I want to double click on is therefore a theme of the changing relevance
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Like in the past, what would happen is that you would have the academic world and you
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would have a world of elites and their ideas and the rest of the world when the world is
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much poorer, 19th century, much of the 20th century, the rest of the world is getting
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on with life while all your intellectual discourse and your intellectual life is happening among
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Today, I think across various sort of fields and industries and whatever, the main streams
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have dissipated, everything has become democratized and the access is much more open.
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Net-net, I think it's a fantastic thing.
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There are, of course, counter effects and, you know, one can see that there are some
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bugs along with the features.
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But net-net, I think it's a fantastic thing.
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Now what are the implications of this for academia?
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Because I think what is happening is like we were discussing earlier at lunch today
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that there is a great hunger among people, among young people for history.
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My history episodes are always really popular.
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A writer like Manu Pillay has a cult following because he speaks in eloquent and clear language
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to those people and makes history come alive with the stories that he tells.
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Now there is that hunger for it where people, the mass of people who would otherwise have
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been living lives of quiet desperation and trying to earn their next meal, want to engage
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in the world of ideas and get to know all of this.
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So is this something that will reshape academia?
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Is this something that will, you know, make academia irrelevant?
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And is there a sense of now, you know, one class of people becoming irrelevant who are
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writing their postmodernist language and who are following their fashions of academia?
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And another mass class of people coming up saying that I don't need to have a PhD to
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You know, I will convince you and win you over with the quality of my work.
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So I mean, obviously it's not black and white and there are certain subjects which require
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rigorous historical subjects, require rigorous academic training, require years and years
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of work in the archives.
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You can't write them on the basis of secondary sources.
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They require knowledge of many different languages.
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And the popular historians of today may or may not have those.
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But they are answering a real need, and which is why it's important for academics to step
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out of writing only for their peers and writing for a wider audience, because then they can
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bring their training, their rigor.
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You know, the greatest Indian historian alive is Sanjay Subramaniam.
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And he's a wonderful writer too.
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He doesn't write turgid prose, he writes very accessible, often eloquent prose.
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But he hesitates writing for a wider audience.
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I've talked to him about it.
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But he knows much more about medieval India, about European expansion than 500 of the popular
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Or about South Indian history of South India.
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But I wish people like him would come out and take their knowledge to a wider audience
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as many great foreign historians have done.
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You know, you know, British historians, particularly, I mean, think of Linda Colley, who's just
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written a very big book which I'm looking forward to read, which I haven't, on the history
#
Okay, now, that's not someone, you know, a general consumer of popular history will read,
#
because it's complex, it's difficult, it's about large ideas, it's not about kings and
#
queens and battles, which is what you want to read about, right.
#
So but it's a major historical subject, you know, a comparative history of constitutions.
#
But she's written in a way in which if you are willing to, you know, take the trouble,
#
And a very important difference in this, distinction in this regard, I mean, is not between scholarly
#
history and popular history, we can talk about that.
#
It's between scholarly publishers and trade publishers.
#
So Linda Colley, who is one of the historians I greatly admire, who's written three or four
#
landmark works of scholarship, the depth of our research you will not find in popular
#
history either in this country or in Britain or America.
#
But she publishes her books, not through Harvard University Press and Cambridge University Press,
#
but through Penguin or Harper.
#
So I think that's where people need to go.
#
Some people are going down that route now.
#
I think some ancient historians, you know, Nanjot Lahiri and Upinder Singh, excellent
#
examples who are writing now for a wider audience, and bringing that depth of scholarship available
#
So while popular history has its place, often it's about a particular kinds of subject,
#
you know, as I said, kings and queens and rich men, you know, and that is only part
#
That the great work of subaltern studies was to shine a spotlight on obscure working class
#
people who don't leave a written record of their work, you know, I think that whose lives
#
you have to reconstruct by using all kinds of fugitive sources spread all over the place.
#
So I think it is a challenge that I think the growing hunger that readers have for history
#
is a challenge the professional historian must respond to and must not vacate the space
#
for people who may lack, you know, the rigor, the training and are filling the space because
#
the professional historian is only writing for his or her peers.
#
I think that's a challenge that I wish more people would embrace.
#
Yeah, I mean, I think as for any other field, Sturgeon's law applies to this.
#
Now Sturgeon's law is that 95% of everything is crap, which will happen in history writing
#
So the point is that that 5% is a space that a newcomer can fill, yes, provided they show
#
the rigor, but a professional historian will already have the training and the rigor and
#
just by, you know, not condescending to the mass public by saying that, hey, we want to,
#
you know, by reaching out and by taking the public in public intellectual seriously because
#
I mean, history is a branch of social science and a branch of literature, you know, it is
#
a branch of literature.
#
And I think that's something I wish more professional historians would take a note.
#
Now the next big theme that I said I'd explore, which came from what you were saying earlier
#
was when you spoke about how you print something out and you underline each thing and you said
#
that your son might find it ridiculous.
#
I don't find it ridiculous.
#
And it's not just because of my age.
#
It's also because that I think that what that does, that process does when you print something
#
out is that it slows down your consideration of what you have written, where you're not
#
You're going slowly over the printed page with a pen and underlining parts and all that.
#
And I think that helps.
#
And I have wanted to ask you, and this is a much larger question, about the rhythms of
#
Like for example, you know, today many people live their lives in a rhythm, if you think
#
about it, which is very frenetic, which is choppy, which is like staccato, thug, thug,
#
Twitter check, Instagram check, Facebook check, you go on from one thing to the other.
#
In a sense, you could say that if our life was to be mimicked in prose, it would be fragmented
#
sentences and not, you know, beautiful, elegant, long sentences which are building their own
#
slow rhythm and building their ease.
#
So I had sort of a number of questions kind of based on this about just these rhythms
#
And one, I want to ask you about sort of the rhythms of life when you were growing up in
#
your past and what you find the difference now and what you do to insulate yourself from
#
the temptations of falling into this kind of modern rhythm where you feel you're doing
#
a lot, but it's all shallow, you're getting nothing done.
#
And it is in this context that I find what you said illuminating about taking a printout
#
and going through something.
#
Because what are you doing?
#
You're slowing down that rhythm and you're giving more consideration.
#
It's possible that even writing directly on the screen, though it's so easy and accessible,
#
even take a printout, there's a way you can slow it down further is writing by hand.
#
I wrote my first book by hand.
#
I think my first two or three books by hand I wrote.
#
And then I would either type it or give it to a typist.
#
I have friends who still write books by hand, the historian David Gilmour, who is a wonderful
#
historian of colonial India and has also written on Italy, writes by hand.
#
If you read Darwin's autobiography, it's a gem of literature completely written by hand.
#
So I, of course, on the other hand, it is, I mean, I have some, I mean, I wouldn't want
#
to appear absolutely old-fashioned.
#
I think it is sometimes easy to revise on screen.
#
There would be writers who turn out brilliant first drafts just based on the screen and going
#
I mean, young people get accustomed to different rhythms.
#
But all reflection, I think I was very lucky that I was born before the age even of television
#
because Dehradun had no television till I was 20.
#
So let alone the internet, let alone the smartphone.
#
So the radio was very important, reading was very important, walks were very important
#
and conversation was very important.
#
You know, and I think these four kind of elements of life, the radio has disappeared as a medium
#
of instruction and education, podcasts, fortunately, to some extent are now compensating for it
#
for younger Indians, but radio has gone, reading is now in bites, walks have been replaced
#
by gym work, and I still walk, I go to common park, I don't like the gym, and conversation,
#
long extended conversations without people looking at their phone.
#
So I think I was lucky in that sense that the rhythms of my life were determined very
#
early on, without a dependence on on such things, you know, which of course are great
#
and convenient and use, aid you and use you.
#
And I, when I write, I never have my phone with me.
#
I would like not to be connected to the internet.
#
But that I don't do because the internet is valuable for fact checking.
#
But if I was a novelist, I'm sure Keshava is not committed, rightly so, not connected
#
to the internet while he's composing a chapter of a novel.
#
I don't look at Twitter after 11 a.m., whatever happens, if somebody tells me, you know, Russia
#
has invaded Ukraine at 3 p.m., I might go to the news, go to the BBC website and look
#
So I think obviously these are things one has to learn.
#
I mean, I obviously I deeply appreciate the benefits that technology has brought about.
#
But writing is something that takes place over the long haul, sometimes the very long
#
So my new book, Rebels Against the Raj, has been in the making more than 20 years.
#
I wrote a biography of Elvin, which is by the anthropologist, published in 1999.
#
And Elvin, who was a Oxford trained anthropologist who became a scholar and advocate for Indian
#
Adivasi people and was close to Gandhi and Nehru, had one abiding regret because he never
#
And so when I finished my biography of Elvin in 1999, I thought, let me write a companion
#
volume, a group portrait of seven or eight people.
#
And I gave a series of lectures in Nehru in the Northeastern Hill University in 2001 called
#
The Other Side of the Raj, where I portrayed 14 or 15 such people.
#
And 20 years later, this book has come out because I did other things, but it was always
#
in the back of my mind.
#
So I was always gathering material, thinking about it, narrowing down my list of 14 people
#
to seven, focusing on them, finding ways of getting new material on them.
#
So writing books is about the long haul.
#
It's something which often germinates in your mind over decades, if you are fortunate to
#
And I think that's something, that's the kind of rhythm, and I'm sorry to revive an old
#
debate between you and me, that's the rhythm that comes naturally to a lover of test cricket
#
and not to a lover of 2050.
#
But I love test cricket too, and I'm not going to argue about that.
#
One, it's very interesting, and it's something I think I've written about also, the difference
#
between writing by hand and writing on the computer, and it's a very fundamental thing.
#
There is a trade-off, and the trade-off is the speed and convenience of writing something
#
But at the same time, the greater consideration that you put upon your thoughts in your writing
#
when you're forced to write slowly.
#
And I think individuals have to kind of figure a trade-off for themselves, except that many
#
young people today have perhaps not written by hand at all, so one doesn't know how that
#
Now, I am struck by something that would seem to contradict our mutual appreciation of slow
#
rhythms, which is something that your favorite editor, Rukun Adwani, said about you, where
#
he once said, quote, Ram Guha was from the word go rather like an unstoppable force of
#
a volcano spilling over with more ideas for books than he wanted to write, then his brain
#
was able to contain, stop quote.
#
So a slightly unconventional question.
#
Give me a picture of your brain when you were a young person, and what's going on through
#
Like how much activity is there?
#
Did you daydream a lot?
#
What did you think about in your free time?
#
So I think all Rukun is describing, Rukun got to know me when I was 25 or 26, and my
#
life changed dramatically between the ages of 21 and 25.
#
From four to 21, I was obsessed with playing cricket from the age of four till the age
#
And I read occasionally and I come from a family of readers, not of readers, but of
#
And I had friends in college who introduced me to novels.
#
And so I read some of the well-known novelists of the day, I listened to music, I did other
#
things, but I had no intellectual interest at all, till by accident I discovered the
#
And in the year 1978, Rukun Advani, who was in college with me for three years, he was
#
two years senior to me, he did an MA, so we overlapped for three years, we stayed for
#
three years in the same small, self-enclosed community of males and never exchanged a word
#
with one another because Rukun had contempt for sports people, which he kind of hints
#
at in his essay on me, which is why when I met him five years after he had graduated
#
and I, by accident, had a mutual friend's wedding and I told him I'd completed a PhD
#
on Zipka movement, he thought this guy's gone mad.
#
And then it took him a long time to understand that a genuine kind of transformation had
#
taken place, which took place in Kolkata, where I went for a PhD at the Indian Institute
#
of Management, a strange place to be doing a PhD in sociology, but I was fortunate that
#
we were mentored by a very remarkable teacher called Anjan Ghosh, who is no longer alive,
#
who really shaped me intellectually in all kinds of ways, which is why I continue to
#
write for the Telegraph of Kolkata, because I owe Kolkata a second chance in life.
#
Kolkata gave me a chance to explore the world of ideas and research.
#
So it's from then, maybe I was making up for all those years when I was playing cricket,
#
ever since then, I've always had many ideas, so I always have three or four book projects
#
And the days before Rukun became so reclusive, I would meet him or call him and bombard him
#
with the ideas he talks about in his essay on me.
#
And I still have things, even when I'm working on one book, the second and third somewhere
#
playing around, because there's so much, I'm curious about many different things.
#
I know what I don't write about.
#
I never write about economics, because I don't understand it.
#
I never write about technology, because I don't understand it.
#
I never write about fiction, and I never write about films.
#
But that leaves still a very large and capacious array of subjects which we engage in what
#
I read about, what I discuss, what I write about in my columns, and what I think about
#
So I think, in that sense, although I consider myself a scholar, I have a PhD, each of my
#
books is based on many years of original research, I'm glad I'm not in the academy.
#
Because in the academy, you're compelled to read the latest article in the latest cutting
#
Here I'm free to roam as I wish intellectually.
#
I can read whatever I want, in whatever way.
#
I'm now reading, for example, a wonderful biography of the Jewish philosopher Martin
#
Buber, who had a famous argument with Gandhi, who grew up in Germany and had to go into
#
exile because of what was happening in the 1930s, and was an early proponent of a bi-national
#
state in which Arabs and Jews would coexist.
#
Now this is not something which, if I was teaching a full-time professor, I would be
#
I'd be told to read the latest book on whatever, the Mughal relations with the Rajput, so whatever
#
else is topical, or so on and so forth.
#
So I think, in that sense, not being in the academy frees you to do this, to range widely.
#
But Rukun was lucky that he met me, and I got to know him.
#
I was also deeply fortunate in having him as my editor, helping him shape the prose
#
Yeah, but I always have many ideas, and sometimes I return to them 15 or 20 years later, as
#
I did with Rebels Against the West.
#
Though I did lovely and illuminating, but I did ask you to sort of paint a picture of
#
your mind, and the sense that I mean that in is, what are you thinking about through
#
If someone was to map your brain, let's say that the gents who, you know, put a chip on
#
the 2000 rupee note, they manage to put a chip in your brain, and they get a mapping
#
of what's going on in there, like does your mind wander a lot?
#
Like with me, my mind is just skipping around all the time, it's choppy choppy choppy.
#
When I'm writing, it doesn't wander, it's absolutely focused.
#
It wanders when I listen to music, or when I'm working.
#
Like earlier you said something that also ties in with our discussion on rhythm, where
#
you said that listening to music has made your prose clearer.
#
No, and I totally buy that.
#
I can see why that might be the case, because one, all good music is precise.
#
Everything is in its place.
#
It cannot be any other way, right?
#
And also listening to Hindustani classical, a lot of it, it seems to me, will slow down
#
the rhythms in your mind, will put you in a quieter place where you can reflect more,
#
and therefore the words will come out with better consideration and all of that.
#
So do you think that there is...
#
No, and you know, I listen to music lying down in the dark, roughly from 6 to 7.15,
#
sometimes 5.45 to 6.45, and you know, my wife often comes back home from work and I'm asleep
#
Not asleep, listening to music, and she puts it on.
#
So I think that's clearly something which allows you to slow down, to reflect, walking
#
But I often now, the older I get, I mean, often just lie down and do nothing.
#
Today, for example, we met for lunch and you wanted to do the interview straight away.
#
I said, I'll come in an hour.
#
I just went home and lay down, I didn't sleep.
#
I just said, you know, let's think about different things and that's what happened.
#
So I think, I suppose it's also functional age, that you, you know, when you're younger,
#
you can do things, you know, intense and focused and concentrated periods of work can extend
#
But when I work, I'm only thinking of that piece of writing or that piece of research.
#
So I'll be in the archive, ordering a file, taking notes.
#
My mind will not be wandering.
#
I'll be curious and excited and occasionally enchanted by what I found in that file I've
#
ordered in the archive, and I'll be assimilating it and taking it.
#
And I think some of that comes, again, these are things you can't, you know, use maybe
#
a post-facto justification.
#
Some of this comes from long hours of cricket practice, you know, three hours in the nets,
#
trying to get an off break past the defense of Arun Lal, which happened about once every
#
Right, so I think that some of this training in sport or music maybe gives you an appetite
#
for that kind of sustainable.
#
For people listening to this who haven't heard my episodes with Ram before, the one we did
#
just before this, which I linked from the show notes was extensively about his cricketing
#
life and it's fascinating.
#
I want to double click now on lying in the dark listening to music because I've done
#
But I find that my state of mind can be in three different places when I do that.
#
One is where I'm lying in the dark and listening to music and in the beginning, it's nice and
#
soothing, but then my mind is wandering and is going all over the place.
#
It's just jumping around.
#
The other is when I'm actually focused on the music.
#
So it's not background.
#
I'm just enjoying it, right?
#
And the third is something that I find it hard to achieve.
#
Is that meditative state where you are just still, you don't really need to think of anything
#
that the mind is always working, but you can be still in the moment, completely relaxed.
#
Like as I say these, you know, I close my eyes and just relax my muscles, that kind
#
of state where you are in that kind of flow.
#
So you know, which of these is more common with you?
#
What music do you listen to?
#
I listen to all kinds of music, but it's eclectic.
#
But I don't lie down and listen to rock, for example, I listen to quite a music if I'm
#
Yeah, so I mean, when I was younger, I would listen to a fair amount of folk and some rock,
#
but now I've become, just as I just listen to classical music, you know, that's what
#
And maybe that's more conducive to that kind of quiet and listening, because also the tempo
#
is built up slowly and then you follow it and you kind of take your clues from it.
#
It's hard to explain, you know, I don't think what it does to you, but it's given a very
#
different and happy dimension to my life, you know, and I must say, I am an enthusiastic
#
amateur listener with the emphasis on amateur.
#
So I, my late friend, Keshav Desiraju, who's already figured in this conversation, was
#
a remarkable civil servant, legendary secretary of the Ministry of Health who transformed
#
our attitude towards disabled people, towards mental health, and then in retirement wrote
#
a landmark biography of MS Subbalakshmi before he tragically died last September at age 65.
#
Keshav was someone I would call when I listened to a piece of music I'd not heard before,
#
and he would instruct me gently, lovingly, in the most non-patronising way possible.
#
You know, I wish I had that ability, which real connoisseurs don't.
#
My wife, Sujata, often chastises me for being impatient when people who don't know much
#
about cricket ask me questions about cricket.
#
You say, isko kya pata iske baad, iske ka saath mein kya baad karunga Sachin, Sachin
#
aur Dravid ke baad maare mein.
#
You know, that's, that's, that.
#
And Keshav was truly learned, but he would never be non-patronising.
#
So I was grateful for having people like him and others I discussed.
#
I mean, he's now gone, so I can't really, you know, ask him about questions.
#
I like asking other people, I would like to ask, you know, and so I think it's, I'm not
#
at all a scholar of music in the way, say, Amit Chaudhary is, for example.
#
I just like listening to it.
#
I have a rudimentary appreciation of it.
#
I think I know the difference between great and very good and very good and good.
#
I think that much, you know, maybe 15 or 20 rags I can recognise, seven or eight are particular
#
YouTube has an extraordinary repository, which you can just mine and mine and mine.
#
But I, I don't really think about my books when I'm listening to music, when I'm working,
#
I'm thinking about the next chapter and what the arguments might be like.
#
But when I'm listening to music, I'm just listening.
#
And I'm not disturbed at all.
#
My mind is not wandering.
#
I'm just soaking in the beauty of music.
#
So the last episode I released was with Amit Abakumar, the writer, and he told me about
#
how when he dies, what he, the music he wants played at his funeral is Henrikh Gorekhi's
#
So I was very intrigued by that.
#
And after we recorded the episode, I turned off the lights and outside my window, there's
#
a night sky and I'm looking into the night sky and I'm playing that.
#
And I was deeply, deeply moved by it.
#
And it's a very powerful piece of music.
#
And later I shared this with another friend who has a home in the mountains.
#
And he told me that, look, in the nineties, I would listen to it a lot.
#
But then my wife said, please don't listen to this because it is so eerie and lonesome
#
in the mountains that this kind of amplifies that.
#
And by listening to this, and in fact, by reading Amit Abakumar's book, which is full
#
of journal entries, but just by listening to this, I felt I got an insight, not an intellectual
#
insight, but maybe an empathetic insight into this person who is my friend.
#
So this is something that moved him and by being moved by it.
#
So I want to ask you in terms of classical music, what are your sort of favorite works
#
which really move you, composers, pieces?
#
I think I can answer that in a broad sense.
#
You know, as I said, I know enough now to know the difference between great and very
#
So great, great in my mind, in vocal music, it would be Malik Arjun, some reasonably well
#
So Malik Arjun, Bhim Sen, Kumar Gandhar, Kishori Amunkar, alongside some names not so well
#
known, but to my mind also great, Basavaraj Rajguru, Sharaphat Hussain Khan, some who
#
are great and there are not many recordings of them.
#
and Fayaz Khan would count in them, among instrumentalists, there would be Ali Akbar,
#
Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee, Bismillah Khan and Vilayat Khan, five truly great.
#
Just below would be Buddha Devdas Gupta, Vilayat Khan, Arvind Parikh.
#
And so there were 15 or 20 musicians I can listen to all the time, different compositions
#
I would occasionally go to younger people.
#
So, you know, I think I would listen, I like Ashwini Bhindadesh Pandey, I like Veena Sahasrabud
#
Bhai, I like Rashid Khan, you know, I like Venkatesh Kumar, he's a very fine young vocalist
#
in Bangalore called Priya Prashottaman, whose music I like very much.
#
So I would, but I think there's a difference between, maybe there's a difference between
#
Western classical music and Indusani music in that regard, that they are Western classical
#
music, they are particular symphonies, particular compositions that people regard as that.
#
Indusani music is more, you know, it's more a kind of a different kinds of things.
#
So I can't say that, it's just that it's endless.
#
And I said, I think I know the difference between Kumar Gandharv and a guy from Kolhapur
#
who's imitating Kumar Gandharv, okay, for example, right.
#
So we're also very listable, you know, because his imitation is quite good, you know, it's
#
like, you know, a great pianist versus a competent planning player, yeah, so it's at the joys
#
of YouTube is you're exploring it all the time.
#
I mean, there's a wonderful, you know, what I go for example, there are two or three people
#
on YouTube who, and I'm discovering more, who upload high quality music all the time.
#
One is a chap called Raju Ashokan, who lives somewhere, I think in Atlanta, Georgia, and
#
who loves Hindustani and Kannada music.
#
The other is a Bengali called Subrata Chaudhary, who probably lives in Kolkata, and take every
#
week or so they upload five or six recordings.
#
So when I go to YouTube, I'll just see what is there from Raju Ashokan and Subrata Chaudhary,
#
it's just a whole ocean of joy unfolds, you know, sometimes what I do is I listen to music
#
when a great musician dies.
#
So when Bhutadev Dasgupta, who was a magnificent sarodheer, who was, who actually combined
#
a career as a top class professional engineer, general manager of the Calcutta Electric
#
Supply Company, with playing music.
#
So he was never as well known as Amjad Ali Akbar, but in their league.
#
And since I did a PhD in Kolkata, I could go for concerts of Bhutadev Dasgupta.
#
And when he died, Subrata Chaudhary had put up some 15, 18 recordings.
#
So that's just me for a month.
#
So you know, it's like, it's like that.
#
So it's, I would not say I have a, you know, even 10, you asked me to list 10 recordings
#
that wouldn't be able to.
#
Yeah, you know, from a selfish perspective, I'm just thinking that I want to go back after
#
this to my hotel room and turn off the light and listen to something you recommended.
#
So I'm just going to sort of mention a piece of advice I give my writing students, that
#
avoid adjectives and use verbs.
#
So I'm going to take your mind away from the adjective, great, which you use and go to
#
And obviously you love all of these people, which is why you think they're great and you
#
But the last time you, the last time you lay in the dark and listen to music, what would
#
I would recommend something to you.
#
Now there's a, there is a piece of music, which is one of my, among my 50, 100 favorites.
#
There are two, I'll give you two options, it depends on how much time you have.
#
If you have an hour, they're both concerts in Bangalore.
#
So if you have an hour, listen to a Yemen, Kalyan, jugalbandi between Ali Akbar Khan,
#
whom you know of, and someone you may not have heard of called Doreshwami Ayyengar,
#
who was a great Veena players of the 20th century from Mysore.
#
So a Hindustani Carnatic jugalbandi, Sarod Ali Akbar, Veena Doreshwami Ayyengar, played
#
in the home of a couple who are great connoisseurs of music, Shivram and Lalita Ubhaykar, who
#
are both now dead, who had a home not far from the palace grounds.
#
This is a one hour Yemen Kalyan.
#
I mean, it's just magical.
#
And it is, it's full of two truly great musicians playing the most beautiful rag in my city
#
in the home of a couple I knew and who encouraged me and loved me and, you know, inspired me.
#
Now that's one piece of music, which is one hour long.
#
If you have that time, if you have only half an hour, okay, go to YouTube and do Bade
#
Ghulam Ali Khan, Hamsadwani, Bangalore 1956.
#
Now this is again very, it's a fabulous piece of music.
#
Bade Ghulam very rarely sang Hamsadwani, he's known for many other rags, but not for Hamsadwani.
#
It's a very unique recording of Hamsadwani.
#
Hamsadwani is a Carnatic rag incorporated in Hindustani music.
#
And it was sung by Bade Ghulam shortly after he returned to India from Pakistan.
#
You know, Bade Ghulam was originally from the Patiala Punjab Gharana.
#
So he went to Pakistan and then he found there is no place for music there.
#
He came back, or not enough places, he came back and Moraji Desai, an austere puritanical
#
guy who's got a bad rap from historians, not always for right reasons, got him a government
#
house in Bombay so that he could stay there.
#
He was made an Indian citizen.
#
And shortly after that he came to Bangalore where in the Ram Navami concert, which is
#
held every spring in Basavangudi, the heart of old Bangalore, in the compound close to
#
Tipu's palace, summer palace, in the compound of the Fort High School, which is a gorgeous
#
colonial building, he sang under an open awning, he sang Hamsadwani.
#
And it's a fabulous recording and I think of it, 1956 Ram Navami, my late friends, Lalita
#
and Sivaram Ubaikar would have been there.
#
My other friend, the great philanthropist and connoisseur of music, Tara Thandavarkar,
#
the architect, may have been there.
#
Some of my uncles and aunts may have been there in 1956.
#
After a year, Karnataka was created as a state of Mysore.
#
These two pieces of music are sublime in themselves.
#
One Bade Ghulam singing Hamsadwani in the city part of Bangalore.
#
One Doreshwami Ayyengar and Ali Akbar playing Yaman Kalyan in the controlment side of Bangalore.
#
Just listen to Ayyengar.
#
If you have half an hour or one hour, how do you just go to heaven?
#
Another question and this is a question coming from my own genuine curiosity.
#
So you know, not a question that I feel should be asked or my listeners might want to know.
#
In the sense that, you know, when I was growing up, my mother was a Hindustani classical musician
#
though an amateur, of course, but she learned it for many years.
#
She would sing and then at one point she started a choir and she would conduct that.
#
I'll post a video from that on in the show notes.
#
But I never got into it, partly because I was like a rebellious kid and whatever and
#
I was like rock Sunoinge, Nirvana Sunoinge, Iye Sunoinge.
#
And I have in recent years become attracted to Hindustani classical and just classical
#
music in general, but I am struggling with how to educate myself on it.
#
You know, where does one, you know, without going to a guru, reach that level where you
#
can understand, you can begin to understand one, the technical stuff like ragas and all
#
and two, to sort of understand context where all this is coming from, like what you did
#
so beautifully is not just spoke about Hansad Bhani and he didn't perform it often, but
#
also gave that context of a place and time, which gives a work an added meaning for me.
#
And for everyone who was there, no doubt.
#
So you know, do you know, I mean, how did you go about it?
#
It's just 50 years of interest, 40 or 45 years of interest, talking to people who know much
#
So I was lucky that in university, I fell in with a group of friends who taught me about
#
Then I had case of Desi Raju, then when it comes to non Hindustani music, my son Keshavar
#
is a listen to a lot, in fact, unlike me, he has a musical ear and can sing.
#
So when I want to change from Hindustani music, I go to him.
#
So African music, you know, and things like that, you know, suggestions come from there.
#
So just knowing that there are people who can alert you to dimensions of music that
#
And actually, my knowledge is my enthusiasm and my love far exceeds my knowledge of music,
#
you know, of but what it's given me is incalculable.
#
And the older I get, it gives me more and more and more is how I would put it.
#
So it's I think it requires long hours and years.
#
I the first concert first piece of Hindustani music, I remember, was in about 1972 or 73.
#
I was an asthmatic and I had an attack at night and I was I took a drug that kept me
#
I went to a radio, All India Radio and Bismillah Khan was playing Durga, which is still one
#
of my favorite compositions.
#
Two years later, I went to university and fell in with a group of friends.
#
So it is actually 50 years, you know, if I probably 71 or 72, I listened to Bismillah.
#
So it's 50 years of listening to music, you know, and I'll never be learned or scholarly
#
or have really a deep insight into what goes into great music.
#
But yeah, it's just making the time for it.
#
I think the best learning can often be by osmosis.
#
So if you just if you're enthusiastic, that's the first step.
#
And other things just happen.
#
And by the way, a quick aside before I go to my next kind of question, what you mentioned
#
about the connection between, say, your ability to focus while working or researching or whatever
#
and the connection between that and your time in the nets playing cricket is again very
#
resonant to me because I feel that any kind of Riyaz is Riyaz for the mind, not just for
#
Like I will often to my writing students also when I'm trying to tell them how to inculcate
#
a particular writing habit of the craft.
#
You need to first be mindful and then you internalize it.
#
So Sunil Gavaskar goes out in the nets as a seven year old.
#
He's not being a perfect straight drive, but he's being mindful of where his feet are,
#
where his elbow is going.
#
And then it becomes second nature and he can do it in a split second.
#
And that's also resonant that if you do Riyaz in any one field, it will shape your mind.
#
And I would just add to that.
#
I was lucky in that I spent so many years playing a team sport and not an individual
#
That's if I wanted to be a tennis champion and I was playing eight hours just alone with
#
someone else against the wall, with a marker, against the machine, you're different.
#
I think being part of a team sport teaches you many things.
#
Glowing in somebody else's style, even if you fail, traveling in a group, going, taking
#
a bus or a second class train journey somewhere else without a smartphone.
#
Now the 11 cricketers in a team will all be on their smartphones.
#
So I think big part of a team sport and of, but Riyaz, yes, Riyaz is crucial, practice,
#
discipline, rigor, hard work.
#
But I think learning to take the rough with the smooth comes from being in a team sport.
#
Of course in tennis also you lose, but your egos hurt much more than because it is after
#
So I was having this discussion with some of my writing students on one of the WhatsApp
#
groups with them and we were talking about the influence of parents.
#
And on the one hand, it's indisputable that parents have a huge influence on us.
#
On the other hand, it's been argued convincingly by various people and by various studies that
#
that's actually not the case.
#
Like Judith Rich Harris wrote this great book called The Nurture Assumption, which came
#
out in the nineties, a seminal book in my view, which kind of showed that your key influences
#
in childhood are really your peers.
#
The parents don't really matter so much.
#
And I think there might be, you know, even though these are contradictory, I think there
#
might be grains of truth to both of these.
#
Now in your case, I have, you know, reading through your writings and all that picked
#
up snippets of things where you refer to your parents in different ways.
#
Like you speak about how when you were a kid, your father's staff car would never take you
#
anywhere or pick you up and all of that, and he was so meticulous about that.
#
You've spoken about, you know, how in 1962, Nero came, you know, spoke in your town and
#
your mother was so moved and so inspired, and this was after the loss of the war to
#
China, that she donated her bangles to the cause and everybody was scandalized and, you
#
know, and I would imagine that that is something that kind of shapes a person as well.
#
So tell me a little bit about your parents, about the kind of influence, the kind of childhood
#
that you had growing up and how your relationships with them evolved.
#
So I think, I think this is not merely in retrospect, the way they shaped me was one
#
that there was absolutely no caste or community.
#
So I am technically a Brahmin, but I've never worn a thread.
#
My father never wore a thread.
#
I used to think it's because he's a scientist, but now I realize that it's partly because
#
he's a scientist, partly because his father's elder brother was a pioneering social reformer
#
in Karnataka, still revered here in this state called R. Gopalswami Iyer, who was the first
#
Brahmin to campaign for the, in the modern world to campaign for the eradication of untouchability
#
He was my father's father's brother, right.
#
So there was no caste feeling, there was no community feeling.
#
You know, remarkably, if you can imagine, of course, we were upper caste, middle class,
#
So most Tamil Brahmin families would only have a Brahmin cook.
#
We had a Rajput cook followed by a Muslim cook.
#
Of course, no, not good meat.
#
My mother taught in a school, her closest friends were two Christians and a Muslim.
#
And so that says no community or caste feeling.
#
That was partly also because of the way we were in a public sector outfit, and that's
#
how Nehru's India, I mean, there was some bad sides about the public sector in terms
#
of economic productivity and innovation, but in terms of pluralism and social solidarity
#
and showcasing the diversity of India, that was part of their stand.
#
So that was part of what they gave me.
#
The other thing that particularly my father gave me was he was an extraordinary Indian
#
parent in that he spent so much time with his children.
#
You know, he would play cricket with me, he would take me bird watching.
#
My sister was a very gifted athlete, all because of him and his training.
#
And he never, he just let me do what I wanted.
#
I got a second class in my BA.
#
I could have got a, because I was from Doon School in St. Stephens, I got a job in Hindustan
#
He said, you want to do an MA?
#
I got another second class in MA.
#
All those entitlement routes were available to me.
#
I want a comfortable job because of my privilege and my English speaking abilities.
#
I said, I want to do a PhD.
#
He said, okay, go and do a PhD.
#
So there was absolutely no pressure of any kind, particularly from him.
#
So I think in that sense, I think Nurture did play an important part in what I may have
#
And I think Piers, of course, I mean, intense debates, arguments.
#
I've already spoken about music, my friendships in college, debates and arguments with them
#
I mean, I have some regrets.
#
I mean, I think I have some regrets about the range of what I could have learned.
#
And the main regret I have is that almost all my conversations, intellectual conversations
#
over the last 40 years have been conducted in English.
#
There have been some in Hindi, but not enough and not at all in a third language.
#
So if there is any advice, I'd give a younger scholar or writer of any kind listening in.
#
I mean, unlike, say, for example, Amitav Kumar, whom you was your last guest, I suspect that
#
now he's lived in America for many years.
#
Between the ages of 10 and 30, it would be 50-50, or maybe even 60-40 in favor of Hindi
#
is what I suspect in the case of Amitav.
#
And I think that's probably an abiding regret I have that, you know, that my world was shaped
#
really by conversations and arguments and debates in English, which may have made me
#
a better writer as a consequence, but probably shut certain windows into how to approach
#
So I'll take a digression here and ask you a question that I had saved for later, but
#
you've touched upon it now.
#
And the question is, are we all Annie Besant?
#
Now, the context for this is that as you write in Rebels Against Siraj, the context of this
#
is that English could have been a hindrance for her because she couldn't, you know, once
#
other leaders who had connects with the masses like Gandhi and all came up, her English wasn't
#
It became a mass party and she was kind of relegated to the sidelines and in her case
#
Now, one thing that I have explored and, you know, people sometimes ask me that, in what
#
way have I changed through the years of doing this podcast?
#
And one way certainly is in realizing that I was in a sort of a bubble all my life, that
#
I was in an English speaking bubble and therefore I only saw, you know, one aspect of the country
#
and had sort of a vision of the country, which I think was largely wrong.
#
And we discussed this at lunch also about how, you know, we are the fringes, we English
#
speaking liberal elites are, and the country is something else.
#
Now, I've brought this up in a context where I have mentioned you in fact, where, you know,
#
and the first time this, so there's a thread of conversations I've had.
#
And I remember I spoke with Akar Patel, who I'll be recording with again soon, but I,
#
my first episode with him was about three years back.
#
And Akar and I were both in agreement over something that you had said in this essay
#
in Caravan, that the Hindu right wing does not have any intellectuals worth the name,
#
And we were both in agreement with that.
#
And my sense where I articulated it then was that, look, you know, their so-called conservatism
#
and the ideas that might come are just a fig leaf for bigotry and misogyny and all that.
#
And that's partly true.
#
Now, what I was convinced by other guests in later episodes, like Akshay Mukul, like,
#
you know, Suyash Rai, Rahul Verma, and a host of people was that, that impression, which
#
you, Akar, me, we all shared is wrong because we are reading only in English.
#
We're not reading the languages.
#
And you know, various people gave various examples, like, you know, Suyash spoke about
#
And the question is not whether one agrees or disagrees.
#
I disagree strongly with whatever I've understood of Karpatri Maharaj, who's not really been
#
translated even into English that much, but it's coherent.
#
And it's coherent and it's, you know, it's just coming from a different place.
#
But from that tradition, it's coherent.
#
So in a sense, I feel in this conversation, I've come full circle because when Akar and
#
I mentioned that we referred to, you know, your excellent essay.
#
So you know, is this something that, has there been a similar process where, you know, you
#
speak of today of just only English being, being a loss, being a liability.
#
And I feel that way even more, and not just in this context of not understanding these
#
social currents, but even in a context of, like, I did an episode with Sarah Rai, a fine
#
writer in her own right, also the granddaughter of Munshi Premchand.
#
And when I, when we got to the section where I asked her about the books which had made
#
in, which had influenced her, all the English language books she named, I had read.
#
But none of the others, the Hindi books I had even heard of in some cases.
#
And I, I felt horrible that here I have an opportunity to be in such a rich country in
#
terms of culture and languages.
#
And I've kind of missed out on all of that.
#
So what are your thoughts?
#
You know, it's a large and complicated question in one, can't, you know, do it any kind of
#
By the way, Kalpatri Maharaj figures in India after that.
#
So, and they were certainly at the time, and in the essay you talk about, I mentioned conservative
#
intellectuals like Gurrier and Jadhunath Sarkar and others.
#
So I think although I have operated mostly in English, almost exclusively in English,
#
I've had the good fortune to have interaction, have had interactions through my work with
#
many people writing in different Indian languages and also close friendships.
#
So great Uttarakhand historian Shekhar Pathak, whose magisterial history in Hindi of the
#
Chipko Andolan, I edited and helped publish, has been a lifelong friend with whom I write
#
conversations for my life.
#
Nagraj, the much-moved Kannada writer, whom also his conversation shaped me.
#
The remarkable couple, Bengali and English writers Meenakshi and Sujit Mukherjee.
#
Trideep Surud, the scholar of Gandhi and who writes in Gujarati and in English.
#
Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who actually is fluent in five languages, Girish Karnad.
#
So Mahashita Devi, whom I also have known.
#
So I've always braided my business to listen and learn from people who don't write in.
#
So it's not as if the world in which I express myself is English, but the world in which
#
I absorb things come at least at second hand mediated by people who have this extraordinary
#
depth and understanding from the languages.
#
Now I think one should not self-legelate too much.
#
You know, Karpatri Maharaj may have been formidably learned, but he was a bigot.
#
He was a bigot because he did not embrace the world outside.
#
We may not be embracing the world inside.
#
And this is what, you know, I've written an essay, I don't know if you've seen it.
#
I wrote an essay some years ago called The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual,
#
which I think is probably the best essay I've ever written, which identifies this phenomenon
#
that from about 1880 to 1960, they were truly bilingual intellectuals.
#
So there was, you know, Ambedkar writing in Marathi and English, Tilak writing in Marathi
#
and English, Nirmal Kumar Bose writing in Bengali and English, etc., etc., Girish Karnad,
#
who understood the world of Western literature, but wrote in Canada.
#
And now there has been a separation of discourses into English only and the vernacular language
#
I think the cross-fertilization that used to take place has been lost.
#
And I think our greatest strength was that.
#
It was not that it was not the case that, you know, the vernacular intellectual necessarily
#
They may have known the village better.
#
They have known the Adagrao better, but they would not have known how Adagrao fit into
#
the district, into the province, into the country, into the world.
#
Now I think that is what we are missing.
#
What India had uniquely, uniquely in the history of the modern world, India had a flourishing
#
There was a reason why Tagore did his creative work in Bangla and wrote his polemical essays
#
There is a reason why Gandhi wrote some things in Gujarati and some things in English.
#
So we had a flourishing bilingual world.
#
Yeravati Karve, whom I think you mentioned a little while ago, wrote wonderfully in both
#
Marathi and in English.
#
Now that is the world we have unique to us.
#
The French only operated in French.
#
The Spanish only operated in Spanish.
#
The Japanese only operated in Japanese.
#
We actually had a bilingual intellectual world, which produced the finest social science,
#
history, political analysis, philosophy, and so on and so forth.
#
And that is what we have lost.
#
That is what we need partly also to regain.
#
And how that will happen, I can't say.
#
But certainly every language is a window into a new world.
#
And I would encourage the brilliant Hindi and Marathi writers who are in their twenties
#
to improve their English, I would encourage the brilliant English writers in their twenties
#
and thirties to become really conversant with a second or a third language other than English.
#
So one should not excessively self-flagellate on this business.
#
A writer only speaking Kannada, reading Kannada, writing in Kannada, arguing in Kannada is
#
also limited in her own way.
#
So I think that should be very clear.
#
And I think we had uniquely this bilingual tradition.
#
I mean, this essay, it's called The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual.
#
It was first published in EPW, and there were about half a dozen very interesting responses
#
Then I revised it, and then it came, I think, in one of my collections, I think Patriots
#
and Partisans, which explains this, that the richness of the bilingualism and what it gave
#
us and what we are losing by the separation of discourses into English only and Basha
#
So I want to double click on this, but before that, an observation where you said Garpatri
#
He was a deep misogynist.
#
And my favorite example of this is he has this book called Marx or Ram Rajya, something
#
of that sort, which has not been translated into English, but I'll leave a link to the
#
Hindi, whatever, for anyone who may want to go through it, where he talks about why communism
#
And one reason that he says is that, you know, because there is no concept of property, you
#
know, every woman will be like a bucket from which anybody may drink, you know, which is
#
That's how he figures in India after Gandhi, actually, misogyny rather than his bigotry.
#
Or both, because he was opposed to the Hindu court bill because it gave women rights and
#
because Ambedkar, who was a Dalit, wrote it.
#
I mean, he may have been a brilliant bigot, that's fine, but he was a bigot nonetheless.
#
And let's double click on the bilingualism question, where, you know, on one hand, like
#
you pointed out, you said language is a window to other cultures and that's one reason why
#
But I'm wondering if there's another reason that it is useful, which lies in the fact
#
that languages are different from each other in fundamental ways.
#
And a kind of expression, which is possible in one language, may not be as heightened
#
Like you talk about Tagore doing his fiction in Bangla and leaving his polemic for English.
#
And it strikes me that one reason for that might be that Bangla, and I'm half Bengali,
#
by the way, it's a beautiful language, is by its nature expressionistic, right?
#
It's that sense of beauty is heightened and therefore it is natural for fiction and poetry
#
Whereas, you know, English is much more functional and economical and crisp, and it would be
#
a good vehicle for polemic, which is not to say that you cannot do polemic in Bangla or
#
you cannot do beautiful things in English because, hey, that's why I love English, but
#
different languages have different characteristics.
#
Like when you spoke about Tagore, you spoke about Gandhi and so on, is that part of it?
#
It would be that, of course, absolutely.
#
I mean, I don't know enough about different languages, but I think you've captured it
#
There are certain registers available in Hindustani that would not be available in English for
#
someone who knows both languages and so on.
#
I mean, there's a reason why people, you know, who are absolutely familiar, you know, again,
#
this is my big friend, Keshav Desi Raju, was fluent in, that is, formidably fluent in English,
#
Hindi, Telugu and Tamil.
#
Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who was a close friend of Keshav and mine, is formidably fluent in
#
English, Hindi, Tamil and Gujarati.
#
So they had three languages in common, and the three of us spent a lot of time together
#
on different parts of the world, in different cities in India, and their jokes and allusions
#
would flow effortlessly in the three languages they shared.
#
I would, I could capture 100% of the English, 75% of the Hindi, but none of the Tamil, right?
#
And the way they would talk, you know, what language called code-switching, depending
#
So I think you'll see this, I mean, you'll see, if you were to ever, I don't know whether
#
he's ever come on your program, but please get him, Arvind Krishna Marutra, has he ever
#
I'd love to have him on, I love his poetry, I've never asked him, you know, with some
#
If you see how Arvind switches between Hindi, English and Hindustani, seamlessly and beautifully,
#
he's a friend of Sehra Rai, so maybe Sehra should take a second my recommendation and
#
She, in fact, already has, so she offered to introduce me to him, so someday, yeah.
#
So please, and you tell him, you speak both Hindi and English, and you just see how beautiful
#
it is to listen to him, right?
#
So absolutely, I mean, the different registers, different forms of expression, and when you...
#
So I can appreciate Hindustani more than Hindi, to the extent that I can see, I can love it,
#
you know, when I hear Arvind speak, or when I used to hear Ramu Gandhi lecture in Hindustani,
#
it was just fabulous, you know, or reading JP's prose, I mean, JP spoke the kind of Hindustani
#
that was spoken in Dehradun, it was not the kind of Sanskritized Hindi that has now become,
#
and there's a lovely essay of JP, which I, but a few things I've translated from Hindi,
#
is an essay of JP called, Nagaland mein shanti ka prayas, the quest for peace in Nagaland,
#
which I translated chunks of, and it's so beautiful to read.
#
I had Ninal Pandey on my show recently, and she was also just switching effortlessly between
#
Hindi and English, and it was beautiful, and on the one hand, you know, the only time I've
#
done a full Hindi episode on my show was with the farmer leader, Gunvand Patil ji, who could
#
So in my introduction, I apologize to those listeners who may not be familiar with Hindi,
#
because people expect an English podcast.
#
But in this case, my whole sense was that I just want my guests to be authentic to who
#
So whatever comes naturally, you kind of go with that.
#
And then Amitav Kumar, he told me about this evocative Hindi poem that speaks to him.
#
And it's a poem called, Rail by Alok Dhanwa, and it goes this way,
#
Har bhale aadmi ki ek rail hoti hai, jo maa ke ghar ke oor jati hai,
#
Siti bajati hui, dhuwa udati hui.
#
To me, this is untranslatable, because just the rhythm of siti bajati hui, dhuwa udati
#
hui, you can't capture this feeling.
#
I find the sentiments problematic.
#
The glorification of the maa, I find highly problematic, highly problematic.
#
Spoken like an academic intellectual, actually, at one level, I mean.
#
You know, mere paas maa hai, meri gari unke paas jati hai, you know, I find that lovely.
#
It's beautiful to listen to.
#
It's an emotional expression.
#
I think there is an empathetic world and there is an intellectual world.
#
So my next question is sort of, you know, earlier you said that so much of life is accident
#
when we were speaking about the passage of time and what shapes the world.
#
And you said in your own life, it's been like that.
#
And in this lovely essay about you by Nandini Sundar and Srinath Raghavan in a functioning
#
anarchy, which is another lovely book, they wrote, indeed, the succession of jobs that
#
Guha did not join is revealing, he turned down an offer from the Times of India, a professorship
#
at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, because he had decided by then
#
to move to Bengaluru, a professorship at the National Law School of India University in
#
Bengaluru, because it would have meant attending from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and so on and so forth.
#
Yeah, that's a highly incomplete list, because that only deals with jobs in India.
#
Yeah, and jobs elsewhere also.
#
And it reminded me of something that my dad said, like, you know, a year before he passed,
#
I sat down with him and just recorded conversations about his life to get to know him better.
#
And he told me about how, you know, at the time, like I said, he was, you know, in grow
#
up in Calcutta and in the 60s, he had a roaring love affair with my mother, who he went on
#
And the condition for marriage from the other side was that you have to have a job and only
#
the IAS is respectable.
#
So with like three months left, he prepared and he got into the IAS.
#
But at that time, among the alternative paths he had available to him was First National
#
Citibank had offered him a job, Clarion Advertising had offered him a job and all big names at
#
He had an offer from Cambridge where he could have gone to Cambridge and, you know, done
#
his PhD and all of that.
#
And the then editor of the EPW had told him that he had loved something he had written
#
and had said, you come to Delhi and work for me and I will groom you to be my successor.
#
And he actually went and worked for two, three months at the EPW.
#
And then he missed my mother too much and he went back and joined the IAS.
#
And I am always fascinated by the counterfactuals in none of which I would exist, of course,
#
But I'm always fascinated by the counterfactuals in the different directions that a person
#
could grow in because in my mind, he would have been a completely different person in
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what you feel about the options in your life.
#
Would you have actually been a different person in any of these options?
#
And if there is, if there is a core Ram Guha, core you, which is common to all of these,
#
you know, how would you define that core that no matter where you went and what you did,
#
that core would be there?
#
Very hard to say how life would turn out.
#
I mean, I mean, among the reasons I could turn down all those jobs is because my wife
#
Sujata had a design company and who supported me partly financially and wholly morally and
#
personally, you know, for more than 40 years now.
#
So it's very hard to answer that kind of question.
#
I mean, I don't believe in counterfactuality really.
#
I once joked, I have written, I think, two columns on counterfactuality.
#
One was what if Subhash Bose had come back alive in 1947, arguing that he would have
#
been a major challenger to Nehru and he would have split the Congress party and stood against
#
Nehru in 1952 and might even have won.
#
And the other was what if Lal Bahadur Shastri had lived another five years?
#
And that ended with the line that if you had lived another five years, Rajiv Gandhi would
#
He would be a retired pensioner from Indian Airlines indulging his hobby in photography
#
and Rahul Gandhi would be a mid-level manager in a private sector company.
#
But with me, I don't indulge in counterfactuality.
#
I can certainly say I thank the kind of people who, the chain of lucky accidents that rescued
#
me from cricket to scholarship, which was learning about Elvin in a Kaurapur village
#
from a veterinary doctor called Dr. Das when I was doing my MA.
#
And then I come back to Delhi and find his writings, meeting Sujatha, which happened
#
in 1979, then going to Kolkata for a PhD and this mentor of mine, Anjan Ghosh.
#
And of course, Rukunath Vani, my first editor, who transformed my life by publishing my first
#
book and then my subsequent books.
#
So I think these accidental meetings certainly played out, but what would have happened?
#
I mean, I can't, I mean, if I had taken a professorship at the Delhi School back in
#
the early 90s, I may have nurtured some good PhD students.
#
On the other hand, I've been fed up with academic politics and intrigue.
#
So to go to the second part of that question, that if, where I ask that what is like at
#
your core, is there an essential Ram Guha that you look at?
#
I mean, one argument could be that we're all construction of our genes and circumstances.
#
And maybe the deeper you go into trying to figure out what the real self is, you realize
#
But at the same time, like when I, for example, look back on myself as a young person, I have
#
changed in so many profound ways.
#
But there is a core there, which is perhaps the same with the same weaknesses and flaws,
#
perhaps, but it's kind of the same.
#
So when you look back on the 15 year old Ram Guha, for example, what do you and that person
#
kind of, who is that, you know, what is that core?
#
So I think it's this sense of opposition to, I'll let you put it differently, you know,
#
I was in a, I'll answer this question slightly differently, but you've got a sense.
#
I was in a, before the pandemic, I was in a chairing a panel.
#
And the other speakers in a panel were a Dalit, a gay, and someone from a minority.
#
And one of them was also a woman, right.
#
And I said there that I was born with five forms of privilege.
#
Just reflecting on my, who was around me, I was born with five forms of privilege.
#
I was in India, five forms, Hindu, male, Brahmin, straight, and English speaking, right.
#
Hindu, male, Brahmin, straight, and English speaking.
#
Now I was taught very early on by my parents to disregard the Hindu and the Brahmin part.
#
So that part from 915 to 63, I detested religious chauvinism and I detested caste feelings of
#
That has been consistent since then.
#
Even then I was ambivalent about my English being a privilege.
#
You know, I could see that because when I went to boarding school, there was a classmate
#
of mine in the dorm who was always mocked for being a Hindi speaker and that really
#
So maybe I was guilty about English privilege even then.
#
I could see that English gives you an unfair advantage in life in this country.
#
Even I was, I suppose for my times, relatively more open on sexual preferences.
#
Since we are, you know, talking in a personal vein, and I haven't really talked about these
#
things before, and this I think would interest some of your listeners.
#
My father's closest friend, who was my godfather, was a man you might have heard of called K.T.
#
Acharya, a great food historian.
#
I've heard the name, but I haven't read him.
#
So he is India's greatest food historian.
#
He wrote these two landmark books, a companion to Indian food and a historical grocery to
#
Indian food and food materials.
#
And you know, you could read all our food, become doctors quoting him all the time.
#
He was my father's closest friend from college days and he was gay and my father knew it.
#
And to his great credit, was fine with it.
#
We're talking about the early 60s and 70s, with a few people, Dr. Acharya, the world
#
renowned protein food scientist who then became the pioneer in historical Indian food, could
#
confide in was my father.
#
So I knew that Tamu Mama was gay and it's okay.
#
Now, later on, of course, Maring Shujata, who's a designer, and of course, the design
#
community, there are many gays.
#
So I'd say I have a lot in common with that young man.
#
What the form of privilege that I found hardest to combat and has been most difficult is male
#
You know, I was brought up thinking boys are superior to girls.
#
I was sent to a boarding school.
#
My sister was not, even though she was smarter and a better sports person than me.
#
So that kind of stayed for a very long time until I had a daughter of mine, Ira, who grew
#
up and is a passionate feminist and probably has moderated my patriarchy, but not overcome
#
So I'd say that is so for good and for bad, in many ways, I'm really in my values.
#
I think what my parents gave me, this absolute lack of caste and community feeling.
#
I think that's something, and that's why I hate it when discriminations are made on these
#
grounds and particularly, you know, by our own dispensation.
#
But that sense that, and I think university reinforced it.
#
The wonderful thing about Delhi University was that it was an all-India university, unlike
#
Bombay and Calcutta, which were far superior back in the 40s and 50s, but increasingly
#
I mean, the catchment area of Bombay was Bombay, the catchment area of Kolkata, Kolkata became
#
really a Bengali university, Bengali city and a Bengali university.
#
Who would know, anyone who studied in Kolkata in the 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s today, who
#
would know that was the place where Raman was a professor doing his Nobel Prize winning
#
work or Radhakrishnan wrote his major works of philosophy.
#
So Delhi University that way was a wonderful showcase for the diversity.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and then get back to the show.
#
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 loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised 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 and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Ram Guha about his rich life and you know, you'd mentioned earlier
#
in the show about how you were sort of an accidental historian.
#
And in our last episode, of course, we discussed your cricketing journey in a manner of speaking.
#
And you pointed out that Rukun Advani, your editor, was kind of surprised that you, you
#
know, he had known you in college and you were just a sports guy.
#
So yeah, he wouldn't talk to someone like you.
#
But then he had to take you seriously because you had changed so much.
#
Tell me about that change.
#
What were the triggers for that change?
#
So I did a BA, got a second class, on the Delhi School of Economics for MA, why I sent
#
Stevens College to play cricket.
#
And in my MA, after my MA previous, there was a remarkable teacher at the Delhi School
#
of Economics, who happened to be my cousin, incidentally, Dharmakumar, who I've written
#
And she initiated a scheme, get the economics students to do field research, because they
#
only looked at numbers and ran regressions and never actually did research projects.
#
You know, they learned fancy statistical techniques.
#
And there was a series of grants they made, and to do research in the summer holidays.
#
Now, it so happened that my father's younger brother worked with Hindustan Aeronautics
#
in Bangalore and was in charge of a MIG factory in Kora Put in Orissa, a factory making Soviet
#
fighter planes that had been built in the depths of Adivasi, Orissa, maybe because it
#
was so far away from the Chinese border, or God knows why.
#
And my uncle said, look, it's called Adivasi workers and we don't know how they're doing.
#
So I designed a research project to study Adivasi workers, the transition from tribal
#
life to industrial factory life.
#
And it was an economics project, it was looking at productivity records, running regressions.
#
And the P.R.O. of that factory was a very nice and kindly man called Mr. Patro.
#
And at some stage he asked me, do you want to see Adivasi village?
#
So on my last Sunday, we went to, in Kora Put, we went to a Gadawa village.
#
In that village was a veterinary scientist called Dr. Das, who took one look at me and
#
said, where have you come from?
#
I said, I come from Delhi.
#
He said, long ago, a tall young man like you came from far away to these hills and wrote
#
His name was Varier Elwin.
#
I said, no, I have not heard of him.
#
I went back to St. Stephen's College and I was clearly recognizing my career as a cricketer
#
So I dropped out of the cricket team, went to the library, found a Varier Elwin, fell
#
in love with his prose, which is evocations of Adivasi life.
#
I said, this is about real people and their real struggles.
#
It's not equations and numbers and graphs and charts, which anyway I don't understand.
#
I'm a lousy economist, but maybe I'll make a fist of becoming a sociologist after reading
#
So I finished my MA and my father gave me another year off.
#
I fell in love with Sujata and I started looking for options.
#
So I applied for the Times of India.
#
I applied to the State Bank.
#
I applied to Irma in Anand, the first batch of Rural Management graduates I got in.
#
And because of Elwin, I was interested in possibly pursuing a PhD in sociology.
#
And I knew that my old university, Delhi, would never give me admission because my grades
#
And a person you surely know of, Shiv Vishwanathan, whom I knew from my days at Delhi University,
#
told me, I am, Calcutta has a small sociology department and is a brilliant young scholar
#
So I applied, got in, and the choice was going to Anand and becoming an activist and a proselytizer
#
for cooperatives, which is what I really wanted to do because of what Kurian had done and
#
what Shyam Benegal had shown through his movie Manthan.
#
Sujata told me flatly, if you go to Anand, I can't marry you because designers can't
#
If you become an academic and get a job in the city, I can marry you.
#
And that made my decision.
#
And so I went to do a PhD in Kolkata, and within a week, sociology resonated with me.
#
I could see that I related to society and politics and human beings in a way I did not
#
to indifference curves and, you know, and stochastic models.
#
And so I was just discovered memetia completely by accident.
#
And then, you know, I got into environmental research, I met Rukun and so on.
#
So it was really this series of accidents that made me a scholar from sociology I moved
#
to history and then later to biography.
#
But there is still something of the sociologists in me.
#
I think, you know, the kind of books I've written, say, India After Gandhi, is not the
#
work of a conventional historian, you know, because there's so much about caste and language
#
and religion that comes from my training in sociology.
#
So I think I was grateful for that, and Anjan Ghosh was a wonderful mentor.
#
He did many, many other things for me, you know.
#
He taught me, he was a Marxist, but his politics never entered the classroom.
#
In the classroom, he taught me Weber and Durkheim with as much scrupulous care as he taught me
#
Outside the classroom, yes, you know, he would be going for dharnas and waving red flags.
#
He also introduced me to film and hardly watched film when I was in college.
#
And he made me a member of a Calcutta film club.
#
So we were through four and Goddard and Kurosawa.
#
So he was a quite remarkable man.
#
And I think really Sujata, Anjan and Rukun are probably the three people I owe the most
#
Tell me something more about each of these people in term.
#
I won't speak about Sujata, because she...
#
But tell me about the other two and how they shaped you.
#
Yeah, so Anjan did a BA in English in Jadavpur University, was like many young people at
#
that time caught up in the Naxalite movement, attended the inaugural party meeting at which
#
Kanu Sanyal spoke in the Maidan in, I think, May 1970, saw himself as a non-party Marxist,
#
then went to JNU to do an MA in sociology.
#
JNU at that stage was dominated by the SFI, the student wing of the Communist Party of
#
Arvind Anjan opposed them as being to the left of the SFI.
#
He was associated with a group called Freethinkers, which opposed SFI every year in the student
#
election and lost every year.
#
But he was really admired in JNU for his love of the scriptures.
#
He was called Lenin, because he had a goatee and he was bald like Lenin, he was known as
#
He stayed out in Delhi, he was teaching in IIT and he would have made a career in Delhi,
#
which is really the home of Indian sociology.
#
But his father died and he had to return to Calcutta to look after his mother.
#
And he was just a wonderful man with the delightful sense of humor, a love of scholarship, a truly
#
I wish he had been in a university, not in a management institute.
#
And I particularly respected him for his lack of dogmatism, that whatever his political
#
beliefs in the classroom, they left aside.
#
And later on, I read a great essay by Max Weber on universities, where Weber says this,
#
he says, a university is not a political party or a seminary.
#
The job of a teacher is to expose students to all kinds of thought and let them make
#
And that is what Anjan practiced.
#
Too few teachers practice that.
#
When I was younger, historians were told that Marxism is the only way to understand history.
#
Now we're all told you have to become nationalist historians, whatever that phrase means.
#
So Anjan, I think the curiosity and love of scholarship and intellectual independence,
#
I think comes from Anjan.
#
Rukun, whom I met later and who published my first book and with whom I'm still in close
#
touch, is a very different kind of animal, he's a wonderful editor.
#
He understands, understood thought and he understands language.
#
He has a PhD in Literacy from Cambridge.
#
His first book was on the nonfiction writing of E.M.
#
Over the years, he's become an absolute recluse.
#
He's hardly meets people.
#
He's in Rani Khet with his wife, the novelist Anuradha Roy, they run a boutique publishing
#
house, which he founded after leaving OUP after 20 years of building OUP's list.
#
Our conversations are essentially by email.
#
And during the pandemic, one of the things I did was to go over all our correspondents
#
dating from handwritten letters from 1985 to 2000, we wrote to each other by hand and
#
I had all his letters and copies of some of mine because I would type, he would write
#
by hand, lovely flowing hand and onion skin paper, from 2000 on email.
#
And I just kind of, how do I put it, excerpted the more interesting parts of the correspondence.
#
And there's a file of 180,000 words, which is only the excerpts from our correspondence
#
of which 130,000 must be Rukun's and certainly the most incisive and the funniest and the
#
wickedest parts are from Rukun.
#
I mean, it's a devastating sense of humor, the kinds of things in those mails about some
#
of our Stefanian contemporaries who are now very, very famous and powerful people.
#
You know, one day I hope someone, I've done this because I leave this behind for postality.
#
Rukun's letters to me about all kinds of things.
#
I mean, I wish I could read out some excerpts to you, but I think it's premature.
#
So yeah, so I think Sudhata, Anjana and Rukun are really the three people to whom I would
#
And would you say that the nature of the letters changed when they shifted to email?
#
Because like one of the things I discussed with Amitabh also in my recent episode with
#
him is how back in the day when we would write by hand, they would be, you know, we'd put
#
more of ourselves into it.
#
It was a rarer thing to actually sit down and write while today everything is functional
#
And that's pretty much all you're writing.
#
But when you would sit down back in the day, you'd elaborate at length, you'd share memories
#
and like you said, Rukun shared impressions of these people.
#
Rukun doesn't talk anyway.
#
So he doesn't, you know, he doesn't phone, he doesn't, he's not on his smartphone.
#
He listens to a lot of music.
#
Like the letters you write, have they changed?
#
Well, when I write to him, I often write at greater length.
#
His letters are longer and more reflective and more sharper.
#
But I do occasionally write him long letters, for example, I wrote him a long letter after
#
reading Amartya Sen's memoir.
#
And I won't disclose the contents of what I wrote, but I could really share it to Rukun
#
what I felt about that memoir, which was about five paragraphs and then eight paragraphs
#
came back from him and so on and so forth.
#
I think probably the quality and the sharpness of my correspondence has changed and deteriorated,
#
So when I put a chabi him, then the kind of things that come out, you know, are just utterly,
#
utterly, utterly, utterly delightful.
#
The other question I have is, it's very interesting that when you talk about your falling in love
#
with sociology, actually going there, talking to real people, leaving the numbers behind.
#
Now there's a sort of a dichotomy there and there are two parallel attractions.
#
And one attraction that especially young people have is for the big picture, the big story,
#
the theory that explains everything and so on and so forth.
#
And the other attraction that more and more as I grow older, I find, you know, it's becoming
#
bigger and bigger for me, is that just get down to the level of the individual life.
#
Of course, at some level it's an anecdote and it's, you know, big data is much bigger,
#
but there is some richness there as well.
#
So how would you approach this, because as a historian, you have, you know, you've tackled
#
those big narratives and you've looked at the big, vast sweep of history, but at the
#
same time you've done the sociology and actually going and spending time with the tribals and
#
So, you know, I mean, I absolutely, I mean, it is making large complex arguments about
#
how societies change and how individuals actually live, whether in the minutiae of their daily
#
lives, whether that's explored and documented in detail through field research or through
#
I've shifted from one to the other.
#
I mean, my books on Gandhi and Rebels Against the Raj are really about individual lives,
#
but I think one day I'll go back to a broader sociological book.
#
I'd like to write a book on, you know, on some eight or nine defining themes in Indian
#
And yeah, I mean, I think between sociology, history and biography, I mean, they're kind
#
of, I've gone back and forth and in my columns too, I mean, sometimes they're just evocations
#
of a person who recently died.
#
Sometimes there's a larger argument about, you know, about society or politics or culture
#
So it's kind of, I, but still it's within, within certain clearly defined boundaries.
#
You know, I, I'm, I, do I read fiction?
#
I never write about it.
#
And I never blow up a novel.
#
You know, do I follow what's happening to the extent I understand it in the economy?
#
I would never presume to comment on what is often asked, sir, we are getting people to
#
We want non-economists.
#
Tell me a bit about learning to write and to be a storyteller, you know, because, you
#
know, we were joking at lunch earlier and by the way, a short while back you mentioned,
#
you said to me when you mentioned Niravati Kukarve earlier in case frantic listeners
#
are rewinding this episode to figure out where I did that.
#
It was not in this episode.
#
It was during our lunch together.
#
And you know, one of the quips I made during lunch is that there should be a Ram Guha prole
#
generator for all historians.
#
So the, you know, they don't write turjit prose and they actually write lively prose,
#
which tells a story and so on and so forth.
#
So tell me a little bit about how you found, found your writing voice, like who, were there
#
So there was an early model, a very early model who was the English cricket writer A.A.
#
Thompson, who wrote these evocations of county cricket and Yorkshire cricket in particular.
#
And many years later, I read an essay by a British novelist who said, when you're young,
#
your model should be a minor writer, when you are 14 or 15, don't think you can write
#
like Tolstoy or if you're a budding historian, you can't write like Mark Block or Max Weber.
#
So I suppose to some extent, there are all kinds of different people.
#
I mean, it's hard to see a particular model.
#
But if you have to look back, ignoring models and just talking of craft, if you have to
#
look back at your first book in terms of craft, you know, what are the refinements?
#
So there was much more jargon in my first book.
#
You know, I think people said it's well written for a sociologist, but the qualification was
#
OK, so that's how I see it.
#
So I, so I suppose once I stopped to impress my academic peers and my academic seniors
#
and really trying to convey the depth and richness of the story as I felt it had to be conveyed,
#
when I was disregarding, you know, what people would make of it, I suppose that happens,
#
And it's again, Riyaz is so important, you know, writing for several hours each day.
#
I think writing a column, I obviously I had to write a column because I did not have a
#
I can make a living by writing two columns.
#
Other my other friends have university salaries and pensions.
#
And if they were to write, university professors would write more often for the newspapers.
#
I think it will liberate them intellectually and in a literary sense.
#
So I think writing for a wider audience, knowing that your work is going to be translated into
#
all these Indian languages and you can't be, you know, nodding to Foucault and Bourdieu
#
and Derrida and using all kinds of sort of complicated jargon.
#
Tell me also about fiction.
#
Like you said earlier, through most of your life, you didn't read much fiction and you
#
just mentioned in the break that during the pandemic, you rediscovered your love for fiction.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what was the fiction you read growing up, if any,
#
you know, and was it a habit that kind of gradually went away?
#
And what happened during the pandemic that you kind of fell in love with fiction?
#
So I think when I was growing up, I read some detective stories, but when I was in college,
#
I had long summer holidays.
#
So in term time, we did play cricket.
#
And since Stevens had the best college team in India, I mean, two of my contemporaries,
#
we talked about this before, Keerthi Azad and Arulal played cricket for the country.
#
So it was very, was I professional standard.
#
So from, and the season ran from July to March.
#
So there was no room after six hours of practice or a match to come and read a novel.
#
So in the summer holidays in Dehradun, I read novels.
#
And I remember two writers who made a great influence on me, novelists, and I can't really
#
now remember who recommended them to me, were Hemingway and Somerset Maugham, whom I read
#
everything they ever wrote.
#
And they wrote a kind of, if you read either or both of them, a kind of a clear, unadorned,
#
unornamented prose, you know, the kind of prose a historian should be reading.
#
Who wants to become a historian later on?
#
But then I stopped reading fiction for some time, and then I picked it up slowly.
#
And I was, I think my son, Keshav, was a novelist and who reads very widely, has really alerted
#
me the kind of things he thinks I'd like, and he's almost always right.
#
So now I read much more interior writing.
#
I don't really read the Hemingway Maugham.
#
So Keshav introduced me to Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, Barbara Pym, you know, delicate,
#
intimate portraits of human relationships and their ambiguities and their complications.
#
So I was reading quite a lot of that, encouraged by Keshav.
#
Then the pandemic happened and these vast open spaces of time opened up because I was
#
not traveling anywhere.
#
And then I decided that I would read Tolstoy.
#
Now we've discussed in previous episodes my books on Gandhi.
#
Now Gandhi really admired Tolstoy.
#
Gandhi had three mentors.
#
And going back to a theme we've talked about, about, you know, knowing your world inside
#
the inner world, but going, embracing the book globe.
#
Gandhi's three great mentors were Raichand Bhai, who was a Gujarati philosopher, Gokhale,
#
who was an Indian but not Gujarati social reformer, and Tolstoy, he was a Russian and
#
So I have written about what Gandhi got from Tolstoy.
#
But what Gandhi got from Tolstoy was his philosophical and moral and religious writings.
#
So there is, he read Tolstoy's essays on Brahmacharya.
#
He read his book on religious philosophy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and that's
#
where Gandhi's kind of anti-orthodox Hinduism comes from.
#
Gandhi would not have wanted a Ram temple because Ram was inside his heart, as it was
#
inside, as Christ was inside Tolstoy's heart.
#
So but there is no evidence that Gandhi read either Anna Karenina or War and Peace.
#
So I said, dekho, mujko padhna hai.
#
And I started with a wonderful collection of Tolstoy short stories, which is, which
#
It's translated by this couple who do a lot of Tolstoy translations, the complicated names,
#
Pevzner and Volkovsky or something.
#
It's absolutely brilliant.
#
I mean, there's a, there's some famous short stories like Haji Murat and the death of Iman
#
But there's a story there, and these are about 50 page long short stories.
#
There's a story there called Surji.
#
And it's a story of a Russian orthodox monk struggling with his sexuality.
#
I mean, I want, it's Tolstoy's, it's a story of Tolstoy who was not a monk.
#
It's also the story of Gandhi.
#
And I wonder if Gandhi at least read that short story, because he has a guy, he enters
#
He's from a rich family.
#
He enters a seminary, before he enters, he's due to marry a gorgeous aristocratic beauty
#
from a similar kind of noble family.
#
He says, no, I'm going to become a sadhu or a monk.
#
He enters a seminary, then is there doing all these austerities, and then falls in love
#
with a young woman, breaks his vow, is mortified and struck by remorse, abandons the seminary,
#
the seminary goes for a kind of a, becomes a mendicant, goes for a walk across Russia.
#
I mean, it's a fabulous, fabulous book.
#
Then I read Anna Karenina and Warren Pearson, then I read Middlemarch, you know, so lots
#
of time to be invested in these three epic novels, but they transform my understanding
#
And I, I'm so glad that the pandemic allowed me to read these two, three truly great novels.
#
And now I've gone back to reading other stuff.
#
I was reading a more kind of a contemporary stuff.
#
There's a novel called Limonov, which is by the French writer, I think, Emmanuel Carrere,
#
which is about Russia in the last 20 or 30 years, very stark and direct and occasionally
#
Then I read another book that Keshava recommended to me, which is called the Netanyahu's by
#
Joshua Cohen, which is an account of Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu's father, who was a Zionist
#
And I must say two, three things.
#
I don't read fiction set in India because I'm reading about India all the time.
#
So since I don't have another language to explore the world that language can give me,
#
I can, when I read fiction, let me at least read it about Russia and Latin America and
#
Africa and at least I get a window into parts of the world that I would not otherwise get.
#
The second thing I'd say is that I have no illusions about where historians stand in,
#
you know, in how do I put it, in any hierarchy of literary genres.
#
I think poets are up there, the best poets are up there and then come novelists and several
#
notches below come historians and I'm glad I've been able to very late in life spend time
#
with people like Tolstoy and Giorgio.
#
I mean, regarding the hierarchy, I would just say I get where you're coming from, but I
#
don't think that much as I don't believe in all kinds of hierarchies, I think it depends
#
on what you're optimizing for.
#
And I think that hierarchy holds for interior life, that if you want to capture interior
#
life, then yes, absolutely, I guess poetry is the purest exploration of that and all
#
of these novels you mentioned have that interiority and I'm a big fan of Penelope Fitzgerald who
#
you mentioned, especially Gate of Angels, which was such a moving book and I mentioned
#
her once in a while and think of her once in a while because she started writing well
#
So you know, for late bloomers such as me, hopefully there is hope.
#
Yeah, I also read her, by the way, more than one book of nonfiction, but she wrote a biography
#
of her father and her brothers, I think it's called the Knox Brothers.
#
I think they were writers and clergymen and quite remarkable family of four brothers.
#
Tell me now then about the autobiography because that is obviously something you are more than
#
qualified to talk about and at one level, like my writing students, we had a conversation
#
recently about someone asked a question in one of the Q&A's of my webinars about the
#
difference between fiction and nonfiction and my point was that fundamentally you should
#
think of it as the same.
#
I mean, obviously on the margins there are differences, but fundamentally you're telling
#
a story, you're telling a story with a certain amount of craft, you want to make it evocative,
#
you want to make it real, you want to make your characters 3D, it's all there.
#
So there is a storytelling aspect to it.
#
Now if I specifically want to drill down on biography, it is so full of specific challenges.
#
One of the challenges is finding a suitable voice, another challenge would be figuring
#
out a way to go beyond bare surface biographical details and managing to capture the interior
#
life of a historical figure without being presumptuous, without overreaching.
#
So how has your thinking on that really evolved?
#
First a little bit about the art of biography, again talking about fortunate meetings.
#
When I was working on my Elvin book, I spent a year in Berlin at Institute of Advanced
#
Studies there called the Bishop's Collegue, and I was fortunate to have as one of my colleagues
#
there the great biographer of Goethe, a man called Nicholas Boyle, who is professor of
#
German at Cambridge University.
#
And this was the first biography I was writing.
#
So I had long conversations with Nicholas, which I think really taught me a great deal
#
about how to not abandon, but marginalize or sidetrack my sociological past and get
#
into the lives, the individual life of this character, his emotions, his relationships,
#
his feelings, his shifts of mood, his abrupt transitions and so on.
#
And from Nicholas, my conversation with Nicholas and then writing about Elvin, I wrote an essay
#
which I published in the Financial Times many years later, where I coined what I call the
#
Boyle's Laws of Biography as a kind of joke because I had got them from Nicholas.
#
And as I recall, four in all, one is if your subject was a writer, always look for sources
#
that did not emanate from that subject.
#
You know, Gandhi, there are 97 volumes of Gandhi's collected works, but look for what
#
other people have written about Gandhi.
#
Look at unpublished correspondence around Gandhi, about Gandhi.
#
The collected works of Gandhi's letters, but not the letters of his correspondence.
#
So that's the first Boyle's Law of Biography is always look for as many sources that do
#
not emanate from the subject himself or herself.
#
I mean, S. Gopal's biography of Nehru, which is a very good, important book, is massively
#
dependent on Nehru's writing.
#
Many books on Gandhi just don't go beyond the collected work.
#
That's the first lesson.
#
The second lesson is the literary quality, the literary, emotional and indeed historical
#
quality of a biography is often determined by the secondary characters and how you flesh
#
Now, this is not biographers generally just follow that person's life.
#
They don't look at that person's friends, rivals, colleagues, interlocutors, children,
#
lovers and, you know, and so on and so forth.
#
So it has to be a vast cast of characters.
#
You know, my Gandhi biography, Sunny Mehta, whom I was privileged to have as my editor
#
on it, said there are 150 characters in it who are all seem to be interesting, you know,
#
So I think the second, the kind of it, in that sense, it is like an epic.
#
Your guy or your girl, you know, your central character is only one of many and it's true.
#
Your central character's relationships with their, as I said, friends, rivals, enemies,
#
lovers, children and so on that you flesh out the wider picture.
#
A third law of biography is never anticipated.
#
So a sociologist would give a thesis and then explore the thesis.
#
Now if you're writing about, for example, when you're writing about Elvin and he falls
#
in love with a tribal woman and eventually breaks up with that woman, don't let, don't
#
let the reader into that secret till the breakup actually happens.
#
A fourth lesson of biography, which I learned because both Elvin and Gandhi had left their
#
autobiography is, and this is my own coinage, an autobiography is a preemptive strike against
#
That person wants to leave her or his record behind and to preempt what the biographer
#
would do and don't be deterred even by someone like Gandhi, who may have apparently covered
#
his entire life and his childhood in such great detail.
#
I mean, one of the great delights of my Gandhi biography was to actually find his school
#
mark sheets, which are not there in the autobiography, then of course finally would be the question
#
of how to bring in the wider picture, the larger landscape.
#
So in the case of Gandhi, of course, there's so many things, there's the history of the
#
freedom movement, there's the history of social reform, there's the history of inter-religious
#
relationship, there's the history of colonialism.
#
In the case of Elvin, it's more anthropological debates, the situation of the Adivasis.
#
So it's kind of a multi-layered approach and then of course the subtlety of how you draw
#
people in, when you introduce Nehru into the story of Gandhi or Elvin's tribal wife into
#
his story, I think that is literally artifice plays a part.
#
But where it is different from fiction writing is that you can't invent.
#
It has been well said that a biographer is an artist under oath, that you cannot invent,
#
you cannot speculate, you cannot imagine.
#
You are constrained by what your sources tell you.
#
The last thing I'd say and I'll stop there is that my Gandhi biographies are actually
#
exceptional, in that they are about a very famous figure must written about.
#
Most of my other books, including Rebels Against the Raj, are about kind of interesting middle
#
range figures who touched many different worlds, who touched the world of the mighty and the
#
powerful but also often live in villages with peasants and tribals and so on and lead interesting
#
unusual lives of what I call the middle range.
#
They are not totally destitute nor are they really powerful and important.
#
Subaltern studies is only about the oppressed.
#
Most biographies are only about Churchill, Napoleon, Gandhi, Ambedkar, etc.
#
And I think these people are actually these figures of the middle range, like Elvin, like
#
the characters in Rebels Against the Raj, like Palwankar Balu and the Danish Ticket
#
I wrote about, they are actually what I find much more interesting.
#
So I'd like, if I was to write, I'm often told why don't you write on Nehru, why don't
#
you write on Ambedkar, I don't think I want to go down any of those routes.
#
The biographical subjects I might choose in the future will be actually forgotten obscure
#
people who need to be rehabilitated.
#
And what you said about so many characters and so rich, I mean, if there are listeners
#
who watch a lot of TV and web series and all of that and are just getting into reading,
#
I draw a comparison with The Wire.
#
Like one reason The Wire, the TV show, the HBO show, kind of blew me away was it was
#
very novelistic in the sense that it gave its characters space to breathe.
#
So there weren't one or two main characters.
#
You know, there were so many minor characters who had arcs of their own, complex lives of
#
their own, and that really kind of, you know, affected me.
#
I want to come back to modern times.
#
On the one hand, what we see today, one thing that I shouldn't say on the one hand, because
#
they're not opposed to each other, two separate kind of things are playing out.
#
One of them is that we are increasingly engrossed in narrative battles, which is all of politics,
#
Where narratives really matter.
#
And of course, narratives have always mattered in politics, except that now the technology
#
to get these narratives to everyone are ubiquitous.
#
We are surrounded by them.
#
And therefore, the way history is used has become deeply political, where, you know,
#
the discourse is so polarized that you're necessarily forced towards one simplistic
#
narrative of the other, either Nehru was evil or Nehru was good and there was nothing wrong
#
And it's, you know, you don't see the shades of grey, you don't see the multitudes.
#
And therefore, there is, it seems to me that a historian who wants to do actual history
#
and stay away from the politics and do actual history and talk about this, finds himself
#
almost in a sense as a crusader of a particular sort, where it is almost inevitable that she
#
will be hated by all sides of the political debate, because what they're trying to say
#
is that Nehru was good and bad, and you know, you've got to look at all of this shit.
#
The other aspect, and you know, I'll use the other wire, the excellent online site as an
#
example here, is that what we have seen happen to our journalism is that today, in our journalism,
#
you either have people who are a disgrace to what journalism should be, or you have
#
people, and I'm thinking of people like the people of the wire, the news minute, scroll,
#
news laundry, so on, who are going above and beyond what you would expect journalists to
#
And in a sense, they are also being crusaders in this battle, like historians.
#
So what is your sense of this?
#
Because I don't think that you would have wanted to play this game to stand up and fight.
#
You would have wanted to sit in your study, listen to Malik Arjun Mansur and do your thing.
#
But now you're having to stand up and fight.
#
I fight, but I also don't fight all the time.
#
You know, I think it's important to have the time to do your own work, also to pick your
#
What are the things you want to fight about, you know, and only fight about things, not
#
just the things you care about, but things that you know and understand.
#
So you'll recall that during the CIA protests, I was holed up by the police.
#
You know, I was holding a placard in front of the town hall and I was taken away.
#
Now, why did I do that?
#
Because I'm a biographer of Gandhi, because I grew up in an environment where religious
#
discrimination was regarded as wrong.
#
And as a biographer of Gandhi, I stand for Hindu-Muslim harmony and against the subjugation
#
and suppression of a religious minority.
#
Now, both I feel about it and I've worked on it.
#
Now that happened in some months later, the farm agitation broke out.
#
And there were endless calls, both in Karnataka and Delhi, I said, I'm not an economist,
#
I don't understand agriculture.
#
I said, okay, now, so it's very, very important, particularly for young scholars who are scholars
#
who see themselves also citizens with a conscience to know what you can intervene in, where
#
you feel you should not become an all-purpose activist.
#
This is part of my problem with the phrase public intellectual.
#
Now, there's certain things I would speak on.
#
I would speak on freedom of expression, regardless of, you know, who is the victim.
#
I would speak on Hindu-Muslim harmony.
#
I would speak about Adivasis, because I feel unlike Dalits and Muslims, their problems
#
are very rarely figured in the public discourse.
#
And I've worked many years on Adivasi questions, but I would not be, I mean, someone like me
#
would get, every day that we say, yes, sign this, this, yes, this, this.
#
We're very, very clear about what, if you want to be a citizen who takes your scholarship
#
to the public square in a more active way than simply writing excessively, make sure
#
that you understand the issue and you have some credibility in speaking about that issue.
#
So I think I worry sometimes about, you know, obviously people are upset and they're angry
#
and maybe this kind of detachment I'm talking about comes with being an old man and maybe
#
not having energy and some would say it's cynicism.
#
But I think it's very, very important if you, I mean, I think crusader, I would not call
#
myself crusader, that I can have a problem with that term.
#
But if you want to intervene in the public sphere, make sure that it's a subject on which
#
you care and which you have some reasonable understanding.
#
My next question is also about social media and I don't want to ask a general question
#
about the social aspect of it or what it does to the discourse, I want to make it more personal.
#
But first, you know, one of the things that, you know, what has happened definitely with
#
social media is that it's polarized discourse.
#
You know, people go online, they form tribes, then you want to raise your status within
#
By attacking someone in the other tribe or by holding people in your own tribe to unreasonable
#
And eventually you are not addressing any argument, you are always attacking people
#
instead of addressing arguments, right?
#
And in fact, I read a recent and my understanding was that it brought out the worst in us, which
#
even I have seen in myself sometimes when I have reacted intemperately to something
#
And I read an interesting study recently, which talks about how it's not that it brings
#
out the worst in us, but it empowers the worst people who are most full of anger and all
#
of these unpleasant things.
#
And this gives them that megaphone, so to say.
#
But that's not about that's not my question.
#
My question is, at a personal level, and I've experienced this with people I'm acquainted
#
with, or we have mutual friends with will behave in ways on social media, which they
#
would never do in person, right?
#
And and it's kind of hurtful.
#
And you learn to ignore it after a while and you learn to say, okay, it's a good thing
#
that they have revealed themselves in this way, right?
#
But what you see and and again, there is a line by Yeats from The Second Coming that
#
you like to quote, where you say the best lack all conviction while the worst are full
#
of passionate intensity.
#
And I think you see this amplified on social media.
#
It was actually when I quoted it, it was the people I had in mind were Malmohan on the
#
one side and Modi and Shah on the other.
#
Yeah, in this lovely interview you gave to Madhu Trehan in 2012, which I'll link from
#
She's such a good interviewer, she does a really good job.
#
So you know, she really brought and I love that.
#
Tell me about the personal aspect of it.
#
I'm not asking for sociological wisdom.
#
And I think it's evident to everyone what is happening to what it is doing.
#
But at a personal level, did it disturb you?
#
The constant attacks like you know, sometimes what will happen now is that I'll open my
#
Twitter and I'll suddenly see that my notifications are flooded with abuse.
#
And then I will know that fine, I know what happened.
#
Either Barkha Dutt or Ram Guha retweeted me.
#
And now all their fans quote unquote have unleashed themselves in the mentions, which
#
is not to say don't retweet me, please do, but yeah, it's predictable by now.
#
So how do you react to it?
#
Does it make you sad sometimes?
#
I mean, I suppose I spend less time on it nowadays, it used to make me more angry and
#
I also recognize these limitations as a tool.
#
My children have been very good in advising me as to, so I'm not on Facebook.
#
So I know all kinds of things I said about me on Facebook also, often by academics, not
#
by right-wing trolls, by left-wing academics actually, more than by right-wing trolls.
#
I think I'm grateful for my children, for the kind of counsel they've given me over
#
the years and how to handle it.
#
And now I tweet actually less and less and it's really my writing that, yeah, so it's,
#
but it is, I mean, I think what I like about Twitter is getting your ideas across and getting
#
other people's ideas across.
#
You know, so I often tweet like Mukul Kesavan is not on Twitter, he says interesting things,
#
you know, music postings by people I know, you know, so that at least you, it's a more
#
of a service that you're performing rather than getting into arguments and debates and
#
you know, name-calling and all of that.
#
So yeah, so now I do, I actually tweet in my own voice less and less.
#
I tweet my articles, but I tweet other people's articles or interesting shows, interesting
#
discussions I might have seen, occasionally a book recommendation, but very rarely.
#
And what I kind of reassure you at this point is that one thing I realized about Twitter
#
is that there is a vocal minority which is really loud and acerbic, but there is a vast
#
silent majority which really appreciates the work people like you do.
#
So you know, they might not express it often and perhaps, you know, if you're listening
#
to this and you appreciate Ram's work, let him know, though he doesn't check his notifications.
#
I check my emails, but my email is in the public domain, so please write to me.
#
So there you go, please write to him and tell him how much his work means to you.
#
I try and reply to every email I get, myself.
#
Lovely, you're asking for trouble now because there's just a thousand emails.
#
I want to now stay with the Eats poem, The Second Coming, and talk about the lines that
#
precede what I just quoted, where he wrote, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
#
the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
#
And this seems to me to be so profound because I find this happening in our society, right?
#
And we were discussing over lunch that, you know, we were sort of going back and forth,
#
you, me and Keshava, about was our society always like this or has it become like this?
#
And my sense is that this was a current running through our society from well before independence,
#
you know, in Akshay Mukul's excellent book in the Geeta Press, he talks about, you know,
#
issues like love jihad and cow slaughter and all that were live in the twenties, were live
#
well before that, right?
#
These are not new issues.
#
So my sense is that this is what it was and society has, in a sense, caught up with politics
#
and the whole larger question of how, you know, the top-down vision of the framers of
#
our constitution, they failed, it was never going to work, you know, and Ambedkar knew
#
it himself when he spoke about just a topsoil and democracy.
#
What is your sense that, you know, what you see in society, like, I often say that, you
#
know, you, we talk of 2024 elections are so important and my thing is that, yeah, even
#
if the political dispensation changes, society is what it is.
#
You see, I, it's, you see, it's very, I mean, as a sociologist, I know that, again, I mean,
#
to hear Ambedkar ruining or plagiarizing a, with my mission, I hope, a statement to Keshavas,
#
which I'll then explain, which is that, in India, things are never as bad or never as
#
You know, in 2005, 2006, when all my friends in Bangalore, the IT people were saying we
#
become superpower and we've decoupled India from Pakistan, now it's India and China and
#
we are the country of the year in Davos and, you know, all of that, that was, things weren't
#
that good and maybe now things aren't that bad.
#
And as a sociologist, I would say that there are many things going on in Indian society,
#
which actually at one level are deepening democracy.
#
So the challenge to the English speaking elite, the challenges to the caste system, the growing
#
organization, assertiveness of Dalits.
#
I think there are many, some very interesting things going on, the spheres of creativity
#
in non-traditional areas, but they are also likewise countervailing forces that are more
#
complicated, more depressing, more worrisome.
#
So India moves at different layers at different levels in different parts of the country.
#
So it's impossible to pass a generalization of what's happening.
#
Things are not as good, not as bad as they seem, just as they were not as bad, good as
#
they were some time ago.
#
I would say this as a historian, I've said this before, but I'm not in your shoes, so
#
The interim judgment at pass on what is happening today or what has been happening over the
#
last three or four years is that this is the fifth major crisis the republic has.
#
The first major crisis, probably the fourth, possibly the fifth.
#
The first major crisis was that of partition, which no one ever thought we could build a
#
nation from its fragments and I mean, Granville Hostin's great history of the constitution
#
says fundamental rights were being negotiated, debated, enacted against the atmosphere of
#
So the fact that India was united, had a democratic template, and had this extraordinary constitution
#
was a coming out of that crisis.
#
And of course, I've written about that at great length in India after Gandhi.
#
The second crisis was a crisis caused by the China war, the Pakistan war of 62 and 65 respectively,
#
and the food, the agrarian shortages in the near famine situation, and of course then
#
the insurgencies in Mizoram and so on.
#
Then the second crisis.
#
The third crisis was the emergency, which everyone knows about.
#
The fourth crisis probably was the late 80s and early 90s when you had rising cast and
#
In retrospect, it doesn't count as important as the first three.
#
And the fourth crisis, so let's leave the early 90s, is today.
#
It's the fourth major crisis in the history of the world.
#
So it's not unique, it's not unprecedented.
#
I've been thinking a lot about the other crises, the emergency I knew at first hand.
#
I grew up in the early 60s in a time of scarcities and shortages in the war with China.
#
And of course, I've spent many years studying the aftermath of partition and now I'm living
#
through this fourth crisis.
#
That's how I would see it as a historian.
#
I will not be apocalyptic, I'd be worried, occasionally despairing, but not apocalyptic
#
because we don't know what will happen.
#
I'm worried about some other things.
#
I'll say I'm not worried about some big thing like the survival of India or the loss of
#
So, I mean, I would not be apocalyptic.
#
I normally have been nostalgic for the great India I grew up in, which I've lost, none
#
I'd be precise, identify it as a historian, as the fourth major crisis the republic has
#
passed through and anatomize it as a sociologist by pointing to four or five particular aspects
#
First, the demonization of Muslims who are really being turned into a permanently subjugated
#
minority almost like Dalits used to be.
#
That's the first thing.
#
And no particular order, but one this.
#
Secondly, the growing North-South divide.
#
The fact that the least prosperous parts of India are the ones that would have an increasing
#
The peace prospers, the least open-minded, the more patriarchal, the more communal parts
#
of India will decide our democratic future.
#
Thirdly, the multiple environmental crises we face in terms of, which are actually serious
#
enough regardless of climate change to really pose a question mark about our economic future.
#
Fourthly, the decline in capability of institutions, which includes the press, the judiciary, the
#
And fifthly, our declining status in the neighborhood, the fact that we've lost the neighborhood.
#
So there are some particular aspects of what we're going through today that should worry
#
There may be one or two others that I've not talked about.
#
But that's how we have come through terrible times before.
#
Maybe we will and maybe we won't now.
#
So I would ideally in the normal course of things have doubled down on that and spoken
#
for just an hour on these profound points you made, but we have like 15 minutes left.
#
So maybe the next time I'm in Bangalore, we can do a longer episode.
#
I just have a couple of kind of more sort of questions for you.
#
And one arises from your latest book, Rebels Against Siraj, which I'd encourage everyone
#
It's such fantastic storytelling and I just learned a lot from it.
#
But I want to sort of stick to one thing that strikes out and which you mentioned right
#
at the start, that these seven people that you have profiled were actually in a sense
#
traitors because they were fighting against their own country, against the British Empire.
#
But they were fighting for principles.
#
They were fighting for human beings.
#
They were driven both by principle and empathy.
#
And we can look back at them and just admire them unhesitatingly.
#
And therefore, the question comes to me is that what is sort of a modern analogue of
#
Because it's so easy for people like you and me to just be called anti-national because
#
we are against one particular government.
#
It would be equally, you know, like it would be equally, it would be more easy for someone
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who says that, who argues for Kashmir or for the Northeast and or who compares the Indian
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army in Kashmir as an occupying force to being similar to what the British did to us.
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And I know many Kashmiris will look at us as a colonial occupying power.
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And suddenly, and it seems natural to call them anti-national, but to admire these fabulous,
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you know, foreigners you mentioned for essentially the same thing.
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So you know, and how do we, you know, is this something that sort of gives you cause for
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I'll take a minor issue with the drawing a parallel with Kashmir, because in Kashmir,
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as I've written elsewhere, there are three sets of criminals, the Indian state, the Pakistani
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It's not black and white.
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But there are victims all across.
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The victims have been victims of the jihadis and as well as the Indian state.
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You can argue that the Indian state has caused more violence than the jihadis.
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So let's be clear about Kashmir is not, what is called the freedom struggle in Kashmir
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is not remotely comparable to the freedom struggle led by people like Gandhi.
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But you know, but having said that, the Indian state is, as a citizen of India, I am ashamed
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at the crimes that the Indian state has committed and continues to commit.
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These crimes were committed and have been well documented by me before 2019 and I will
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certainly go to document what happened after 2019.
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So I think that's, because you know, again, we have to get beyond just black and white
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stuff, you know, which is Kashmir is a very complicated business.
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You know, it's not something which is, and I think both sides in this intellectual, in
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this debate, and this is partly, partly, but not wholly because of Twitter, have simplified
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You know, I think the liberal left and also I'd say the Kashmiri, proponents of Kashmiri
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independence have never properly even understood, let alone atoned for the expulsion of independence.
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None of these excuses what the Indian state has done.
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But I think that's why the nuance and complexity of Kashmir is important.
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And I would, but I think with Muslims generally in India, there is no ambiguity that what
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is happening today to Muslims across India is truly awful.
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It's unprecedented in the history of India.
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It's like what the Burmese are doing to the Rohingyas, what Pakistan did to its Hindus
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and Sikhs, what Bangladesh, it's exactly, maybe it's exactly that.
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And that, I think, is very, very clear.
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And people who are fighting for the equal rights of Muslims today, you know, Hindus
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who are fighting for it, you know, like, you know, many mutual friends of ours who are
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called anti-national all the time, you know, the Hindus who joined the anti-CA protest,
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the Muslims who participated in the movement of Shaheen Bagh, the students of Jamia Amelia,
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far from being anti-national, they were upholding the noblest ideals of the Indian Republic.
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You know, I think I was moved into protesting that day by what I saw, the brutalization
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by the police of the students in Jamia Amelia, which is a university which Gandhi had created.
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So I would, I think Kashmir requires itself, but what is happening to Indian Muslims today
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outside of Kashmir is despicable, and anyone with a shed of decency should be standing
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up against what the Modi Shah regime is doing to Indian Muslims today.
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That I would say clearly, and they are upholding the noblest ideals of the Republic and let
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them be called all the kinds of names they want.
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The CAA, as I wrote at the time, is immoral, illegal, immoral as well as illegal and totally
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awful and absolutely discriminatory piece of legislation.
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So you know, I think that particularly is something on which every Indian has to take
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I couldn't agree with you more on this.
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Every Indian has to take a stand on our treatment.
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What is happening in my state today with the kind of public disturbing of Muslim women
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who want to be educated?
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I mean, what could be more awful than this?
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No, and I couldn't agree with you more.
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And I did an episode on the CAA with Srinath Raghavan also, which is one of the top three
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So I'll link that from the show notes.
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But about Kashmir, I was acknowledging the complexity rather than taking a simple line
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and pointing out that for a 12 year old kid there, whose 15 year old brother was taken
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away and killed by the army or by the security forces, rather, and whose 14 year old sister
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was blinded because of those pellets, there's no point talking to him about what was done
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to Kashmiri pundits 30 years ago.
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I agree, but at least intellectuals should.
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At the Kashmiri intellectuals, the Kashmiri novelists, they should, they should.
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I'm not asking the 12 year old or 14 year old who is suffering from the security forces
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violence or something like that.
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But you know, I think the intellectuals who are famous and have a voice, never do.
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And never, you know, I think that's, that is, I think that is what complicates it.
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That's what really complicates our discussion on this.
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And earlier we spoke about the passage of time.
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I mean, I said you, you can link it also.
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I wrote a, I wrote a column which came after, I wrote several columns after the abrogation
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One was called the multiple tragedies of the Kashmiri pandit, which came in India at that
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It explains the complexity to the extent possible it's in, you can do in a newspaper article.
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Earlier, we discussed the passage of time and how when you look at time differently,
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you can look at history differently.
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And one of the ways in which I think that applies is, you know, is the whole concept
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of the nation state, right?
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And I recorded an episode with Nirupama Rao yesterday, which will actually come out well
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But that was one of the things we discussed because she spoke about how there were Tibetan
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maps which would not show those kinds of boundaries, which would not recognize a boundary that
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divides a mountain or a valley or a river or whatever.
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The point being that culture unites us and these arbitrary lines drawn on maps then become
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And from this perspective, when we, you know, we today, we think of nation states as hardened
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This is the definitive line.
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But you know, in the vast sweep of history doesn't necessarily have to be like that.
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Earlier, you, for example, mentioned the divide between the north and the south.
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You know, when delimitation comes up again, for example, that is something that could
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So, do you think like one of the points that you made in India after Gandhi was that something
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that we take for granted is actually miraculous, the fact that the center held, right?
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And we could just have splintered and whatever.
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And maybe there's another counterfactual way that would have been a good thing.
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But the center held and we are what we are.
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But it's not something we should take for granted.
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But once it has happened with hindsight, it looks solidified.
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Do you think that we also, you know, if you're looking 50 or 100 years down the line, do
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you think that the influence in this globalized and connected world, that nation states, which
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have not been around for very long, if you look at the sweep of history, may not necessarily
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be so relevant or so powerful?
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You know, it's impossible to foretell.
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You know, I think historians make very bad astrologers.
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And I made some disastrous predictions in the past about how elections would go.
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So it's impossible to foretell.
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But for the moment, you have nation states and you have to work within them.
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I have India after Gandhi ends some lines from JBS Haldane explaining why he's not a
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world citizen, but an Indian citizen, right?
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And I'm not a world citizen.
#
And one of the duties of an Indian citizen, to paraphrase Haldane, one of the duties of
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a citizen is to hold his state to account and to criticize it for its excesses and
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And that's what all of us should be doing, who see ourselves as Indian citizens.
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What will happen 20, 50 years later?
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Will you have porous boundaries and so on?
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At the moment, the treatment of our religious minorities is unconscionable.
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The capture and subjugation of our institutions, the will of a particular party and a particular
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leader have very dangerous portents for our economic and social and political future.
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A deteriorating relationship with the neighborhood.
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For example, again, this is a subject for a different discussion, and it should be someone
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like Seenath Raghavan or Nirupama Rao, who can do more justice to it, or Shiv Shankar
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Menon, perhaps best of all, who could do more justice to this.
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One of the tragedies of Indian foreign policy, which the Modi government has compounded,
#
is our relationship with our smaller neighbors, their deep historical reasons why we have
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bad relations with Pakistan and China.
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But to the contrary, their historical and cultural reasons why we should have good relations
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with Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, we do not.
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Now, these are things we should all be working towards.
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But I am not someone who thinks about a distant future in a utopian world where there will
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I live in a world of nation states.
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I have a government which I must hold to account.
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You know, when you say I'm an Indian citizen, we're both Indian citizens.
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But I think legally we are Indian citizens.
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Morally, I don't feel constrained by the nation state, or empathetically, I don't feel
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And when that becomes a constraint, when somebody within your nation state is your person and
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somebody else is another or somebody within whatever artificial tribe you draw within
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it is, you know, that kind of sort of gives me pause.
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My final question is something which will bookend the discussion.
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We started by speaking about your notion of home.
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And I'll end with this little quote from an essay musical poem, which I know you love,
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where he says, quote, I have made my commitments now.
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This is one to stay where I am.
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As others choose to give themselves in some remote and backward place, my backward place
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And I find this very moving.
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And what is your backward place?
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It is all of the Indian Republic.
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It's not a I mean, it's the home is home is, of course, there are room now, but it's just,
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I mean, I'm too attached to this country.
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And you know, I'll be have to be, it's hard for me to think whatever happens to it.
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You know, I have a living, you know, do what I can, write whatever books I still have to
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I'll get angry when I have to, I'll tweet where I have to go on a dharma when I need to.
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I mean, it's not a again, I give a lecture in memory of Justice Ananda Bandare, which
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was then published later.
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But it's also available on YouTube, it was called patriotism versus jingoism.
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So I'm an Indian patriot.
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And I have no hesitation in saying that I mean, that's where I was born.
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And if I'd been born somewhere else and raised somewhere else in a different kind of environment,
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with different kinds of influences, I may have been a Catalan patriot or a Kashmiri
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patriot or whatever else, you know, that's it.
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So that's, you know, that's, that's, that's why that's the backward place where I am.
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It could be despotic, but it's my place.
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Ram, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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And next time you've got to give me four or five hours of your time, because as you can
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see, there is so much to discuss.
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That's most of the hour.
