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When we are in the middle of life, it's messy. A million things are happening at once. We
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don't know how anything will turn out. In hindsight, of course, we build simple narratives
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that explain it all. The past is always one linear story. And so, when we think of our
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freedom struggle, we think of Indian freedom fighters coming together to fight the British.
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But really, there was much more than that going on. They were also fighting each other,
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trying to reconcile their thoughts with those of their fellows, fighting in the marketplace
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of ideas, fighting in the marketplace of politics, fighting for themselves as much
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as for this nation state, which didn't then exist, which had to be imagined into being.
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In their quest to define themselves, these men and women also shaped what we are today.
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If you want to understand where we are, you need to know where we came from.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Shruti Kapila, a professor at Cambridge
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who's just come out with a book named Violent Fraternity, Indian Political Thought in the
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Global Age. This book examines political thought in India in the first half of the 20th century
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and looks at major figures like Tilak Gandhi, Ambedkar Savarkar, Iqbal and Patel to see
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how they clashed in terms of ideas and actions. One of Shruti's main points also is that Indian
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political thought evolved in unique ways that have no relation to how political thought
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developed elsewhere. So we can't apply foreign prisms to understand India. And it's important
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to get a sense of those debates and those maneuverings because they still matter today.
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At one point, Shruti writes about how Hindutva is quote, a theory of violence in search of
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its own history. Stop quote. Think about that again. A theory of violence in search of its
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own history. That is so resonant and so thought-provoking, just like Shruti's book and many of her insights
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in this conversation itself. But before we begin the conversation, let's take a quick
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commercial break. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time. I loved
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the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercised
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my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because
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I wrote about many different things. Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons
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and now it is time to revive it. Only now I am doing it through a newsletter. I have
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started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever
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catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about
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much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign
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up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox. You don't need
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to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
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Thank you. Shruti, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen. Thank you for having me. It's
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a great pleasure. You know, while reading up on you, I realized that you grew up in
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Chandigarh just like me. In fact, you, you know, did you? I did. I was born and brought
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up there. I was kind of there till the eighth standard. So there were possibly a few years
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in the early eighties when I imagined we were in the same city at the same time. Oh, wow.
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Yes. Well, I was definitely there in the early eighties. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was born at
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the end of 73 and then I left in, I think, 86. So that's my kind of span of time there.
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Right. I never left it till I was 20, 21. So I, my first two decades, I mean, I did
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my entire schooling and even my undergraduate degree there. So and then, so yeah, this cannot
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go on the program, but which sector did you grow up in? I was actually going to ask you
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on the record itself. Okay, you can ask. No, no, we can just continue like this. Yeah.
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I was in sector 16 to begin with. I mean, I was probably born in some other sector,
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but the key years of the childhood, which you remember were in sector 16. What about
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you? Oh, well, we were neighbors. I was in sector 11 most of my life there. And so, yeah,
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so we were just across as a tour and we had very good family friends in sector 16. And
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so, yeah, so yeah, Chandigarh is small, at least then it was pretty small. And did you
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study in St. John's or? I studied in St. John's, my God. I studied next door in Sacred Heart.
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What a small world. Yeah, we probably like, I used to cycle to school. So you must have
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passed each other. Exactly. Or you must be one of those boys who made our lives miserable
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trying to leave the, you know. I was a very good boy, but I can totally imagine you cycling
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past and me thinking, hey, that girl looks like she's really smart. As it kind of turned
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out. Oh, that's very, very sweet of you. And then after that, where did you go? After
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that, I went all over the place. My dad was an IAS officer. So he was posted to Pune between
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86 and 91. And I finished my education in Pune in 94. And then I've been in Bombay since
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95. Though my dad retired in Chandigarh in sector 11. Oh, does he live in sector 11?
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He passed away last year, but I used to go all the time to sector 11 and meet him there.
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And it's, you know, one of the interesting things about Chandigarh is how other cities
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have kind of changed. Other cities where I have been to once in a while. But I don't
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know if it's, you know, because of the wide expansive spaces and the fact that you can't
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really, you know, in terms of space or those limitations, there is what there is. Maybe
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that's one reason. But no, I think that's right. Yeah, that's right. It's very like
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a Buzia master plan, which kind of became something that the administration had to stick
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to is both a good thing and a bad thing in some ways. But the city has really expanded
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in all the other directions now. So you have also new Chandigarh now and you have, you
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know, Naya Gaon and all these other places, which, you know, are now and the tech city.
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And so it's more sprawling. But you're right. It's the old bits and it has a kind of architectural
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integrity, which very few cities in India have, you know. And so they look like mishmashes,
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you know, like even Delhi is a mishmash of different architectural styles. Chandigarh
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that was quite coherent. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it leads to a dilemma for me because,
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you know, when it comes to urban planning, I'm kind of a follower of Jane Jacobs. And
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I think cities should evolve organically and all of that. So just ideologically, I'm kind
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of against the kind of central planning that went into Chandigarh. But when I go there,
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I just love it. What do you do? I know, but I see what you mean, because I used to feel
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very bad, like when I started traveling, especially in India. So of course, my mother's family
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is from the Punjab. You know, you have places you go to, whether in Punjab or older cities,
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you know, or elsewhere. And even in Himachal, where our families are spread. So, you know,
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the thing was that I used to feel very strange that this was a city that had no kind of concession
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to the past. It had no kind of, you know, memory even etched in of the past, you know.
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And this was particularly so when I went to Banaras for the first time, it was like a
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complete opposite. But then actually, as I thought about it, since we are talking about
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books and ideas and stuff, and Chandigarh is a very interesting place to grow in. And
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it's a truly in Heruvian city in that sense, you know, and because I realized that now
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that we're talking about the central vista in India, like, well, you know, the imperial
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past is being redone and stuff. I was really, in time, I think that Nehru's vision was
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quite bold, because though he was a historian, if you look at the city, the city makes no
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concession to the past. It makes no concession even to the vernacular. None of these things
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are there. Okay, people can have ideological views on it. But as a city, which is a postpartition
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city, it is made as a kind of signature for a postpartition India from the very province
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where as it were Pakistan is settled in effect, you know, because of East and West Punjab.
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And then you think about this is really futuristic. This is really bold. It's really, you know,
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it wants to occupy the future rather than occupy the past. And it's kind of an I've
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enjoyed, I mean, when I was growing up there, certainly, I found undergraduate years, very
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stifling. And that was because of militancy. And that's partly why, you know, after, you
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know, this is not, you know, my first project, you know, this is, you know, my this book,
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you know, in a way, if you had lived on in Chandigarh, say, through the late 80s, and
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certainly the early 90s, you know, that very decade of militancy, it really, you know,
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it also changed the culture of the city. Because when I was slightly younger, when I was a
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child, there was a lot more public culture. And then, you know, yeah, it became and today
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the city is very, it's vibrant, but its texture is much more commercial. You know, and it's
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less of a bureaucratic city, less of a city of bureaucrats, less of a kind of cultural
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hub of ideas or books, because it was a center of both Punjabi, Urdu, but also English literature,
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and of course, journalism, because my father was a journalist. And, and, you know, and
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you, you know, it's dead, all of those things are dead. But now the dominant side of it
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is commerce. You know, it's very commercial in both good and bad. It's an underrated city
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in India. Yeah. And obviously, what we feel about it will be tied up with memories and
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also is complicated. It's interesting, you should talk about, you know, Nehru not giving
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any concession to the past, because, you know, in the case of Chandigarh, it's okay, you're
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kind of building up a city where there's nothing there. You're not imposing a vision on something
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that exists, you know, it's just barren land, and then you build the city and all of that.
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And that's an interesting experiment. But in general, you know, I recently did an episode
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with Rupur Daman Singh and Adil Hossain, both, I think, students of yours, in their excellent
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book, and they have that debate in their book between Nehru and Iqbal and also Nehru and
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Jinnah. And you get the sense in parts of it that Nehru, as he was moving towards this
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whole project of constructing an idea of India, was sometimes perhaps guilty of not taking
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into account what was already there. And you see this in the sense that Iqbal tries to
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school him on what Indian Islam really is like. And you also see this when, you know,
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Nehru tells Jinnah that the communal thing is an elite problem. It is not, you know,
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I wouldn't go that far. But I think, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, Adil is a former student
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of mine, a graduate student of mine. Rupur Daman was part of the set. I only taught him
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a course. I can't claim any credit for him. But you know, the thing is that I didn't mean
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it in the sense of him being uncaring of the past. When I said that Nehru was gave no concession
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to the past. So if you look at his very famous speech, the Trist with Destiny, you know,
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that speech also says, you know, we only hear one bit. We know that phrase, you know, in
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this Trist with Destiny and the rest. But actually the speech, if you read the following
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sentences is very interesting because he says, well, India's had a sad past, but the past
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is over. You know, so he defers to the British as a sad past. And he's saying what we are
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going to occupy is the future. And it's a future that others will write about. You know,
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so it's an interesting, I think it's a kind of unprecedented and unparalleled post-colonial
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confidence in a way that allows him also, like, I mean, I'm sitting in England and I've
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been in India for, you know, several, for the past two, three years, primarily in India,
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though of course living between the two places. And I'm struck by the debates on empire decolonization,
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which are taking place here. So I've had just a debate in my faculty on empire over naming,
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you know, it's a naming of a building. It's, you know, should it be called after a particular
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historian, et cetera, et cetera. Now I was, and the students who were, who have requested
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or petitioned or mobilized to change the name, it's kind of an open question at the moment.
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And they say, they deploy the language of decolonization. They deploy the language of
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anti, you know, primarily decolonization and race and, you know, racial equity, you know.
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And you know, I'm struck by what happened in India. So, you know, in the sense that
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we are all children of post-colonialism. I mean, we are, you know, you and I are of the
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same generation. And, you know, the, so we might not be Nehru's children. We're not the
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generation of 47, but the thing is that it's interesting that Nehru is able to manage a
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very, not painless, but a very sophisticated, psychologically sophisticated transition from
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empire to nationalism, because you don't see the desire, you know, like the British called
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no real existential value for Indians. Yeah. I mean, they have gone, okay, go, you know,
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we won this, we won this moral and political fight. And, you know, but there is none of
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this kind of, the British no longer occupy the mindsets of Indians, right? Either in
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hatred or in denigration or as attachment. They're gone. They're simply gone. And in
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that sense, the way he naturalized the Lutyens landscape, you know, the central vista, he
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made it Indian, you know, there was no, you know, you can't, I mean, when I at least have,
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you know, whispers those buildings or even been through them, I think of them as quintessentially
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Indian buildings, right? I mean, they look, you know, they look British, you know, in
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terms of, you know, the style, but, you know, but they feel very part of, part of Indian
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fabric, you know? And so I found that very mature that you, you know, you got, got rid
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of the empire, you Indianized the stuff, you occupied the future in a way that the British
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then lost their salience, their importance, their full importance in India. So, which
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is not to say that we need to love Churchill. No one, I mean, every Indian knows that Churchill
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was very bad to India, but no one is going to have an agitation around him. Whereas,
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you know, that's the stuff of politics here. But if you look at the central vista project
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and I don't want to get into too much controversial ground straight up, but if you look at this
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central vista project, the project, and certainly some of the figures, even historians like
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say Vikram Sampath, who have written on Savarkar, they deploy the language of decolonization
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and you know, they say, well, this is, you know, we are decolonizing Indian history.
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And you think, really? I mean, you know, for one, you know, for one, so you get the kind
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of flipping here. It's the left using the language of decolonization and there you have
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as a tour center, right and right wing historians using the language of decolonization. And
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I think I'm closer to Nehru and other figures. They never use this word. You know, they never
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use the word decolonization because after all, they were becoming free. They were taking
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charge of their own histories and their futures. So in a way, the empire just lost its value
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in every sense. So I find it's kind of slightly perverse return in debates around the central
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vista and Savarkar disconcerting, but it speaks back to the Nehru movement.
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In your book, you've quoted Carl Schmitt in various places. And one of Schmitt's fundamental
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things, of course, is that in politics you need an other. And just thinking aloud, I
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would imagine that if you want to place the central vista project within a narrative,
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you know, your chosen other right now is, of course, a Muslim. That's what we are. That's
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what modern politics is all about. The hatred of the Muslim. That's what we see over here.
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But you can't bring the Muslim into a narrative for the central vista project. So obviously
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you'll go back to decolonization because there is no other enemy, right? So I guess.
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Yeah, but I actually think this hidden enemy is Nehru. The hidden enemy, the undeclared
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enemy is Nehru, because it's not just Hindu-Muslim. It's the remaking of a new India as the word
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goes on. You know, we're tired of hearing what we don't know what new India is, but
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we hear it all the time. But what is it? It's actually in opposition to the compact, the
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political settlement of India of 1947 to 50. And so secularism part of, you know, the fact
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that, you know, post-imperialism was just died, you know, like made sense of very quickly.
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We can come to Schmidt, but I think the problem I think is a good one that you pose. Who really
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is the political enemy in India? And that really is a foundational question of the book.
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And Schmidt is important only because, I mean, he's a very controversial figure. He was a
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jurist of the Nazis. But the interest, the reason why particularly historians, historians
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or theorists from the left have used Schmidt is say Badiou or even, you know, Derrida earlier
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actually, you know, so lots of Zizek, you know, they've all, you know, come, they've
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taken on Schmidt, but obviously you can't accuse them of being, you know, pro-Nazi or
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anything. But the reason they use him is because, and that's also my reason, is that Schmidt
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offers the most precise critique of liberalism that, you know, you can't, you can't just
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say, you know, there is no squeamishness. You shouldn't, you know, he doesn't run away
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from the difficult questions or doesn't try and put a kind of curtain or doesn't try and
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make them, you know, doesn't sugarcoat the issue, you know, and, and that's why Schmidt
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is important. And that's why it allows us to, at least it allowed me to think in the
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book that look in 1857, Indians killed the British in large numbers. They killed women,
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they killed children, they killed, of course, men. We've all seen Janoon. If we haven't,
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people should see it. You know, it's, you know, you know, you see the way in which it's
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a kind of, and it's the largest violence the British will see in the 19th century outside
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of the Crimean war. It takes the British two years to suppress the mutiny. It leads to
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the modernization of its army. It's a profound moment for like, you know, British institutions
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as well. But 90 years later, the British are singularly spared. You know, so what happens
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the, you know, when you have the moment of freedom, of course, if you look at British
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accounts of the mid forties to 47, they're quite paranoid. They feel that, you know,
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that violence that is in the society will come to them. You know, and of course there is
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kind of also a kind of hasty retreat. You know, there is a retreat. People just up and leave,
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you know, whether they are army men or civilians or business figures and what have you. They
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decamp very quickly. But the question is not that, because their fears were misplaced,
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because the Indians were really not interested. The British were no longer the enemy as it
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was. You know, and that's really the book's work that, you know, why is it that political
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enmity turned on the Hindu Muslim question more than the Hindu Muslim question? Why did
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it turn intimate? So if you look at the story of the West, its passage to modernity, its
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passage to modern statecraft is rested on two principles. One, the complete monopoly
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of violence by the state, that the state will be the author of violence, its protector,
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its legitimate user. So it has control over violence. And the second is that the figure
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of the political enemy will always be the foreigner. So the foreigner and the external
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always are kind of theorized and also not just theorized, but weaponized as the enemy.
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So it could be the refugee, the immigrant today, but the European problem of the Jewish
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question, though the Jews were internal to European history, they were seen to be external
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and the like. Right. I mean, there's a kind of foreign, the Jewish question becomes one
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of foreignness. And in India, that's really interesting. In India, it departs. That's
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the central claim of the book is that it departs from Western political ideas, even as it remakes
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them in a big way, is the enemy will not be the external. I mean, the British just have
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no existential political value to Indians. And right from 1905-08, when the book opens,
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and that's not because they're not powerful. Of course, they're incredibly powerful in
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1905-08, but they have lost their salience as a status, their existential status as the
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political opponent. And that's really what the book is about, that in a way this is truly
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a post-colonial project because India's founding figures have already thought of a political
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future where the British don't exist. And they're really interested in how to live with
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each other. And also then the question of enmity is going to the Gita, really the intimate
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kin. That's why the Gita becomes big. But it's interesting because Schmidt allows you
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since you mentioned Schmidt, that's really his value. His value really is the way he
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can identify a problem that liberals are too either scared or too hypocritical to name.
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The way I see it, an insight is an insight. So whatever the history of the thinker otherwise
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might be or whatever he might be connected with, in his case, his Nazi history, it doesn't
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really matter. It's a powerful insight, which I keep coming back to even when I look at
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modern India and even in fact the splinterings within the BJP and within the right where
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now that they've kind of obliterated the other, they are sort of turning on each other.
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You turn on each other, but that's happened to the left too. So the left also had this
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problem that since it's failed in curtailing the power of the right, they have
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turned on each other. They police what is the right thing to say. So it's a different
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kind of policing going on there. It's more of a policing of words and actions and culture.
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Whereas in the big BJP family, we are seeing that it's become internecine now with the
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various factions and so on. But I think the central insight of the early period, which
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is foundational too, as it were, even the grammar we are in, is really that as the Gita,
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why does the Gita become such a big political text in the 20th century? Today I was listening
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to Radio 4. They had a kind of morning show on the Arthashastra of all things. And it's
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really interesting that Arthashastra is really not referred to much. A, it's translated very
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late. B, hardly anyone cares about it. And let's say the Gita, which becomes the text
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for Indian political actors to imagine, to think through their problems. And I was interested
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in that question. Why the Gita? And there the answer is a very simple, then I elaborate
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it with Tilak. It's a question because it forces you to ask who the enemy is. And the
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answer is obviously the only the brother, the intimate, the neighbor, the kin is open
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to enmity. The foreigner is of no value in that story. But then the second order, the
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big question, is it okay to kill your own? And the third question then, that violence,
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which is really the main kind of driver of the book, that violence is not a question
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to be handled only by the state. In fact, far from it. So, you know, the Indian political
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leaders had a very particular problem. So the book opens with, you know, 1905-08, which
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is considered to be the first mass moment of Indian politics, which is the Swadeshi
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era politics. And I don't know how many of your listeners will know this, but you know,
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this was about the proposed partition of Bengal by Kursan. And of course, there's a pushback.
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And by the by all sorts of regional leaders, particularly in Maharashtra, but now today
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Maharashtra, but also Bengal, obviously Bengal, because it concerned Bengal, and also Punjab.
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So you had Rajpat Rai, you had, you know, Aurobindo Ghosh. But above all, you had Tilak.
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And they fail. You know, okay, the partition is kind of withdrawn. But the moment fails
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because everyone is put into prison. There's mass repression. And, you know, Tilak is sent
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into prison, you know, solitary confinement in Rangoon. And he is, you know, the figurehead.
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He's the most famous kind of leader at this point prior to Gandhi. So he's not a minor
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figure. And, and he's just wondering, you know, what happened? He realized that actually
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the imperial state, the British imperial state had become all too powerful. It had reached
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a kind of different stage of its maturity, where it was entirely peaceful, and could
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co-opt Indians, as you know, English education and whatnot, this degree of kind of progress
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in India, often, you know, and so it's kind of, it could be permanent at this rate. And,
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and so the idea would be that you, you'll have to change, not just, so the idea is how
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do you now forge a politics which can succeed? And the answer is, they decouple, Tilak decouples
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the question of love and violence, or the state and violence. And this is profound,
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because you know, the history of the modern state is that it's the state which is the
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legitimate owner and prosecutor of violence. That's why you have armies. That's why you
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have armies on the borders. And what Tilak says, following on from the Gita, that actually
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life and death are questions of individual, of you and I have life and death. These are
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individual, these are individual attributes. These are not attributes belonging to the
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state that it can deploy, control, manage, and the like. And as a result, violence also
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inheres in you and me. It is not something which is, you know, out there. Of course it
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could be abstracted. So he breaks away with this abstraction of law with violence. And
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this produces a very operable political subject. And the Gita, and then he says openly, you
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know, all political questions are Kshatriya questions, which is to say, it's not a caste,
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obviously it has a caste slur, but at a more foundational level, he means that war, the
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theme of war and warrior-ness defines the political. The political is not about, you
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know, you and me negotiating, which is what the British and liberal Imperials were doing.
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You petition the state and say, you know, my people need some more rights and, you know,
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how come we are not sitting on juries and, you know, whatnot. And he says, well, this
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is just nonsense, you know, because this is going. So this breaks apart the liberal Imperial
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story completely. And from then on, you will see, even Gandhi belongs in this tradition.
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When Gandhi is also of the same tradition that life and death cannot be, they're not
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state questions. They are questions that belong to individuals. But of course, Gandhi will
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have a completely different outcome to the same starting point. And it's a story that
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stays in India till date. But, you know, we can unfold it, unpack it slowly, because you
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can even think about today's farmers movement, you know, as a Gandhian moment as well.
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Fabulous. So, you know, I was actually going to go back to your childhood and talk about
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growing up in Chandigarh. But no, but we'll do that after this, because you've already,
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you know, gotten us to this sort of fascinating point. So we'll just take this to the break
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and then we'll go back to your childhood.
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So here's a question that arises from this, like reading your extremely fascinating chapter
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on Tilak, your first chapter, Political Theology of Sedition. At one point, you spoke about
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bomb throwing, like you spoke about how the scholar Christopher Pinney compared bomb technology
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with that of the printing press. And Tilak spoke about how it was pregnant with democratic
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possibilities and so on and so forth. And I began to kind of think aloud and tell me
#
if this makes any sense to you. One of the sort of processes that I have been examining
#
in my last few episodes, so they have nothing to do with the subject of your book or what
#
you study, is how technology is leading to all kinds of decentralization and a crumbling
#
away of the mainstream, right? So you see this in the media where in the 90s, you have
#
your mainstream newspapers, you have a consensus on the truth, and that gets completely decentralized
#
because of technology. And I would argue the net effect is good, but there are a lot of
#
problems such as you no longer have a consensus on the truth. There are just, you know, narrative
#
battles everywhere, so on and so forth. You see a similar thing in music, for example,
#
where there is no longer a mainstream. Once upon a time, maybe rock was, could have been
#
called mainstream, but now it's not the case. Now it's kind of splintered. And I would say
#
on the whole, that's a great thing because, you know, much more expression of individuality
#
and scope for people to find whatever they want. And, you know, and even nation states,
#
perhaps in the modern time, where nation states are getting less and less control over their
#
citizens or over their subjects, as the case often is in practice, because individuals
#
are being empowered with different kinds of technology. You can't stop them from being
#
globalized and you can't stop the flow of ideas and all. So just thinking about bombs
#
and tilak, it struck me that bombs, in a sense, are also a form of decentralization, because
#
what you're talking about, the monopoly of power being with the state, suddenly now,
#
this technology, bombs, has decentralized that a little bit, that individuals-
#
Okay. So let's talk about him. Let's talk about bomb and let's talk about tilak, but
#
also talk about that terrible words edition. And then we can talk about technology and
#
state. And these are fascinating questions, and I'm totally interested in them because,
#
so let me stick with history for a minute. And, you know, so we, of course, know sedition
#
is back in our times. It never actually really went away, but it's back in a big way in our
#
times. But his is the most famous sedition case in Indian history. And the case refers
#
to actually bomb throwing. And that comes, you know, so you have, you know, again, it's
#
interesting to talk because it's the, you know, we've just been living through a pandemic.
#
So you had the Bombay plague in 1897, which is incredibly, it had very draconian, since
#
you're in Bombay, you know, it was the epicenter. And that's where a lot of the, you know, repressive
#
technologies, state technologies came through. You should see some images, you know, of that
#
period. You know, you have like what are now trolls, but at that time, they were like,
#
you know, all these small, the sort of the housing, the Indian housing, especially around
#
mill worker working districts. You know, you had these like, like these fire hoses just
#
coming and just, you know, dropping really kind of powerful, you know, what would be
#
now pesticides, some sort of medicinal, you know, decontamination. And it was a kind of,
#
it's quite aggressive to have your house being doused while you're sitting in it. And, and
#
people were also being taken out and put into camps and the like. So it was very, there
#
was a very kind of, that kind of triggers in some ways, Tilak's politics. And you have,
#
as it were, the assassination of the plague commissioner in Pune and him and his lieutenant,
#
you know, they're just, you know, killed off. And initially the, you know, the government
#
is unable to pin, you know, the law is not sufficient at that point to, to say, well,
#
you know, murderous acts because the inspiration was Tilak. They could not find a direct relationship,
#
but they could say that what Tilak had written in his papers was contributing to it. But
#
the thing that really ups the ante is that you have in distant Bengal, Khudi Rambos,
#
that very famous legend, Khudi Rambos also wanted to kill a British official, but he
#
ends up, his bomb ends up killing two women by mistake and two British women, but you
#
know, and it got called the Muzaffarpur outrage. And then it, it occasions Tilak's writings
#
on the bomb. And, and this is what becomes the centerpiece of his sedition trial. And
#
there he says, well, the bomb he says is a secret amulet. He says, you know, it's like
#
a charm. It's like, you know, like, uh, it has a magic, it has jadu, you know, because
#
it can, it converts things. It, it, you know, it converts, it converts a relationship. It
#
can wait. So that's a secret. It's magic is its ability to alter. But secondly, uh, it,
#
it is so easy to assemble. It is truly democratic because it's very easy to, to assemble. And
#
above all, it puts the king and subject in the same position of power. There is a kind
#
of, you know, that's the democratization. The democratization is that you circumvent
#
the state. You are, you're the king. You have all the armies, you have brought all these
#
draconian laws, you have brought all these, you know, the tyranny of, you know, surveillance
#
and the like that he is kind of really in vain against. What are people to do? You know,
#
and his answer is that the bomb has offered a kind of sublime as the word, you know, sublime
#
possibilities. And this is where his critique of imperial power and sovereignty would start.
#
He would say, well, it is, you know, the bomb is not just kind. He says, you know, I'm not,
#
I'm not sort of saying yes or no, but the bomb has allowed the king and the most oppressed
#
subject to be part of the same dialogue. It can't be, you know, it can't again be abstracted
#
and put away in a, in a third place. But he makes another case, which actually really,
#
so the British get really upset. You know, you know, the Rowlatt report would also later
#
say the same, you know, I mean, they think that, they think that this is just part of
#
a kind of global anarchist pattern because you see the, even in this period, Tsarist
#
Russia, you know, I don't know how many people have seen any series around the early 20th
#
century, lots of Netflix series on Russia at the moment. And, you know, there's a lot
#
of bomb throwing in, in, in Tsarist Russia. And this is, you know, 1905, 08, and even
#
in Portugal, even in, you know, so there's a kind of wave of, you know, anarchism, you
#
know, that young men are using bombs to kind of overthrow the same, but they're like, he's
#
saying, well, you know, our use of the bomb and Indian use of the bomb is not the European
#
use of the bomb because they are interested in class conflict. They're interested in,
#
you know, getting rid of Kings and, you know, moneylenders. Ours is about the British. It's
#
a political, it's, so that's why he uses the word it's democratic. And it's true that this
#
is a kind of, this would influence his followers, Tilak's followers for one Savarkar, but also
#
the Ghadar people who would then go through bombs across the world in, you know, in, in
#
it. So I think your broader question of technology and centralization is a really important one
#
because I don't see it so much in terms of centralization. I see it in terms of what is
#
democratization, what is, where is democratization going on? And there I would somewhat be a bit
#
more cautious than you in the sense that I think contemporary wars on data, you know,
#
data, the new oil, you know, you must have heard it many times by now in your podcast.
#
The thing is that it appears as decentralized to us. You know, it feels like, okay, you know,
#
I'm sitting in Cambridge, you're sitting in Bombay. We are having a great chat. We're having a chat
#
about the same people and it's technology. And we thank that, you know, world. But at the same time,
#
I think, I mean, I really am interested in democracy and democratization. I do think
#
some of these technologies are eroding democracy. So they might free up the citizen or individual
#
or whoever, but I think whether it has been Cambridge Analytica and, you know, whatever we
#
know about Brexit or the Trump election and indeed the use of social media in Indian elections,
#
we can't just say, it's just competitive narratives. It's just very expensive for business.
#
You know, but I think, yeah, I think it gives us choice, but I'm not sure if it makes us more free.
#
But no, no, great points. And I mean, the future is unknown, unknown. So one never knows. Like,
#
you know, I used to, I don't do this anymore. And I'll tell you why, but whenever I would end
#
my episodes, I'd ask my guests about what makes them despair and what makes them hopeful.
#
And the reason I don't ask this anymore is because there isn't much people have to say
#
anymore in the whole full part of the sort of equation. So these days I end my episodes,
#
as I will eventually end this one by asking my guests to, no, no, these days I end my episodes
#
by asking my guests to, you know, recommend books they love and so on and so forth, because
#
they don't have to search for something that gives them hope. So the sort of very interesting
#
framing that I found in your book about political thinkers of that time, which I hadn't really
#
considered that way before is all of us look back to the freedom struggle in those years as being
#
a battle of Indians against the British, right? That's a typical kind of framing. And your framing
#
is kind of different. And you introduce it right at the start by something that, you know, is known
#
in psychology as the hedgehogs dilemma. And I'll quickly read it out and then ask you to sort of
#
elaborate where you speak about this fable, which goes like this, quote, a family of hedgehogs
#
masked very close together one winter's day, hoping to use one another's warmth to protect
#
themselves against the cold. However, they soon felt one another's sprinkles, which made them
#
draw apart. When the need for warmth brought them closer together once again, this second evil was
#
repeated with the result that they were bounced back and forth between the two ills until they
#
established a moderate degree of distance from one another in which they could best endure their
#
condition. Stop. And this is Freud quoting Schopenhauer. And your central point, which I
#
wanted to elaborate on, is that the focus of, you know, these years following 1905, 1908, you know,
#
the resistance to the partition of Bengal essentially faces defeat. Figures like Tagore and
#
Aurobindo withdraw from, you know, the active fight and, you know, Tilak is left doing whatever
#
he does. Gandhi eventually appears on the scene and so on and so forth. And your central thesis
#
is that here what we have ignored and what your book tries to bring to the forefront is this
#
battle between this fraternity of brothers, this bunch of hedgehogs drawing closer together and then
#
bouncing further apart because, hey, prickly and all of that. And this is really fascinating. And
#
your point is that the British is no longer such the focus of what's going on. They're also focusing
#
on each other and this stuff happening there. So elaborate on this a little bit, because I found
#
this so fascinating, counterintuitive, and I hadn't heard this aspect before.
#
Yeah. Thank you so much. I mean, it's not, you know, to be sure, it's not that the British don't,
#
they are there. I mean, what I find fascinating about this moment in, is precisely this deep
#
intellectual and political confidence to not just rewrite modern politics, but to start thinking
#
of a politics in which the British don't exist. So, you know, this is at the moment of the height
#
of powers of the British. You know, this is post-cursin, you know, all, this is a kind of
#
completely new kind of phase of British imperialism in India. And it could be, as I said,
#
could have been permanent. And this is what they're reckoning with that, you know, this could just
#
be permanent. And yet in that moment, it's not despair and haplessness, but a way in which a
#
kind of existential move is made to start thinking, to occupy, as I say, the future. They don't
#
want to occupy the past and worry also about the present. And the turn is to the inner, to the
#
internal. And there are two ways you could, you know, you could understand it. One way is, if I
#
can be a bit more about political thought, one way would be that, of course, modern politics is made
#
on that very famous French revolutionary triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity is the last one.
#
And you could say that the failure of the Swadeshi is also the end of liberalism in India, whether
#
it's Indianized form, particularly it's Indianized form, because the concern with ideas of freedom
#
will give way to how to live with each other. So liberty would be jettisoned as a primary concern,
#
which is not to say that the struggle for independence will not mean much, but the central
#
question would be how to be with each other. And as a result, the British lose, as I say, the
#
existential validity in India. It's a truly post-colonial moment in that sense, 50 years
#
prior to independence, 40 years prior to independence, because they are thinking, you know,
#
yeah, they're not going to be here. That's going to happen. But what about the future?
#
That's going to happen. But what about it if they're not here? And so the turn is, so in a way,
#
it degrades the empire at the very height of its power, that it denies its status as a political
#
enemy. They're just there. They're rulers. They will go, you know, that the eventual victory is
#
assumed by these figures. But by the same token, the thing then therefore that matters, and that's
#
my insight from Freud, because I'm very interested in psychoanalysis, that it's only love objects who
#
can become objects of hatred. So our enmity, you know, the interesting thing about the Hindu-Muslim
#
question is it's an intimate one, like the hedgehogs, drawing in, drawing apart, coming in,
#
coming out. But it is the question of intimate enmity in that sense is important because only
#
love can convert to hatred and hatred to love. The British have become an indifferent presence.
#
The fight, of course, the kind of institutional fight will be with them. But there's a kind of
#
complete indifference to the British. They have been degraded. They don't exist. You know, everyone
#
knows if they have a fight with someone very close, the best thing to do is to ghost them,
#
you know. But if you're constantly fighting with them, you know, you're giving them a kind of
#
presence, right? I mean, even if it isn't a negative. So it's a two way move. It's a move
#
to, it's a deeply post-confident post-colonial moment to think of life without the British,
#
even at the height of the power of British in that moment. And secondly, that it also correctly
#
identifies the British as truly foreign and in India without actually those strings of attachment
#
of love and hate, which we give to our intimates, you know. So they're truly not the intimates in
#
India, in Indian history. And as a result, the story turns to Hindu-Muslim questions and also
#
subsequently caste questions because those are intimate questions, questions of how to be with
#
one another. But finally, you would say that, you know, not to get too technical, but liberty would
#
be degraded in favor of what political thought people or what is generally known as sovereignty,
#
how to control your own destiny. So not so much about freedom, but how to kind of take
#
charge of questions of life, death, national destiny and the like, what we call sovereignty
#
and sovereign status of Indians. Yeah. So I think that's really, I think the way I see it,
#
both as a way of what Freud would call identification, Indians stop identifying with
#
the British. Let's simply put, you know, they've gone, they've left. And even though Nehru would,
#
I think he gets misquoted, but I think misunderstood rather, I feel rather sad for him these days,
#
you know, that he was the last Englishman to rule over India, you know, he is very famous,
#
but he's being ironic. He's basically being ironic because he himself had this, if you read him,
#
I don't, he just has a small walk on part in my book. He's not there. I don't devote a chapter
#
to him, but it's just interesting that if you read his autobiography, he's very influenced by Freud.
#
He's reading psychoanalysis, you know, in his prison and stuff. And he just says, you know,
#
Gandhi really represents India. He really is the soul of India. You know, he's always
#
feeling that somehow, you know, he's not Indian enough, you know, he's always battling with this,
#
you know, problem, but, you know, he was a true Indian in some ways, you know, in lots of ways.
#
So yeah, I think it's so to turn to that, it's about intimacy. It's about things. Why the Hindu
#
Muslim question matters is because yeah, it's a love hate, hate love. It can move one way to another.
#
Whereas the British are just either powerful, powerful foreigners. That's it. So once you,
#
once you disempower them, they're just foreigners. Yeah. You know, in that phrase, which he
#
obviously meant in a tongue in cheek way, last Englishman to rule over India. I think I wouldn't
#
have a problem with the Englishman bit. I'd have a problem with the rule over India bit, that word
#
rule. But, you know, so because our governments are supposed to serve us, not rule us. I think
#
it's that mentality, which is a problem. Yeah. Right, right, right. No, but that's a pet peeve of mine that we
#
are subjects, not citizens. That's what we made ourselves. My next question is going to seem a
#
little naive for sure. So, you know, forgive me in advance for that. And because I don't know
#
anything about psychoanalysis, but I am sort of fascinated by what you said about this relationship
#
between love and hate, where we tend to hate that which we love the most. And I am just thinking of
#
that in concrete terms. And I'm thinking of modern India. And I'm saying, no, most of these Hindutva
#
people, you know, their hate for Muslims doesn't come from any love for them. You know, there are,
#
of course, many people like me who are born Hindu and who love many things about Islam, from
#
the food to the culture and all of that. But when you actually see the violence being committed
#
everywhere against Muslims and the people who are part of these political movements,
#
I don't think there's any love there. I think there is just genuine resentment and hate.
#
And, you know, am I being too simplistic by interpreting it in a literal way?
#
Oh, no, no, I think that's absolutely correct. But it's the hatred comes. So it's not whether
#
that love may have existed or not existed. My point is that even hatred is sign of intimacy,
#
is my point, you know, and the problem for Hindutva, and this is my Savarkar chapter,
#
and also it stays to date, it remains relevant till date. The problem for Hindutva is twofold.
#
One, that India doesn't offer Hindus a pure monopoly of the past or of the future,
#
which is not just in terms of Muslim rule, which I think, you know, we'll come to in a second.
#
But actually for Savarkar, the biggest problem is that of Buddhism, that one, India is births,
#
not one, but two religions, two great world religions, you know, Buddhism's, you know,
#
born in India. It's a crucible of, India is a crucible of Hinduism. Of course, it's then shunted
#
out in, you know, in the second century and onwards. But the thing is, so the problem is of,
#
you know, one of attachment, like who fully attaches and who is fully owns India. And
#
for the Hindutva lot, it's a problem because India is not only the kind of wellspring in terms of
#
of that, but then you also have this kind of idea of Muslim rulership, you know, where, you know,
#
you've had Muslim empires in India. And this kind of causes, and yet, and this is something that
#
actually the person who writes most insightfully about it is actually Ambedkar. So Ambedkar is
#
saying, look, he writes in the thirties, forties, and it's quoted in my book. It's about the
#
partition question. Ambedkar is saying, look, Hindus and Muslims are actually quite tied together.
#
Caste Hindus and Muslims, they are symbolically tied together. They share a lot together. They
#
are honey-cooned. He uses the word they are honey-cooned, you know, and it's true whether
#
these are ritual practices, Sufi puns, whatever, you know, there's a whole life of kind of popular
#
religiosity and devotionalism, which speaks to that mixture, which I don't need to go into here.
#
But he's not talking just about really devotionalism and religiosity. He's actually
#
talking about the shared history of rulership, that Hindus have been rulers and Muslims have been
#
rulers. The reason he says they are fighting in the 20th century with each other is because the
#
nation state is a competitive arena of identities. And that's what he's saying. So he's not saying
#
that they are like, he's not making the British imperial argument, you know, Hindus and Muslims
#
are primordially or, you know, inherently ill-disposed to each other, that they are
#
antagonistic. He's saying, no, actually they are so tied together culturally and symbolically,
#
and they are now fighting because this is a competitive arena. And this is why he will
#
end up arguing for partition because partition allows for some kind of cooling off between these
#
and separating off these kind of hostilities. Right. So today's Hindutva, you know, the figure
#
of the Muslim is weaponized and is seen. And why is that? You should ask why, you know, like, you
#
know, you know, I know there is no, you know, you know, Indian, the Hindu majority is so large, you
#
know, where does this fear come from? Where does this kind of antagonism come from? And I think
#
the antagonism does come, as I say, you know, there's also these questions of conversion and
#
reconversion that, you know, they are part of Hindus and Muslims are all part of the,
#
and it's complicated in the way that Nehru complicates it, that Muslim empires, he says,
#
you know, Nehru in Discovery of India is brilliant when he says that it's only the British who are
#
exceptional to Indian history. There have been empires all through India's history, you know,
#
all kinds of people have come and ruled over it. But it's the British alone who are not loyal to
#
its own people, you know. And so even the Mughals, the, you know, the so-called Mongol empires,
#
even the, you know, the Persianate influence, the Indo-Islamic, you know, the Indo-Persian world,
#
you know, these people all marry, not just marry in, they are loyal to the people they are ruling.
#
So there's a kind of deep intimacy to the Hindu-Muslim question, not just of rulership
#
and devotionalism, which for the Hindutva lot is a problem because India's history
#
is a history of mixture and miscegenation. So, you know, it's not like the passage to
#
Nazism or fascism. I was asked this question today also, you know, at the JLF thing, because,
#
you know, the thing is that if you look at modern states in Europe, they have always claimed a kind
#
of purity of language, race, but certainly religion, you know, you, you know, you don't
#
have to be too hard pressed to say whether, you know, European states have the domination
#
of certain religion, you know, though they might say they're secular. India doesn't have that
#
luxury or even I think there's more interesting precisely because it has to kind of think about
#
its modern statecraft out of sheer diversity. And the problem for Hindutva is that it
#
doesn't believe it wants a kind of not homogeneity simply. It wants the rule of a political
#
Hinduness. It doesn't want Hinduism. It wants a political Hinduness to emerge and the way it
#
sees it can emerge and which is why for Savarkar war is so important that it can only be shed,
#
it can only be made through bloodshed. You know, this, it cannot be the purity of,
#
they can't, there's no pure race to return to or to kind of, in fact, the way Hinduness will be.
#
So basically Hindutva becomes a fight with India's past. It's a war with India's past,
#
above all, which it wants to overcome. It wants to overcome the history of miscegenation
#
and mixture. And therefore to me, it's a theory of violence, really, which uses history as a way of,
#
it deploys history as a way of thinking about that problem. So the Hindu-Muslim question is
#
complicated for me to summarize. I mean, it's complicated even in Savarkar by Buddhism
#
and for Ambedkar by the caste question. So the Hindu-Muslim question can never be a binary,
#
though people will want to make it that way. But even if you look at the Uttar Pradesh elections
#
going on now, it's a triangle. It's a Hindu-Muslim caste triangle. And so it will be because this is
#
not a two-way story. And for the story of India's religions and for Hindutva's origins, it's, they
#
don't think so much about caste. I mean, they might think about it in terms of, you know,
#
today's calculations of, you know, elections and so whatnot. But the main problem is Hinduism,
#
Islam, Buddhism. Let me examine a couple of strands which seem slightly contradictory,
#
you know, one of which is from your book where, you know, you write beautifully of how Savarkar,
#
you know, for Savarkar's Hindutva was, quote, a theory of violence in search of its own history,
#
Sravakur. And I just love that phrase in search of its own history. Then you elaborate upon that,
#
when you say, quote, the cobbled together history invoked by Hindutva was meant to provide it
#
not with the past so much as a future, a prognostic operation that sought to read into the past,
#
a future in which India was not identified by land, blood or history, but had to be produced
#
by war. Hindutva, as expounded by Savarkar, the book argues, is a theory of violence rather than
#
a history of identity, which is superbly put. Now, what, so on the one hand, I completely buy
#
what you're saying here that, you know, the history that Savarkar tries to invoke to justify
#
his theory of violence, as you say, simply wasn't there. It was made up. It was, you know,
#
some could argue fictional and some could argue that even Nehru's idea of India was fictional in
#
some sense and some could argue everything is fictional. But the other, the other sort of
#
aspect of that is how Indian society was even at that time. Like I did an episode with Akshay Mukul
#
on his superb book on the Geeta Press. And one of the things that I kind of realized while reading
#
that book and while chatting with him and doing that episode was that English speaking elites like
#
me were really grew up in India in a bubble where we didn't really have a true sense of a lot of
#
Indian society. Like a lot of the factors of the present, the fault lines of the present are there
#
in the 1920s, 1910s, even going further back. Right. So, you know, issues which to some people
#
may seem like modern issues like the revival of love jihad or cow slaughter or so on. They seem
#
very 20s to me. Yes, exactly. Were very live 1920s issues and they were already burning there.
#
So on the one hand, the specific theory of Hindutva as Savarkar kind of built it up and
#
the justifications he made for it in his made up history, you know, might not hold much water. But
#
the point is the sentiments that they played to the fissures that were within society were very
#
kind of real. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think you're right. Let me just kind of unpack a few
#
things here. So I'm not saying it is fiction. In fact, Savarkar is very clear. He goes against his
#
initial mentor. It's not that, you know, Tilak is a direct kind of relationship, but yeah, you know,
#
they had some conversations and, you know, Tilak is instrumental in sending him to London at that
#
point in early the 20th century. But having said that, he's opposed to Tilak and other figures
#
because he's not interested in the epic tradition. He's actually saying, no, history is what is
#
verifiable, recordable. So he's not saying I'm, you know, this is fantasy land. But what I'm trying
#
to say is, you know, for how does he organize? So let's talk about comparing him with Nehru and him.
#
Both of them use the same time frame to write about the two books of Indian history. One is,
#
of course, Discovery of India, written in 46, in which India is made into a civilizational grandeur.
#
It's divided into three phases and the British have a major as a kind of the third phase is the
#
last one where the kind of moral struggle of empire against nation. But Nehru is making the
#
claim of Discovery of India primarily is that, look, India is not going to be Europe because it
#
is going to forge a nationality out of diversity. This is, you know, this is the point that the
#
Germans, you know, the French also pretty much invented Frenchness, the Germans, you know,
#
Bismarck and all that the rest, we know the whole story, you know, and of course, the English civil
#
wars and the like. But the point was that in the end, a linguistic homogeneity, a racial or religious
#
homogeneity provided the basis of modern nation states in Europe, which of course led to the two
#
world wars. We also know that this was not a cost free thing. Nehru's point is that this is not who
#
we are. This is not what India is. It will defy this trajectory of nationality making. This phrase
#
we love to mock now, the unity in diversity, was precisely Nehru's claim that out of diversity,
#
we will produce a nationality in India. And the labor of Discovery of India is precisely that,
#
right? That India has this kind of destiny to occupy. And, you know, interestingly for him,
#
since you mentioned Schmidt at the beginning, you know, neither since he was a Marxist, you know,
#
he had read, he had read everything a lot. He neither, he doesn't organize history around
#
around evil forces or even class warfare. It's very abstract rise and fall, you know,
#
there's this progress, there's decline, you know, therefore like forces, but he never names,
#
you know, there are no enemies to be had in terms of human beings or groups.
#
Very interesting. Savarkar, also the same to Millennium. And he says, and this is Six Glorious
#
Epochs written in 66, I think, or 62, I can't remember, but 60s. And it's his last book before
#
he commits suicide. And, you know, the book is really fascinating because like all his other
#
works in history, it's organized around war. Yeah. So there's Six Glorious Epochs in Indian
#
history, which have given India an identity, starting with the Shakas, but the, you know,
#
but the main one is, as I said, Buddhism and Buddhism and Islam. And he's basically saying,
#
you know, India's history is pretty static. And the only thing that gives it any dynamism
#
is war. And, and, and these are the six wars that matter. And that's why I'm saying it. So
#
when I read it, I thought, Oh my God, this is a kind of interesting take. Like, you know,
#
I haven't kind of seen the slicing of Indian history in this manner before. And, but then I
#
was like, what is he doing at? Because if your word search the book, the word Hindutva is not
#
used at all, maybe once. So I'm like, what is this? You know, he has written this pamphlet where,
#
you know, it's a kind of elaboration of that pamphlet. And that's when I realized that
#
initially he's looking for purity in India and he can't find it. And then he wants to kind of
#
fight, uses these as obstacles to overcome. So these are the obstacles Hindutva will have to
#
overcome. And in the end, he's very clear that he's saying that, you know, new identities are made
#
on the anvil of war. And even with on talking about Muslims, he's saying, well, friendship is
#
possible with the Muslims, but only after they have been defeated. You know, he's very clear that,
#
you know, war will lead to real peace. And so I think it's not fictive history, but whether it
#
is Nehru, whether it is Savarkar, whether it's indeed Iqbal and his philosophical history,
#
or, you know, even Ambedkar's turn to India's ancient history, they're all using history as
#
the template to convey political ideas of India's future. So they don't write philosophical texts,
#
they write history to say, well, this is our political mission. So it's not the way I would
#
write history as a professional historian, right? But there is a problem in the sense that appears
#
when you talk about today's generation or what have you. History will always be tied up to state
#
narratives. And when you say that English elites, you know, English elites have a very kind of poor
#
understanding of India's or had today, they can't claim to have that. They can't claim to be naive,
#
you know, it's everywhere. But, you know, perhaps, you know, in the 70s, 80s, they were buffeted.
#
The question really is like, I mean, if I were to be completely honest, and I don't want to
#
be controversial at all, I think, in the 50s and 60s, this is not my decade, I was not born
#
at then, I was born in the 70s. So, you know, the effort of India's intellectual elites,
#
and this was a very, I think it was a, it was a good hearted thing. It was not a bad malicious
#
thing. Let me be very clear. It was a good, they wanted to look for sources in the past for India's
#
secularism, for India's diversity. And I think that was, I think, a mistake, because what they
#
should have actually done is say that India's secularism, like Chandigarh, is a bold new project
#
into the future. And it would have been better, because then we wouldn't have had these,
#
then I think, what would Hindutva have done? Would then Babri Masjid be such a big issue?
#
If you are saying, well, you know, it is, you know, this is our new, this is our new charter.
#
It's what actually the Turks did, you know, in, I'm not saying we should have gone the Turkey way,
#
but, you know, it, you know, because, I don't know, there was lack of, I don't know, confidence,
#
or maybe they genuinely believe that all of this existed in the past. I'm not saying the past was
#
bad or good, conflict-ridden or peaceful, but I'm not sure if the Mughal polity was the right
#
paradigm for the secular state. And I think looking for that answer in the Mughal polity,
#
though I can see where they were coming from, became an open, not an open invitation,
#
but it opened the floodgates for the wars we have seen in the last 20 years over Hindu-Muslim past,
#
and starting with Babri Masjid. And, yeah.
#
Yeah, I agree with you entirely. In fact, this is a point made by previous guests on my show,
#
like Kapil Komaredi, who wrote Palavul and Republic, and Manu Pillay has been on the show,
#
and both of them kind of agreed that, look, if we took a different approach to history,
#
if we didn't just try to, you know, paint everything, paint history as something where
#
there was no communal problem, where the Mughals didn't do anything wrong, and so on and so forth,
#
we wouldn't see the backlash. And the interesting, and I love the way you brought Chandigarh into
#
there, that sell it as a new project entirely, and let's see where it goes, where in that case,
#
the arguments would not have been over the positive or how things are, but over the normative
#
and how things should be. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it would have had a bolder compact. You would
#
have had a bolder way of dealing with issues. Now, the problem is that, and I don't blame the
#
founding figures because, you know, look, they have seen a catastrophic fratricide in which a
#
million people have killed using house knives and, you know, whatnot. You know, you don't even need
#
state machinery to have this killing machine, you know, which, you know, it shocks me that in,
#
you know, six, seven months, so many people were killed without, you know, great technology
#
or even state backing. And I think they probably were too, I wouldn't say scared. They were too
#
stymied. They were too shocked by that violence to actually then want to say something. So their
#
effort was to say, no, actually, look, we were peaceful once upon a time. We could live together.
#
We could coexist. And these are the examples, you know, look at the past. And it's not all a lie.
#
After all, these are not like lies, but they're, I would say, inadequate. They were inadequate
#
ways of thinking about secularism or living with each other. And I think, yeah, I mean,
#
and, you know, that's why now you have a complete reversal where the Mughals are just the bad guys,
#
you know, you know, and you think really, I mean, have you seen the architecture? Have you seen the
#
kind of growth in the human sciences and the medicinal sciences in that period or the number
#
of cities that came up? But no, we, you know, there's a kind of way, no, no, no, no, no, you
#
know, it's all kind of love jihad type of stuff that this is about conversion. It's about, you know,
#
it's about power. And so I think that was a, it was an error. I don't think it was just bad history.
#
I think it was good history, but it was an error to, to teach, to make the past an instruction for
#
India's future. Because what actually India was doing was something totally new.
#
Yeah. And firstly, obviously it's easy for you and me to sit here and in hindsight say,
#
oh, we should have done this and done that. But you know, when the country's falling apart around
#
them and they're wondering, will the center hold? What are you going to do? I'd actually go a little
#
further and postulate that this error was a small error, which was part of a larger error of a way
#
of looking at the world. Like one theme that I've often explored in this episode. And I've put this
#
question to many people is that our society by and large was an illiberal society. You know,
#
you can just see this in the sort of the sales of the Gita press books, like, you know, how women
#
should behave and all of that nonsense. Right. And that our society by and large was illiberal.
#
And we had a bunch of liberal elites who were not elected at the time of writing the constitution,
#
who therefore wrote a constitution, which is not as liberal as I would like it to be,
#
but is way more liberal than society itself. So you have the imposition of a liberal constitution,
#
quote unquote, upon an illiberal society by a liberal elite. And the question there is number
#
one, and this is a smaller question, number one, can that imposition itself be called liberal?
#
And number two, leaving that earlier question aside, number two, it's just sort of top down
#
thinking. Is it possible for this to actually change society into something liberal? Like
#
Ambedkar himself spoke of the constitution as a top soil. Right. There was an understanding that
#
this is just the start. Now there was a faith among some that if you, that you can drive change
#
top down. And certainly Nehru had this faith that you can drive change top down. And this is part
#
of the mindset from which that thing emerges that let's whitewash history and let's give a
#
particular version of it. And these are the needs of the time. But Gandhi argued at the time,
#
at the time in the sense before he passed, that real change will only come from within society.
#
It will come in a bottom up way. Politics is downstream of culture, as Breitbart once said.
#
So, and that's, I think a failure of understanding among our leaders, because that top down vision
#
of changing India from the top did not work on any margin. Right. And therefore we have the India
#
that we have today, where I like to say that society has caught up with politics, that now
#
the politics that we see is a reflection of the society that we live in. And for people like me,
#
and I'm sure you, it's an ugly sight. But the point is, it's also, I think, a failure of
#
imagination back then and a failure on the part of liberals through all of these decades to be
#
able to do the bottom up work they should have done. Well, really fascinating, fantastic, and
#
not easy questions to answer, but they also are questions which are out one's own positions a
#
little bit more than I'm more comfortable in doing, but okay, I'll give it a try. So I was,
#
let me first say in my book, I was very careful to, I did not organize my book around any ideology,
#
because my claim is that India's founding figures tore up the copy book, particularly of liberalism,
#
but also Marxism or conservatism or what have you, to set a new, to put a new set of norms in place
#
on democracy and on violence and on where does political, asking the question of where does
#
political change come from. So that's the question about whether I think Nehru is a liberal or not
#
is therefore not, not the most pertinent question to me. But of course, what is the fundamental
#
division from this period and a fundamental political and psychic division is the division
#
that we are now seeing in India between Hindutva and another way of living. Now that could be called
#
the idea of India, or you could call it Gandhi, you could call it anything. I would say it's a
#
psychic division between Gandhi and Savarkar. It is not, so Nehru is more in the middle,
#
you're not middle in the sense he's a kind of figure on the Gandhi side for sure.
#
But unlike Gandhi, he's not so much top down guy. He does believe that the state can be an agent
#
for public good. That the state is not simply a manager of different interests or setting up
#
rules of the game and okay, then you can live. But the state can be an active agent in making
#
India's society move ahead. Now you could say it's a pedagogical project. It's a tutelary
#
project. He wants to educate Indians, but he also has a belief because again, he's not thinking
#
about unlike Patel and Patel himself says that about Nehru. Patel says that he could never have
#
been prime minister. All these controversies are quite silly because Patel himself said he
#
would never be prime minister because he had no interest in the wider world. Nehru is very
#
interested in also giving India an identity in the world. It's not just an internal identity,
#
but what would it look like to the world in the world? I think for him, the experience of empire,
#
having said that empire, they get rid of it. It's a sad past. The empire above all stands for India's
#
economic and degradation. It's not simply a political servitude, which it is.
#
Therefore, it's a very mid-century thing to be doing, which is to say that he puts a huge amount
#
of faith in science and scientism to overcome this problem. It's not simply about religious
#
division. It's not simply about caste division. He really thinks that the promises of human
#
creativity, whether it's in the arts or whether it is in the sciences particularly, will see which
#
is why the money to IITs, which is why the money to higher education, because he wants that
#
flourishing of talent, which can see India out of this kind of misery that it's in. In a way,
#
that could be seen as noblesse oblige. It could be seen as patronizing. It could have been seen
#
as tutelary. It could be seen as something ambitious, what have you. I think the question
#
whether India's society was unfit or was out of sync with these ideas, I think is a more difficult
#
one to agree with. I'll not say because Indians were liberal. That's not what I'm going to say,
#
but that actually the language of politics that won out was Gandhi's. Nehru too belonged to that.
#
What does Gandhi do? Why does he have to be assassinated? I was asked this phenomenal
#
question by a very eminent Indian political leader, whom I shall not name. They asked me
#
this question, why do you think they assassinated, why didn't former RSS member assassinate Gandhi,
#
but not Nehru? Given that Gandhi was old, he would have died anyway. He was fasting himself
#
to death all the time anyway. They were not being facetious, but I thought the question was a very
#
interesting question, given that it's Nehru who has the agenda for secularism. Gandhi's assassins
#
were correct to identify him as the main enemy because Gandhi tapped into that very important
#
way of being in India. That's why whether it's the farmer's strike, whether it is... There's a way
#
in which Gandhi tapped into existing social... In that sense, Gandhi is a conservative.
#
You could say Gandhi is a conservative and Nehru is a progressive because Gandhi doesn't want to
#
change the conditions of life as they appear. He really likes that there are these obligations we
#
have to our relatives, to our parents, whatever, this sort of system of obligations and duties.
#
Nehru is much more of the progressive kind, like there is individual flourishing, individual
#
self-making and growth, very different ways, but Gandhi's... Why does Gandhi win? Because Gandhi,
#
for one, says that this partitioning of religion from politics is a joke. It is not just a joke,
#
it is inhuman and it is impossible. You cannot ask someone to leave their skin behind when they
#
leave, walk into the public arena. The starting point of politics has to be a kind of, not just
#
mutual regard, but this kind of intense responsibility to my own religion, but also to
#
your religion. That, in a way, was a challenge of Gandhi's politics, which is why he can fight for
#
the Khilafat, he can fight for... He's saying, one should die for the right of the Muslim to
#
practice their religion. This is his argument. His argument is precisely that. It is a kind of
#
set of passages in my book on Gandhi, which will make you look at Gandhi as a social conservative,
#
because he's opposed to inter-dining and he's opposed to even inter-marriage between Hindus
#
and Muslims. He's not opposed in a big way, but he's basically saying, respect comes, the power
#
of religion comes if I protect my... Not just I have faith in my religion, but I also have faith
#
for you to have faith in your religion. Let's open it up in terms of the Mapela riots that take
#
place. They came up again in India's political controversy, and Gandhi scolds both Hindus and
#
Muslims. He tells the Hindus, you are playing the victim card now. You're saying this, that happened
#
to you, but where is the strength in your own religion, in your own religious belief
#
to protect your own? He says, if the Muslim is a so-called bully, the Hindu is a coward,
#
so-called coward. He says both these categories come from a politics of fear. What we need to do
#
is attain a fearlessness, but also fearlessness, which is, as I said, not just mutual respect,
#
but a profound... The only way we can have a better relationship with each other is if we are
#
good Hindus and if we are good Muslims. That's his point. Asking someone to convince each other
#
that my religion is better than yours, he says this is not just an inhuman idea, it's an inhuman
#
thing, but it is also the starting point. It comes from a politics of fear, because you fear
#
the other's religion, which is why you want to say no. He wants this kind of word that I use
#
from Lacan, which means extimacy. It's not the opposite of intimacy, but extimacy means you
#
throw a bridge where there is too much separation and you create a separation where there is
#
too much closeness. To go back to the hedgehogs, it's about how to have that distance
#
to live well without having to convert, overcome, absorb, which is what Hindutva wants to do,
#
or the multicultural fix, like, oh, you and I will meet on these terms on this day,
#
and you can have your pork and I can have my beef, or whatever. It's not doing that.
#
It's actually saying, well, you must live like a Muslim, and I must live like whatever, like a
#
Hindu. That's why his politics is a radical embrace of religion. That's why he's very hard
#
to characterize, which is precisely why Nathuram Godse kills him. When he kills him, he calls him
#
the father of Pakistan. That's the word he utters in his confession. Anyway, I find it fascinating
#
that we have more figures who were so immersed. Every day they are working so hard. They're in
#
politics. They also thought so hard and wrote so much about these problems. We don't see that any
#
longer. Our politicians don't really write any longer. Yeah, they don't even write their own
#
tweets. And I'm really glad you explained the word extimacy to me, because otherwise I would
#
have assumed it's the ecstasy which comes from intimacy, and pictures of Savarkar and Gandhi
#
and Nehru doing funky things would have floated around in my head. A couple of kind of thoughts.
#
One is you pointed out that you're not painting our society as liberal, and I agree with you,
#
I feel is deeply illiberal. But there was an interesting counterpoint post to me, which I
#
can't get myself to disagree with also. When I pointed this out to the politician JP Narayan
#
in an episode we did together, he pointed out that one, he said, of course, he agrees with me.
#
And he asked me to elaborate and one can talk about caste and gender and a
#
hazaar other things, right? But he said, if you look at it in another way, there is a liberal
#
element to our culture as well, in the sense that it is so assimilative. We take in influences from
#
everywhere. Even our beloved Prime Minister Suri Dar Kutaz, you know, have an Islamic influence.
#
And this is my example, not his, so don't go after him kindly, if any trolls are listening to this,
#
and so on and so forth. And I found that an interesting kind of way to put it, that there is
#
also that trend. And when you sort of spoke of Gandhi and Savarkar being at completely opposite
#
ends and Nehru being somewhere in the middle, and in the way that the central point of the debate,
#
as I see it, which is the relationship between society and politics, politics being downstream
#
of culture, I actually think that Nehru was at the politics end in an extreme way where he believed
#
that politics could change culture and shape society. And Gandhi and Savarkar were really at
#
the other end, but in different ways, where Gandhi had a recognition of how powerful traditions were
#
and how important it is in a practical sense to respect them and go one step at a time and
#
not try to use state coercion to sort of reform society. Whereas, you know, Savarkar obviously
#
had his own political purposes and that had him sort of stressing that aspect of it. So that is
#
sort of the question that I struggle with, that if, you know, if Gandhi's project was less reformed
#
society from inside, was that ever possible or were we on a fast train hurtling to exactly where
#
we are? Okay, so this is super. I mean, I think this is a super question because, so Gandhi,
#
you know, has this big fight with Ambedkar in the thirties, in the Poonap Act. You know, Maharashtra
#
is really interesting. It's really the wellspring of politics. I'm hoping that now that there's a
#
new kind of politics going on there, so it shall be for where Maharashtra starts, you know, India
#
lands. You know, they always say that about Bengal, but I actually think it's Maharashtra.
#
But, you know, but it's interesting that, you know, so, you know, you had the Poonap Act. Okay.
#
So for the listeners who might not know, a very simple kind of quick history lesson that after
#
Gandhi's very famous salt satyagraha, which actually was not triggered by any preexisting demand,
#
but it's Gandhi's kind of sue generous question around the prohibition of the prohibitive nature
#
of taxation on salt, but it's also about economy and poverty and empire. Anyway, I write a little
#
bit about it, but it's really, to me, that's the moment when India's democracy becomes a
#
feta complete. That is when the foundations of India's, that moment is when India's democracy
#
comes to be, because what does Gandhi do then? He's saying, well, I'm going to walk out of my
#
ashram and I'm going to walk whatever it is, 60 or miles or 80 or kilometers down or 200, I don't
#
know the exact distance between there and to Dandi, where I'm going to open, break open salt
#
on the open shorelines and as a public defiance of the state of the prohibitive. He walks with a
#
handful of his followers and by the time you, when he finishes the act, hundreds of thousands have
#
walked with him. Yeah. And I saw this in the National Museum in Delhi, they had the pathé
#
clip of the, you know, I saw the, actually the visuals they had, you know, put on the exhibition
#
about 80, two years ago. It's just striking the kind of people who are walking with him, men,
#
women, children, you know, and, but that's also foundations, foundational to India's democracy,
#
but it also kind of lay tells you the most, most about Gandhi. It tells you a lot about,
#
it tells you a lot about Gandhi because so it's a very plain language. So it's both very plain.
#
It's both very simple, but at also the same time, incredibly demanding of the individual. Yeah.
#
So his politics is that it's a politics of the plane, the, of breaking the abstract stuff with
#
something, which is, can be embodied, which can be experienced. And it's at the level of the self.
#
And so he's not doing what we now understand as political mobilization, you know, rallies and
#
hundreds of, you know, crores being spent, people being busted, you know, and then all the visual
#
kind of, you know, power play, you know, Gandhi understands the power of visuality. Let's not get
#
it wrong, but you know, he's one of the most, the most iconic images of the 20th century. But he's
#
interesting because he uses that as a kind of grammar to convey something very powerful. It's
#
not always shock and awe, but it's the body, the image becomes a way of communicating like his own
#
body, which is a very frail body. You know, it's an ascetics body. It looks the opposite of say
#
Hitler and Stalin and Churchill, which are military bodies of this period. They are the people driving
#
world history. They are the big men with, you know, the super strong men. And here is a frail old man
#
who will undo the empire and he will deploy that visual language. So it's different kind of
#
politics, but he wants all this to say, he wants change to not take place at the level of
#
institutions. He doesn't really care about institutions. He's an anarchist in that sense.
#
He's an anarchist in that sense. Someone, you know, Faso-Devji actually calls him, him as an
#
anarchist thinker. I'm not sure, but what he is really saying, you know, that there can only be
#
one form of transformation and that's a transformation of the self. You know, you can
#
change, I can change without it, nothing, you know, whether the British come and go, you know,
#
they can enable or disable conditions, but that's not really important. And he's anti-imperial to be
#
sure. And this is the heart of the debate between him and Ambedkar. So you have the
#
Salsatyagraha, which has just happened, which has basically announced to Ramsey McDonald,
#
the British prime minister, that Gandhi cannot no longer be ignored. What is going on in India
#
can no longer be ignored. So you have the round table conferences, which then in London, at the
#
highest level of the imperial table, to really decide what a kind of dominion status or the kind
#
of, you know, what is going to be the constitutional architecture of division of power. And in the
#
first round, you know, Gandhi's not even there, you know, and Ambedkar in the first round has
#
proposed that the Dalits be treated and designated as a minority. So this was because Muslims were
#
designated as a minority and what it meant was that they were separate electorates. Okay. There
#
was not much to fight for, but it was a municipal corporation of Bombay or the kind of, that time
#
the legislative assembly elections had also not come in, but whatever limited franchise there was,
#
it meant that Dalits would get separate representation and they should be recognized
#
as a minority. And actually it's all going to plan. No one is, you know, even Jinnah is fine with
#
it. Like everyone's fine with it. Gandhi gets wind of it. And he then, you know, in the second
#
round table comes in and, you know, as we know, declares a fast run to death if this is to be
#
to be done. And this infamously leads to the Poonap Act where, you know, Ambedkar would drop
#
the demand for that. And people think of this and there's a lot of misunderstanding of this problem.
#
People think of it that somehow Gandhi is an upper caste figure. Now that's far from the case
#
because Gandhi has Gandhi's own marriage with Kasturba has come under a fair amount of stress
#
because in the ashrams, he is expecting not just her, but himself, he is doing so-called menial
#
work of toilet cleaning and the like. Right. And this is like heretical. You can, you know,
#
this is Kasturba is not happy about it and the like, but you know, so there's a kind of caste
#
politics too, but also he has been part of the temple entry movement in the group, you know,
#
in the in Southern India and the like. So he wants that is to be entered to be able to enter temples.
#
So Gandhi is no figure of, you know, but where he is different from. So what he's saying is that
#
upper caste, as you would normally say, I'm touchable by birth, but untouchable by habit,
#
that, you know, I'm untouchable basically, like, you know, by practice, I'm an untouchable.
#
So what he wants it to happen is that caste can only be broken down if we start transgressing
#
its taboos. So upper caste men and women start behaving in ways that are, you know,
#
you know, that they would not and the Dalits will get temple entry education, all the things that
#
they have been barred from. And that's how you kind of delegitimize and you finish off the caste
#
system. Amit Kher is saying, you're right. He's saying, you're right, this is going to happen,
#
right? So, so the fight is that the fight is not that, you know, he's some kind of, you know,
#
casteist. Amit Kher is saying, well, you know, yeah, I mean, you can't rely on the goodwill of
#
people. So I don't think what I'm trying to say is that I don't think Gandhi is not on the side
#
of change. He's on the side of change, but his side of change is so ascetic, so demanding that
#
it is an impossible demand on humans. And I don't mean the temples question or the taboo question,
#
but even in terms of say celibacy, silence, his remaking of the self is based on a kind of
#
self-abnegation, which is, you know, unsustainable. And therefore Gandhi's politics was not
#
reproducible, you know, but what is reproducible, what stays is this grammar of civil disobedience,
#
of the power of restraint, of really politics of the plain. So whether you have environmentalism,
#
you know, the Chipko movement, or whether you have the farmer's strike today, it all is Gandhi,
#
you know, where you can, and that the state is not, you know, you don't, you know, you're not
#
beholden to the state. And Ambedkar would be more on the narrow side, at least initially, of course,
#
he would disown the constitution before he dies, where that actually, you know, the law can guarantee
#
a sense of progress and equity, that, you know, you can make the state a mechanism of equity,
#
of even progress and change. So, you know, but what is good about India, or what is interesting
#
about India is that you have more than one idea. And the person who said to you that India is
#
liberal, I would not use the word liberal, but I would say India, Indians, a large number of even,
#
some, perhaps even Hindutva types, I'm not sure, but there's a degree of openness in India, which
#
is, it's a kind of receptive culture, and not just it wants to receive things, but then owns it up
#
and makes it its own, you know, like the Lutyens buildings, you know, which, you know, may have
#
been made by Edward Lutyens, but someone like me, you know, driving past, you know, those buildings,
#
I don't think of them as British buildings. I think of Nehru walking them down, or, you know,
#
I think of, you know, Indira Gandhi, or I think of, you know, David Gowda, or, you know, whoever,
#
you know, I don't imagine British figures inhabiting it. And that's the thing about,
#
that's what I think that where India is not liberal in the sense of what we traditionally
#
call liberal, which is that it is not a society based on a social contract. You know, it's not
#
based on a kind of contractualism. Anyway. This is also fascinating. And I'm looking to sort of
#
continue this forward and kind of dive deeper into your book and indeed in your growing up years in
#
Chandigarh. But let's take a quick commercial break first. Have you always wanted to be a writer,
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at indiaankar.com slash clear writing. That's indiaankar.com slash clear writing. Being a good
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writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard and a clear idea
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of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Welcome back to The Scene and the
#
Unseen. I'm chatting with Shruti Kapila and I've been just getting like her book is full of way,
#
way more insights than we can possibly encapsulate in even a 10-hour conversation. But while I've
#
been getting tons of insights on, you know, Tilak, Nehru, Gandhi, Savarkar, all of these people,
#
many of my listeners must be thinking that, hey, we've heard about these people before,
#
we'd rather hear the history of Shruti Kapila herself, which I want to get back to because,
#
hey, Chandigarh, right? And also I was reading about your parents and they're both kind of
#
fascinating people. So that's particularly also what I want to sort of talk about your childhood
#
and the influences that they had on you and so on and so forth. So tell me a bit about,
#
your father was of course a career journalist for decades and all of that covered Haryana, Punjab
#
and your mom was a well-known writer. She wrote her first book apparently when she was 12 years old.
#
Yeah. 16, yeah. So 12 or 13, I can't remember, but yeah. Yeah, my mom, yeah, I mean, I come from,
#
I suppose, a fairly writerly background, but quite different styles. My father was, as you say,
#
a career journalist and so much more engaged with the world and into quite a lot of politics. And
#
so he was very formative. He's been a formative influence on me. Bikkhi, he was, yeah, he was
#
very interested in politics, political ideas, how political ideas led to certain forms of power.
#
So he was interested in those things. He never wrote and a book as it were. And then my mother
#
was slightly different. She was more aesthetic, interested in more in aesthetics, like culture,
#
culture stuff. So Chandigarh had a very vibrant theater and art scene. And so she would, yeah,
#
drag us all to, I'm one of three, we'd all be taken to exhibitions and concerts. And at that
#
point you thought, oh my God, what the hell am I doing listening to this? I remember feeling
#
terribly bored and wanting to sleep in, I shall not name the theater group, but a very prominent
#
theater group in Chandigarh, which would put up these Sanskrit plays. And I would be like, oh my
#
God, what is this? And now, of course, the minute when you hit undergraduate years or graduate years,
#
you're like, you feel so lucky that you've actually seen some of these plays and that same
#
Ruchkatika more, whatever, Ghaseeram. Ghaseeram Kotlal is not in the same league, but you've seen
#
all of it. You've seen a large bit of it. So I think I was very lucky because whether it was art,
#
I was given a kind of training into reading and listening, but just by osmosis, it wasn't kind of
#
didactic that you must do this or you mustn't do that. And yeah, so I think there's a kind of,
#
my mother was on the kind of, I would say, reclusive side in life. When my father was
#
a more rigorous person. And I think, you know, I have that too, in the sense I quite like engaging
#
with, you know, engaging with a large number of people. But I also quite like my solitary
#
kind of work in the libraries and the archives and writing. And so they've had a huge impact
#
in the way that I thought I would actually become a journalist. I was a school kid, you know,
#
I always, if, you know, colleagues, students sort of classmates asked, you know, I would always be
#
very clear the answer was, yeah, I'm going to be a journalist. But somehow, you know, I maybe,
#
I think, not to kind of to drive to find a point or to overdo this, but I think my generation grew
#
up with a lot of violence in India. So whether we were directly affected by it or not is,
#
is so particularly if you were born in the 70s, you know, the aftermath of the emergency,
#
followed by the sea, the kind of militancy and, you know, insurgency and counterinsurgency
#
for 12 years plus in Punjab, more like 78 to 92, 91, you know, it's a long period. That's pretty
#
much my child, my entire, you know, childhood training, or it's not childhood, but my till
#
adulthood really. And then you come out and then there's Mabri Masjid and, you know, and so it
#
goes, you know, and you feel that actually, so I think I got, I was resistant to working in
#
journalism partly because I thought that I did some work, but I thought it was, it didn't feel,
#
not in a negative way, it didn't feel satisfying. I felt I wanted to know more.
#
I liked the adrenaline and the kind of the buzz of doing something new every day.
#
It appealed to that, it appealed, but it did not satisfy the deeper questions as to why,
#
you know, the deeper political questions or historical questions of India, which,
#
and I think the training at JNU was formative. So I only studied two years in JNU, I only did
#
my master's there. And it really was, every generation in JNU says that, oh, they had the
#
best time. I would say that my teachers were at their peak when I met them. So my teachers were
#
brilliant teachers and they were, it was interesting because, you know, they were also,
#
they were not no longer part of the state's agenda of writing Indian history, nor were they part of
#
part of subaltern studies, which was, you know, the rage at that time.
#
So yeah, I had really charismatic teachers and that, you know, made all the, it made it like,
#
you know, and I think history from the get-go in India has been the site of political argument.
#
So I think I was interested in political argument and that's why I ended up writing
#
history is what I'm saying. You know, I want to ask you a lot
#
more about your teachers in JNU and what the time there was like, but before that,
#
I want to kind of circle a little back to childhood. And again, you know, my parents
#
were pretty involved in the cultural scene there as well. So I feel this great regret that they're
#
not around. So I can't ask them that, hey, did you know the Kapilas and whatever, who knows what,
#
you know, we might even have sat next to each other while watching some concert or something.
#
So these serendipities. So tell me about the kind of things you read. And also in particular,
#
what interests me is that your mother was a writer in Hindi. She wrote books, you know,
#
her first book was Bhatke Rahi and then her last book was Samne Ka Asmaan and all that.
#
And that also strikes me as very fascinating because what I have increasingly come to realize
#
with the passing of years is that, you know, on the one hand, we are incredibly lucky to be in a
#
rich multilingual country like India, where you have the diversity of so many languages.
#
But I often curse myself for only bothering to understand one and learn one really well. Like,
#
of course, I can converse in multiple other languages, but I haven't read the literature
#
of multiple other languages in the original. And I feel that that's a loss. And, you know,
#
different worlds are shut off to you because of that reason. Well, you know, unlike Europeans,
#
we had the opportunity to enter these different worlds. So did you read in Hindi as well? Was that
#
also, you know, part of your influences growing up? So thank you. That's a very nice question.
#
And actually, I had, I mean, two things strike me that one that my, you know, we were never told to
#
read. It wasn't like this, but my parents had a large number of poets and authors as friends.
#
So, you know, there was, as I said, osmosis, you know, from Chandigarh, but also from the region
#
and both Punjabi, but also Hindi, Hindi writing. So like someone like Teji Grover, who's a very
#
famous poet now was, you know, she used to kind of hang out with us when we were kids. And I was
#
like, I was thinking about it the other day, that poor woman, you know, she must be in her late 20s.
#
And we were like these kids, you know, running over her house. So India is fun like that. You
#
know, like people are not so policing about, you know, okay, you know, you must only hang out with
#
your age or the like. But so, you know, you had people like that, or even Kumar Vikul, who was,
#
of course, a very famous poet from Chandigarh. And so they were all part of my parents circle
#
at one point or another. So they were just there as human beings. I mean, they were not
#
reading poetry to us. It wasn't that kind of influence, but I was, but my father was
#
multilingual also in the sense that Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu. And I remember when I was doing my
#
research in Bombay for my PhD on asylums and psychoanalysis, I thought I'd surprise him. So
#
I spent five months, you know, getting a tutor from, from actually Muhammad Ali Road to come to
#
me to teach me Urdu. And so I thought, oh, you know, I'll go home and I'll impress my dad. And
#
so I went after five, six months when I said, you know, I, you know, guess what, you know, I know Urdu.
#
And I wrote, he says, okay, so I started writing stuff and he says, well, this is not Urdu. This
#
is Arabic. What have we learned? So, you know, of course things change. So there was always an idea
#
to kind of have a kind of very thick linguistic register in more than one language and to be
#
attuned to different languages. Of course, English was also like, it wasn't like, and my mother was
#
very, I would say she was not opposed to English. And she was not an anti-Angresi word because,
#
you know, there, there was also that sentiment that, you know, is always a known in India that,
#
you know, that the, but she never really, yeah, you know, she was, my mother was a more complex
#
person in the sense that she was in, I probably the most modern person I know, if I can use that
#
word, you know, her last book is the last published book. She's got a book in press, which will come
#
out next year. Unfortunately, she died before she could see that out. But, you know, her last
#
published book is actually based on homosexual, it's on a homosexuality. And so these are not
#
topics that you associate at least with kind of Hindi writers per se, or, you know, so she was a
#
very, she had a very modern, very contemporary mindset, but her linguistic register always
#
remained Hindi. And, you know, and I thought that was kind of, again, a kind of confidence,
#
which I like, which I, I mean, you know, I admired and I've been a kind of beneficiary of,
#
which is why that I feel I can inhabit different cultures without feeling inferior, superior,
#
or having to fit myself in or out. And I think that comes from the multiple linguistic registers
#
at home as well. Because of course, English is a political issue in India. And, and it was,
#
I was aware of the debates around English throughout, also through some other teachers
#
and growing up and particularly around my mother on that thing. So what are the kind of books I
#
read? Okay, so now I'm going to be like a bit, how do I put it? Like, I was not a big reader
#
in school. I was a very decent student in school. Like I did, you know, whatever, I was school
#
captain and whatnot, you know, those sorts of things that come, you know, in, in, in childhood,
#
I was, I would say I was more or less an obedient good bacha, you know, which, which given my school
#
was strict meant I was very good. You know, I came from a very strict pro science, not particularly
#
good on humanities or encouraging on the humanities school. You know, Sacred Heart was very, you know,
#
all my, all my classmates wonderful as they are from school have ended up becoming mostly doctors
#
and, you know, engineers and, you know, and mothers and, you know, so far by doing some good to society,
#
unlike you academics. I don't say I do. I was kidding. But I mean, you know, but I was like a
#
fish out of water by the time I was, you know, 16 in that school, 15, 16, you know, because,
#
and I couldn't be, and, you know, I, you know, when class 10 finished and we had the option to go to,
#
you know, at that point, plus two was in a college. You didn't have schools because it
#
would be one of the first years to move to that plus two kind of thing. And it was in government
#
college for girls, you know, in Chandigarh, which is of course, you know, incident to be a kind of,
#
I don't know, finishing school, if I may say so, or I can, or rather than it's supposed to be more
#
like it's kind of, it's not really known for its academic strength, let's put it like that. And,
#
but it was a wonderful freeing time for me to get out of, to get out of the whole,
#
you know, the, the kind of the pressure of science, the conformism of, of a convent school,
#
you know, the kind of uniform, the, you know, it was a, it was a terribly strict school. I mean,
#
now I think about it and I think, oh my God, this was out of the Edwardian 1920s, 30s period,
#
you know, the regimes we had, you know, the disciplinary, disciplinary regimes we had.
#
So, and then I kind of, you know, stumbled into history because history was not really my main
#
subject. It was meant to be politics. And then, but I, you know, not just did very well in it,
#
in my plus two, but I really enjoyed it. And I found actually the study of the Indian constitution
#
and all that a bit too like, okay, whatever. It was a bit like, yeah, okay. You know, and,
#
and so then I took an honors in history and I was also interested in psychology. So that was my minor.
#
So GCG was, was a, Chandigarh was, undergraduate years were again, quite lonesome, I would say,
#
because people were not interested in reading. So I, that's when I really stumbled upon Freud.
#
I still have my first book here, right here I ever bought. And yeah, I just thought I, you know,
#
I, it's just kind of, and so I, you know, because GCG had a very strong department in psychology
#
and, and, you know, they had, therefore the books in the library that meant, you know,
#
there was a lot of Freud, there was a lot of Jung and the library was where, so it was fine.
#
And the girls were interested in what they are. They were quite girly, you know, they were
#
interested in marriage, boys, the kind of normal things teenagers are into, but I, I was more
#
serious than I give myself credit for. And I, at that point, I was a bit like, I was always, yeah,
#
I was always a bit off the loop, I would say, though I had a large number of friends. And,
#
but then the formative thing happened and it was because of militancy, there wasn't, you know,
#
student government or kind of things that I would have liked to have been involved in, like even
#
party politics, nothing was available because, you know, you didn't have union, you didn't have
#
politics, student politics at that point in any way. And, but what happened was that I went to a
#
lecture, I think it was Tappan Ray Chowdhury, who was then the professor of history in, in Oxford.
#
And he came to speak in the Gandhi Bhavan and I was in my plus two, actually, I was in class 12.
#
And so still in school technically. And I asked a question about something, you know, I don't know,
#
you know, but I asked a question that I was journalist, you know, journalist's daughter,
#
I suppose, or whatever. And I came out and I just get preposterous now, I think about it, you know,
#
like, barely 17 or something and asking, you know, but the good side was that as I walked out of the
#
Gandhi Bhavan, two people approached me to very, and one of them was Yogendra Yadav, the head of
#
Swaraj India now. And the other was former head of department now in history in Chandigarh called
#
Rajiv Lochan. So what happens is that they say, oh, who are you? What are you doing? So they just
#
kind of introduce yourself and I'm like, okay, I'm like, yeah, I'm just a girl. I'm basically a
#
teenager. And he just, no, but I was interested. They said, oh, well, you know, are you interested
#
in books and ideas? And I was like, yeah, I really am. And, and so this is a, we have a study group.
#
We have a study circle and would you mind coming to it? And I was like, wow. And it was called,
#
appropriately called SAD, Serious Academic Discussion. So that was actually very useful
#
for me. That was my outlet. And so we would read, my sister was also part of it. And, you know,
#
we would read quite serious books. And, you know, we would read like Foucault, we would read, you
#
know, subaltern studies, you know, these are things that were not available to me in the curriculum.
#
The curriculum was all about, you know, you had to learn the kunji. You know, I was a university
#
topper, you know, as they call it, topper, I'm told is an Indian word, but yeah, I topped the
#
the university in history. But, you know, I, that curriculum was not the interesting thing.
#
You know, the university curriculum, though good, was not what was animating me. It was the
#
discussions in SAD, which really then propelled me into academia.
#
Do you remember any of those early discussions or any books or thinkers that really, you know,
#
just blew your mind and made you just want to dive in deeper, deeper, deeper?
#
Yes. Yeah. So I remember, like I used to, you know, I would, I was interested in,
#
I was interested in Freud. They didn't read much Freud there at all. They didn't read. Freud was
#
more of a private interest. They were interested in, you know, political philosophy and the like.
#
We would read, I mean, most, what I remember is reading Partha Chat, you know, like Indian writers,
#
you know, on politics, Chatterjee, Kaviraj, but those, I don't remember having an influence
#
of those figures as much as what stayed was the ability to discuss and debate ideas.
#
You know, I would say that was more important to me. The books that really transformed or
#
motivated me, I would say Freud is just one definite abiding kind of interest of mine,
#
but it was really ingenue that I discovered reading more seriously and more,
#
you know, in a more disciplined way when you read a book and you kind of try to understand
#
where it came from and read it critically. And there, I think the person in Indian history who
#
completely was spellbinding for me was Bernard Kohn from Chicago and his book,
#
An Anthropologist Among Historians. And I remember I had just got my prize for,
#
you know, whatever, for coming first in Punjab University. I should laugh, but, you know,
#
so I got some prize money and I remember my father coming and meeting me and giving it to me. And
#
then, you know, I went to, you know, I was not a Delhi person, so I didn't know Delhi very much
#
at all, but I went to now the defunct fact and fiction in Vasanth Vihar. And I, you know,
#
I sat there, I'd been going there on and off because of Priya Cinema and I would see this book
#
and I would read a bit and, you know, and then I actually bought it. And then that was just my
#
first possession, if I can use that word in Indian history. And I spent most of my money,
#
that little paltry sum put towards whatever on, on that book. And, but I've carried it with me. So I
#
would say that Bernard Kohn's writing on India were formative for me. And I thought, you know,
#
the way he, yeah, that him. And then I had a very good teacher who's not very well known,
#
but should, you know, but he has really created a generation of students. I think his name is
#
Majid Siddiqui and he taught at JNU and he now lives in Goa, I think. And so he's just kind of
#
like, he taught very innovative courses. He taught incredibly innovative courses in, in JNU. And then
#
of course, many people must have mentioned, I don't know, Neeladri Bhattacharya, you know,
#
so Neeladri and Majid were my, I would say the two main teachers in JNU. Majid, because he
#
really took ideas seriously, conceptual history, but also was very at ease with reading the Western
#
historical and theoretical canon. So it was a kind of, you know, I was in and out. I mean,
#
I kind of, you know, walked, you know, so I didn't find JNU as a campus very good or comfortable.
#
So, but I think what I take from JNU is it's, with the teaching, with the teachers.
#
I'm very interested in how the ways that we look at the world are formed. Like, you know,
#
just when I look back at myself, I find that, you know, you're growing up in the eighties,
#
you know, early nineties, one reaches adulthood, but yeah, but there, but there's no,
#
there's no internet. The access to knowledge is limited. I was privileged enough to grow up
#
in a household with tons of books, but I read mainly fiction at that time. And so what I would
#
now regard as my world views really started shaping only in my twenties, as I gradually
#
got exposed in haphazard ways and, you know, then began to seek out writings and then the internet
#
came and all of that. I'm very curious to know about how the way that you viewed the world
#
gradually took shape, because there seems to be less of a haphazard element to it in the sense
#
that you're going to JNU, you're interacting with these teachers who are influential to you.
#
Before that, you have the reading group where, you know, at least even if they may not be any
#
one particular thinker who, you know, appeals to you in that way, you at least get into
#
the processes of questioning and discussion and how to read a book and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about how you were formed in that way.
#
That's very good point, obviously, not just because of my mom and my parents' friends. So
#
there was a kind of division in the family or not division, but there was a fiction was there,
#
but also there was a world of politics. But, you know, we still see this in India.
#
The world of politics is not really well served in India by writing, you know, fiction is well
#
served. You know, you have a large number of Indian writers and all kinds of language and so on.
#
Even Indian political commentary is, you know, Indian reportage is very good, but I don't know,
#
you know, so I was interested always in political ideas because we used to have, I kid you not,
#
15 to 18 newspapers coming every day because, you know, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English, of course.
#
But I was a consummate reader of newspapers. So I would say my initial, my, always my kind of,
#
even till date, you know, my, I can't live without reading two or three newspapers a day.
#
And, in fact, I find the internet a bit, you know, you have to use your word because you don't get
#
the identity, the full identity of a newspaper. You get bits and pieces. You read people. Now
#
there is substacks and the like. But the Indian Express was such an important source for my,
#
for my growth, I think, in terms of politics. A fiction I never took to, which was even till
#
date, I read it, but I read it very selectively. And I don't know why that is. I was more animated
#
by philosophical abstract thinking or with political arguments. And so I, you know, like
#
everyone in, you know, Chandigarh at that time was reading very unthinkingly, Ayn Rand and,
#
you know, all of that. I read it and I was like, what is this? People are forming cults around it.
#
And I was a bit like, it just left me like cold. Like I literally couldn't understand what, you
#
know, because it was so other, right? We were also growing up with pre-liberalization in there. So
#
you haven't really, you know, you don't really kind of think about America in a big way, right?
#
America also comes into our lives much later, let's be honest, you know? And, and, you know,
#
so, you know, I'm just like, what is this author? Why are people banging on about her? Why aren't
#
like they forming like, you know, you know, all these. So I was saved in the sense that
#
I was saved by my instincts in politics, not to be swayed by that kind of writing.
#
But, you know, you say that it was very systematic. It actually felt very directionless to me
#
because, and also very, I always felt under stimulated in Chandigarh, which, and I was always
#
like, my brother makes fun of me. I have to always say, let's go somewhere, let's do something. You
#
know, there was always like, I was always restless in Chandigarh, you know, there was a kind of like
#
dissatisfaction because it was either too smug, you know, people are writing the IAS exam or,
#
you know, there was a very kind of set paths, you know, you are going to write I am the bar exams,
#
or, you know, you want to write it. It's an exam culture society for middle class people. But I
#
was lucky because we had the kind of wider artistic journalistic milieu, which was, you know, which
#
almost seemed almost a bit dangerous in comparison to all the kind of well regulated lives that
#
people led in Chandigarh otherwise. So I was more influenced, I would think by people rather than
#
books in that period. And also I was less. And, you know, it was haphazard because I was thinking,
#
oh my God, I should write the IAS exam or my God, I should, you know, become a journalist or I should,
#
you know, but I, it was actually the, the, the intellectual teachings, the teachings of this,
#
it was actually the JNU teachers who were so compelling because I joined JNU and then I left
#
it after two months because I thought, you know, for various reasons, the campus had been very
#
hostile to me and I didn't want to live there any longer. And so I, you know, left it and,
#
but 18 months later, I sat the exam again and wrote back, wrote in to, to kind of, you know,
#
to, to come in because I felt the teachers were just what they were teaching was I could not
#
forget it even after 18 months, though I'd only been there two months. So I think that teaching
#
was formative and yeah, what can I say? I mean, I haven't ever actually tried to give my, I think
#
the, the, the academic discussion group was good because it exposed me to, it gave me experience
#
to kind of how to kind of make arguments and how to think systematically.
#
Okay. Give me a sense of what your conception of yourself is at this point in time. Like
#
what do you want to do? You know, so, you know, you're in college in Chandigarh, you're in Punjab
#
university. Everybody around you is talking of marriage and you know, whatever else comes after
#
and you're kind of, you know, a slightly different kind of person, bored. Yeah. And, and then you go
#
to, I'm friendless and bored. I'm friendless and bored. Oh God, I'm already feeling so sorry for
#
your past self, but from, from there, you know, how does your conception of self develop? Like
#
then you go to JNU. Are you ever at any point in time toying with the ideas of what your parents
#
did that either you want to be a journalist or you want to write or? Yeah, no, no. So yeah, yeah,
#
for sure. So I, you know, like most people, pre-liberalization people, I thought, you know,
#
I always thought I would write, but I didn't know that I would write in a formal way as an academic.
#
I thought I would, as I said, in school, I always thought I would do journalism, but I think more at
#
a deeper unconscious level, I think what happened in Punjab and decades of two decades of violence
#
that, you know, one witnessed through the eighties and nineties really made me appreciate, made me,
#
I wouldn't say run away from politics, but gave me pause to think. I wanted to think more than I
#
wanted to do. And yeah, so, you know, there was, I think at a fundamental unconscious level, I think
#
there was this kind of lack of interest in politics emerging at this point, not lack of interest,
#
but a sense of distance emerging from what people would normally call the real world, you know,
#
because I wanted to, I think the inheritance had been quite, while had been quite, it is a violent
#
inheritance, whether we directly suffer or not. And in our case, you know, because of Indian Express,
#
Chandigarh, all of that, you know, it was a bit more, it was not that distant, that story.
#
And I thought, oh, you know, I should write this up since you do well in an exam. So people think,
#
well, you should write the civil service, you know, you know, and I actually thought, oh,
#
I should write, become a civil servant. And, you know, I never wanted to do the private sector.
#
I didn't want to join the corporate world like my friends were joining. And I, you know,
#
you know, within like, I didn't even kind of start a grammar. It was never going to happen because
#
I thought I cannot work for any government because you then have to give up your,
#
your voice. That's the thing about working for any government. It's not about A regime or B regime.
#
Working for governments mean that you lose your own voice and you lose your own. So then that's,
#
then after that, it was clear that I would want to study more. I actually wanted to go to Chicago
#
to study for my PhD with Marni Kohn. And, but I got lured into so as a year earlier. So,
#
that was, that was that. And I only wanted to go to so as in, in London. And so, you know,
#
and from then on, it was kind of, then it clear what I had to do. But like you, I didn't decide
#
till, I don't know about you, but it was more in my twenties. And I remember even after my PhD,
#
when I'd just started at Oxford for a postdoc, I was very hesitant about joining academia. And I
#
really thought I should leave it. And, and then I think over the years, over the last decade,
#
I would say my life has become much more enriched because I have very consciously spent a lot of
#
time in India and with India. So I, you know, every spare time I have, of course, my parents
#
were there and that also helped, but you know, it was also an engagement with its politics. I have
#
really, you know, as it were, made a significant effort towards being not just connected, but
#
intermeshed with, with Indian staff. That kind of intrigues me when you say you very consciously
#
over the last decade or so made an effort to, you know, and mesh yourself in our politics and
#
kind of understand that a bit better. Can you, can you elaborate on your reasons for that? Like
#
when you say very consciously, what made you feel that this was something that was kind of
#
necessary for you to do? So there were two, two reasons. Some were like kind of personal,
#
which I don't want to get into, but the other thing is that, you know, but they were, they were
#
related. I think the other side of it was that, you know, when I, you know, when I came to England
#
in the late nineties, it was a very vibrant society. It was of course, you know, people are
#
very critical of Tony Blair and you know, rightly so for all of the stuff, but it was the opening
#
up in the way that what we call globalization and the like, I'd been to England prior to that on a
#
small visit, but you know, it wasn't my first time in the late nineties, but you know, it was,
#
it just looked completely different. And, and also like, it was so open in terms of interactions and
#
interest in the wider world. You know, this had never, this was not my idea of England at all.
#
And, and particularly London, I mean, Oxbridge and all that, I don't know, but London,
#
central London, so as where I lived and my friends, I mean, it was just, it was over the top
#
exciting time to be in Britain at that time. And it was Europe, it was Asia, it was America,
#
all of it, which was like, you know, happening that big art, you know, the contemporary art scene was
#
very big, you know, and then of course you have 9-11 and the changes things, and then you have the
#
war. And I mean, my friends and my intimates were all always interested or involved in British
#
politics. So, you know, they were, so we would have lots of arguments and discussions and of course,
#
we all went to the march and all of this, but they were mainstream politics people in the sense
#
they either were in the liberal party or the Labour party or, you know, even the auditory friend,
#
conservative friend. But something happens in the sense, partly like the debates around
#
the financial crisis don't really interest me. I mean, they're very important, but there's a
#
divergence to Indian politics and British politics at that period. Because 2008, if you recall,
#
is a kind of golden moment for Indian politics because, you know, you are beginning to have a
#
rearmament of rights in India, you know, right to education, right to information, you know,
#
all the things that, the kind of buttressing of a rights-based regime, manrega, you know,
#
there's a way in which you are getting growth, huge double-digit growth rates, you know, the first
#
UPA regime. And, you know, I wasn't really a congress person, you know, but when I saw all
#
this happening from afar and here there is kind of poverty, you know, there's a way in which banks
#
are collapsing. There is like, you know, I just got really intrigued as to what had happened
#
because when I left in the mid to late nineties, I just thought, you know, the BJP is going to be
#
in India in power forever. You've had the nuclear blasts, you have a good growing economy, you know,
#
what's there for it to be a kind of endless ascendancy. And I think the UPA story interested
#
me that, you know, a way in which a kind of remaking of India was taking place. And I started
#
teaching a lot about Indian political ideas. So it's around a decade ago I started teaching
#
on Indian politics very concertedly, but also on violence too. And I had phenomenal students in
#
Cambridge, you know, both graduate students and undergraduates. So it was a very live thing. And
#
so then it meant, well, of course you have to keep spending time there. You can't just keep reading
#
commentary. So from then on, it just felt very organic and very natural. And then I had not really
#
wanted to write in the press, but slowly I've now started doing it and I quite enjoy it in fact.
#
And so, yeah, I mean, now I don't know what I'll do, but don't ask me that question. But, you know,
#
it's just, I just think it's, and I mean, I still am very interested in Britain. It's not that,
#
because I run a seminar series still, you know, till the pandemic happened in parliament here at
#
the House of Lords on, you know, connecting Indian and British interests and people and the like.
#
But I felt like there was something at a kind of intellectual level,
#
what was happening to Indian democracy is too compelling a story. And so, yeah.
#
So tell me a bit about Christopher Bailey also, because, you know, what kind of an influence was
#
he on you? Because, you know, I know you worked with him. I've of course, you know, his books,
#
Birth of the Modern World and Recovering Liberties are both kind of classics. And I think you edited
#
a book in which he wrote an introduction as well. And there is therefore this engagement that I see
#
coming, you know, an engagement that he had with the intellectual history of India, which in a
#
sense you're continuing and which violent fraternity is therefore a successor to that.
#
Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I didn't, I worked with Chris. I mean, he was of course teaching
#
at Cambridge and the like. And so I really met him after I was in Oxford. And also when I was
#
postdoc, but also when I was in America. And really, this was kind of a conversation that
#
started about the future of Indian history writing. And that really is at the, you know,
#
what, because, you know, in the mid to late 2000s, you know, so coming up to about 2010, when
#
I edited the book on intellectual history of India, where he writes an afterword, but also an essay,
#
but a large number of other historians contributed to it. It was really an opening to say, well,
#
we need a new conversation on Indian history because the debates, so I really don't belong
#
to the so-called Cambridge school of Indian history, nor am I a Bailey student. There is very
#
little, you could say, methodological or empirical commonality in my project and his, right? But what
#
there was a kind of commonality or was the idea that actually what India really need is an
#
intellectual history, an accounting of its own political ideas. And because, so in that sense,
#
you know, that there was, and there was Faisal in Oxford, who was a close collaborator of mine. So
#
they were a bunch of us who were very motivated. We don't, didn't want to have a school or anything
#
shutter the thought because, you know, that would not, I, you know, I really think people should be
#
individual authors and, you know, they should do their own thing. So yeah, but there was a kind of
#
common concern that Indian history had kind of saturated into a kind of very strange set of
#
debates, particularly around 10, 15 years ago, where these debates were about power and knowledge
#
on the one side, or they were very productive, instrumental readings of Indian politics, you
#
know, well, you know, interest groups, you know, or like, you know, well, and I think I was always
#
having grown up in India, been so politicized in India, in my own way. I always saw like, whether
#
even a figure like Bindranwale, you know, who was such a big figure in my childhood, you know,
#
these are people animated by ideas, you know, they don't just want power, you know, it's, it's so,
#
so I wanted to kind of return to some of my most long held beliefs about Indian life.
#
That, you know, India is not a sum total of its economy, or its society. It has always had
#
innovation of ideas and thoughts in it. And somehow historians were not interested in it. Bailey was
#
interested always in his, his history writing is different from mine, because he was interested in
#
two things. One, he was interested in looking at Indian social change as the driver of, if I can
#
say British Empire or modern politics and so on. So he was interested in what Indian merchants were
#
doing, what Indian groups were doing, what were the rising groups, you know, how are they kind of,
#
you know, navigating the world. That kind of social history has not been, while I studied it,
#
I certainly can teach it, I can certainly supervise on it. It's not the kind of history I wish to
#
write. And, but, but I suppose, as I said, yeah, the accounting for ideas is what I, you know, the,
#
that's the intellectual project I had commonality with, with Bailey on world history and global
#
history of which he was the singular author, really, like, you know, he kind of, both of the
#
modern world is a classic and the like. I think it's a superb book. But I think I'd like to debate
#
with the book, because, you know, to me, India doesn't offer convergence, you know, India offers,
#
which is what I try and show in my book, India offers competing diversity of ideas and not a
#
kind of convergence to a modern project. But having said that, you know, he was a very Catholic
#
figure in terms of, you know, his interests and the kinds of histories he was able to mentor,
#
help and the like. I'm also interested in, you know, something you've said before about how
#
you believe that political ideas have causative value, that they actually cause social change,
#
and so a two part question and the second part of it deals with that and I'll ask you to elaborate
#
on that. But the first part is that it also seems to me that then one of your approaches towards
#
understanding the political ideas of individuals is through their actions as well, that in many
#
cases, you know, somebody, a political philosopher, therefore, who you're looking at may not need to
#
have written a book of political philosophy, or a treatise, but you can work out from their
#
actions and their campaigns and so on and so forth. And something cogent emerges from there,
#
and you can deduce what the political ideas are from there. And therefore, you can look at the
#
impact of those ideas on society and say that, hey, when we are talking about ideas, we're not
#
just looking back on the past and in hindsight, you know, figuring out patterns and all of that,
#
but that they are strong, cogent, coherent ideas at the time that are driving those individuals
#
and which are changing society. So, you know, have I stated that kind of correctly and, you know,
#
can you elaborate on that? Absolutely. I mean, I think you guys wouldn't have said it better,
#
but so I think this is part of the reason. So the thing is, in the West, certainly, there's this
#
idea of decoloniality, like, you know, we need to know more about the non-West, how do they think,
#
there's this kind of great glamour at the moment for it. And then in India, you have the opposite,
#
a kind of heightened nativism, chauvinism, bordering on chauvinism, that, you know, even
#
nuclear power existed in the Vedic age, you know, like, you can, you know, you've done it all,
#
you know, so we are just repeating history as a farce, it seems, you know, if we've even,
#
you know, it's not clear, like, you know, if we've already been through everything, you know,
#
what is going on then, you know, but, but I was, you know,
#
so as I said, like, you know, Indian history is a very robust tradition. It has had a huge impact
#
on the writing of other histories, you know, people, whether you do European history or,
#
you know, Latin American history, you know, Indian historians have had a huge impact on
#
the profession. And that's not, you know, I'm talking about, like, you know, my predecessor's
#
generations, like, whether it's the Bolton studies, whether it's Bailey, whether it's,
#
you know, a Marxist, even like, say, someone like Sumit Sarkar, you know,
#
these people have had a kind of global kind of significance, which goes beyond the study of
#
India. And yet, and so that's why India is a very instructive place for reading the world
#
through, because its scale, its debates offer a miniature form of global debates. So that's the
#
kind of, but people have, most historians have only looked at social economic processes,
#
or mobilizations into India, right? So when we think of, when I was thinking that India is one
#
of the most political societies in the world, you know, it's the largest Republic, it's the most
#
diverse democracy, it's got the largest affirmative action program in the world. Surely, these
#
cannot be understood simply down to some sort of economic bargaining, or just looking at how
#
people got mobilized around, you know, they got mobilized around, you know, they got mobilized
#
around, you know, the social history, as it were, of a movement, which kind of creates a change.
#
So where do you look for ideas? And as you rightly say, you know, and if you look at the counter,
#
the parallel examples in world history, French Revolution comes to mind, even the American
#
Revolution, but also the English Civil Wars, you know, Henry Mantel, I mean, I don't know how many
#
people are reading her. I mean, that's the era of the Civil Wars. And that's the birth of modern
#
politics in this country, and in Britain. So there, you know, in all these contexts, the figure of
#
the philosopher has had a role. You can say, oh, you know, Voltaire and Rousseau, we can debate,
#
you know, did Voltaire really affect this? Or India doesn't present us with that problem.
#
India presents us with the opposite problem, which is that it has politically innovated
#
without a doubt. So the people have typically looked at the constitution for that innovation.
#
But that's actually a miss for the reasons you yourself spelt out earlier. It's not exactly
#
representative of India's political innovation. But so where do you start? And I was, you know,
#
this was a question that I had, you know, been thinking about. And initially I thought, oh,
#
texts. So which is why I thought, oh, let's do a book on the Gita. Why is everyone writing on the
#
Gita? And then I kind of thought that actually the job is the opposite for India, that historians
#
and theorists have to make thinkers out of these actors, because we need to give them their
#
conceptual space, their conceptual due, if I can use their word, their reflective agency,
#
because they really thought about all these things. And it's, you know, so we only see them
#
as actors and we think, oh, you know, we know what they may say about caste or conversion or
#
partition. But actually when you read them, that's not the case at all. You know, we don't know them
#
because, you know, they're, they are writing in the full awareness of liberalism, Marxism,
#
and, you know, and they don't produce a khichdi, they don't produce a kind of salad. They don't
#
sell it. They produce completely new ideas after out of it, you know. And so for me, I wanted to
#
capture that. And some of those ideas are very uncomfortable. And most starkly, you see that in
#
Patel. Patel doesn't write at all. Like Jinnah, like his adversary, very little right next to no
#
writings, lots of speeches, but a huge influence on Indian life. So how do you kind of, so the
#
challenge then was to kind of see their action as thought and then write it up as, as a kind of,
#
as I said, you know, to give it a kind of conceptual heft rather than always seeing, you
#
know, they are going out there and working, intervening, this, that. But so, well, hopefully,
#
you know, it has had some, yeah, I mean, it is also written, it's written for India, of course,
#
but it's also written to destabilize the canon of political thought, which is so heavily policed in
#
the West, that, you know, we all think that, you know, Western, you know, the West produced
#
political ideas. And so it's also destabilizing that. You know, and in the case of someone like
#
Gandhi, what kind of strikes me and what I've always thought of, thought about, I mean, you know,
#
I like to say people contain multitudes, you know, borrowing from Whitman's famous poem. And
#
obviously Gandhi is a classic example of that. You go through any of his 100 volumes, it's like
#
mind boggling. And he can be anything you want him to be. So, you know, if, as I'll say, he's
#
an anarchist, you can find support for that. One of my friends keeps arguing he's the first
#
classical liberal. I guess you can find support for that. You can find support for anything.
#
Right. So, and I'm skeptical of any of those readings, kind of, but that's in Gandhi's case.
#
Now, the thing is, when you sort of try to come at all of these different figures and figure out
#
that, okay, you know, if I am to assume that their actions are a reflection of their political ideas,
#
and if I am to deduce from their actions that these then are their political ideas,
#
you know, how much do you have to warn yourself against a tendency to perhaps read something into,
#
read something which isn't there or to overinterpret or just the urge to simplification,
#
which I guess every historian has to watch out for. Thank you. That's a very good question,
#
which is partly why, as I said, to go back to it, like, I really didn't want to pigeonhole them
#
to any ideology. You know, I didn't want them to be called, I have barely used the word liberal
#
for anyone. You know, they all, I'm more interested therefore in, as I said, the grammar,
#
the basic toolkit of politics. What is sovereignty? What is violence? What is it to mean to live with
#
each other? What is the Hindu-Muslim question? What is, why is partition should not be seen as
#
partition violence, but civil war? You know, so I'm interested at the very kind of basic foundational
#
level, because if you were to see them as liberal, then you would either be celebrating a tradition
#
at the cost of another, or you would be boxing these figures in a way which would not be helpful
#
or illuminating, you know, and then you end up with that debate, you know, which we constantly
#
have is, you know, is so-and-so a Hindu nationalist or is he not, you know, is so-and-so a liberal
#
or not, you know? And I was not interested in categorizing, but really seeing the innovation
#
on, say, as I said, you know, on questions of violence, on questions of political agency,
#
on statecraft, on the Hindu-Muslim question, I was interested in those concrete problems
#
and concrete concepts. And I hope I haven't over read, one of the joys of being a historian
#
or frustrations of being a historian is that you can't really say things without evidence.
#
So, you know, so I had to sort of stick to the script, you know, because I would have loved
#
to have said, well, you know, Patel is Hindutva plus plus, and, you know, it would have made my
#
life really easy. But, you know, he's a bit more complicated than that, you know, so that's the
#
thing, you know, that these figures themselves are also defying easy categorization. Like, would you
#
call Nehru a socialist? I don't know. You know, you know, I would find it quite hard, of course,
#
though he's part of a socialist tradition on the economy. So it's very hard to group these
#
figures. And I think that's why India also produces a kind of very robust, competitive
#
democracy, because there are many political ideas from the get go in its written into its
#
to its birthing into its founding. You know, what an interesting part of that whole narrative of,
#
you know, Tilak filing the case against Shirol Shirol's book, Indian Undressed and so on,
#
is this little anecdote which you have about not an anecdote, but a little sort of something
#
that the that Indian Undressed focused on, which was a performance of the Marathi play
#
Kichakwada or the Killing of Kichak, I hope I'm pronouncing it properly. And yeah, and I'll quickly
#
sort of for the listeners quite kind of relate what that happened. What the plays really about
#
the killing of Kichak is about how, you know, the Pandavas in their last year of exile, they had to
#
be anonymous somewhere, they had to go somewhere where they couldn't be found, and they couldn't
#
be uncovered. If they were uncovered, they would have lost the bet. So they went to this particular
#
kingdom called Viratnagar, where, you know, they were kind of posing as a sort of servants or
#
whatever. And a gentleman named Kichak, the commander in chief of the kingdom of Virat,
#
and an ally of Duryodhana as it happened, he saw Draupadi and he was charmed by her and all of that.
#
And then he told Yudhishthir, okay, send her to my harem. And now Yudhishthir has the dilemma that
#
either he, you know, sullies his wife's dishonor by sending her, because of course, in our epics,
#
women are the property of men, or he, you know, gets busted. And, you know, he says who he is,
#
and he refuses, and he gets completely busted. And eventually, what happens is that Bhim steps
#
into the picture and Bhim poses as a statue of a god. And just when Kichak is about to, you know,
#
get it on with Draupadi, he kills Kichak. And according to Shiral, when he writes about this
#
play, this play is a seditious play, according to him, because everything in it is an allegory,
#
that Kichaka is basically Lord Karsan, and, you know, Draupadi is India, and Yudhishthir
#
is the moderate, and Bhima is the extremist party, right? And I was fascinated by this,
#
and fascinated by how something in culture is being sort of depicted in this way.
#
Now, it also strikes me that when we speak about all of these figures, you know, Patel, Savarkar,
#
Nehru, Gandhi, all of these, what is at one level important is what you've tried to do,
#
to figure out their ideas from their actions, and to get to the truth of what they are.
#
But equally important, as in Kichak's place, is what they are seen as, you know? Like, Patel may
#
not have, you know, left much writing behind, but what he is seen as today is relevant, and that is
#
constantly evolving, and he is part of the narrative battles. Did too with Savarkar. And
#
in a sense, you could argue there are two Savarkars, you know, pre-1910, and before,
#
you know, the Savarkar who wrote the history of the 1815 seven mutiny is almost, seems to me,
#
a completely different person from the person who wrote Hindutva, because his years in prison and
#
all of that had kind of changed him. So there are, so, but what is less important to me is these
#
people themselves. You know, to me, that's a historical curiosity. What were they actually
#
like? But what is more relevant in modern times, and what is a life political question is how are
#
they perceived, you know? So therefore, how the notion of Patel, the notion of Savarkar,
#
the notion of Gandhi, how those kind of mutate through the ages and becomes divorced from
#
whatever they were. So what are sort of your thoughts on this? Because, you know, anything,
#
any history of Patel, any understanding of Patel, does it have to take this into account, or
#
can it stop at the moment he dies? No, no, it doesn't. And I think, thank you,
#
because I think the thing is that there are two reasons why these figures are so inexhaustible
#
at the moment. One, of course, because the very political settlement of 1947, 50 of India is
#
being challenged and, you know, is being remade. And as a result, we are all visiting those
#
founding moments in our own light, in the light of our own, you know, politics and
#
parties are doing the same, right? So that's a kind of overall context in it. But there's a
#
deeper context to what you're suggesting and which I would agree with instinctively, which is that,
#
you know, these figures are very, they're inexhaustible. It's a bit like Marx, you know,
#
every generation will read their own Marx, you know, they will interpret him in the light of
#
their own own experience. And I think that's what's happening with this is why I'm calling
#
them as founding figures, because they have that inexhaustible rule. Finally, like, you know,
#
when you say that in elections and all, you know, they're also rolled out, you know, and they're so
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their words, their name is like an invocation. They, you know, it distills as it conveys the
#
power of something, power of a particular idea. So, you know, sure, but they will be remade.
#
Each generation will discover their own Patel, as it were, Gandhi's, you know, reputation is going
#
up and down and obeyed curses like, you know, up and all those things are indicators, in fact,
#
of our democratic present. So it's not that they are frozen in the archives of life, of time,
#
far from it. They are far too alive. They are the ones who are haunting and animating. And that's
#
why they're, they cannot be elided, dismissed, or, or, you know, or just be, that's why they're so
#
foundational. That's why they are like father figurations, if I've used a particularly
#
deliberately patriarchal term, because it, the fraternal argument and the even the father
#
figuration of the political in India is intensely masculine. So it will be interesting to
#
to think about women and gender more. That would be the challenge of my own work. You know,
#
how does it configure it? Because, you know, women are almost fully excluded or because the default
#
figure is the figure of the man in these discourses. There is no getting away from it. Gandhi is the
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only philosopher who will, a political philosopher, thinker who will expend a great deal of energy,
#
good or bad, on the women's question in this, you know, in this way. So, you know, the new challenge,
#
at least for the next coming, you know, if I were to write a sequel to this book, or to write a kind
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of period, later period, the question would be of women and gender and how to even, to even think
#
about, can, so today's burning question, I wrote it like, you know, burning question, but it's a
#
burning question, but it's a question of certainly contemporary politics. Can women actually become a
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vote bank in India to ask the kind of that question, you know, if everything is a vote bank and,
#
you know, can women become a vote bank? And if they haven't, what does it tell us? And so,
#
yeah, I mean, you know, the history of India's democracy is its own book to be written,
#
and it's particularly its political languages, but it cannot, it cannot be divorced from these
#
guys because they are the foundational figures who are also still on the scene. It's not like
#
they've left the scene, you know, Patel is very much here and Gandhi is very much here. You know,
#
they're just here. They're like, yeah, so. Yeah, Patel is very much here in a statue as well. You
#
know, plot for a sort of dystopian novel, I guess, the statue of Patel should one day start walking
#
towards Delhi. That would be interesting. Like, I know that would be amazing. Stomp, stomp, stomp.
#
That would be fun. And what you mentioned about women as vote bank, I had the data journalist
#
Rukmini S on my show talking about her excellent book. And she's examined that question at length.
#
And her conclusion is, of course, they're not a vote bank anywhere because of the simple reason
#
that women contain multitudes, you know, they have diverse interests. And at some level, it seems to
#
me to be an opportunity loss because the fact of the matter is that for 70 something years, women
#
have really been second class citizens in India. So that's what I, my point is that they actually,
#
there is a potential to make them a vote bank. Of course, women in here, multiple identities,
#
you know, whether it's for religious purposes, whether it's of caste purposes, of family,
#
of role, of rank, all of those things. Right. But precisely since things have been so utterly bad
#
for them, you know, it could mean that they could, you know, they could be the true, you know, the
#
true inheritors now of, but I think it would not be possible. That's why I think there's so much
#
hesitancy in, in, in India, where it's so easy to legislate every day, there's a new law, whether
#
you can do anything about it is different, but even the hesitancy to legislate on reservation
#
for women tells you both the impossibility, but also the potentiality of the female vote bank.
#
So I would not fundamentally agree. I would not give up on it as a vote bank just yet.
#
I think maybe it is a positive statement and not a normative one. As we said earlier,
#
change can happen just as Amit Shah united the Hindu vote. Maybe you can come in into politics
#
and animate this. Enough academics. What is this? Change the world. Come on. But kind of getting back
#
to the combination of the world of politicians and writers, one interesting point that you made
#
is that in those early years, like after the partition of Bengal and kind of, you know,
#
Tagore and Aurobindo go their different ways, you have three fascinating books come out,
#
which are both indicative of the changing tide, as it were. And one of them is, you know, Tilak's
#
narration of the Bhagavad Gita. One is Gandhi's Sinswaraj and one is Savarkar's book on the 1857
#
mutiny. Tell me why you kind of lump these two together as sort of creatures of the time and
#
what they indicate and what is the importance of these books? So these, thank you. That's,
#
I kind of forgotten about our book. I don't know about contemporary Indian politics. You drag me
#
back. So yeah, the Bhagavad Gita is a monumental commentary by him after, as I said, you know,
#
it breaks down, it breaks apart the kind of liberal contractualism of, but also it is,
#
the Congress has split for the first time in its history over the liberals and moderates as you
#
described in the Kichakward play. And it's a debate between Gokhale and Tilak and over, you know,
#
means of political action. Coming out of that moment, he then produces, as I said, the question
#
of the Gita, the question of war. And the book is a sellout success, you know. And I wanted to say,
#
when you were speaking about Kichakward, one of the reasons that epics, particularly the parables
#
from the Mahabharat, become such a potent site for conveying political messages. So, you know,
#
censorship is in, you know, censorship is oppressive in India in the 1870s, 80s and 90s.
#
So the work of politics is really policed. Bizarrely, or as a result, the realm of religion
#
is not policed by the imperial surveillance structure, which allows religion a fair degree
#
of autonomy in relative to the political sphere, which is why these ideas are conveyed also through
#
this register, quite apart from them being popular and the like. But there's a kind of ability to,
#
there's a space to do it, which is not there in the conventional political sphere, as we understand.
#
Anyway, that was just a kind of way to say that that's why there is this way in which this form
#
of political communication takes place. But by, so the failure of Swadeshi, you have this, but,
#
you know, Savarkar is in London in that period. In fact, he's in the early 1900s. He is sitting
#
in Hampstead, which, you know, in one of the most foremost secret societies of that period,
#
Shyamji Krishna Verma was a patron of these secret societies and Abhinav Bharat, you know,
#
is his secret society in, is sitting in London, where Madanlal Dhingra is also a member and who
#
would then shoot Kers and Wiley. And, you know, that's, you know, the beginning of kind of a more
#
international stage for this politics. And Savarkar is explicitly involved in writing
#
the history of the Indian mutiny by using the same sources that British imperial historians had used.
#
So the date itself is significant, 1907, because Cairo and all these people are also
#
pretty worried because it's the 50th anniversary of the Indian mutiny. And Savarkar wants to write
#
a book precisely in, as an assessment by an Indian through those very imperial records of the same
#
thing. So his account is radical, but it's not as radical as we would think. I mean, you know,
#
there is space for Muslims, but it's not like, so there is some continuity. There's a continuity
#
in Savarkar's oeuvre because he will always give war a very significant role as a driver in history.
#
War and violence mean a lot, but also another theme that I developed, secrecy. Secrecy would
#
matter to him. And which is why the RSS would also initially would form like a secret society,
#
which I write about. So these are all Savarkars. And so I think these are formative because they're
#
all reacting to that 50th year moment. Gandhi is reacting actually to Hind Swaraj in to these
#
figures he has encountered in Shyamji Krishnavarma's house in India, house in, in Hampstead.
#
Parel actually, Anthony Parel, who has written the kind of, you know, the kind of Cambridge edition
#
of Hind Swaraj, he's actually saying that the book is addressed to Savarkar. And so you have this
#
kind of, so there's a way in which that liberal story has come to an end, imperial liberal story
#
in Indian mindset has come to an end. And people are looking for new ideas in the aftermath of the
#
Swadeshi, but also in the 50th year of the Indian Mutiny. And so it's not a coincidence that these
#
three books are written within months of each other. Of course, both Savarkar's book and
#
Hind Swaraj would be banned, but precisely because I said the work of religion would be
#
allowed a degree of freedom under censorship. The Gita sells out, you know, it has multiple
#
editions within, within two years and translated in all sorts of languages, even a pocket book is
#
created. So it's a, it's a kind of a big, big book. It's a modular book for that. And it, you know,
#
it sets the terrain for, for several decades till Ambedkar comes and does something else with this
#
landscape. What I also found interesting was you talk about how Tilak turned away from liberalism
#
in the sense he had nothing to do with liberalism or freedom as something to aspire to anymore,
#
but he created what in your words is a new political theology. So, you know, I found this
#
phrasing really interesting later, you also sort of refer to Schmidt when you say as a controversial
#
as a controversial legal and political theorist Carl Schmidt famously stated all modern political
#
ideas and ideas of the state in particular are in effect secularized theological concepts.
#
So I've explained this. Okay. So I like the word political theology a lot. I prefer it to secularism
#
because I, a bit like Gandhi, I do think that you can't separate a human being's religion from
#
their politics. You can't really, it's an, it's an impossible demand. And so Schmidt shows in his
#
work, and actually this has now become very important again for all sorts of people like
#
legal theorists like Paul Kahn, but like all sorts of people to kind of say, well, actually,
#
so Schmidt actually says that modern political concepts in the West are really, they're basically
#
rationalized version or a hidden version or another version of theological, particularly
#
Judeo-Christian theological concepts. Yeah. And so therefore, you know, the word that we should be
#
using is political theology rather than secularization or, or, or any of that. Now, this is
#
something I think is fascinating because Tilak is normally understood to be someone who introduced
#
religion into the realm of politics in India, you know, and, but if you start by saying that these
#
are not separate spheres, then it's a no, that argument is a non-starter, but also as I was
#
explaining about the relative degrees of freedom and unfreedom between these two places. So what
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Tilak is therefore trying to do is really trying to convey politics, as I said, through a kind of
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the, the, the epic, the, the tradition, epic tradition, rather than a, a, a mythological epic
#
tradition in, in, in India. And the problem for actually India is the opposite that we don't have
#
enough of a veil on religion, it would seem. Yeah. We would see that there's too much religion
#
everywhere in our politics. And this is what frustrates Indian secularists. Yeah. And so I'm
#
interested in the interplay, the open interplay between religion and politics, rather than
#
seeking its separation or policing it. And so, which is why I could go and look at the
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Gita as a result as the text. And that's a text, you know, or the fact that I could even think of
#
Iqbal's philosophical history of Islam as a way of discovering a new republican history.
#
A new republican sentiment in Islam, which would be consequential. But if you were to just see this
#
as a pathology, then you will not, it would not, these would, you know, we will not have the,
#
I would not be able to write my book is what I'm saying. And, and, and, you know, so I think,
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yeah, so I'm interested in the open interplay between religion and politics,
#
rather than its policing. And because that's what history has shown us. And what then the law can
#
do about it is, is a different order of questions, which I've not addressed in this book, but in the
#
sense you could say that part of the problem of the Indian constitution is its default
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Hinduness as well. So though we are accustomed to debates around the uniform civil code and,
#
you know, well, you know, but history has already told us in the fifties that what was hardest to
#
reform was the Hindu code bill, that it was actually a big girl lost his political career
#
to that. He didn't lose his political career to some other problem. He lost it to reforming
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the Hindu code bill. And, and it only takes up to 2005 for women to inherit in India, you know.
#
So, you know, those debates, the question of how do you triangulate religion, politics and the law,
#
I think those debates need to take place in India. And they will take place because
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these UCC is forcing that discussion. But because we've always thought of it that,
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okay, religion and law, it probably just belongs to Muslims. Yeah. But it's, that's not the case. And,
#
and so, yeah, so I was interested in, yeah. So that's how I came to a political theological
#
understanding of what Tilak is doing or what, what even, but it's interesting that Hindutva
#
would depart from this way of thinking because Savarkar is not interested in religion.
#
Savarkar is not interested in Hinduness. He's an atheist. He's interested in, you know,
#
a particular way of, so his, his books don't have this kind of epic quality. They don't have this
#
kind of, you know, in fact, you know, people think, oh, you know, whether it's the various
#
mandirs or whatever, there's some sacred landscape, you know, the way people tend to think about it.
#
But that's not Savarkar at all. In fact, the whole idea is not about sacrality or religion or,
#
or even theology. It's a kind of pure, simple political Hinduness, which is a category of
#
political mastery. It is not a category of religious realization of power.
#
So I'm going to go back to the, you know, the early frame that you mentioned in your book,
#
which is that of the hedgehog, which was Schopenhauer's hedgehog. And then Freud took
#
it over and brought it up and fed it and nurtured it. And then Freud handed it over to you.
#
In my mind, that's kind of how it's going. So now, you know, what, through this beautiful metaphor,
#
what you kind of postulate is that, you know, the attention of our early freedom fighters
#
shifted from, you know, the foreigner, which is the Britisher from the colonial force,
#
whether they took it for granted or whether they assumed that that force would be gone at some
#
point to each other. And there was sort of this fraternal mingling and the one core consideration
#
there was violence, right? And I find the metaphor very beautiful, hedgehogs coming close together,
#
then prickling each other, pushing apart and all of that. So to take that forward, can you,
#
you know, talk about how from those decades, from the failure of our resistance to the partition of
#
Bengal, up until independence, what are the various ways in which the hedgehogs came together,
#
pushed away, came together, pushed away? And what do I can't, that's such a nice image. So thank you
#
for using that metaphor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So I'll be very trying to do it
#
quickly because I think I'm giving very long answers. So one of the ways to think about it
#
would be that these hedgehogs, or, you know, there's a big coalition after the Swadeshi
#
movement in the Ghadar movement, which is, you know, international, where there's even a
#
declaration of government of India in Kabul, where actually Muslims do a hijrat, large number
#
of Muslims leave India in Kabul only to be then sent back and then have a huge crackdown, you know.
#
So you have moments of, you know, coming together. And I think that the question of the hedgehog
#
question is most, how do I put it, most systematically and most sustained way, really
#
discussed by Gandhi and Ambedkar and their fight, which I've elaborated on whether we can live
#
together, what are the conditions of living together, the question of extimacy, what might
#
be the right folks. So Gandhi, it's an extimacy. For Ambedkar, it is a kind of recognition that
#
actually there is a huge amount of civil war. The reasons these hedgehogs are apart, these hedgehogs
#
might be apart, but they're apart as in the cast because this is a chasm of violence that has
#
ensured that they are separate. This is not they're separate because they are just hurting each other
#
because of their intimacy. He's saying there is no intimacy between castes and, you know, and there's
#
a, and that lack of intimacy is produced by violence, by a civil war in Indian history,
#
and which is repeated now. He uses a word, you know, that the Nazis could learn from the Hindus,
#
he says in his books, because, you know, they don't even have to display their violence now
#
to have control over it. So you have this story, you know, this question of closeness, violence,
#
intimacy, fraternity, and sovereignty, which is the life and death question. Who controls the state,
#
who controls the power of life over others? That is what sovereign power is. And for that, the answer
#
always also then, then Ambedkar steers away from the hands of, you know, for want of a better word,
#
from Gandhi's death politics, individual death politics, and, you know, more about moving it
#
towards Republican order, like, and as I said, the democratic formation. But I think the moment of
#
the real head comes to it in the partition violence. And there, you know, I think Patel's
#
owning of this idea that this is a fratricide, it is a civil war, allows him to kind of reorder
#
that violence into a kind of new Republican form, which is to say that this violence to me,
#
I revise the study of partition violence as simply something that history does to people,
#
because I'm very critical of, well, let's use a less negative word. I'm very surprised that people
#
think that in this, this narration of partition violence, everyone is a victim. Yeah. No one has
#
perpetrated that violence. How is that possible? You know, a million people die. So that's why I
#
was interested in seeing its political nature. So it was seen to be a guilt free violence on the
#
one side. And another side, it was seen to be something that history extracted out of people,
#
the price of history, or it was seen as a blame game, you know, Jinnah, Patel, Heru, you know,
#
the British, a kind of revolving game. And actually, when you read about it, you see how
#
actually it worked, where the crowd, much like lynch mobs today, acquire the status of semi
#
sovereigns, you know, because they can hide their anonymous agency, they're kind of, you know, you
#
know, it's not like a homicide or a murder where, you know, you can, you know, ultimately get a
#
figure culpable, you know, precisely the crowd allows you to kind of hide in yourself. But at
#
the same time, it becomes a semi sovereign because it kills without impunity. You know, it kills,
#
you know, it just kills. And it is a particular structure to partition violence, which I explain
#
that takes place and that form is repeated everywhere. And really, partition violence is
#
the form of violence from which an externality is produced out of an intimacy, how to make
#
something which is internal to you, intimate to you, how to make it not foreign, but external.
#
And that's why it is so violent. That is precisely why it is so violent, because it has to expunge,
#
externalize something which is so deeply intimate, known, implicated. And yeah, so I would see that
#
story as that. And as a kind of, when the hedgehogs really, you know, have a kind of, you know, huge
#
huge kind of bus stop and then there is, yeah. And these hedgehogs are still dancing today,
#
right? So, you know, my question, therefore, is that we read your book gives us another lens
#
through which to look at our history and to look at these figures and so on and so forth.
#
And you've described the jostling of the hedgehogs really well just now when you,
#
you know, brought us all the way up to partition. But these jostlings are happening today. We still
#
have these hedgehogs as it were. And I'm very of using the word extimacy because all these pictures
#
will come into my head. What have you done? But so, you know, when we look at modern times,
#
and you have also spoken about how you make it a point to come to India to also engage with what
#
is happening around you and so on and so forth. You know, what are the lessons we can learn in
#
two different ways? One, as just concerned citizens who are looking around us and seeing
#
what is happening. From the prism that you build of looking at Indian history, how can we see
#
present times better? That's question number one. And question number two is that as actors in this
#
drama in whatever limited roles we have as citizens or some people may be public intellectuals and so
#
on, you know, what are the interventions that are possible? What can be done?
#
No, thank you. Tough questions. So one, I'll start with a very pessimistic note,
#
which is that the Constitution will not save us. And this is the problem. And that it's actually,
#
which is why, you know, I've been very critical of books that have celebrated the Indian Constitution,
#
not because it's not worth celebrating as a document, it is, but it no longer
#
is now, it's not capable. It has not, you can fetishize it as you did, you know, in the CAA
#
and all of that, you know, protests and so on. But there is something going on with Indian democracy,
#
which, which is, it feels almost as if democracy and India's Constitution are in parallel.
#
And they're not the same thing at all. So for one, I would say that one can't read the story
#
of India's democracy through its Constitution, which is a habit our public intellectuals have,
#
our scholars have, and what, and certainly our activists have. And, you know, it's more like you
#
can own the Constitution, you can fight over the ownership of the Constitution, but the
#
Constitution in itself is not going to resolve the situation. Yeah, that's, that's the first thing.
#
The second thing is that I think that there's been a huge innovation in the theory and practice of
#
violence in the last 10 years. I would, you know, since, since sort of 2014. So, okay, let's start
#
with the 2000s, actually since Gujarat, so Gujarat, but also, so it was interesting that the so-called
#
weak government of Manmohan Singh saw very few riots in India. It was a peaceful decade, maybe a
#
decade of corruption, but not a decade of riots, violence, insurgencies, and counterinsurgencies
#
that, you know, we associated certainly with earlier Congress eras of the seventies and eighties.
#
But, so it was a new kind of UPA, new kind of Congress in the 2000s, which, which is interesting,
#
which has not been written about, to be honest. So that requires some thinking about, but post,
#
post that violence has taken a different form in the sense that lynch mobs are not the, so we've
#
seen a down, fewer riots, fewer riots, but many more lynch mobbings. And that in a way is almost
#
a different kind of theory of violence because it cuts across, I mean, it, it kind of, it just kind
#
of breaks the basic compact between the subject and the state, between the citizen and the state.
#
Which is to say, one-on-one, you know, just kind of politics one-on-one lesson that, you know,
#
we as individuals live under a state. Why? We give a bit of our individual freedom. We are not going
#
to be in a state of nature and just kind of might, you know, mightest is, you know, you know, is the
#
strongest is going to brute force or any of that. Because yes, we will flourish and also we will get
#
some security. The idea is that, you know, there is a kind of physical security in giving up
#
a little bit of our natural rights of whatever they may be. Now, something like lynch mobs is not
#
like a riot, which is a collective act of, you know, it's a collective act of many things.
#
Lynch mobs in a way are going into the basic compact, but when you look at it, you know,
#
lynch mobs in a way are going into the basic compact, but when you, you individual and the
#
state and breaking it by actually entering your home, you know, as happened with the clock,
#
the first lynch mobbing is actually breaking, breaching. It's not taking place in the street.
#
And then someone coming to your house, they've come straight to your house.
#
And so it's a, it's a, you know, it means a different, there's a different kind of,
#
it means different things for Indian democracy is what I'm saying. And I mean, I think
#
the difficulty for me is to ask the question whether a politics of conviction is possible
#
in India. So the question to ask to with me would, for me to be, would be like,
#
is it a politics of conviction possible in India or is conviction now totally exhausted by Hindutva?
#
Right. So you have Hindutva politics, which is highly ideological. You believe in ABC, you have
#
XYZ things to hate, ABC things to love, you know, it's a pretty clear project. Yeah.
#
And then you have, as it were, caste parties where people are like, okay, many, you know,
#
OBC groups, Dalit groups. I mean, great, but there is no politics of conviction. Where is
#
the space for a politics of conviction? That's what I'm interested in. And where will it come
#
from? And I think that is now a challenge for something like the Congress because a Congress
#
story has dissipated in the last 40, 50 years, precisely because of multi-party democracy.
#
So the founding figures could contain a large number of these political projects under a broad
#
tent in the fifties, in the sixties, precisely because the work of nation building and something
#
else took precedence, but also there was less democratic competition. Now there is much more
#
democratic competition, but at the same time, there is also a kind of exclusionary violence
#
associated with the project of Hindu nationalism, which has a huge amount of social mandate.
#
You can't say that this is just a bunch of thugs coming and doing it. A lot of people are
#
backing it. And I just wanted to show in my book that actually these figures have thought about
#
all these problems, that they had actually navigated the question of violence and politics more than
#
we had given credit to them because we thought India's story of freedom was primarily nonviolent.
#
My pessimistic sense would be that as things stand today, there is simply no politics of
#
conviction in India today. Maybe it might emerge, who knows. And I want to also double down on what
#
you said and I agree with totally, and I know many people disagree with us on this, that I agree that
#
the constitution will not save us. And I give a couple of reasons for this. One is that the
#
constitution is completely irrelevant to society and what's happening around us. And a classic
#
example of this is this hijab controversy, where I think we often kind of get diverted into either
#
focusing on the aspect of is hijab good or bad, which to me is not relevant to this at all.
#
And the other question is, are constitutional rights should be protected, which is also not
#
relevant to this at all. I think the central issue here is the hate for Muslims. That is a
#
central issue here. That is the force that is popping up at different parts of our society all
#
of the time. And that's what we need to counter and the constitution will not help us. And one
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reason is the constitution is irrelevant to society. And the second reason is the constitution is not
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what many of us think it is. The constitution, there's this famous cartoon where somebody goes
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to the parliament bookstore and says, can I have a copy of the constitution? And the person replies,
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sorry, sir, we only stock books, not periodicals. That it has been defaced so often, starting from
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the time of Nehru, that it no longer is what it once was, which is why Ambedkar said I would like
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to burn it. And it does not protect any of our rights, including our right to free speech or to
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dissent. I mean, it was Nehru who brought the sedition law back after the court stuck it down
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as unconstitutional. So I share your pessimism of the constitution there. You have any thoughts to
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add to that or shall I move on to my final couple of questions? No, no, please move, please move.
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So a couple of questions right at the end. And one is what used to be the last question I would
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ask all my guests, but I stopped asking because nobody was hopeful anymore. But since I warned
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you about it, I might as well ask you that from a historian's perspective, it is possible for
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somebody like me, who may not study history so deeply, to sit around here and to look at the
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current times and be extremely negative or for someone else who believes in the political project
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that is happening to feel the opposite way. But you have a historian sweep of history where
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you've seen decades and centuries pass by in a flash in your mind's eye. So if you are to say,
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think of India 15 years from now, like 2037, what's the best case scenario and what's the
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worst case scenario from there? What would you be, what would you hope for and what would you be
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fearful of? So I would be fearful of a full on Hindu state, only because India is too diverse
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and it would require not so much control of violence, but the deployment of violence to produce it. And
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so that project to me is not simply a majoritarian project of democracy, but a project of a certain
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form of politics of violence, which Gandhi knew so well. And it's not, it's not coincidental
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that it's really his assassination, which puts an end to the civil war of partition. So, you know,
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people had been killing and killing and killing for, you know, months. If you start with 46 and
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direct action dates, it's almost, you know, a year and a half to almost to it. So, so my, my worry
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would be the realization of the Hindu state as a, through a kind of both the control, the dispersal
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of violence, the displacement of violence through the deployment of violence. And so that would be,
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I think, a bad thing for India, because India is also very diverse. It will not, even if that
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fantasy came to be true, it would require kind of violence that is unprecedented in human history.
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It's not simply to India, it would be unprecedented in human history, because
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just, you know, the numbers of Indians involved, the number of Muslims, number of Dalits, you know,
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it's a big, big society. So what would I be hopeful of? What would I be hopeful of is, yeah,
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a politics of conviction that actually, let's be honest and say there are two ideas of India.
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Yeah. So let's have two national parties, really, like a fight between two major ideas. At the
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moment, we don't have that. Our party structure is, the history of Indian party structure has
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unfolded, even with Indira Gandhi's and the like, even with, you know, Nehru even starting,
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you had, as it were, one national party, and then you had regional federated parties, regional
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parties that can come as a front, you know, and now the role has reversed because you have the BJP
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as a national political force and you have regional parties. But can we actually have a party
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politics, which is bipartisan to major national parties if there are really two ideas of India,
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which I think there are, and, you know, and, and of course the regional party should also have to
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have, I'm not saying it should be either or, the regional party should also exist. That's not what
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I'm saying. So I'm interested in a kind of politics of conviction to see whether there'll be two
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national parties in India. And if there are, then there is hope, then there is real hope, because
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then you can have a contestation, you know, like with Trump, you know, after four years, he left,
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he had to go, you know, but otherwise I also think some of the, some of the chauvinism cringe has to
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go in India, you know, it's too, so people go from one extreme to another. Everything has happened,
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you know, you know, as I said, nuclear weapons in the medicaid. So like, what are we doing now?
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Right. So why bother? Like we are just declining in that case, right. We're just a declining
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civilization if, you know, we've had all of this, you know, so we have that, or we are always like
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a kind of, like a kind of superior isolationism, like we don't care about the West yet. We want
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its approval all the time. And you're seeing that a lot at the moment in India, you know,
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whether it's its foreign policy, whether it's, you know, so anyway, it's an interesting time
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because China, you know, there are many things happening by the time, in 15 years time, if I'm
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alive, if, you know, we should have this conversation again, because, you know,
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I think the world map is going to look very different. The world political order map is
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going to look very different. That's fascinating. And that's a promise I will hold you to that 15
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years later. If both of us are still around, we'll definitely have a conversation. And so I want to,
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I want to kind of then end with the final question for all my guests, which is that I'd like you to
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recommend for my listeners and for me, you know, books or films or music that you absolutely love
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and you'd like to share with the world. It need not necessarily be related to, you know, your field
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of study, or it could be no, no boundaries at all. But what are, what would you take with you to a
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desert island? Like what has given you real joy and knowledge and illumination in your life?
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So I think Freud has been an abiding interest of mine. And in fact, he's, it's the first piece of
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book, actually a full book I read cover to cover as a teenager in, in Chandigarh. And so he's
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remains, and he's a very good writer, you know, even though he's been sort of not always been
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helped by good translators. I think he, there's something very literary about his writing,
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because it's about human experience, emotions, but also big things like political leadership and,
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and God even. So I really enjoy him. And in terms of, I'm not, I mean, I'm somewhat ashamed to say
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that I'm not a huge fiction writer, reader, given that my mother was a fiction, you know,
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wrote fiction. And, and I don't know whether it's my resistance to my mother, because I'm a very
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avid reader of newspapers, magazines, nonfiction, I consume, like, as if people you're watching a
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film or something. So I think, so having said that, there's a kind of brilliant memoir written by a
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South Asian woman who recently died, Sarah Soleri. Her memoir is called Meatless Days. And it's about
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living in Lahore during Ramzan, but also about a constricted kind of life, but which leads to,
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to imagination. And it's very witty. And it's written by a woman. There are very few memoirs,
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which were, you know, which were kind of resonant, given that I grew up in a kind of Punjab and
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Chandigarh, which was what we call locked down today. But, you know, it was kind of, you know,
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it was very restricted. It was, you couldn't really do much. There wasn't much of a social life
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to be had. And her book really spoke to me. And then I discovered when I went to Jamie,
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that she was actually a very eminent academic. Today, it's pre-internet days, so you couldn't
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really Google search anyone. So, you know, in a way, there was a kind of mystery to a writer
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in some ways. And I enjoyed finding out that she was, she was a very brilliant academic as well.
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And then of course, I love, I absolutely love Rohiton mysteries books. And again, very much
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on politics of India, but also how personally, you know, things. So for an earlier generation,
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or for some people, Rushdie has been such a huge impact. And I think there was something to his
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writing in a way that it predated or prefigured what historians would do later with partition,
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for instance, right? I mean, the Midnight's Children, but also Shame, amazing book. Shame
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is his wonderful book, Moore's Last Sign, amazing, amazing books. But I was less moved by him. And I
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don't, I don't know why, whereas maybe Rohiton mystery more about post-colonial India spoke
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directly to me. And so I think these are the people I would take, but in terms of cinema,
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also you asked me, you know, you asked me what films and stuff. And, you know, in JNU, great
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thing about JNU was that there were lots of people who were interested in films and you would,
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they would know when the film festivals were coming. So you would actually get on a bus
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and go to Allianz or go to the German Institute and spend days on end, seeing three films a day,
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four films a day, you know? And so I saw all the great European art house cinema in a kind of
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binge watching, you know, what you'd call binge watching today. And my favorite, favorite film,
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all time favorite film is actually by a German filmmaker by Herzog. And it's called Aguirre,
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The Wrath of God. And it's a brilliant film on colonialism, but also on the kind of very
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inherent crime, a human crime that kind of constitutes not just colonialism, but you could
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say what, you know, settlement of human life, civilization and the rest. It's a brilliant film.
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And just as I was mentioning Rushdie, it struck me that the current Indian cinema, Hindi cinema,
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particularly of the last eight, 10 years is a bit like what fiction, English fiction was
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about 40 years ago, which is that it could look at things in advance and tell us what's going on
#
in Indian society or politics. And I've really enjoyed, say, a film like Massan, which was so
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ahead of its, not just ahead of its time, it so brought so forcefully a universal experience of
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women in India, you know, but also of human relations again, you know, men, women, cast
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and sexuality, parents, children. I thought it was a brilliant film. But in a more serious,
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not serious, but I mean, I'm a great consumer of Hindi cinema on everything. I watch a lot of
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stuff, but a film again that struck, I haven't seen it in almost 20 years, but the film that
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has always is very profound for my becoming a historian was actually a very abstract film
#
by Kumar Shahani. It was a film called Khayal Gaatha. And I had actually, again in Chandigarh,
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through my sister, my brother and I, but also a bunch of our friends, we were quite serious
#
students of Hindustani classical music. And we were taught by someone who was a direct disciple
#
of Kumar Gandharv. And so we would actually go, I mean, I've even performed, it surprises me,
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I used to perform at state functions and the like. I mean, we were quite serious,
#
but I had given up on music for very many reasons. But this film is actually not about,
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not simply the history of Khayal, but really the history of India it shows. And it's a very
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abstract, there's very little dialogue, but it's a stunning film. And I would love to see it again,
#
because again, it talks about India's sort of last millennium, which has been so controversial to
#
politics today. And it shows the Hindu Muslim world, and yet it's not preachy. It's not either
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preachy. And it shows it through, and it actually made me really think that history could be
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creative. History's always been, it has satisfied the side of politics in me and a sense of argument,
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because historians really argue, Indian historians love to argue. But there was something also very
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creative and very human in the story that Khayal Gatha shows through really lavish depiction,
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quiet, but lavish depiction. So I would sort of, I like thoughtful films, let's put it like that,
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films that stay. I don't like very messagey films. But I also like, I like hardcore entertainment
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as well. I like Mirzapur. I like Patal Lok. I'll watch anything in some ways,
#
and certainly to do with Indian politics. So yeah, I would say I have this kind of interest.
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And historians, you know, though Bernard Cohen, Bernard Cohen is the first one that I really read
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properly and was a big, the first book I actually bought with my own money. I think historians,
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my tastes change. Even my philosopher's tastes change. You know, 10 years ago, I used to read
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a lot of Foucault and now, you know, maybe not, you know. So yeah, so things, they change. But
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because you asked me such a big question, I thought I should give you books and films that
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have stayed with me, which I will actually watch again and again. Yeah, it's a fascinating answer.
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I can't wait to dive deep into this. I mean, and you know, this is the point I often keep making
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is that, listen, individuals, all of us contain multitudes. And the fact that you should be able
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to mention Freud and Mirzapur in the same, you know, answer kind of speaks for a lot. And you
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mentioned Herzog. I love Herzog. And what's interesting about Herzog is that he's one of
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those rare feature filmmakers who then also shifted to, who then shifted to documentary
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filmmaking and was a master at that as well, which is a bit rare because people kind of place those
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on a hierarchy in their minds. And once they are making feature films, they're just kind of happy
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with that. And Herzog almost moved in the other direction and did some great documentaries as
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well. And, you know, you mentioned Sara Soleri, an academic of repute who also wrote memoirs.
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And I've had so much fun talking to you in this episode that I wish you do that also someday.
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Thanks so much, Amit. Yours is really, how can I say, you're one of the best conversationalists
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ever. And it's a shame we haven't really met, given that we were in Chandigarh together at
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some point as children. And I hope we will, you know, life will give us the occasion to meet at
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some point. Absolutely. Inshallah. Thank you so much for your time. Total pleasure. Thank you.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
#
and pick up Violent Fraternity Indian Political Thought in the Global Age.
#
Besides writing this book, Shruti has also edited a couple of influential books, which are linked
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from the show notes. You can follow Shruti on Twitter at Shruti Kapila. That's one word. You
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can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the
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Unseen at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening. Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the
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Unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of the show? You can go over to
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