#
Human beings are frail and limited and the world is complex. We try to make sense of
#
this complicated world by telling ourselves stories about it, but these stories are always
#
too simple and can never contain more than a fraction of the truth. You would imagine
#
that this would lead us to be humble, to understand the limits of our own knowledge and our own
#
power. And yet, in our species, ignorance seems to go hand in hand with arrogance. The
#
less we know, the more we imagine we can control. The classic domain where this falls short
#
is the domain of economics. An economy, like a society or like language, cannot be designed
#
or controlled from the top down. It's an example of spontaneous order, or what Adam Ferguson
#
described as, quote, the result of human action, not human design. In other words, it's formed
#
from the bottom up, not the top down. Much like natural selection in the universe, as
#
I discussed in an old episode with Matt Ridley that I'll link from the show notes. Now, a
#
classic example of this hubris, which hurts because we in India have suffered from it,
#
is central planning. When we gained independence in 1947, our founders decided that the best
#
way to run our economy was from the top down. This was a fashion of the times. Yes, Frederick
#
Hayek published his great essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, in 1945, which explained
#
how a central planner could never have all the information needed to design the economy
#
and only the price system could do this efficiently from the bottom up. It's a masterpiece. I'll
#
link it from the show notes. Do read it. But Hayek was an outlier at the time, as were
#
Indian dissenters like B. R. Shanoi. People then thought planning was the way forward.
#
They assumed that the Soviet model was working for the Soviets. We now know it was a big
#
failure. And so we set up the planning commission, private enterprise was suppressed, and we
#
crawled forward as an economy while others left us far behind. Millions of people remained
#
in poverty for decades longer than they would have if private enterprise had been unleashed,
#
like say, in South Korea. The lesson here is not in specific things that the planning
#
commission did. The top down mindset itself was wrong. Many years later, Hayek would coin
#
the term the fatal conceit for this. And yes, it was conceit, and it was fatal. We eventually
#
changed course, unleashed the power of free enterprise in 1991, and brought hundreds of
#
millions of people out of poverty. But those in power today still commit the mistake of
#
thinking about the economy and society in a top down way, as do so many of our intellectuals.
#
And we need to look at the mistakes of the past, the disaster of our planning commissions,
#
not to assign blame or to attack this individual or that individual, but to learn from those
#
mistakes, to learn humility, to learn that society and economies cannot be designed from
#
the top down. Let us not land in that hell again.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is a historian, Nikhil Menon, who's
#
just written a superb book called Planning Democracy. This is a history of our planning
#
commission, but is also a story about fascinating human beings who were remarkable people, did
#
great things, but did not understand the limits of their abilities, went down some wrong paths,
#
made big mistakes. We see the brilliant P.C. Mahalon Abyss, a man almost trapped by his
#
own brilliance. He can solve small problems, so he makes a mistake of believing he can
#
solve big ones. He does this nation a favor by building a remarkable statistical ecosystem,
#
but he also harms it by imagining that data can be used to order the world. We see Jawaharlal
#
Nehru, a great leader with his own set of fatal flaws and his kind of cute bromance
#
with Mahalon Abyss. We see the petty politics and intrigue within the planning commission.
#
We see how Bollywood starts singing about five-year plans. We see the Congress party
#
cultivate a group of sadhus who are asked to promote planning in this world so they
#
can have peace in the next. There's some crazy shit going on. I enjoyed chatting with Nikhil
#
about his book, and about his life, so the first two and a half hours is really an oral
#
history of this fine young scholar. And we actually get to the book after that. I loved
#
all of this conversation, but before we get down to it, let's take a quick commercial
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love
#
to help you. Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of
#
Clear Writing. An online community has now sprung up of all my past students. We have
#
workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community interaction.
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing. There are many exercises, much interaction,
#
a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST,
#
or about $150, and is a monthly thing. So if you're interested, head on over to register
#
at indiancut.com slash clear writing. That's indiancut.com slash clear writing. Being a
#
good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard and a clear
#
idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Nikhil, welcome to
#
The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Thanks, Amit. Thank you so much for having me.
#
I had a great time reading your book, but let's, let's begin by kind of talking about
#
yourself. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Tell me about your early years.
#
I was born in Madras. It was then Madras, not Chennai. And I spent the first few years
#
of my life there. I have very little memories of that time because we soon moved because
#
of my father's job to Bombay, as it was then as well before Mumbai. Actually first to,
#
for a short period to Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, then to Pune, which is where my younger sister
#
was born, and then to, to Bombay. But my first real memories are of Pune and then of Bombay.
#
Still love the city based on the memories of a six and seven year old. So it's more
#
the affection or nostalgia rather than any learned sort of experience of the subject.
#
But I mean, it's, it's, the Bombay for me is the Bombay of Kiss Me bars, which is something
#
that you used to get when you were, when I was young. This is still very early liberalization
#
of Bhel Puri, of Chowpatty Beach. But also there's sort of more ugly side of the riots
#
of 91, 92. I was only six. So I can't, you know, I don't have very clear memories, but
#
I do remember the sort of, I suppose children absorb this sense of fear that's around them.
#
And I remember when my father was out of town because he had a sort of sales job that, that
#
took him traveling for long periods in the month. The women and children would be locked
#
inside the house and the men folk would go upstairs. If there's any sort of band of rioters
#
that came by, they would throw stones down on them. And so I remember that fear of my
#
mother and me and my very sort of toddler sister being locked inside the house. That
#
is a sort of memory I have. But yeah, so those are my sort of early years in, in Mumbai. And
#
then after which we all moved back to Madras, which is, was home for both my parents as
#
well. And so I had the luxury of now having both sets of grandparents around. And I think
#
in some ways my, my love for book toddler sister being locked inside the house, that
#
is a sort of a memory I have where.
#
So tell me a bit about your grandparents and the love for books. Like what were they like?
#
What kind of books did you have lying around? How did you kind of gradually get into the
#
world of reading as it were?
#
Yeah, I'd say that one set of my grandparents, my, my, my mother's parents weren't necessarily
#
bookish in that I don't remember in their house seeing too many books around or them
#
reading many books on a day-to-day basis. And that might be because my grandmother,
#
who was the more bookish of the two of the couple, she, she died when I was very young
#
and so I didn't get to interact with her. But, but I do know of stories from family
#
members about her, her love for learning. She, because of her life circumstances could
#
not study perhaps as much as she wanted to, but you know, her, her daughters certainly
#
have and her children have.
#
But it was the, my other set of my paternal grandparents, my, my grandfather worked, was
#
a journalist and he worked for a now defunct newspaper called the Madras Mail. And this
#
was, he worked for it before independence and then after as well. And he was the sort
#
of person that you'd always find with a book. He would go anywhere. When he would take me
#
for haircuts, he would carry a book along. When he was going on an auto rickshaw ride,
#
he would carry a book. It was almost a sort of source of comfort, a crutch almost. But
#
the books that, that, that he had around with the sort of books that I, I imbibe and I think
#
that after a point he would, he was enormously fond of me and I of him. But I suppose after
#
a point you don't want to be just telling, you know, children's stories. So he would
#
just read out to me whatever he was reading. And so these were then be the unabridged Sherlock
#
Holmes, all the entire series of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Then sometimes he would read
#
the Ramayan, the Mahabharat and explain those stories to me. That of course would be abridged
#
many times over to, to make it intelligible to me. And so I remember, I remember that
#
being associating books in some ways with, with him and his smell. He, you know, used
#
to use snuff. And so I remember associating books with that smell and with him and with
#
his, his dog, who he saved from death at a dog pound by, the story goes by, well, while
#
on there to do a story on dog pounds, he saw this one dog, Puppy, and who was so stiny
#
that he couldn't bear the thought of it being killed. And so he literally put it in his
#
shirt pocket and walked out. And so that dog, Sumi, would also be, apart from me, the other
#
listener to these stories. And so I think I associate in some ways, perhaps I associate
#
reading books with the, with those moments of being perfectly enraptured by my grandfather
#
reading a story, those smells being in my grandparents' house and having a dog by the
#
Wow. That's such a charming memory. And when you read those stories now, do you hear his
#
I, I do hear his voice. I hear his voice also when I often think of him, he also died when
#
I was young, but I often think of him, hear his voice when I am, I'm not a religious person,
#
but my parents are. And when we go to a temple or there's like a sort of puja or there's
#
something now, it used to be done for my benefit now, for my very young daughter's benefit.
#
I, I remember the prayers that he taught me, because those are the only prayers I know.
#
Just the, you know, the very standard Sri Ram Jayam, Om Namah Shivaya. And after the,
#
the Ganpati prayer, sort of knocking my forehead, that's something that he used to do. So I
#
sort of, I associate those things with him. And I also, yes, I do see his books at my
#
aunt's place. I made sure to have one copy of his books now sit with me on my, in my
#
bedroom on, along with, along with some other books in the US. And so it is, it is nice
#
to know that, that, that those very same books that he used to read out to me from, I have
#
to confess that I haven't gone back to reading all of Arthur Conan Doyle's oeuvre, but, but
#
it is, I suppose I was, I appreciate those stories more for the memories that they spark
#
rather than, you know, the, the stories themselves, which are wonderful, but.
#
So in your book, you, you know, described CD Deshmukh, Chintaman Deshmukh as a rooted
#
cosmopolitan, which is a fascinating phrase. And, and the first time I heard it, it was
#
used by one of my earlier guests, Sugata Srinivasaraju, you know, describing himself. And, and I
#
thought to myself that, you know, I am cosmopolitan, but I don't feel quite so rooted, but I admire
#
those who are. It's something that I envy because I think there is something in that,
#
like in Deshmukh's case, you wrote quote, he was a rooted cosmopolitan combining Anglicized
#
sophistication with Brahmanical learning and so on. You, you go on to elaborate on that.
#
And it strikes me that your grandfather then also was a little bit like that in the sense
#
that he's reading out these Aadha Kanandal stories. And at the same time, he's taught
#
you prayers and shlokas and all of that. So tell me a little bit about sort of, you know,
#
was that rooted cosmopolitanism as it were, these different worlds coexisting harmoniously,
#
was that a part of your growing up and did it shape you in any way? Would you say that
#
that's what you are as well? Or do you feel you're more, you know, one or the other?
#
I certainly would not describe myself as that. I don't think I'm nearly quite as rooted in
#
terms of my intellectual traditions. I would like to think I'm cosmopolitan. The fact that
#
I at least have family across different places means that in some definitional way I am,
#
I would like to think that I aspire to intellectual cosmopolitanism as well. And so it is an aspiration.
#
And I think that yes, C.D. Deshmukh certainly was. And though I hadn't thought about it,
#
my grandfather certainly fits the bill as well. Somebody who was very comfortable speaking
#
in three languages, could read and write in three languages, Tamil and Malayalam, and
#
English, of course, which was the mode in which he did his job as a journalist. But
#
also someone who, as you say, apart from just linguistic ability, which I lack. I mean,
#
I don't have the ability in quite the same way as him to reflexively think in different
#
languages. I don't think in different languages. I can read and speak Hindi, and I can understand
#
Malayalam and Tamil, but I'm not comfortable writing in those languages as my grandfather
#
certainly was. And certainly I would not put even my grandfather at the level of someone
#
like C.D. Deshmukh, who really was a translator of Sanskrit texts into Marathi and into English
#
as well. And so he really was a root cosmopolitan. But also from the face of it, he would just
#
look extremely anglicized. This is a quite dapper looking man who was trained in Bombay
#
and then topped the ICS exams and then was trained at Cambridge as well. And so he would
#
seem like the kind of person who you would think of as deracinated, but actually was
#
very rooted. And I have an admiration for that. Not to fetishize being rooted, but it's
#
just that the way I was brought up, unfortunately, was at a time in which the emphasis on English
#
was so much that I think that my parents felt that that was the most important thing. And
#
I understand those choices, absolutely. But I do wish, for example, that I had greater
#
facility in my mother tongue, Malayalam, which as the years go by without any grandparent
#
alive anymore, I can see the sort of inevitable almost erosion of that entire world. Luckily
#
I speak, my parents live in Tamil Nadu and in Chennai, and so there's a sort of cognate
#
language that I'm familiar with. But it is in a sense that I can see that in a decade
#
or two, I wonder how many people I would ever be able to speak in Malayalam to. I could
#
hold a conversation with my grandparents, which now I think would increasingly be hard.
#
And that is a loss that I feel, and a loss in some ways that is greater than the fact
#
that I don't live physically in India. Because my work's in India, I visit often enough.
#
But I think that I do have a great admiration for linguistic capabilities because I wonder
#
often if there are things that are non-translatable and cultural textures that come from only
#
inhabiting certain linguistic frames. And I wonder if the fact that I maybe can claim
#
to possess that only in one language, what does that lead to? Even though in Hindi I'm
#
quite comfortable, I can read, I follow Hindi popular culture. But I still wonder, especially
#
outside of those two languages, I wish I was one of those people who could speak six languages
#
from different continents. That is something that I admire.
#
Yeah, and I often think about how those of us who are in India are so lucky to be here
#
in the sense that, one, there is no shortage of experiences and stories and textures all
#
around you. And two, there are so many languages and all of these languages are windows into
#
different kinds of worlds and experiences, right? And most Indians in some way or the
#
other are multilingual. One thing I've noted is that most of the guests on the show, and
#
it's a limitation, are English-speaking elites like myself. And for many of us, we've been
#
brought up in this sort of English-speaking elite bubble where we have a view from within
#
the bubble and a lot of the mistaken notions about India that I had, that we are broadly
#
liberal, that we are broadly tolerant, that we are broadly secular, were I later realized
#
with Time Falls. But the few of my guests who actually grew up speaking, a number of
#
guests like Sivash Raya, Rahul Verma, they grew up reading Hindi newspapers, exposed
#
to that world. And from there, I often get another perspective that is actually closed
#
off to English-speaking elites like myself. Like I remember, I've done a couple of episodes
#
with Aakar Patel, and in the first of them, my thesis, which he agreed with, is that there
#
is no such thing as a right-wing intellectual culture in India. It's really, it's all intellectual
#
tradition, rather. It's really all bigotry, and you can cloak it in the language of conservatism,
#
but there's nothing there. And I later realized, speaking to other guests, that I was wrong.
#
And the reason I felt that way was because all my reading was in English, and I was going
#
by what I had read there. But if you read much more in the languages, you realize that
#
there was a vibrant right-wing intellectual tradition. And I might not agree with it.
#
Some of it might even repulse me. And some of it, you know, one can learn from. But it's
#
coherent. It's there. And we were blind to all of it, as much as we were blind to sort
#
of our country in that sense. And I wonder if, and which is why I was sort of interested
#
in your, you know, your grandfather being that kind of a person who was immersed in
#
both cultures. Because I think the point of being a rooted cosmopolitan is not so much,
#
you know, achieving excellence in different languages like Mr. Deshmukh did, or even being
#
able to read and write in multiple languages. But simply being exposed to that, being exposed
#
to those currents, even if you're not particularly, you know, well versed in a language or whatever.
#
And I looked through the acknowledgments of your book, for example, and the people you've
#
named. And some of them have been on my show. And so many of them I've read and heard of.
#
But it seems like a small group. It seems like, again, a small elite group of people,
#
very similar background, so on and so forth. So just, you know, being in these circles,
#
what is your sense of this? Do you feel that the scholars within this ecosystem, for no
#
individual fault of theirs, can nevertheless have blindnesses about the country, things
#
that are unseen to them, given that it's a close group of people with similar backgrounds
#
and so on and so forth?
#
Yeah, I think that there is, in some ways, it is inescapable. I think in whatever, in
#
whatever part of the income distribution that you are born and raised in, or whatever intellectual
#
traditions that you just happen is your milieu, I think that you are likely to be corseted
#
by it, to be shaped by it. And so I think that what's important is to acknowledge its
#
limitations. But I don't think, I think that there's a danger sometimes in it, in self-flagellation,
#
in sort of rejecting what you have, because it is limited. I would, I would contend that
#
anybody has those limitations. The question is whether you're open to sort of opening
#
some windows in that bubble, such that there are streams of other thought that can come
#
in, that you are willing to open the door and step out sometimes as well. And so, and
#
I think that even amongst English speaking elites or elites of any kind, there can be,
#
so for example, in American politics, which I'm assuming at least Indian listeners are
#
much less passionate about, and so maybe we can think about it in less, without retreating
#
into tribal corners. In American politics, you have very, two parties that are ideologically
#
very different, but both represent elites, right? And so it isn't as if there isn't
#
groupthink, that there is only groupthink within a certain liberal elite. I think there
#
can be groupthink in all kinds of elites. And so, and I also don't think that in the
#
case of India, it is necessarily the case that, that the English speaking elite always
#
was fooled into thinking that it represented the nation. So for example, Gandhi certainly
#
did not think so. Nehru, who is seen as the epitome of this kind of liberal elite, anglicized
#
elite, all of Discovery of India is about how alien he feels, right? About how he realizes
#
that this is not the country. And in some ways, I think that the work of the early generation,
#
the first generation of the post-colonial India, across political parties, all of them
#
concede that the nation needs to be tutored into their ideas, especially if you are on
#
the liberal end of the spectrum. In the writings of Nehru, certainly, like every public speech
#
is basically a concession that the public does not believe in these things. Ambedkar,
#
for example, cried himself hoarse talking about how, you know, he said, as he said at
#
one of his perhaps his last speech at the Consul General Assembly, that this is only
#
a top-solved democracy that we have on an otherwise extremely undemocratic land. And
#
I think what he was conceding is that people like him, people who had the views and influences
#
of Locke and Dewey and the sort of the liberal canon, that is not shared by, in fact, he
#
felt it's not even shared by the English speaking elite, right, by much of the Congress
#
as well. And so I think that there is an admission that this is not shared by others. And in
#
some ways, I think that what allowed that generation to be cognizant of it is the fact
#
that it was so infinitesimally narrow, right, that you could not but recognize that there
#
were only so few people who shared it. Whereas I think with India's growth and with education
#
growing and with English speaking becoming more accessible, even though it still is preserved
#
the elite, but the elite itself has expanded, right, just in terms of magnitude and a percentage
#
of the population. I think that now it's easier to fool yourself into thinking that it actually
#
represents a fair amount of India, whereas it doesn't. And so I think it's ironic that
#
at a time in which India was less, had a narrower elite, that that elite was more aware of the
#
limitations of that milieu than perhaps later on.
#
I was at a conference recently where people were, you know, having grand conversations
#
about how we can change India and so on and so forth. And one of the academics present
#
there used a phrase that didn't quite resonate with me in the sense that she said that we
#
need to educate the people. And I absolutely hated that phrase because it just seems so
#
paternalistic and patronizing that we need to educate the people, like we know everything,
#
we know nothing. And you just spoke about how Nehru quote unquote he realized that people
#
need to be tutored in his beliefs. And I think that approach that elites have often had is
#
one reason why I think they are justifiably derided today. That, you know, you pass judgment
#
on the rest of the people, you say, we know best, we are going to teach you, we are going
#
to show you how to live your lives. You know, even the notion of the constitution that why
#
is it so sprawling? You know, Madhav's theory, of course, is that it's also a pedagogic document
#
that you need to teach the people how to think and how to live and all of that. And I think
#
there is, you know, a paternalistic strain to that, that is bound to not end well as
#
we sort of, as we sort of see today. And what I see today is that we had a liberal constitution
#
imposed on an illiberal society, a relatively liberal constitution, not as liberal as I
#
think either of us would perhaps like, but relatively liberal, imposed on an illiberal
#
society. And politics has caught up with society today. And this was perhaps inevitable given
#
this sort of top-down thinking that we shall tutor them. And in fact, your book is about
#
a particular manifestation of that kind of top-down thinking, which is really fascinating.
#
So when you sort of look at all these characters, and you've written so much about not just
#
Nehru but also Mahalan Abyss in your book, and one of the things I really enjoyed about
#
your book is how the parts of them are such acute character studies of these interesting
#
people with, you know, their fatal conceits, as it were, and all the flaws that they had.
#
And do you feel that this was a fatal flaw? You know, that maybe Gandhi took it too far
#
when he idealized villages, which as Ambedkar correctly said were, you know, dens of localism
#
and vice and prejudice and all of that. But Gandhi did have a point where he said that
#
you need to change society from the bottom up. You can't sit in your little ivory tower
#
and say we will tutor the people, we will educate the people.
#
I mean, firstly, I should say that I've never been to a conference where the title was How
#
to Change India. No, this wasn't the title. Okay, but that was the subject being discussed.
#
Yeah, I mean, you know, the pompous people will get together and say, yeh karna chahiye,
#
wo karna chahiye, you know, that kind of thing. Right.
#
I'd say that paternalism, I'd agree with your characterization of what you say is in Madhav
#
Khosla's book that the Constitution is a pedagogic document. I'd say that in some ways the Nehruvian
#
era is marked by that kind of pedagogic instinct. It's apparent in his speeches and his writings
#
that and that reflected a view amongst the Congress at the time that if you needed to
#
have a liberal democracy with all of its limitations that in a country that is actually deeply
#
illiberal that there was no way around it. And so I suppose the way that I would respond
#
to you or I mean, I'd be curious to know what you think is how what was the other model
#
available unless your model of governance is that you will only reflect the people.
#
But for example, that is certainly not what the chief architect of the Constitution Ambedkar
#
thought. I mean, he thought that would be it would be terrible if India, the Constitution
#
reflected the people because he thought it was as he referred to, you know, villages
#
as sort of dens of localism, ignorance and vice. And I think that that view is held by
#
others as well, which is that India is a country that is seen as benighted, is seen as living,
#
is quite explicitly referred to as living in the intellectual dark ages. And that especially
#
with things such as caste, with untouchability, with the horrors that all of these people
#
had personally witnessed while in the consumed assembly, right outside their doors, the violence
#
of partition of thousands of people gathered at Humayun's tomb, but at other places in
#
Delhi at riots breaking out the middle of the night while they're having these discussions.
#
So I think it's to them, it was a very visceral sense that that India needed to move out of
#
those kinds of attachments. And does that lead to paternalism? Yes. But I wonder if
#
an Indian democratic experiment that was not going to take say 200 years like the American
#
one did, if there is a way out of that, because it seems to me that, I mean, even if you want
#
to have an illiberal, I mean, perhaps if you want an illiberal democracy, then you wouldn't
#
have to be so paternalistic because in the view of many people at the time, India was
#
illiberal on these counts. Even Gandhi believed that perhaps he wouldn't have used the language
#
of liberalism, but he certainly disagreed fundamentally with the way in which India
#
treated women. And we can debate whether Gandhi himself was above board on these matters.
#
He certainly disagreed with the treatment of untouchables, the Harijans as he started
#
to call them, after his long decades, long sort of transition in his views on those.
#
And so whether it is from a liberal like Ambedkar or Nehru or it is somebody who is within the,
#
who's considered sort of conservative amongst liberals like Patel or somebody like Gandhi
#
who I suppose escapes easy political classification, there is a certain distaste towards India's
#
social evils, right? And I think that those today across the right and left, we'd all
#
agree are our issues, right? Sex discrimination and all these things. And so how does one,
#
how does one institute a democracy that does not just reflect those things without it being
#
paternalist? I think it is a question. And I'd be curious to think what you, how you
#
think that they might have escaped that bind?
#
I know that's a great question. And I recognize that it's easy to criticize them in hindsight.
#
I think if I was there in the moment, you know, it was perfectly natural for them to
#
think the way they did. Ambedkar of course was right about society then and what he said
#
then holds true today. So that is a dilemma when Ambedkar talks about how the constitution
#
is just a topsoil on democracy and all of that. You know, it is such a profound lament.
#
I think he himself knew in this, that moment that there are no easy answers. And you know,
#
given what the world thought at that time about what a state should be, what is relation
#
to society should be, given our experiences with colonialism and so on and so forth, it's
#
perfectly understandable for us to have gone down on all those directions then. I buy that.
#
However, what we need to do today, I think, and enough people don't do with enough seriousness,
#
is look back at that time and recognize in clear terms the mistakes that were made because
#
we do have the benefit of hindsight. What we see in modern times is like I often say
#
that Narendra Modi, no matter how much he may rail against Nehru and Indira and all
#
of that, is really their true successor in different ways. He thinks in a top-down way
#
just like Nehru did. He has the authoritarian instincts of Indira Gandhi. He has perhaps
#
even the callousness and psychopathy of Sanjay Gandhi, right? So it's almost as if we sort
#
of learnt nothing from the past. We had this glorious golden moment between 91 and 2011
#
which lifted, you know, hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And I have a number
#
of episodes on that period which I'll link from the show notes and why it ended. But
#
have we internalized those lessons? For example, in your book, you point out about how the
#
planning commission may have gone. But one in, you know, and this is not what you said
#
in your book, but my sense is that Modi took the same mindset into everything he does.
#
And what you do point out in his book is that Rahul Gandhi actually promised to bring back
#
some kind of planning commission. He said it would be a good idea that Mamata Banerjee
#
said ki Bengal ke liye planning commission hona chahiye. So my big worry is that all
#
this time has passed and we haven't learnt. You know, I was chatting with Pratap Bhanumata
#
the other day and he used this great phrase about a certain way that some young people
#
today think which is tech solutionism, right? And another phrase we can use for the same
#
thing from an earlier time is the engineering mindset. And we know that that's a folly.
#
You know, Hayek called it the fatal conceit. We've seen what it has done to India. So when
#
I hark back on those times and think about the decisions these people made, look, all
#
of these were great people, people like, you know, we would be such a better place today
#
if we had an arrow today, by which we mean an intellectual with that kind of inquiring
#
mind and so on and so forth in politics. And we don't. But it's important to look back
#
at the time and see what are the mistakes we made, which is why I kind of, you know,
#
talk about it and bring it up. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, tech solutionism reminds me of
#
a phrase that I use associated with Mahalanobis, which is a sort of techno utopianism and this
#
belief that if you had enough data, that if you had the computer to crunch the data, that
#
it would lead to sort of optimal solutions in a planned economy. And this, of course,
#
as you know, goes back to the sort of great debate in the early 20th century between free
#
market economists like Mises and Hayek and a sort of planning economist from socialist
#
country Oscar Langer about called the great socialist calculation or the economic calculation
#
debate, which is essentially a debate about can an economy be planned essentially if you
#
have enough data and the free marketeers argue that, well, there can never be enough data
#
and that you can even if you had enough data that you would not have the sort of crunching
#
capacity to know what to do with it. And people like sort of Mahalanobis and Langer, et cetera,
#
basically once the computers invented, they say, aha, well, now we have it. So it should
#
be possible. Right. So I think that there is an inflated belief in the possibilities
#
of technological solutions. But I think that that that level of optimism in some ways comes
#
with the territory of new nation formation. And I don't say this to, again, going back
#
to your point. Yes, I think that we necessarily need to, as citizens, criticize decisions
#
that were made in the early years of the republic, but also in the recent past. But as a historian,
#
my job is to try to understand them and explain them. Right. But understanding is not necessarily
#
a way of justifying them. It's just to understand it and to understand why, for example, planning
#
was so popular. Right. Today, it seems alien, this idea that centralized planning would
#
be popular amongst young people going to college or popular amongst all the economists, popular
#
even amongst international economists recommending things to India. But I think that with this
#
book and with whatever historians do, our job is to try to recreate that context. And
#
I think that in recreating that context, I think that I realized how much technology
#
mattered to this early generation, because it felt to this generation that technology
#
was the way for India to leapfrog decades, if not centuries of backwardness. And so that
#
India would not have to go through 200, 300 years of democracy like Britain or advanced
#
nations in Western Europe or America did in order to have similar economies. And which
#
is why you see this thrust towards the IITs, this kind of celebration of the technocrat,
#
like not just Mahalanobis, of course, but Homi Baba. Why does Homi Baba have such a
#
central role in the public's imagination? Why does Vikram Sarabhai have such a central
#
role? And it's because of these, what is seen as the emancipatory possibility of this technology,
#
right? That we went from being Ghulam to now having a space program, to have a nuclear
#
program. That in itself was seen as an achievement. And I think that that comes with an inflated
#
sense of what these technologies can do. And perhaps leads to a maybe unforgivable ignorance
#
about the necessity of much more mundane things like primary education, primary health. Things
#
that despite India and China in 1950 having almost identical per capita incomes, even
#
by 1980, even before Deng Xiaoping and the changes wrought by that, China was already
#
ahead of India, not in terms of per capita income so much, but its investment in its
#
labor force was such that it had a labor force and a citizenry that had education that was
#
much healthier and was not dealing in quite the same way that India was with undernourishment,
#
et cetera. Which allowed it, once it did liberalize its economy, or at least make it, maybe liberalize
#
is a more complicated word with the CCP, but at least made it more export-facing, allowed
#
it to tap into that potential in ways that India perhaps overlooked. And I think that
#
that is, in my mind, one of the signal failures of that era, of the early decades of independence,
#
in that there is such a focus, admirable in many ways, on building institutions, world-class
#
institutions of higher education, but not enough to what is happening at the other end,
#
that getting Indians just a basic education, getting them basic two meals a day, forget
#
three meals a day, getting enough protein in their diet, all things that I'm sure you've
#
discussed in your other episodes with economists and policy experts. And I think that that
#
might have been a failing that accrued from the narrowness of this class and believing
#
that this class needed to provide all the solutions. And so, well, this class, we do
#
have, by 1947, a class of people who have cleared the ICS, who have been foreign-educated,
#
who have, like Nehru was, like Mahalanobis was, like Homi Baba was, like Vikram Sarabhai
#
also was, all of them Oxbridge-educated, actually Cambridge-educated. And so there's a valorization
#
of this class and of the abilities of this class to provide solutions to the country.
#
And perhaps it wasn't, it didn't look more broadly at what, at improving the average
#
as opposed to making India's topmost class world-class.
#
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one of the things, one of the ways in which I think your
#
book really works as a book of history is that you haven't taken, you're not coming
#
at it from any prism. You're just trying to understand the events of history through the
#
actions of people and the context in which they operated. So it really works. Like, if
#
I was 20 years old in 55, right, then like Jagdish Bhagwati and Manmohan Singh at the
#
time, I might also have fallen for the Mahalanobis point of view, right? It's later on that Bhagwati
#
and Manmohan and all of that went in different directions. But at that time, what do you
#
do? You are a new country, as you said, your default mode has to be optimism because you
#
don't have a choice. And, you know, that would have seemed so seductive. As far as a, you
#
know, socialistic calculation argument goes, a couple of things, one that I, of course,
#
agree with, you know, the Austrians and the free market economists on that, that you will
#
never have enough data. That's point one, because, you know, Borges has a story about
#
how a good map of the world is as big as the world itself, right? And it's really a similar
#
problem except that a good map of the world, which is as big as the world itself, is immediately
#
in the next instance, a bad map of the world because the world has changed. So it's an
#
insurmountable problem. Now, this led me to conceiving of a thought experiment, which
#
I posed to one of the libertarian guests on my show. I think it was David Bowes. Was it
#
Tyler Cowen or David Bowes? I think it was David Bowes. And the thought experiment was
#
this, and it was sort of an anti-libertarian thought experiment. And it was this, that
#
what if you have tools which allows you to, you know, tap into every neuron of every brain
#
of every human being in the world and know exactly what they think and feel right now,
#
and also what they will think and feel in the future. So would that justify central
#
planning if you can satisfy all their wants and needs and they're perfectly happy and
#
everything is taken care of? In a thought experiment where you have sort of the actual
#
tech utopianism of a Mahalan abyss, you have all the data, you have all the computers,
#
you know, would that then justify central planning? And if I remember correctly David's
#
answer, and this would be my answer as well, is that it would not. Even then it would not
#
because autonomy matters. You have to respect individual autonomy and individual agency
#
and all of that, right? So just that fundamental way about the state directing the action of
#
millions of people, even if you could do it to everyone's satisfaction, it still doesn't
#
work for me. And I think that this was, you know, a fundamental dilemma and an understandable
#
dilemma at the start of the republic because of the scale of the task. How do we build
#
this nation? How do we even bring it together? You are forced to think in terms of collectives
#
and think of in terms of group identities and not individual identities, you know. Thinking
#
of individual rights at that moment is perhaps a luxury. I had a great episode on VP Menon
#
with Narayani Basu and VP Menon of course helped Patel in his project of, you know,
#
creating these lines on the map that we see today, the nation as we are. And I feel at
#
one level an immense disquiet about that because it seems to me like an act of fast track colonization.
#
What the British took two, three centuries to do, we are doing in a few months with a
#
combination of persuasion and coercion and promises that are later broken. And how moral
#
is that? Now, on the other hand, I love this country as it is. It kind of worked out okay,
#
but that would again be, you know, justifying the means because of the end. But also I get
#
it. I get it that when you are in that moment where everything is falling apart, where it
#
seems as if the centre will not hold, I understand that centralizing impulse and to think of
#
things like individual rights in that moment, no matter if you did pay lip service to them
#
in the constitution, but they are not protected adequately. I sort of get that. So, you know,
#
in that sense, I am not going to fault our founders on anything that happened between,
#
you know, between independence and say till the mid-60s. You know, I really get angry
#
the mid-60s onwards, Indira Gandhi onwards, because I think, you know, deliberate acts
#
of wildness were carried out. I mean, a lot of Indira Gandhi's policies, economic and
#
otherwise were crimes on humanity. But until then, these were great men dealing with difficult
#
and intractable problems. And thank God, we do not, you know, that phase is over. But
#
we have more knowledge now and we can look back and sort of, and even what you have done
#
in your book, you know, giving your readers the understanding of why these people, such
#
as they were, with all their complexities, acted in the ways that they did, I think is
#
profoundly useful. It is profoundly useful because it goes past ideological dogmatism
#
that, you know, centrists may feel today, or rather, status may feel today. And it gives
#
that context that, okay, these are the decisions they make. Like, what do you do, right? What
#
would you do in that place, you know? But yeah, I mean, broadly, I think I spent a long
#
time agreeing with you just now.
#
Now, I mean, thank you so much. I am very glad to hear that you found that aspect useful.
#
What you said about Borges sort of struck me as well about this thirst for data and
#
this belief, almost unfalsifiable belief that enough data will lead to a sort of omniscience
#
and therefore lead to very good outcomes. And the irony about going back to the Borges
#
story about trying to come up with a map for the world, that is, if it has to be detailed
#
enough then just becomes a replication of the world. It's almost an irony that the person
#
who seemingly has a view like that, PC Mahalanobis, is also the world's leading expert on sample
#
serving whose logic is the absolute opposite, which is that you should not do enumeration
#
of every single item, but instead take a representative sample and from that blow up to what it might
#
represent, right? So that seems an ironic twist that the person who believes in this
#
sort of centralized planning comes up with, is one of the leaders in a very different
#
kind of thought experiment, one that becomes so successful that is now that as Angus Deaton,
#
the Nobel Prize winner in economics said, where Mahalanobis and India led the rest of
#
the world has followed such that Indian National Sample Survey has been used as inspiration
#
for lots of the household surveys that are done by the World Bank and the United Nations
#
today in more than a hundred countries. So I found that contrast while you were talking
#
very interesting. I also found it interesting because the thing about computers is that
#
today we know that they cannot solve all of the world's problems. In fact, perhaps we
#
might even blame them for a good deal of them. But again, as a historian, it took me by surprise
#
how liberatory it was seen as being when it was first invented, when the first computers
#
come with the Colossus in Britain, which is used for code breaking during the Second World
#
War or the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania's campus in Philadelphia. When Mahalanobis,
#
we know from his diaries that I read while researching for this book, he has his diary
#
in which he's traveling from Philadelphia to Princeton, meeting John von Neumann, reading
#
Albert Einstein, meeting these people, meeting Howard Aiken at Harvard. And he's talking
#
about the computer and he talks about it as solving all kinds of problems that we now
#
know today that even the best supercomputer can't do. But at the time, again, it's this,
#
the newness, the newness of it and the absolute mind boggling leap in human computational
#
abilities with the first computers, the first computers, which by the way, might have had
#
some of the computing power that we might now carry around in our pockets, right?
#
Much less than that. You would not be able to load Twitter on one of those.
#
But it was seen as, and in fact was referred to in the American popular press as electronic
#
brain, right? So it was seen as just being this, like a new kind of organism that could
#
produce new kinds of results. And, but I think that that's related to this, this confidence
#
in quantitative capacity leading to optimal outcomes is the fact that centralization of
#
the economy or the state had got a good reputation amongst anti-colonial nationalists across the
#
world from the late 19th century onwards. And the reason for that is that for better
#
or for worse, capitalism comes to be associated with colonialism, right? As the arch-colonial
#
power in the world through the 19th and the 20th centuries, Britain is seen as, well,
#
they had the industrial revolution. They are the primary capitalist nation in the world
#
and the primary colonial nation in the world. And so you see this rhetoric being used by
#
socialists and even non-socialist anti-colonialists across the world in Africa, Asia, about capitalism
#
being a form of colonialism. And so I think that once it is tarnished with that, it becomes
#
very hard for anti-nationalists to think of themselves as capitalists in that manner,
#
which is why when you look at the consumer assembly debates or parliamentary debates
#
in the early 1950s, everyone refers to themselves as socialist. The Jansung refers to itself
#
as socialist. The Congress refers to itself as socialist. The communists, of course, say
#
that socialist is too light, but everybody refers to themselves as a socialist. And I
#
think it's because of the legacy of colonialism and its association with capitalism. And then
#
in the late 19th century, you have this epic event, at least to Indians at the time, which
#
is the Meiji Restoration in 1868, in which you see what is seen as this kind of sleepy
#
Asian nation that wouldn't allow other countries to come visit or enter it, suddenly very rapidly
#
modernizing and technologically advancing. In the late 1920s, with the first five-year
#
plan in the Soviet Union, again, you have this nation that you just see as, like India,
#
primarily an agrarian in the language of the time, a feudal nation, suddenly making rapid
#
technological advances. In the 1930s, it starts becoming clear that, well, you can have centralization
#
even without adopting a communist system because, well, hey, America under FDR has what people
#
today might call forms of planning, the levels of public investment, the role of the state.
#
And then by the 1940s, the very government that is colonizing you, in 1945, Winston Churchill
#
is thrown out of power, Clement Attlee, government comes into power, and the Labor Manifesto,
#
the Labor Party Manifesto, refers to the Labor Party in England believing in a planned state.
#
So now you have this as even at the very center of colonialism, them believing that the state
#
should have a very central role. And the Second World War, of course, plays a very important
#
aspect in this because whichever side you are on, allied or axis, the state is playing
#
the role of governing the economy. And I think that that gives a lot of belief to people
#
in India, which is why by the 1940s, Indian industrialists are calling for planning, Gandhians,
#
not Gandhi himself, but Gandhians are calling for planning, the Muslim League has its own
#
plan, the Congress Party has many of its own plans as well. And so it becomes in some ways
#
a part of the language of nationalism. And I think that is what in the early part of
#
the book, at least, especially in the introduction, I try to recreate. Why is it that JRD Tata
#
is sitting in on national planning committee meetings in the 1940s? Why is it that people
#
on the board of Tata and Sons or GD Birla or Lala Sriram are all on these planning committees?
#
And I think it's that it's in some ways this sort of lost economic world in which the role
#
of the state is just seen as non-negotiable in a way that today, of course, it's not.
#
Yeah, and we will come to it when we talk about the book. But I think in some ways it
#
is also out of self-interest because all of these businessmen you named want to protect
#
their own turf, right? So they're like, OK, the state must do everything and don't let
#
foreign companies in, you know, protect our markets and all of that. So that is really
#
a crony capitalist impulse. It's not a free market impulse. But, you know, and there's
#
a lovely quote in your book about socialism, which I'll kind of read out like when, you
#
know, early on when they talk about the necessity of planning to achieve the socialistic dream
#
as it were. And you write, quote, The choice of socialistic was a convenient obfuscation
#
that allowed vague agreement within the party without tying it to specific commitments.
#
Seemingly far-flung points on the contemporary political spectrum saw themselves as socialist
#
or socialist adjacent. The term socialist was a large umbrella that accommodated many
#
under it. Indian socialist thought was a shape-shifting ideology that threaded together members of
#
the Congress Party, those of the opposition Praja Socialist Party of Jayaprakash Naira
#
and Ramanohar Lohia and Kamnadevi Chattopadhyay, and even Gandhians like J.C. Kumarappa and
#
Vinoba Bhave. Even the Hindu nationalist Jhansang occasionally claimed some version of socialism
#
as their goal. The result, as Sudipto Kaviraj put it, was a bewildering variety of socialisms
#
from communists to Hindu. Stop quote. And it's interesting how that word seems to cease
#
to mean anything. I mean, even when the BJP was formed in 1980, they said, OK, we are
#
about Gandhian socialism, till, of course, Rajiv Gandhi took the Hindu vote in 84, and
#
then they were like, no, no, we've got to fight for that.
#
I'll go back to Mahalanobis and the joy which you bring out in his book of his excitement
#
about computers. And I sometimes think that that's actually understandable and damn good,
#
because I think what happens to all of us is that we become too jaded. There is this
#
whole quote about how a sufficiently advanced technology can seem like magic, is indistinguishable
#
from magic. I think Arthur C. Clarke said it. And you can imagine the sense of awe and
#
wonder when you see a computer working for the very first time. Or I remember the sort
#
of astonishment when I saw GPS work for the very first time. You hear about it, and you're
#
like, shit. You can see a map, and you know where you are on it, and you're being given
#
directions. We just take it for granted. You know, one of my friends said that no one in
#
this current generation is going to know what it is to be lost again. Like, that's so fundamental.
#
And in that sense, I think we've lost something. And one can sort of understand the excitement
#
of the people of that generation and how they get carried away. Like, anytime new technology
#
comes about, you know, we'll all overestimate the short term and underestimate the long
#
term, right? You think it's going to be dramatic. It's going to change the world. Kali robots
#
are going to take over, right? So I kind of get that Mahalanobis excitement. It's something
#
that I think we should all kind of cultivate without getting carried away into a utopianism
#
as he did. But we'll talk about the book in a lot of detail. But I realize that I took
#
our listeners away from the narrative of your own life. We had just about kind of stopped
#
at your grandparents. So tell me a little bit more about what kind of books were you
#
then reading? Like what kind of kid were you? What kind of things interested you as a child?
#
And tell me a little bit more about that journey. Yes, to return to my narrative, which is much
#
less exciting. But as a child, I was interested in the things that I think many young children
#
are, especially boys. I loved sports. I loved watching sports and playing sports. Playing
#
sports was a big part of my growing up, playing on downstairs in the colony with the other
#
kids, riding cycles, playing cricket with tennis ball or whatever, rubber ball or whatever.
#
We could find never a real cricket ball because that required too much investment and threatened
#
too much bodily injury, which our techniques could not really handle, especially on the
#
concrete surfaces that we played on. But yes, I love cricket. I regrettably do not manage
#
to watch nearly as much now as I did. I really enjoyed playing football. And so I used to
#
play cricket at school. I went for cricket classes, played football almost every day
#
at school, played later on in high school, played badminton as well. And I remember cricket
#
actually in my years in middle school and high school, taking up a sort of disproportionate
#
amount of mental space. The fortunes of the Indian cricket team and such in particular
#
kind of indexed my mood through days and months. And I think that is a very common case amongst
#
people, perhaps especially gendered, perhaps especially young boys of my generation. And
#
I think that now there's lots of interesting work that when I teach in the US to my students
#
about the nineties and the early two thousands, when I teach liberalization and the changes
#
it makes in Indian popular culture, I try to convey perhaps unsuccessfully how such
#
in cricket sort of transforms the lives and the popular culture and the kind of hoardings
#
that you see around the city. So books were also a part of it. I would like to say that
#
books were as important as sports, but they frankly weren't. But it was another aspect
#
of my life. I enjoyed reading. I would get sometimes obsessed with certain books. I remember
#
reading Les Miserables, the whole thing. I don't remember particularly enjoying it, but
#
it almost became a sort of challenge that I need to on my way to school and on my way
#
back. And while I'm waiting for my sister to finish her dance classes or her music classes,
#
this is in Madras where learning Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam are all sort of almost
#
rites of passage that unfortunately or fortunately young girls go through. I myself went for
#
some Carnatic classes as a very young child. And I think that the lack of talent was very
#
quickly spotted. But I remember reading books like that, big books that one felt that you
#
had to read in order to be intelligent, but also books that I just enjoyed reading in
#
early middle school, your sort of body boys. But then after that, some books that were
#
recommended to me or I saw recommended in, I'm assuming in the pages of the Hindu, which
#
is also a staple in Madras households. But I remember reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#
and that I remember not just feeling like this is part of what my literary diet should
#
be, but actually enjoying it, finding it difficult, but enjoying 100 years of solitude, especially
#
perhaps because one is a young teenager, especially Love in the Time of Cholera, though Love in
#
the Time Cholera is about extremely old people in love, but still finding that quite moving.
#
So those are the books that come to mind. Who else? Marquez certainly, I remember trying
#
to picking up Rushdie's Midnight's Children a couple of times and not making it past the
#
first 50 pages, being arrested by the opening scene of this young Salim Sinai knocking his
#
nose against the prayer mat and a ruby red drop of blood falling on it, but just finding
#
it too difficult and all the sort of verbal acrobatics, very impressive, but hard to follow.
#
And so I read quite widely. I read mostly fiction, a lot more fiction and at a rate
#
that I have never since matched. Regrettably, I wish I read. I'm trying now to start reading
#
a lot more fiction again, but it was mostly books on fiction that I would find at my school
#
library. My school was a big influence on me. I went to a school that is part of the
#
Krishmurti Foundation. It has the name that elicits always interesting response. It was
#
just called the school. And it's a school at which I joined when I was in third grade
#
and I was there till I finished my schooling. My sister was there since her kindergarten
#
and my mother taught and teaches at that school. I found the experience of being at that school
#
very different from, in a way that I could notice, it was appreciably different from
#
the schooling and pedagogical experiences that I had before. Then I was in a, in a much
#
more mainstream school in Pune and Mumbai before that, Bombay, where I remember having
#
to, you know, just memorize by rote multiplication tables. And if you got them wrong, you'd have
#
to sort of stick out your knuckles and you'd get wrapped on the knuckles with a wooden,
#
with a wooden ruler. I remember, I don't even remember if I ever got that on my knuckles,
#
but I remember that being like a real fear that that would happen. And it was also part
#
of the sort of social humiliation of the fact that you had to go to the front of the class
#
and then you'd extend your hands and this teacher would, would do this. And so I went
#
to school, which not just didn't have any corporal punishment, but also had a much less
#
hierarchical interaction between teachers and students. We'd call our teachers Akkas
#
and Annas, which means elder sister and elder brother, which is not to say that there was
#
no hierarchy. Of course there was, but that it didn't feel punitive in quite the same
#
way. And it, I think it allowed me to feel much more comfortable. School began to feel,
#
I was never one throughout school. I know there are some, many who end up in academia
#
who just loved going to school every day because they just loved learning. That was not my
#
experience. I would much rather have been at home every day playing cricket, playing
#
football or, but, but school was not something I feared necessarily because of the people
#
at school. And I, and I enjoyed my time there. I made, I enjoyed the very small class sizes
#
that we had. I remember in the 11th and 12th, I did history and it was just two of us with
#
my teacher for two years studying history, which is perhaps a sort of sad sign for history,
#
but it was, it was good in that at least we, we got to have wide ranging discussions.
#
Did the other kid become a historian as well?
#
No, he did not. No, he did not. Perhaps for his, to his eternal benefit, perhaps he is
#
quite happy in what he does. But I think that it also fostered, just like my interactions
#
with my grandparents and my extended family and my own parents, a sense that books can
#
be something more than just what oppresses you in the classroom. That they can be an
#
escape and they can be an escape not just when they're in fiction, but even in nonfiction
#
and that there is something, yes, I might not, and I did not love classes in biology
#
and chemistry, but that, that I felt that there was, that my school inculcated an appreciation
#
for learning for its own sake and that my job was in a sense to find what it was for
#
me, not necessarily to become an academic, but find what is it for me that might give
#
me a sense of that excitement and that about certain subjects. And so I really valued that.
#
I found that, and I find this whole, the board exams and the stress that goes into it toxic,
#
I was very much part of that in that I was not able to shirk it. I could not play it
#
cool. It just was miserable for me to go through. And I felt that I, and I was very glad that
#
those experiences of the 10th and 12th did not overshadow a different relationship that
#
I had built with learning and the world of ideas, which I think is important regardless
#
of whether you want to go into academia or not. I think that it's just, I think that
#
is a good thing. I mean, I know from my sister, for example, who also has this, who's not
#
an academic at all, works for a media company. But, but I think that this was something that
#
I shared. I know from friends of mine who are also not in academia, but went through
#
this school or similar schools, that they have this association with the liberal arts,
#
with learning and with reading. And I, as years have passed on, I've come to appreciate
#
that even more and more. And so since you were asking about what my influences were
#
at the time, I'd say that apart from specific books or authors, it was actually more this,
#
this context, this milieu of going to a campus that was just so beautiful. It was, it was
#
referred to by, you know, sometimes by bus conductors and auto drivers as the card, which,
#
which in Tamil means that forest, because it, you know, it was really this lush campus
#
on the Theosophical Society campus used to be in Adyar in, in Chennai, had this beautiful
#
sprawling banyan tree at its sort of center. And it was a school where you, you know, it
#
might seem excessively hippie to some, but you know, we didn't have uniforms. For many
#
years in school, I just didn't wear footwear. We didn't have exams till the eighth grade,
#
all of which I understand, you know, many of your listeners might be parents and might
#
balk at these ideas. But for me, it was, I think, a wonderful experience to have that
#
and to, there was an emphasis on environmentalism, which was, you know, not common at all at
#
that time amongst schools, certainly in Chennai. There was an emphasis on relating what you
#
studied to social issues. And I think that that is something that has stayed with me.
#
We went on trips every year to a school farm, and this is not some kind of Enid Blighton
#
farm. It was an actual functioning farm where they grew legumes and rice, et cetera. And
#
we partook of farming activities, not in any coddled way. It's not like we were working
#
like farmers, certainly not. We were not working from dawn to the middle of the day. But we
#
would spend, you know, a couple of hours working the farm. We would cook our own food. We would
#
do the things that life there would entail. And I think that it gave me, again, it's not
#
like privileged city-bred students can suddenly get a sense of what life is for others, but
#
it certainly opens a window. And we would do that every year from starting with two
#
or three nights to by the 11th and 12th grade, spending three weeks there. We would go on
#
trips to study aspects of social concern. One that sticks, I have a sort of searing
#
memory of is one in the 11th grade when we toured different districts in Tamil Nadu,
#
studying caste and the presence still of untouchability, seeing things like the After Effects or the
#
two tumbler system, seeing things like people in the village coming and telling us, well,
#
you're all upper caste. Why are you going and staying in that part of the village? Why
#
are you eating there? Meeting a woman who, I remember this so clearly, who only had a
#
stump of an arm. And it was because she refused to sleep with an upper caste man. Her village
#
and her arm was thrown, was cut off and thrown into the fire in front of her and meeting
#
her and her daughter. And so realizing that, I mean, perhaps it was also maybe too much.
#
Maybe it was too much for somebody so young to be exposed to something like that. But
#
I think on the whole, it was an experience that really did shape me, that it gives you
#
a visceral sense of these are worlds and these are privileges that I have not thought about.
#
Engaging with uncomfortable conversations with people in my own cohort, my classmates,
#
close friends of mine, a close friend of mine who it turned out that he said that I cannot
#
go and stay the night or eat in that house because my parents who are Brahmin would just
#
disown me. That is just not something. And these are not conversations, obviously, that
#
you have on a day-to-day basis. And you don't have it because you are in such a bubble.
#
You are in a bubble where even though admission is not caste-based because it tends to be
#
from a certain background, as you know very well, listeners, no income tends to index
#
with caste as well. And so you just end up being in these upper-caste circles as I am
#
even today, very much so. But having to confront this sort of thing really made me think about,
#
you know, I had to think about, well, what is my caste? How have I not been thinking
#
about this so far? How is it that it shapes the way in which I live my life? Why is it
#
that when, for example, if we have a domestic help at home, why is it that she almost never
#
sort of sits on the chairs? You know, like when she's taking a rest, why does she sort
#
of sit on the floor? Again, it's not like we tell her, you should sit. And even when
#
I'd offer, please sit on the chair, she wouldn't. But that's obviously not just a personal preference
#
of sitting on the floor. It's to do with years, maybe decades, maybe centuries of a system
#
and not maybe centuries, certainly centuries, millennia, perhaps, of a system that has ground
#
people into believing certain things or believing that shaking these boundaries might have bad
#
consequences. And so in these ways, I found that this experience of school when I was
#
very young was very helpful. And then when I went to college in Delhi, it was even more
#
mind expanding. Sorry, this is a long winded explanation. No, it's lovely. And there's
#
lots to think about. One of my friends who works in a very senior position in a big company
#
had this lament to me once. He said that whenever I go out for lunch or dinner with my fellow
#
CXO people, I will find that I have nothing to talk about with them because they don't
#
read books, they don't watch movies, you know, they don't know the world outside their bubble
#
as it were. They don't seem to have an interior life, right? Or at least they don't seem to
#
have a rich interior life. And that gets me to thinking, but you know, there's a danger
#
in thinking that some people don't have the facility for that interior life. I think that
#
is very patronizing and very wrong. I think what is a more likely explanation is that
#
how you grow up impacts all of this. So, you know, people like us who've been privileged
#
enough to grow up surrounded by books in relatively well-off families, exposed to so much, you
#
know, we can develop that, we can read a lot of books, we can watch movies, we have access
#
to all of these things. Most people don't. Now, just in the context of education, you
#
speak about how your school gave all of you both the exposure by taking you to all these
#
villages by showing you a world outside the bubble so you get that exposure and also enabling
#
you to read stuff, to discover joy in books that goes beyond, oh, I need to study this
#
for my exam, right, which I think is beautiful. And as you pointed out, it's like, it's not
#
just you, even others who haven't gone in an academic direction still feel that books
#
played an important role in their lives. And I'm just wondering whether what we think of
#
as education itself is an artifact, whether it's deeply broken. You know, our concept
#
of education, our education system really comes from the early 19th century where you
#
figured out a system to produce people to be workers in the industrial revolution, to
#
be factory workers and so on and so forth. It is so regimented in terms of kids of the
#
same age study together, there'll be the same bunch of subjects they will study, you know,
#
there are templates for everything, you know, ki geography hoga, geography mein ye syllabus
#
hoga, is class mein ye syllabus hoga, us class mein. And beyond a certain point, is that
#
really learning? Is that really education? So for people who don't have the kind of privileges
#
we do to be able to go beyond this, you are, I feel severely hobbled by that, right? So
#
what are sort of your thoughts on it? I mean, A, you were lucky enough to go to a school
#
that allowed you to get beyond this. And I guess people go to normal schools and obviously
#
they get past all of it. And now you've escaped into a, you know, a different world of higher
#
education, which also I'll ask you about. But what I'm just thinking aloud here from
#
your experiences, you know, what are sort of your thoughts on that? Do we need to rethink
#
all of this? Like typically when we talk about education, we'll talk in terms of not enough
#
people are being able to go to school, which is a problem. Yes. We'll talk about outcomes
#
in education, but those outcomes in education will be framed within the system as it is
#
now, which I would argue is ossified and outdated and all of that and so on and so forth. But
#
I'd argue that we need to fundamentally rethink it. Just the whole structure of that. So what
#
are your thoughts? I don't know if I have any well formulated policy recommendations.
#
I do know from that, this is something that I think about as well in my personal life,
#
because I am now a teacher myself. And especially during the pandemic, there were all these
#
discussions at my university and at every university really about, you know, do we move
#
to online? But those are some logistical discussions. But behind those logistical discussions are
#
questions about what teaching itself is. What is education? What are we all here doing?
#
Is it just content delivery or is there something else that we're trying to do? And I think
#
that the stakes become even higher when you go the younger your students are, right? So
#
I only teach college students and above. And so I think that the stakes are much lower
#
than that of say, my mother's, who has through her life being a primary school teacher, and
#
sort of an admirable teacher in a way that I can never possibly be. But at that point,
#
is what you're doing really just delivering content? In which case, there are so many
#
ways in which you can get the content that you don't have to rely on a flawed human being
#
to deliver, you know, bits of information that you can get from on flawed sort of technologies
#
that that can at least in terms of the facts can sort of provide it if again, if you vet
#
your sources, etc. But I think that what I found in my school, and again, I can only
#
speak from my experience, which is why I speak about my school. And like you said, people
#
have go to all kinds of schools and arrive at very similar positions to do what I do.
#
So so I don't know how much you can say it's correlation or causation. But since I have
#
a experiment of one, I cannot sort of judge otherwise. For example, just in the in the
#
subject that I studied spent so many years studying and that I am a member of today as
#
a historian history, I have so many people when I speak to them, when they asked me what
#
I do, and I say that I'm a teacher or that I'm a historian, they say, oh, we hated history
#
in school, but now they're interested in it. And I think that that has to do with the way
#
in which history is taught. And this is, you know, a common complaint. But the way in which
#
history is taught is the worst aspects of history, this the belief that you to memorize
#
dates, and figures and lists of you know, like this almost BuzzFeed listicles of like,
#
four most important reasons the Second World War happened, or three reasons why Mughal
#
Emperor Akbar was successful while so and so was not. And I think that that robs history
#
of of its texture of its scale of its explanatory power of its just human interest stories.
#
And I think that that can be extended in different ways to different subjects. Now, when it comes
#
to the policy, however, I feel a much much more. I don't feel quite as confident talking
#
about what can be done to change the way in which education is done. In general, I might
#
have some thoughts about how history might be taught. But in other subjects, because
#
I find myself pulled in different directions between thinking, should we just burn this
#
to the ground and come up with a better system? Or given that we're not even at educating
#
every child in an adequate way, and that even the people that are on the books as educated
#
or literate studies have shown by economists who specialize in education that their level
#
of literacy is not what say an eighth standard student should have. And at that point, then
#
I wonder like, are these again, are these quite literally first world problems? Like,
#
should we be actually trying to just whatever our definition of education and literacy is
#
should we be first attempting to have every child in India educated, say to the 10th standard
#
or the 12th standard, have that as a goal first, and have them, you know, get midday
#
meal schemes, get them, you know, properly nourished, etc. And then look at I mean, I
#
wonder, for example, if otherwise we risk making the same kinds of mistakes that you
#
made in the Nehruvian era, where you try to think of, well, you need IAMs, we need IITs,
#
but you forget the very basics and the nuts and bolts. And so that's why I'm a bit conflicted
#
about wondering whether pedagogical methods and standards should change, or whether doing
#
that might be putting the cart in front of the horse.
#
No, I think, and I didn't even ask you about what your policy recommendations would be,
#
because that is a Nehruvian way of thinking, you know, one hopes that disruptors emerge
#
from within society, whether they use a mechanism of markets or not. But you know, and I totally
#
agree with you that it's, it's a big problem where so many people just don't go to school
#
at all. But is it a first world problem? No, I'd argue it is very much our problem because
#
the very fact that we have 10s of 1000s of unemployed PhDs that when there is an opening
#
for say, a railway clerk wala job, you know, there'll be 20 openings and 50,000 people
#
will apply and there'll be 3000 PhDs and all of that, what is then clear is that those
#
degrees have become meaningless, that education doesn't have any value, because it's not
#
giving you skills that are useful in any corner of the modern world. Right? So there is a
#
supply demand mismatch then that on one hand, we have a jobs crisis. And we have began,
#
you know, a huge number of people who have education, but they haven't learned anything,
#
you know, and that's just a reason to fundamentally rethink it, but not from the point of view
#
of the state. I think whatever solution comes will not come from the state. And however
#
things change, I just wish that the respective state and respective places are wise enough
#
to kind of enable experiments to sort of play out there. Getting back to your sort of personal
#
narrative, you also pointed out about how you could find escape in books, not just in
#
terms of fiction, but also nonfiction. And that's fascinating because for me, when I
#
was a kid growing up, most of the escape that I found were really in fiction at that time,
#
you know, in my teenage years and all of that. Elaborate a bit on what you meant by finding
#
escape in books of nonfiction and how was your reading and how were your interests progressing
#
through the reading that you did? Yeah. And to clarify, maybe I wasn't clear. Much of
#
my escape was also in fiction. There was some nonfiction, but I think that the nonfiction
#
tended to be just books of history on, you know, I remember reading some books on like
#
Nazi Germany, finding, you know, war again, as young boys are likely to do, finding that
#
exciting and wanting to know more. Again, my grandfather was an influence on this. He
#
liked reading books of history. I remember him talking about books, you know, old Hollywood
#
movies on wars, like The Guns of Navarone was like a movie that for some reason sticks
#
in my mind is something that he would talk about. But also I think that the sort of blend
#
of mythology and history really was something that I was interested in. I would read Amar
#
Chitra Kathas and Twinkle comics and I remember comics on Dharamayan and the Mahabharata,
#
on Karna, on sort of superpowers of these people. Because again, I think that it goes
#
back to my, you know, story, bedside stories by my grandfather and him explaining, you
#
know, why Karna was really a hero and does not get his due or why is it that that Krishna
#
does not reveal himself, you know, till the moment that he chooses, you know, why doesn't
#
if you're a God? Because my question was, I suppose, a rational one for a child, which
#
is that if you're a God and you're omniscient and you're all powerful, then why don't you
#
just end this? And so I think those are the sort of interests that continued in, that
#
got funneled into other directions with interests in, you know, books on history, etc. But it
#
was mostly the world of fiction that I was interested in and the world of, you know,
#
I also enjoyed watching, like I do today, I enjoyed following popular culture, watching
#
Hollywood movies, Hollywood movies. I loved, you know, as I said, sports, consumed as much
#
as I could off it. But yeah, but I think that my reading diet and my forms of escapism,
#
maybe not escapism, but my forms of reading changed quite fundamentally after I went to
#
college, as it does for many people. And for me, the fact that it also was a change of
#
location was a time when I left home at 17 to live in a different city. I was living
#
by myself, I mean, though I have an aunt who lives in Delhi, so I had, you know, like what
#
they call a local guardian, who I'd visit every weekend, but living on my own, interacting
#
with people who are very different, linguistically, of course, from different parts of the country,
#
from very different economic brackets. In some ways, I think that that is one of the
#
great privileges afforded by the university for everyone that you are, at least for me
#
it's the first time in my life in a group or class of people, in a classroom filled
#
with people from all over the country, in a way in which, you know, I don't think really
#
any school in any part of India really does. And in a classroom, this is at Ramjas College
#
in Delhi University, in which not everybody, in fact, a very minority of my class in history
#
beginning, this was in 2004, spoke English in a way in which they would be comfortable
#
chatting in English outside of class, right? They all knew English, of course, and read
#
and write and did their work in English. And so for me, that meant that I had to shore
#
up my skills in a different language, that I had to, also it had people from different
#
income backgrounds, people from very different cultural backgrounds. It's not just income
#
differences, but also cultural backgrounds. I lived off campus in a paying guest accommodation,
#
very, very small, very humble. I remember my rent was, I think, 1750 for the first year
#
after which it was hiked.
#
This was 2004. And I lived in a sort of single room accommodation, which through staircases,
#
I mean, these are all, of course, illegal buildings that were built for partitioned refugees.
#
And so I must have been in what must have been a storeroom at some point, which just
#
had enough space for a single bed, a single table and a single chair. But there was a
#
kitchen that people who lived in similar places like me, we shared, and they were from, they
#
were friends of mine, Anand and Abhishek Bihriya, who were both from Bihar and so who had very
#
different backgrounds and very different life experiences to me and very different cultural
#
references. Though, for example, they were of very similar, maybe, you know, economic
#
background, but they found the fact that I spoke primarily in English to be an oddity,
#
right? And the fact that I was not as comfortable as them in Hindi was a strange thing, which
#
is understandable. In Delhi, most people speak Hindi, and so I wasn't one of those. But you
#
also encounter things that you just would never imagine that you would first. I mean,
#
I remember at university in my one of my first days going to college, somebody said, You
#
are from Madras. And I said, You're Madrasi? And I said, Yes. And he said, But you're not
#
black. I mean, there's literally and this is not a joke. And so you realize that there's
#
all these sort of, I mean, it's telling about the sort of colorism that exists in our society,
#
but also telling about how rarely this person had obviously encountered somebody from the
#
South. And so I suppose there was a mutual incomprehension, like I found many things strange.
#
But I suppose many people found me strange as well. But but I and I found the first year
#
in Delhi quite difficult to to get used to, to get used to this sort of different climate,
#
not climate, I don't mean I don't mean in terms of weather, but I meant sort of intellectual
#
climate, cultural climate, to get used to a place that I don't know if you or your listeners
#
would would feel the same, but some place that is much more aggressive than Chennai
#
is certainly seeing very clearly being in a tutorial class behind that was being taken
#
by Professor Hari Sen, who I heard is just very recently retired from from the university,
#
wonderful teacher, but being a tutorial and seeing behind him in the window, four men
#
stomping on another man very, very violently and instead of me trying to meekly say, you
#
know, sir, excuse me, and him saying, you know, no, Nikhil, you need to wait your turn.
#
And me trying to say that, no, this is actually a matter of violence unfolding behind you.
#
And so and this was the sort of thing that at the time, I think that Trump just was going
#
through a transition. I went there recently, it's a much more elite college now. But at
#
the time was undergoing quite a transition. And there were these aspects of college life
#
in Delhi, which again, is not like from what I've heard what it was in the 90s and earlier,
#
but violence was pretty common. I mean, this that this sort of thing could happen was very
#
common. I was told I was just telling a friend a couple of days ago, I was told one of the
#
reasons I didn't live on campus was because me and my father went to the Ramjas College
#
hostel and because my father, like you know, many parents, you know, want their children
#
to, you know, rough it out, and they want them to, you know, go through the experience
#
of being in a hostel. And you know, which I understood, and of course, it would be much
#
cheaper than living, it would be much cheaper than the 1750 that I would be paying outside.
#
But I remember somebody at the hostel telling my father,
#
Yes, you will have a hard time. This is neither Bihari, nor Jat, nor Northeast.
#
And so basically, when a fight broke out, he was saying that this person has no protection.
#
And so I remember all of that being truly alarming to me. I hadn't, I knew about Delhi
#
University and ragging, I hadn't confronted the thought of like, there will be gangs,
#
and that there will be, there will actually be violence between them, and that I needed
#
to have a side and that I need to pick a side and be under the chatrachaya of one of these.
#
And so, so those are the sort of things that I found, I found quite, quite different and
#
very new. And I think, overall, it was to my benefit that I had those experiences and
#
that I learned from them. But it did lead to, coming back to literary diet, I think
#
that my reading, my reading intake started matching my mood because I started going alone
#
to a park and reading lots of very depressing Soviet authors. I was reading Maxim Gorky.
#
And so, and it was, and so I realized at some point that I needed, after two or three of
#
these extremely dreary, depressing books, you know, of uneven literary quality, I read
#
all of Anna Karenina in the first semester as well. And, you know, again, an amazing
#
book, but not really the most uplifting, right? And so it was not really a form of escapism.
#
In fact, it was perhaps me just wallowing through my literary taste as well to match
#
my experiences in Delhi. But things are socially improved for me, you know, later on. And I
#
know, as everyone does, found my group of friends and many of whom are still friends
#
to this day. And I'm very grateful for all these experiences and for all the experiences
#
of being, you know, a young student in Delhi, dealing with, you know, having to kill rats
#
in your kitchen and, you know, and all the kinds of things that, and all the kind of
#
capers that one gets into as a student, especially at a very large university. And so I'm very
#
grateful for that experience, especially because socially it, it really, and intellectually
#
as well, it really expanded my world. I had one, I had really good, some exceptional teachers
#
who were very passionate, some of whom are like my teachers at my school as well, thanked
#
in the acknowledgments to my book. I think that it really taught me what, what a difference
#
a committed and passionate teacher can make. Just having a teacher who, who looked like
#
they were, that they believed that they were doing something important and that mattered,
#
that we paid attention and that mattered, that we discussed these things. That was,
#
was really inspiring. And, and so, so yeah, so that was a real, it made a mark.
#
Lots to double click on. So when, when you pointed out to your teacher that, you know,
#
there's violence behind him, what happened? Finished that story?
#
Oh, I mean, he, Professor Sen did the right thing. He got up and, and he was about to,
#
to get to them when I think that the, the college security got there, but actually within
#
five minutes of it, the police was also there. And so luckily he did not have to get involved
#
in that. And then we later on found out that the issue was also that the issue that apparently
#
merited this, this act of violence was that this was a boy, again, just so mundane and,
#
and sort of depressing was that apparently this boy had, through rumors that these four
#
guys who were stomping on him, kicking him, had heard that this boy had chedoed some girl
#
at Hansraj and that they had seen him at the Hansraj canteen chedoing some Ramjas girl.
#
It was just, it was just like levels of toxicity layered upon others. And so these men decided
#
that it's upon their honor to, despite this girl never having complained from all that
#
we could think, we don't even know if this, whatever this, this alleged incident took
#
place. But that was apparently the trigger that caused this, this act of violence in
#
the main lawn. It was not in some sort of furtive corner of the college. It was in the
#
main front lawn of the college. But yeah, yeah. So that, that is what happened.
#
And I, I get what you say about Delhi as well. Like in, I finished my college in Pune in
#
1994 and I worked for a few months in Delhi and then I came to Bombay. And, and the reason
#
is pretty much the same that at that time, I think Bombay as it then was, was a one cosmopolitan
#
city in India where you could just come from anywhere and feel at home and you could just
#
be yourself. And Delhi had that slight aggressive nature to it, especially if you're not privileged,
#
you know, in the Delhi context, if you're not already settled there and you're living
#
in a nice house or whatever, if you're just a young person alone in the city, there is
#
that period of settling in and you know, trying to figure things out. Like I, I, I see sort
#
of a couple of simultaneous tensions that one typically feels at this phase in life.
#
And one is that you're just about trying to find yourself that, you know, one is trying
#
to define oneself. Who am I? What do I want to do? What am I interested in? Where am I
#
comfortable? And the other is, especially when you go to another city from where you
#
are, is that you also want to fit in, you know, you also want to be with the cool boys.
#
You also, you don't want to seem like an outsider, you know, and, and all of that. So what were
#
these simultaneous processes like that process of figuring out what you want to do with your
#
life and who you want to be. And also the process of being in this environment with
#
the potential, which can potentially be hostile, but obviously it wasn't necessarily like that
#
all the time, but of, of, you know, that anxiety of fitting in, which so many of us as young
#
people have difficulty dealing with. Yeah, absolutely. I was in no way immune to
#
it. Perhaps I'm not immune to it even now, but, but I think that what I didn't know very
#
clearly was what I wanted to fit into. I mean, that's the other anxiety, right? That you,
#
you layer on top of the anxiety that you want to fit in and you want to be part of some
#
group, but then you don't know which group either. And I was in a place where it didn't,
#
there weren't to me, very obvious groups that I, that I want to fit into or certainly groups
#
that would have me at least. And in the end, what it ended up becoming was that I, I found
#
that the, the group in my college that, that seemed to have similar interests to me, that
#
spoke and had similar cultural reference, et cetera, tended to be the music society.
#
I had no skill. The literary society, I perhaps similarly had no skill. And then the debating
#
society in which I had no skill that I knew of, but I had not tried it ever. And so I
#
thought maybe let me see. It also was the case that, that Ramjit at the time did not
#
have a very well-defined debating society. So it was amorphous enough in which I could
#
be a part of the crowd without having to distinguish myself. And then over time that became actually
#
a part of my social life at the university for the three years that I was there. I was,
#
I debated quite a bit. I was a debater, I suppose. I have mixed feelings about it because
#
I made some wonderful friends who I'm very close friends with till this day, who I'm,
#
you know, I'm extremely fond of and close to, and they are, they are my, some of my
#
closest friends. But I also sensed towards the end of my time as a debating in Delhi,
#
I also sensed that, that there were some aspects to it that were not the most, not the best,
#
let's just say, because it essentially was, I've, I realized firstly, very gendered and
#
I don't know if it's the case even today, but I think that young men tend to be voluble
#
and young men, if they are given some sort of incentive, like money at the end of it
#
can be even more voluble. But the problem is I think that it's, that there can be these
#
perverse incentives that you are young, you don't really, you want to please, you want
#
to be part of a crowd, you want to be liked, and you are told through all the sort of social
#
cues there are and financial incentives that if you come up with some glib argument that
#
puts down somebody else that can sometimes be, sometimes maybe even be unfair, many times
#
unfair, and certainly not sincerely held political positions or policy positions, but that you
#
are just rewarded for it by literally with tallies and really with people clapping. And
#
that's fine, it's fine, you know, if you develop a facility for thinking of, you know, different
#
sides of an argument. But I think that it can also lead to just being glib about many
#
things, believing that, well, there are two sides to everything. And that there are many
#
sides to everything and therefore not really thinking about, well, what do I really believe
#
in? And what are the actual political and social costs of these things, just because
#
you are so attuned to thinking in this manner, which is actually kind of shallow. And so
#
I started thinking, I started feeling, having much more mixed feelings about it. But you
#
know, I mean, maybe, I don't even know, maybe that was after I stopped debating and that
#
I was looking back on it. I don't know if I was particularly troubled by it at the time,
#
because to me, it was an escape route. It was a way in which to have a social circle
#
of like-minded people, of friends, of having a social life, of having people that I could
#
hang out with, of traveling even on debates, of at a time in which, you know, I'd relied
#
entirely on my parents for money, that I could feel like, okay, now, you know, I can make
#
some a little bit, it's not, we're talking very, very small amounts, but at the time,
#
they feel, they feel large, right? So if you get a thousand rupees at the end of a debate
#
that you win, that's most of your rent for, you know, that's as, you know, it feels like,
#
and so what you could do with that also felt like, they felt like princely sums. And so,
#
yeah, so I have these mixed feelings, but it was really, I really need, I have to acknowledge
#
that that was what in some ways got me out of a bit of a funk, you know, instead of being
#
at the local park in Outram lines, reading Maxim Gorky, at least I was out with friends.
#
And so I think there is something to be said for that.
#
What was the next step in your path after that? Like, were you already thinking of going
#
further in terms of studying history, being a historian or whatever? You know, what did
#
it take for you to sort of find that groove? Because many people kind of just drift along
#
and they do the next logical thing and they take where, you know, circumstances and life
#
are taking them while others admirably, you know, have it all figured out from the start
#
that, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And then I'm going to do that next and so
#
on and so forth. So what was that journey like to getting to where you eventually got?
#
Yeah, I suppose I fall in the unadmirable camp. I did not have it all figured out. I
#
was not a planner at the time, at least. And I knew that I liked history. I knew it from
#
the time I was in high school that I enjoyed history. I enjoyed it even at the time that
#
I was in college. I suppose I did, you know, I was doing all right in it. So that was some
#
sort of signal that, you know, maybe it's not the worst decision to stick to something
#
that you are all right at. There were, I of course had like everyone who does history
#
or some of the liberal arts in college had many people wondering and asking, you know,
#
for my own benefit, you know, where this is leading, how is this going to lead to some
#
sort of employment and whether I had thought about the big issue and the elephant in the
#
room of remuneration at some point, at some point in my life. And I suppose choosing to
#
ignore all these very concerned questions, I decided that I just needed to do a master's
#
in history. And suppose I was just then being carried along by the current of, well, I like
#
doing this. I'm not bad at it. I seem to be okay at it. People seem to think I'm good
#
at it. And so I went to university for my master's. I was at the university. I was sort
#
of changed college affiliations, but I basically stayed in the international student's house,
#
which I mean, I'm not international. I'm an Indian citizen, but they had some kind of,
#
you know, quotas for people who did extracurriculars and somehow, and the life there was definitely
#
better than, and then staying in my paying guest accommodations. And so again, it was
#
like now I was staying in this place with people from all over the world, many African
#
nations, many Asian countries. And so that was a nice experience. And it came with much
#
more comfortable lodgings. I, for the first time had again, to maybe to younger listeners,
#
might sound strange, but it was only my master's when I was well into my, you know, I was maybe
#
19 or 20 at the time that I got my first laptop, partly, which I could pay for, you know, partly
#
through, you know, the fact that I had, you know, I could tell my parents that, you know,
#
I've saved some money from these debates. And so they were like, okay, so, you know,
#
you deserve a laptop at this point. And, and, and so, you know, life sort of became much
#
more comfortable on a day-to-day basis. But also I began to think about my future and
#
sort of career prospects more seriously once I was in the masters, because of course, then
#
you're doing an advanced degree. And, and so I started thinking, looking at people and
#
thinking, oh, is that a path I could follow? Can I see myself as a historian? It still
#
seemed very far-fetched. Well, there are moments when even now it seems very far-fetched, but
#
certainly I don't compare myself to the people I had, I had as my models at the time. I looked
#
at the professors I had at the time. And, and these are some excellent teachers and
#
scholars, right? Talking Shahid Amin, Dilip Menon, these are some really Sunil Kumar.
#
These are all, you know, really, really scholars who had made a name for themselves in their
#
scholarship alone, but also were very good teachers. It was also at a time in which there
#
were debates. I mean, there have been debates about the polarization of history, you know,
#
since independence, certainly so since the Babri Masjid came down in 92. But in 2008,
#
which is when I was in my first year of my masters, was also this, the huge, I don't
#
know if you remember, but this 300 Ramayanas episode in Delhi University, where I was actually
#
in a class with Professor Sunil Kumar and we were taking an exam and a brick came flying
#
through the window, you know, through smashing the glass. And luckily it didn't hurt any
#
of the students, it fell in one of the rows between us. And there was then this, then
#
we heard this sort of chanting outside by a, like, what was literally quite a mob of
#
ABVP students who were protesting against a essay written by the very eminent scholar
#
A.K. Ramanujan, you know, written in the, you know, decades ago, decades certainly before
#
2008, called the 300 Ramayanas, which is about the various traditions of the Ramayanas across
#
the world, right? Across Southeast Asia and within India itself. This was seen as some
#
kind of, some sort of apostasy by the ABVP who said that there is only one Ramayan and
#
there aren't these different Ramayanas in which, some in which, as we know, like in
#
the South and in Sri Lanka, where Ravan is seen as the real protagonist and the hero.
#
And so for the sin of being the chair of the department that had admitted this essay into
#
its syllabus, also just happened to be a Muslim man. Professor Jafri was roughed up. They
#
came into the department and started pushing the head of the department around. We were
#
again locked into the room so they couldn't come in, but that led to afterwards the entire
#
student body of our class joining with other students across the campus in this kind of
#
show of solidarity with Professor Jafri and with the fact that you should be allowed to
#
study whatever text you want, especially at the master's level. If it's been vetted by
#
other academics and even if not vetted by the academics, you should just be able to
#
study whatever text you want. And this was not even, didn't even seem like a controversial
#
choice. This was a very, a very eminent academics essay on a subject that is universally acknowledged
#
as existing, which led to almost, you know, towards late in the evening, a kind of showdown
#
between our students and this ABVP. And the ABVP was obviously not interested in this
#
necessarily for the intellectual reasons about the Ramayana, but it was also part of, you
#
know, DUSU, politics, Delhi University Student Union politics and all of that. But, you know,
#
there was this sort of police barricade between us and these students. And in some ways history,
#
which had always been alive in Delhi in these ways in which we had read about and talked
#
about the ways in which history is politicized, it became much more real. But the fact that
#
history and just such mundane matters as what is in a syllabus can ignite such passions was
#
a real revelation to me. And that sense has stayed with me. And of course in today's day,
#
you know, this, we still live in the age of the history wars, but that sense of a grievement
#
mapped onto the syllabus that some other student, it wasn't as if any of these students were
#
being forced to study it. There might have been MA history students amongst them, but
#
that was not there. It wasn't that we as students do not want to study this. It's that you as
#
scholars or scholars in training should not be studying this because it offends our sentiments.
#
And I think that that was very eye opening to me.
#
And it seems to me that two contradictory conclusions can be made about history here.
#
And one is that history is therefore not some boring dead subject. It's more relevant than
#
ever. Like you said, it's alive. It has, you know, history in a sense becomes a basis for
#
things people do and therefore it is important and so on and so forth. And at the same time,
#
the contradictory impulse is also to think that this actually makes history irrelevant
#
because we are trapped in narrative battles and it doesn't matter what actually happened
#
or why it actually happened. You know, everything is eventually going to be, you know, simplified
#
within the ideological echo chambers where they emerge. Even the way we look at Nehru,
#
for example, right, you have a nuanced view of all the protagonists in the book, Nehru,
#
Purnabas, everyone. But in the sort of the marketplace of ideas as it were today, and
#
I shouldn't even dignify it with that term, but in the discourse that we see, especially
#
on social media, you just have polarized views. Either he was, you know, an out of touch deracinated
#
elite who was wrong, who was responsible for everything that went wrong with India or he's
#
a great liberal, secular, democratic leader who built this country and shaped our institutions.
#
And both of those are true and both of those are untrue. And it's just a complicated story.
#
And that's what history is. History is complicated. You know, in these times, it often seems that
#
it doesn't matter. So how do you think about these sort of dual sentiments which kind of
#
collide with each other? Because on the one hand, it can add an urgency to what you do,
#
not just in terms of the specific, not just in terms of the way that you do your history,
#
but also the things that you choose to write about. But at the same time, you might realize
#
that everything is being politicized. Everything is about narratives. Forget that. Let me go
#
on my pursuit of truth. That is my dharma as a historian. That's what I got to do. So how
#
do you sort of think about all of this? Yeah, I mean, first, I'd say that you've actually
#
portrayed the debate in the marketplace of ideas, perhaps too charitably. I mean, I wish
#
that the debate was just between is Nehru a deracinated Anglophone versus is he a great
#
liberal hero? I mean, if those were the polls, I think we'd be in a much better place. But
#
the debate really is Nehru as, you know, if you type Nehru on YouTube or something, it's
#
like Nehru syphilis, you know, womanizer, responsible for every ill that India has today. And so
#
I think that that's where we are. And I think that in some ways, it is inescapable. I think
#
that there has never and there will never be a time in which history, especially recent
#
history or history relating to the founding of a nation will be apolitical in that there's
#
no way in which for it to be seen as apolitical because it matters so much to the identity
#
of the nation and of its citizens. Right. You could, again, to take it to a different
#
context. We see similar things in America as well. Right. In America, there are, again,
#
debates that are start with debates, maybe even amongst historians, but then is made
#
out into completely something else different, such as, say, with the 1619 project, the New
#
York Times, the 1619 project, which is the study of slavery in America and a sort of
#
a provocation to think about what if the founding of America is thought of as 1619, which is
#
when the first transatlantic slaves are brought to America rather than 1776, which is formerly
#
the birth of their nation. That has led to a huge Republican conservative backlash such
#
that President Trump was talking about it. And again, so you see that these kinds of
#
history battles are in some ways inescapable. And I think that the point is not to shy away
#
from it. But the point is, what is the role is for different people to decide what their
#
role in that is? Do you want to just be a sort of keyboard warrior pouring fuel on the fire
#
by typing random stuff on YouTube comments about how either is Nehru responsible for
#
all these ills or is the Congress Party this wonderful institution that cannot be criticized?
#
Or do you want to actually learn about it? And then, of course, that is not uncomplicated
#
because then where do you go to learn about it? Because, of course, we do not live in
#
a marketplace that is necessarily very efficient in sort of channeling you towards the best
#
sources of information. In fact, quite the opposite, right? With Facebook and with algorithmic
#
knowledge enterprises, you are actually directed towards the more controversial ones, which
#
tend to be often the least scholarly ones. So I think that for the citizen, there's a
#
challenge. But that challenge is different than the challenge for me as a citizen, but
#
also a scholar of modern Indian history in which I have to decide what is my role to
#
be. And I tell my students that there is no view from nowhere, right? You can aspire to
#
an Archimedean viewpoint in the pure sciences, but you cannot in history. In any subject
#
in which the human being is involved so much, there will be some biases. Now, what historical
#
training does is to try to weed out those biases or at least provide the reader of my
#
articles or books ways in which to identify my biases, right? So that would be that I
#
provide rigorous citation of all my sources so that you, Amit, you can read my book, you
#
can go through my sources and say, okay, so these are the sources he's used. He's chosen
#
not to look at these or he's chosen to look at only these. So that's what I have to judge
#
him on. And you can decide, well, is that biased and in which way is it biased? You
#
can then verify my sources by saying, he claims to have looked at X number of files in the
#
national archives and this particular file, I'm going to go and check, right? Which is
#
the closest that we have to replicability in science. I'm going to go and check whether
#
this quote from, he said it or not. Or did Deshmukh actually say this or is this something
#
that Nikhil has made up for some kind of rhetorical flourish? So those are the ways in which we
#
can check for biases, not eliminate them, but perhaps make them a part of your process
#
and make them apparent to the reader so that they know where you come from. And I think
#
that mostly I find at least with students, because at least with students also you have
#
a assumption of trust because in a classroom, as opposed to me as an author sitting on one
#
side of a screen versus somebody who's reading an excerpt of the book on some website and
#
wants to post something nasty about Nehru and then my book is just the vehicle for that,
#
there is no shared trust there. But in the classroom, there's an assumption of good faith
#
between the students and the teacher, hopefully. I think that we usually have that. And in
#
that case, I tell students at the beginning of a course on modern Indian and Pakistan
#
that my biases really are towards, I am an Indian citizen, I have views on my country,
#
but I'm also a scholar. And so I will try to keep my personal views and its politics
#
separate from what I teach. But on the other hand, I do not have two sides on the 1984
#
take massacres. I'm not going to provide you a Congress Jagdish title of justification.
#
There are to me no two sides on the Godhra as well. So my biases are pro-democracy, pro-human
#
rights. That's what you have to take me as. And if you feel that that is, if you believe
#
in illiberal democracy, then yes, you can call me out on that being my bias, but I own
#
up to that. And so I think I find that that is a useful way of thinking about history
#
is that no, nobody can claim to be. So if someone is saying that they're absolutely
#
bias free, I think that that is, that is not true. But what you can say is, is this person,
#
has this person trained to do so that does not just mean credentialing. It means that
#
you don't might not have a PhD in history, but that you follow all the methods that historians
#
do, right? Which is that you are rigorous with your sources, citation, et cetera. Is
#
your work peer reviewed? Is it reviewed by others in a way in which it's a blind, especially
#
such that they are able to eliminate obvious errors in it? Again, can there be works that
#
still have errors? Yes. But has it gone through a certain filter that suggests to you that,
#
okay, so and so might be trusted when they say this, not infallible, but might be trusted.
#
And that's the same with scientists as well, right? Scientists also get certain things
#
wrong, but we trust them overall because they've been through certain processes that suggest
#
to us that they have become experts in that. And so I would think that that's the way I
#
would like to, to think about my role, but also about how, if you're a citizen of India
#
and you are interested in history and you want to know what, who to trust, this is,
#
I would say the way to do it, which is that what are, and try to triangulate the motivations
#
of the people, right? If it's a party spokesperson, maybe don't trust that person entirely on
#
the history of their own party, which is not to say that party spokesperson cannot be scholars,
#
but maybe that shouldn't be your only source for it, right? And if you're reading on the
#
Nehru years, I would encourage people to read my book, but certainly read other books that
#
have a different view as well and see which is more persuasive. And I think that there
#
is no substitute for that work. And that is the quandary that we find ourselves in. But
#
I think that it's inescapable. And I think that we have to, we just have to be a part
#
of it. We can't retreat to ivory towers and citadels. That is not a privilege that we
#
Well said. And I don't know how many party spokesmen are listening to this, but they're
#
just thinking kiya humne kya kya, achcha chal raha tha, humne kyu lai bheesh mein, but I think
#
they'll be okay. I think they'll be okay if they are listening to this. So take me through
#
the rest of your journey then, you know, at what point do you say that, okay, this is
#
it. I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. There is going to be no MBA. There is
#
going to be no whatever. This is my path. I am going to do this. And when you think
#
about it in that manner, is it just the subject that you're thinking about, that I love doing
#
history, this is great fun and I can make a career out of this in academia and so I'll
#
do this? Or have you also at this point in time formed specific domains where you say
#
that, okay, I'm really interested in post-independent history, for example, or this kind of journey
#
is a journey I want to take? And how influential were the teachers you had or perhaps the writers
#
you read or were influenced by at that time? How influential were other people in sort
#
of helping you find this way? Yeah, the question of when did I decide that
#
I'm not going to do an MBA can be said as when did I decide to disappoint my father?
#
No, I'm kidding. My father is very supportive. But it means that certain, yes, once you start
#
doing an MA and an MPhil, certain avenues do start closing. And so I was joking about
#
my father. He's been very supportive. Despite really having a very different background
#
than me, not having the privileges I had, my father, as I said, had a sales job, had
#
to right after college start working for a living and to support a wife and children
#
and support his parents as well. So through most of his adult life has had to support
#
two households. It's a life that's very different from mine and much more difficult. Went house
#
to house selling, say, shaving sticks. And so, you know, of course, he was concerned,
#
like many people were, you know, what is this going to lead to? Like, what do people who
#
do an, not just a BA in history, but then an MA in history, this looks dangerously like
#
you want to try to become a historian. Or is it going to be civil services? Maybe perhaps.
#
But no, I think even at the MA stage, I think that I kept career options open. I don't even
#
know really what I would parachute into. But I think I just thought that, you know, maybe
#
till the end of the MA, other things may be possible. You know, maybe journalism, maybe
#
law, maybe the civil services, even though I just don't think the civil services was
#
not something that I thought of very seriously. And I think part of it was because of my experience
#
as an undergrad in Outroom Lines and this Pingus accommodation, one of the people that
#
lived with us, I mean, lived, you know, in this sort of, in this warren of small little
#
rooms was somebody who was preparing for the civil services. And it seemed like just such
#
a grind, such hard work. And that even after all that hard work, the chances of success
#
was so slim, and seemed to hinge on some things that could seem just quite idiosyncratic,
#
that it really kind of put me off the idea. And so that was not what I was...
#
In the end, I think he decided to go a different direction. I think he decided to try to become
#
a judge. I mean, that's the last I had heard of him. But, and so it was, you know, when
#
I'd met him, it was already his second year trying and he had tried two or three years.
#
And so that was sort of very dispiriting to see, you know, every day to see the sort of
#
stress and the toll that it took. And in some ways, just put hitting pause on your life
#
for two, three years, living away from family, just trying to crack this one exam. And because,
#
you know, as listeners know, I mean, that's what it takes. I mean, you can't do other
#
things on the side. It is all or nothing. And so that sort of put me off. And I don't
#
think I really considered that very seriously. But by the end of my master's, I felt that
#
I, I think I'd started thinking about doing a PhD. And I'd also started thinking that
#
I might want to, I definitely wanted to, to go abroad just as a life experience. Because
#
I'd spent by the end of my master's five years in Delhi. But I also felt that if I wanted
#
to get into the kind of program that I wanted, that I needed to do some research, I also
#
need to get some sense of what research is like if I was going to embark on an entire
#
PhD. And so I enrolled in a PhD at JNU, which is another wonderful experience. It is in
#
some ways the most economically diverse group of students that I've been with, the most
#
liberal in terms of the ethos amongst the students, the most safe, for example, that
#
women on any campus I've been on in India have felt ever. And so the life of being at
#
the dhaba late at night, discussing your readings, discussing ideas, that was very, very exciting
#
and intellectually extremely stimulating. And of course, I had the great privilege of
#
working with wonderful scholars and teachers again, who really are a model to me of what
#
can be done if you really commit yourself to public education, to education, which does
#
not remunerate you very much, but you're still committed to it because you believe in the
#
cause of education, of doing this as a service to society, not just as career advancement,
#
but as history and being a teacher as a calling. And when I was at JNU, and to me it's been
#
a real, it's been a source of real dismay and anguish that JNU has come in the past
#
few years to be associated with just, with being anti-national, with being, I mean, the
#
people at JNU were some of the most patriotic I've met because they were anguished and
#
angry about the state of India precisely because they cared so much. And it's been a real source
#
of sadness that JNU has come to be in the public mind associated with this kind of thing.
#
And of course also that students from JNU were just sort of arrested. Umar Khalid was
#
in my MPhil cohort. He was in classes with me. And to think that somebody that I, he
#
was not a friend per se, I mean, we knew each other, but to think that somebody I was sitting
#
in a classroom with has been in jail now for what, a year and a half, based on very flimsy
#
evidence. And, but, and regardless of the merits of the case being slandered on public
#
television with accusations, which are not even made by the government, accusations just
#
made by television pundits about being a Pakistani spy or, you know-
#
And not just allegations, doctored videos.
#
And doctored videos, right? And, and so to think that, to think that you, that it's possible
#
to just ruin the life of someone. I'm not to say that, that, that, that, that his life
#
is ruined. He has a long life ahead of him and, and hopefully he is out of jail very
#
soon. Um, but to think that that, that when, when the state turns on you and when, uh,
#
when sections of the media can also turn on you in that way, that, that the results can
#
be so enormous on somebody that, that was so, that whose life basically mirrored yours,
#
right? He lived in a, in a, in a hostel on campus. I live in a hostel on campus. He went
#
to the hostel to eat his food. I went to think we sat in the same classes. Uh, but that at
#
that point he was doing an M full thesis. I was doing an M full thesis. Both of us were
#
doing, you know, going to the archives once in a while. The, the, the idea that, that
#
an event like that can just suddenly change your life so much, uh, is, is quite astounding.
#
Does it make you rethink what it feels like to be an Indian? Does it make you rethink
#
the whole project? I mean, it's very clear that the one fundamental difference between
#
you and Umar is that he's Muslim. Yes. And there's no putting a sheen on it. And Kashmiri.
#
And there's no putting a sheen on it that there is, uh, so much anti-Muslim politics
#
that is dominant today. I think that is a core problem with our politics today. And
#
does it kind of make you wonder? I mean, this is a question I've also asked in, uh, in other
#
fora for example, you know, you know, how libertarians feel about taxes, right? Now
#
the thing is even accepting that fine, that some amount of taxes are necessary. You need
#
a state to protect our rights, blah, blah, blah. And then you argue on the margins about
#
when is it justified? When is it not justified? But I've come to recently, uh, start thinking
#
about that when your taxes are being used for bulldozers and the kind of things that
#
are being done in your name, you know, then is that even moral? What does citizenship
#
mean? How do you look at your relationship with the state? And I must clarify for all
#
the tax officers listening to this, that they will find I am a law abiding citizen and I
#
pay all my taxes. Well, but just at that moral level of thinking of what does it mean to
#
be an Indian and also the incredible, this quiet that it gives me, gives me to see this
#
happening because this is not any more a fringe sentiment, right? This is, this is our politics
#
in a sense, this is our democracy expressing itself. So, you know, what, what, what do
#
you feel? Yeah, I mean, there is, it's, it's bigotry. There is just no two ways about it.
#
It's bigotry that is, that is unfortunately mainstream and is also given, uh, not just
#
political encouragement, but patronage. And, um, it isn't a new sentiment in India. There
#
has been bigotry of, you know, all sorts, uh, in India, I'm sure always human beings
#
are human beings. Um, but it is one thing when it is seen as shameful in, in the broad
#
public sphere. And it is one thing when it is rewarded, right? Rewarded with career advancement,
#
with, uh, political positions, et cetera. I, I had, I'd heard extremely bigoted views
#
when I, when I came to, uh, only because this is one of the first times I was having this
#
kind of conversation in college, again, in my paying guest accommodations. One of the
#
people that lived, uh, with us would talk about, again, you know, his views on history,
#
which were completely unmoored by fact, but about how, you know, I mean, that there was
#
just like, you know, mountains of these Hindu bodies that were always every day piling up.
#
Again, not to say that, you know, early modern India was some sort of paradisiacal place
#
where there was no, uh, you know, inter-communal violence or conflict far from it. India was,
#
has always been a casteist and been a religiously divided place, but this was certainly a huge
#
exaggeration about the nature. And it was about the talking about, you know, Mughal
#
rule, et cetera. And you, and I think that those views that at the times seemed to shock
#
me because of how extreme it was and how far away it was from what any scholar had been
#
able to prove, right? I mean, the point about these sort of things is that if it is so true,
#
there must be some scholar who should be able to prove this sort of thing. And of course
#
the retort you get is, well, all of them are leftists, but then you think that human incentives
#
are such that there'd be such enormous rewards if you were able to prove incontrovertibly
#
that actually this happened, right? Original research is rewarded as amongst historians.
#
We respect original research and making a big intervention like that would be something
#
that would make everyone sit up and notice. But the fact is that it is, again, it's this
#
sort of assertion that is unfalsifiable. It's that, because then it gets to, if you say,
#
well, that doesn't seem to be true, it's like, well, all of you are of a certain, uh, ideological
#
disposition. And I think that it's views like that, that I have noticed every time I have
#
come back to India, especially in the last sort of 10 years or so, especially in the
#
last, you know, five, six years, that it is just more and more openly expressed, expressed
#
not in, you know, conversations amongst friends over dinner, like it was the first time I
#
heard it, but now just, you know, now just without any sense of shame, without any sense
#
that's what you're saying is, uh, is cruel and, and narrow minded. Uh, and it's led to,
#
to me feeling, I mean, I am, I feel patriotic as an Indian, but patriotism does not mean
#
that you do not feel shame. Uh, that's at least in the way that I think of, of, of,
#
in fact, it can be why you feel shame. Yes. I mean, it is, I feel shame because I care
#
about, about India. I am, I mean, I live abroad, I am an Indian citizen and I work, my work
#
is on India. My family, much of my family lives here. My wife and child live, we live
#
in the United States. Um, I mean, without even going into this sort of tedious debate
#
of, well, then why do you live elsewhere? But the way that I feel about it is, yes,
#
it is complicated by the fact that this happens, but there has never been a time in which I
#
think you can just feel uncomplicatedly happy about everything about your country. But this,
#
I do feel is, this is particularly vicious and it, and there seems to be, it seems to
#
only be getting worse to the point where I have, I have the privilege not of being Hindu,
#
I have being an upper caste Hindu man. And so it doesn't directly affect me. Uh, but
#
I have friends, I have close friends who are Muslim or are married to somebody who's Muslim
#
and to them, this is a real concern to them. They are discussing whether to leave India
#
and if they live abroad, but had plans to come back to India to actually something that
#
10 years ago, I would not have thought was possible, but making actual life plans saying
#
that we want to go back to India, but we don't think it's, if we have a Muslim child, we
#
don't think that this is actually a safe or the best decision. If we have other options,
#
why would we choose this? Um, and so I think that it's that, and it's when I have those
#
conversations that it really sort of, it strikes me with a, with the force really of a sledgehammer
#
that, that, that this is a privilege. My privilege is that I only have to think about this when
#
something in politics comes up, right? But if you are of certain communities, this must
#
be a sort of, even if you're a privileged and off with economic means, it still must
#
be this sort of low boil existential dread about is violence around the corner. And it
#
must have been what, you know, being Sikh in, in North India and Delhi must have been
#
in the, in the late eighties after 84, right? That, that this community that seemed once
#
like it had, uh, that I was enveloped in affection with, and I seem to have been integrated into,
#
uh, in the, in the best cases has completely turned on me. And, and so not that Muslims
#
ever in India, I think have felt that, you know, they were completely well integrated
#
and, and, uh, embraced, but, but that, uh, and I think that again, that's a memory I
#
have from, uh, 92 in Bombay as well, the sense that of people turning on each other of, of
#
our colony being referred to as a Hindu colony, as SBI colony being a Hindu colony, people
#
wondering whether they should go to the local grocer, who we got our groceries from, who
#
was, who's Muslim. But remembering that my mother made it a point to tell me that, you
#
know, when there was this bond and nobody was setting out, but my mother had to set
#
out because my father was out of town to get us some groceries, but that she got it from
#
this Muslim grocer who had of course shut his shop because it was a Hindu colony. But
#
that when she went there, a window opened and from the side, little, little bag of groceries
#
without my mother choosing, cause there's no time for it. This person just chose what
#
was to be in there and just furtively gave it to my mother, who he knew was Hindu and
#
in a Hindu colony. And in that little thing, this man who must have been dreading for his
#
life given his social circumstances and his economic circumstances had the, the, the largeness
#
of heart to slip into this bag, the chocolate bar that I liked, right? That, that, so, so
#
I think, and that is the sort of thing that those are the kinds of bonds that, that, that,
#
that cannot last much longer if this kind of thing continues. And that is what, that
#
is something that saddens me and I see around me and I, and I realize that I can never really
#
share that experience of others. And it really is a, is a just unmitigated shame.
#
You know, what I agree with you on, on, and what is sort of heartbreaking is that something
#
is fundamentally changed. Like, yes, of course, Muslims were always, there was that tension.
#
They were never kind of, never quite treated as if they are part of this country. But there
#
is a very moving story about Ehsan Jafri, that Jafri, who had suffered from previous
#
riots, I think in the sixties or whatever, and had lost his home and all that. He chose
#
not to go to a ghetto. He was asked once that, why are you staying where you are surrounded
#
by Hindus? And he said that, no, to, to go to a Muslim ghetto today, to withdraw into
#
that, even if it's safer, would be to betray my idea of India, to, to betray what I believe
#
in. I will not do that. I believe that we can coexist and stay in. And we all know what
#
happened to Ehsan Jafri, right? And that to me is, it's such a great betrayal. And, and
#
I sort of see it playing out, you know, Kapil Komaredi in an episode he did with me once
#
pointed out that, you know, the Hindus who stayed in India after partition, it's a default
#
thing. This is where you are. But the Muslims who could have gone, but who chose to stay
#
here, they chose something. They chose that same idea that Ehsan Jafri chose, right?
#
And to now reward them in this way is, is utterly sort of heartbreaking for me. And,
#
and you, and you pointed out about, you know, your lament about how, you know, people in
#
JNU are now treated as if they're anti-national. And there is this little bit in your book
#
as well, where you quote P. R. Brahmanand, you know, talking about how when B. R. Shanoi
#
and C. N. Bakheel and Mr. Brahmanand himself objected to the second five-year plan that
#
they were, you know, sidelined and left out of planning committee meetings and, you know,
#
branded anti-nationals and CIA agents, you know, but there, you know, it's, it's that
#
common thing of dissent causing you to be called anti-national. But today what we see
#
is your identity, your location is enough for you to be called anti-national. So I do
#
think that, I mean, I tend to be more pessimistic than others, I mean, but I do think that something
#
fundamental has shifted and it's sad and I don't know where we are going to go. So maybe,
#
maybe, you know, like the rest of the country and the country can't take a break, but we
#
can take a break. So let's take a quick break and continue our conversation on the other
#
side. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of
#
you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel
#
I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced
#
to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well,
#
that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it. Only now
#
I'm doing it through a newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land
#
up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The
#
India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you.
#
Welcome back to the Seen in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Nikhil Menon and we are discussing
#
still discussing his fascinating journey. We'll get to the book eventually. So we've
#
gotten you all the way to the point where you're sort of doing your PhD at JNU and you're
#
thinking of taking it even further, the further, the further than that. Or you're doing your
#
MPhil in JNU rather. MPhil. You're doing your MPhil in JNU and you're thinking of going
#
even further. So take me through sort of the rest of your journey from there until before
#
the book. Yeah, maybe I should be more rapid because perhaps one of the reasons we've taken
#
so long is that I'm being long winded. No, you're being great. Please, please don't artificially
#
hurry it up. Well, my PhD took the longest. It took five to six years. So we could be
#
here forever. No, so from from JNU, I left after two years after my MPhil to do my PhD
#
in the US. And that was a real change. I had not ever been to the US before. I hadn't been
#
abroad actually very many times, maybe, I think, two or three times maybe before that.
#
And so it was it was a culture shock in the way that in a way like moving from Madras
#
to Delhi was, but in a very different way in that it was different but comfortable,
#
not in a different but very intimidating. Part of it could be that I moved to a very
#
small town. I was in Princeton, New Jersey at Princeton University. And it's like a small
#
quaint picture postcard like town and very much non threatening in the way that the Delhi
#
can be overwhelming and intimidating. So I also, you know, there's also a function of
#
the fact that I'm much older. And so you feel less insecure about yourself, you're less
#
worried about who you are and and and what where you fit in. I had really a wonderful
#
time in my PhD. Of course, with all the anxiety that doing something as lonely as a PhD can
#
produce. You are choosing one topic to burrow down on and deciding to become or hoping to
#
become an expert on it and produce some original research on. And so sometimes it can feel
#
like standing on the edge of a precipice and not knowing whether your bridge across will
#
appear or whether you can build it or if you will just take a step and sink. But at the
#
same time, at least for a couple of years in my PhD, you know, having done at this point
#
quite a frankly embarrassing amount of master's degrees, I've done an MA and an MPhil and
#
now in as part of your PhD program, you are effectively also doing another MA. I did feel
#
like I could take it easy to some extent that I didn't have to that I didn't have to be
#
quite so anxious, at least for the first two years. And so I I remember kind of cutting
#
loose for the first semester at least. I remember being amazed by the high speed internet and
#
then just streaming every TV show that I wanted to watch. I remember going through several
#
seasons of Breaking Bad at an alarming rate. I remember it causing others to also because
#
I grew up in I studied before that in Delhi University and JNU. And it wasn't common for
#
everyone necessarily to study at the library at JNU. Many people did. But I just worked
#
in my room, whereas the culture at my PhD was that most people just showed up at the
#
library or a coffee shop and work there. And because I was missing from these spaces, people
#
just thought that I wasn't doing any work. But you know, I was certainly doing less work
#
than I probably should have at the very beginning. But I quickly found that I rediscovered a
#
joy in reading and in engaging with with history outside of Indian history. This is something
#
that I think, unfortunately, in India, when you study history, at least in the place that
#
I went to, and when I was there, you just did Indian history of different time periods
#
and different specializations. And very rarely did you have the opportunity to study other
#
other parts of the world. And it's certainly at the master's level and after I did, but
#
not at the range at which I was able to, during my PhD, in my first year, take courses by
#
experts in, you know, in early modern Europe or in in modern Britain, or, you know, just
#
things that are far afield from from my own core interest. And I found that quite a horizon
#
opening and also freeing, because it felt like I could just study it without worrying
#
about, oh, I need to keep this in mind for the future, that this is going to be related
#
to my future project, or in some ways, how is this related to my future research? It
#
was just studying it for the sake of learning. And that was was was very pleasurable. I also
#
made, I quickly made a group of very close friends with whom I'm close with till today.
#
I also met my, the person who would go on to become my wife, and also the the mother
#
of our child. And so I suppose I was particularly lucky in that I, I made those connections
#
and I had that relationship throughout my time in my PhD. So I look back on my my PhD
#
very fondly, though there is a lot, I am sort of papering over a lot of just dread about,
#
you know, about trying to get a job, there is a it's, there is a sort of jobs crisis
#
in the humanities in that many, many more PhDs than there are jobs. And, and once you're
#
at the end of a PhD, in history, you really do feel like maybe there aren't many other
#
options. Right. So I had to get off that train, you know, about seven to 10 years earlier
#
if I needed to make other choice. And at that point felt though I am exaggerating, people
#
go on to doing other things. But I felt like by that point, not only was it the most obvious
#
choice, but also, by that point, I was quite convinced that that is what I'd really like
#
doing. I felt that it was my version of the good life that are the nearest approximation
#
that I could think of, of a life in which I felt like I was doing something worthwhile,
#
and doing something that I enjoyed, and doing something that I, I could be decent at. And
#
so that that sort of trifecta, I think is hard to hit. And, I mean, I'm sure and there
#
are days in which maybe I feel like it's not the case. But overall, I am very glad with
#
that, with that decision. But of course, you know, landing a job was very, very stressful
#
and anxiety inducing. But again, overall, I had a very good time. And it's where I started
#
thinking about this particular project that led to this book. It's the, this book is based
#
on my PhD at Princeton. And it's also where I started thinking about the, because research
#
I had been doing for a while, but I started thinking about the mechanics of writing and
#
what writing, what kind of book do I want to write? How should it be written? How can
#
I improve my writing? These are things that I hadn't really given too much thought to.
#
I just, in some ways, I had a model of write, a vision of what writing was, which maybe
#
many people have, which is that you just have certain innate abilities. And what you put
#
on the page is a reflection of that. And I suppose spurred by my disappointment at what
#
my innate abilities seem to be, I felt that I needed to, to try to improve on it. And
#
I luckily seem to find that actually good writers and people who, who even teach writing,
#
like yourself, believe that writing is a skill that can be worked on and improved actually
#
quite drastically. And so I just became much more, I mean, I didn't do any formal course
#
on it or anything, but I just became much more conscious about, about writing and about
#
my writing style and about how, whether, again, it, you know, I leave it up to readers to
#
think if it has had any effect, but I certainly think that I improved as a writer in that
#
process. And I think that improving as a writer also improves your research and your ability
#
to translate that research and to be much more specific about the claims that you're
#
making and about the arguments that you, that you want to advance. And so I found that actually
#
very useful for my research. And also I found it a way in which I could channel my energies
#
towards if I was not feeling like I was making any progress on the research, I felt like,
#
okay, I have this piece of writing. How can I try to improve it? Can I try to make it
#
more precise, less wordy, less sort of flabby, less, you know, I mean, all the things that
#
you try to do. And so, you know, I just tried to find whatever piece of advice on writing
#
I could find online. We were talking about this earlier before we started recording.
#
I looked up to these series of essays by John McPhee, who's this legendary writer for the
#
New Yorker who's also taught generations of students on writing. And I found that that
#
attention to structure, to narrative, how to plot narratives, that all of that, again,
#
I don't know if it has worked, but it was new to me. I hadn't thought about writing
#
that way, because I just had this view that that you just have your level of skill and
#
then that's all you can do. And so I found this, I found eye opening and I found it something
#
that I wanted to spend time working on. And since then I felt that, you know, that's been,
#
I think it improved my research and I think it improved what I was doing. And I realized
#
that if I'm going to be a historian, in some ways my job, apart from teaching, that half
#
my job is writing and I might as well try to improve on the way that I write. And so
#
apart from the research that took a fair bit of my time during my PhD.
#
Were you also teaching during this time?
#
No, the graduate program that I was in actually had very generous funding, very generous scholarship
#
and actually did not require you to teach, which perhaps has its downsides in that, you
#
know, you don't get a feel for what teaching is like, you don't get the experience. I
#
chose, I volunteered to, to be a teaching assistant for a professor for one semester,
#
but even that's not like teaching your own course. And so actually once I started my
#
job, I had this moment when I, just as I was about to go to my first class, this moment
#
of panic in which I wondered, you know, I've chosen this career and I've even got a job,
#
but I actually have no idea how, how I am as a teacher, what the experience of being
#
a teacher is like and A, whether I will be, be any good at it and B, whether I will enjoy
#
it. And so thankfully both the answers were, I mean, whether I was good at it, it seemed
#
like I was at least competent and that again, like writing, you can improve. And so I think
#
that in my first semesters, I was, I probably, I probably am a better teacher now than then.
#
And I hope to improve further every semester. You know, I, I tried to, you know, I tried
#
to get better, but in terms of enjoying it, I really did enjoy it. And I found that actually
#
it was very nice to be able to, to pair teaching in a classroom with doing research and with
#
writing a book because they move at different paces. The research is, you know, moves often
#
at snail space, takes years and years. Whereas the teaching is something that you can get
#
feedback on immediately. And you sort of get feedback, even if they don't straight out
#
tell you that, you know, you sucked. I mean, even if they don't say that to you, you know
#
when a class has not gone well, you know, when you sort of miss the sweet spot. On the
#
other hand, you also know when a class really did feel like a good number of them were really
#
engaged and that there's like a buzz in the room at the end of the class. Some people
#
still want to talk about it. Then you know that something has gone well. And, and that
#
is nice to know that at the end of the week that, oh, I had two classes and then, you
#
know, that one maybe didn't go so well. One went well, but at least you know, as opposed
#
to the research in which it just takes so long, I'll come back to writing and teaching.
#
But before that, I want to go back to our old subject of fitting in and this time in
#
the context of the academic world in general, like one often hears about the academic world
#
and I've heard this from historians within academia. In fact, that there are these pressures
#
that you have within that world to think in a particular way, to do a particular kind
#
of subject, you know, to look at the world with a particular kind of prism that in one
#
sense the act of doing history is not just doing history. It's, it's also got an ideological
#
tinge to it sometimes. It's also got other incentives mixed in because if you're a professional
#
historian within the academic system, you have those typical pressures that you need
#
to publish a certain number of papers and you need to publish them in a certain number
#
of journals and a certain kind of work is expected from you and maybe whatever you write
#
has to have a new point of view on something. I mean, I know sociologists certainly feel
#
that pressure that everything has to have, you know, a new theory that explains whatever.
#
What were those pressures like that for you? Because I'm assuming that you're coming into
#
history and this personal project of being a historian driven by the pursuit of finding
#
out more about the world, being able to understand it better, explain it better and all of that.
#
But there are also these other kinds of pressures and incentives and often academics can seem
#
like a big circle jerk where you're talking to each other constantly and your ideas aren't
#
getting out there. Now you've clearly and we'll talk about it when we talk about the
#
writing a bit more, made an effort to get past that because your book is, you know,
#
and I mean it as a compliment, doesn't read like an academic book. It's got the rigor,
#
it's got all the footnotes, but anyone can read it and enjoy it as just a story just
#
unveiling itself. And I think McPhee wrote a famous book called story as well. Tell me
#
about all of this that, you know, being in academics, again, there is that pressure to
#
fit in, which can change what you do in hidden unseen ways, perhaps even to yourself. So
#
what are your thoughts on that? And you know, did this come up during your journey?
#
I think that it's, it's a pressure that I'm sure many people feel. And it's a pressure
#
that I began to feel in terms of publishing and professionalizing after the first two
#
or three years of my PhD. But in terms of intellectual conformity, I frankly did not
#
feel that very much. I was really fortunate to have a really, really very encouraging
#
and wonderful academic supervisor who, Gyan Prakash, who's been a guest on your show as
#
well, and who was, who sort of advised with a very light touch in that I actually applied
#
to my PhD program, claiming to do a very different project. But within a year, I basically abandoned
#
it and there was no cost to it, right? I mean, Gyan would sort of joke about how I tricked
#
him after coming into Princeton, but you know, but really he encouraged that you try to explore
#
what subject really appeals to you. And I think being at the place I was did influence
#
it because I started going from a place where I was doing only Indian history. I went to
#
a place where I was now taking courses in all kinds of other geographic fields. And
#
then I think that that influenced the ways in which I started thinking about Indian history
#
itself. I started thinking about, I was also a part of a group of people at Princeton at
#
the time who were looking at, who had interests in post-colonial India, in independent India.
#
Gyan himself, you know, had written Mumbai Fables, was writing Emergency Chronicles amongst
#
the students. There was Rotem Geva, who's writing a book that's just come out on Delhi's
#
Partition, on the Partition's effects on Delhi. Rohit Dey was there at a time, a few years
#
senior to me, working on finishing up his research that then led to his book. Vinay
#
Sitapati was also there, working on a very different topic, but also on independent India.
#
And so there were, you know, several people there who were interested in this field that
#
I had been interested in to read on. But when I was an undergraduate or a graduate, MA or
#
an MPhil student in Delhi, and this might be different now, but there was not a single
#
course offered just on independent India. And I found that it's only when you look back
#
to it, you realize, well, that's kind of strange that we didn't have that. And in some ways,
#
I mean, even like a book that, you know, many people refer to as helping this sort of field
#
grow India after Gandhi, that comes out, I think, in 2008 or so. So I think that it's
#
only the last, you know, 15 to 20 years that, I mean, of course, there has been work on
#
independent India, but I mean, by historians. After partition, I think historians tended
#
to sort of stop there. And I think now historians are doing a lot more work on independent India.
#
And that seemed exciting to me. So I wanted to, because I was interested in reading about
#
independent India, I thought, why not work on a subject like that? And that's what drew
#
me to the topic that I did. And of course, I was very fortunate to be in a place where
#
that was encouraged. And as I said, my advisor, and I think that the reason I mentioned the
#
advisor is that in your PhD, the relationship you have with your dissertation committee
#
and your advisor can actually shape your experience a lot, both your social experience, definitely
#
your intellectual experience, and it can determine whether the entire thing is a stressful period
#
in your life, just overwhelmingly stressful period in your life in which you're constantly
#
worried about your, you know, your professor's favor, whether they have time for you, time
#
to read stuff, time to give you feedback, time to give, you know, write letters of recommendation
#
and all these things. Whereas for me, I had just such a really pleasant experience in
#
which I had a very encouraging and supportive dissertation committee, intellectually, extremely
#
vibrant climate, and a place where I really felt like they had my back and that they would
#
do what, I mean, of course, in the end, it's up to you, but that they would do what they
#
could to help facilitate this research improve. And I recognize that that's not the case for
#
everyone. And in the cases where it's not, it can be very unpleasant and can feel even
#
more lonely because now, and often then you're also in a foreign country, you just feel alone
#
and you feel like nobody can help you out of the situation because you're in this power
#
relationship and the supervisor has, in a sense, some power over you. So, so in many
#
ways, I was, I was fortunate to, for where I went.
#
Yeah, Gyan has, of course, been on the show a few years ago to talk about the emergency,
#
but I think that was less than an hour. So he, you know, he'd listen to this and he'd
#
be like, you spoke to me for less than an hour, why are you bothering the child? Let
#
him go, it's been four hours, eight hours. So how did you get?
#
Nobody might criticize me for being so long winded.
#
You're not being long winded at all. This is every moment of this has been so fascinating
#
for me and I'm sure for the listeners. And if you were on Twitter, they'd let you know
#
that, but sadly that can't be the case. But so tell me about how you arrived at this specific
#
subject. You know, I can understand Mahalo Nabis as a fascinating human being in itself.
#
I can see the attraction there, but just this subject of planning and the role that it played
#
in Indian public life. And you know, the different alleys that you've gone down in this book,
#
like what drew you to it and what eventually gave you the confidence that this is meaty
#
enough to be a thesis and to be a book and so on and so forth.
#
Yeah. I mean, I, I suffer a crisis of confidence even now about the book. So, uh, but the way
#
in which I arrived at the topic is that I, I knew that I wanted to work on independent
#
media. I was thinking about what topics I could, uh, address that were another criterion
#
I had is that I want to tell a national story again, because at the time that is what I
#
was interested in. I want to read a story about, uh, I was interested in stories about
#
nation building and I wanted to understand this particular period of the 1950s and 60s
#
to some extent the 70s, because I think that a nation's founding is a seminal moment, right?
#
It is a unique moment and that yes, every decade is different, but the nation's founding
#
is specific, uh, and will not be replicated in some ways and, and, and always will have
#
knock on effects and ripples through history into the present. And so I was, I was reading
#
up on the period and I, I remember, uh, coming across references to plans and the five-year
#
plans and when you'd see documentaries about the time, there would be an obligatory reference
#
to what is happening in the five-year plan. And then I started thinking that, yes, even
#
when I was in school, when I did economics, we did study, cause you know, I mean, this
#
is before the planning commission was abolished. We did study the five-year plan. The second
#
five-year plan was especially mentioned as being really important. And then the name
#
of Mahalobis would come up, but I hadn't quite understood why it became so popular. And I,
#
I felt that there wasn't really an explanation for why is it that planning became so central
#
to the story of modern India, that it became popular, not just amongst economists and politicians,
#
but that in films, they were talking about it in Bollywood films and in songs, they were,
#
they were referring to the Panchavarshya Yojana. In, uh, in plays, this was a common theme
#
that came up in the background. When you talk about, when they're interviews with young
#
people from the time, 1956, they talk about the five-year plan. And then when you refer
#
to, for example, if you looked at international press about India, if you looked at say the
#
Washington Post, the New York Times or, uh, or the Guardian or something, there would
#
inevitably be some reference to the five-year plan and to planning and also planning and
#
this democratic experiment with planning. So that is really what grabbed my attention.
#
One, the fact that planning was just ubiquitous in the language of planning was ubiquitous
#
across political parties. And just, it was just part of the ether and just part of the
#
air that everybody breathed in the 1950s in India. But also simultaneous to that, what,
#
what hooked me was the, the references to this Indian experiment in which it was trying
#
to combine liberal democracy with planning and the, the alienness of it in which I read
#
about it, say in the New York Times archival documents or in the Washington Post or sometimes
#
even in the Times of India, that really got to me this, because then I thought, oh, that's
#
true that I hadn't thought about it that way, but that India was combining Soviet inspired
#
economic plans with liberal democratic political systems. And that too, for example, at least
#
viewed from the West, this was seen as a great experiment and one that could determine the
#
future of Asia, because of course, you know, to the North of India is both China and the
#
Soviet Union, both of which have command style planned economies, but they're not democracies.
#
And so whether this fusion could work to some were seen as determinative of whether democracy
#
of a certain kind can work in recently decolonized poor nations across the world. And so then
#
the stakes of that seemed really grabbed me that it's, this was not just important in
#
India to India, but also it seemed important in global terms and Indians were aware of
#
it. It's why I think it's sometimes I think fed into Nehru's overblown, sometimes overblown
#
rhetoric about planning the sense that India was perhaps shining a beacon for the rest
#
of the third world, for the rest of the decolonizing world, because India, of course, is one of
#
the earliest decolonizing nations. And that this was a path, especially during the Cold
#
War, when Soviet or command style economies were seen as authoritarian as they were politically,
#
and that those were, in some ways, absolutely incompatible with liberal, capitalistic or
#
market based economies and political structures, and that India was trying in a sense, as I
#
say in the book, it's sort of this arranged marriage between the two. And that really
#
appealed to me, this sense of the stakes being pretty high.
#
And how important were both writing and teaching to clarifying your thoughts and sharpening
#
your thoughts on the subject? Like, you know, from my point of view, a great way to learn
#
something is A, to write about it, because if you force yourself to write clearly about
#
a subject, you have to think better about it. You immediately figure out where are the
#
gaps in your knowledge, where you need to sharpen your arguments, and so on and so forth.
#
And equally, a great way to learn a subject is to actually prepare yourself to teach it,
#
because then you have to, you know, answer every basic question about it. You can't have
#
any holes in your understanding of the subject, as it were. So how important were those, not
#
just in the way that you approach this specific subject, but in sharpening your thinking,
#
as it were? And earlier before this, in a sense, one could say, you went through a different
#
kind of pedagogic exercise in thinking when you did all your debating, because there again,
#
you have to structure your thoughts and structure your arguments and so on and so forth. So
#
how important were all of these in just a way that you think about something in, you
#
know, forming habits of the mind, as it were? Like, what I find, for example, is that ever
#
since I've like for note taking now earlier, when I would take notes while researching
#
something, I just, I'd have pages and pages of Microsoft Word, and it would all be kind
#
of linear, and I can move things about, but it's one mess. Now I use Rome Research, which
#
uses the old German system of Zettelkasten, where you have nested entries. And I just
#
find that sometimes I'm thinking more clearly about something, because to put things into
#
categories and subcategories, and then to cross link them, you know, just become so
#
much easier. So tell me a little bit about this, because whenever you start thinking
#
about a subject, your head is a muddle of thoughts about it. There's a lot of information
#
coming in. And how do you organize that? How do you break it up into bits, break it up
#
into categories, start organizing it? And I guess all of this, you know, from note taking
#
to writing to teaching, all of this is a way of sort of thinking, organizing it and thinking
#
about it in a particular way. So what's your journey with that?
#
I think that there are two, two aspects to it. One is the logistical challenges. And
#
the second is just the intellectual challenge of producing a cogent argument. In terms of
#
the logistics for historians, especially, I mean, for most historians, we go to archives
#
and the archives can be institutional archives. It could be finding the scripts of some of
#
the plays that I talk about, or, you know, watching the movies from the 1950s that I
#
analyze, watching documentaries from the Films Division of India that I analyze. But a lot
#
of it is, was for me, coming back to Delhi, spending months on end at the National Archives
#
of India, and at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, where a lot of the private papers
#
of lots of figures, including Savarkar, for example, it's not just Nehruvian figures,
#
are held at that institutional collection. And so it was just many months of spending
#
days at the archives, first just collecting the material, then at Calcutta, going to the
#
PC Mahal Nobis Memorial Museum, which is on the Indian Cistical Institute campus. I spent
#
some time in Bombay getting some of the Films Division documentaries, which took a while
#
and necessitated me going to Bombay. And then a few months after that, they just put all
#
of it on YouTube, which made me feel like a bit of a fool. But the challenge, in some
#
ways, the archive is a challenge, because you can have days, if not weeks, when you
#
just go and you come up with nothing, nothing that is of interest to you, nothing that seems
#
really relevant to your topic. And so that can be one kind of challenge and of anxiety
#
about, you know, have I picked a good topic? Have I picked a topic that actually doesn't
#
have very much on it? Then there's the fact that, as I write in the book, I discovered
#
the Planning Commission records seem to be kind of missing. And as another scholar said,
#
it seems like having tried using contacts at ministries, etc., that that scholar came
#
to the conclusion, Vivek Chibber, that some clerk at some point just decided to get rid
#
of these documents because it doesn't fit into one of the classifications that continued
#
from the colonial period of, you know, Ministry of Finance, Home Ministry, etc. It's this
#
kind of interstitial body that might have fallen through the cracks for that reason.
#
And so that produced, you know, that got me even more worried. But once you start finding
#
some documents, that also, so I think that a perception that people sometimes have about
#
archival research is that you know what you want to argue and you look for the documents
#
that prove that. Instead, at least in my case, and I think in the case of most historians,
#
is that you know the broad field that you want to research, but the archive often surprises
#
you. And for example, I did not know that I'll be writing about Mahalanobis at all.
#
I thought that he might play a small role because he was involved with the Second Five
#
Year Plan. But I did not think that the Indian Statistical Institute or statistics or computers
#
would be one half of the book. And that was directed by what I found in the archives,
#
what captured my attention at that time and what I found really arresting in the archives
#
in Delhi and in Calcutta. But once you sort of amass all these photocopies, there is then
#
the challenge of you have to take all these, you know, thousands of pages back to the US
#
and then there's a worry about you hear all these amongst historians. There's always somebody
#
who's heard some horror story about somebody who spent months or a year collecting all
#
this stuff and then there was the monsoons and all of it just got soaked. Or it got lost
#
in a, somebody was traveling in an auto and they left it there and they lost their entire
#
years of research. And it is true that once you lose it, there is no substitute for spending
#
again another few months getting it because the archives in India, I should say, don't
#
allow you to take photographs. So you cannot take photographs of these documents. So you
#
have to get the archive to photocopy it for you or to scan it for you. But you can take
#
photographs of that. Yes, you can take. So at that time also, I did not have a good enough
#
camera phone and it was so many documents that I just, you know, went to Nehru Place
#
and told them to scan the entire thing. I sort of had a backup. So there are all these
#
good concerns about, because then you get so possessive about these documents, you carry
#
it only on carry-on luggage, not in your check-in luggage because I can lose all my clothes,
#
but I cannot lose these documents, which is what I actually intend to do even when I go
#
back to the US this time, which I'm already making plans for two months down the line
#
about where I will carry these documents. So they are never more than five feet away
#
from me. But then the challenge when you come back is logistical about like, what do you
#
just do with thousands of pages, right? You have to have some method of going through
#
it of then categorizing these different thoughts. And unfortunately for me in my PhD, I just,
#
I wasn't, I'm not a very organized thinker and I'm not a very organized person in general,
#
but I can with archival stuff then that's perhaps the only thing going in my favor is
#
that I can get obsessive about these documents. And so I would just go on these stairs in
#
which I would just, just be inhaling these documents over long periods. And then I would
#
not be able to let the documents go. So if I was at the gym or walking, taking the half
#
an hour walk home, I would be on my phone on a note app writing down ideas as they came
#
to me, right? I'd sometimes have like sentences that came to me or like a little garbled versions
#
of arguments that I could make. And I'd just write them all down because you don't know
#
when they'll come to you. And like you said, it's only when you write them down later on,
#
you look at it and you'd think, well, 80% of that is garbage, but at least the 20% there,
#
that's actually, I can work with. And so I'd have notes on my phone, on my laptop. But
#
then you decide that, okay, I need to organize these, this vast amount of paper into bite
#
sized portions. So for example, with me, the first chapter I wrote was about the computer
#
because there was an easy thing to identify in the archive. Almost all of it came from
#
the Calcutta archive. So I knew that it's a discrete set of papers and I was like, okay,
#
I can spend some time on this and maybe produce something on this. Because if I just looked
#
at all the documents all the time, I'll never get down to writing. It also helped that it
#
had this really, I came across, purely by chance, this online archive of this man called
#
Morton Nadler that was then on the Virginia Tech server, which has since been taken down.
#
So I think on the one year that was up, I managed to get access to it. And it was basically
#
the memoirs of a man named Morton Nadler, who was this young Jewish kid in Brooklyn,
#
who was from very early on had become a communist, became a member of the Communist Party of
#
the United States in the 1930s, had aroused the suspicion of the American army, the FBI
#
and CIA, was fired from a job in Chicago because of his communist sympathies, and then decided
#
to lie to his parents and say that he's going to do a PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris. And
#
then instead he took a ship to Paris and then took a flight to Prague and Czechoslovakia
#
because it was in the Soviet Union and he wanted to be part of building Soviet communism.
#
And so when I'm reading this stuff, and then I saw some reference to Calcutta and the ISI
#
and I knew, okay, so there's something here that's really exciting. And the story happens
#
that Nadler, once he's in Prague, starts working on sort of Soviet computers there, but then
#
gets very disillusioned with the Soviet Union and communism because he finds out that the
#
American government revokes his citizenship because they think he's a deserter and it's
#
treasonous. But the Czechoslovakian government also suspects that he might be a double agent
#
who's been planted by the American government and that this entire thing of the embassy
#
cancelling his passport is just a ruse so that he can get embedded into the Soviet government.
#
I mean, it's this real Cold War intrigue stuff, right? But then they decide, okay, maybe we
#
can trust him. So they recruit him as a spy to spy on his family back in America. But
#
because nobody really trusts people in these situations, they have their own spy tailed
#
by another spy. And so they have his phone tapped. He suspects that one of his lovers,
#
who's one of his many extramarital affairs, is also a planted Soviet spy. And then in
#
the end, the reason that this story is relevant to me is because he decides that he gets so
#
paranoid about being in Prague and gets sick of this overbearing Soviet state that he decides
#
he needs to leave. But where does he go? He can't go back to America because they revoked
#
his citizenship and he's seen as a communist. And then somebody tells him that you need
#
to go to a non-aligned country. And it so happens that Mahalanobis, the professor, shows
#
up in Prague around that time and Morton Nadler makes contact with the third secretary of
#
the Indian embassy there and gets in touch with Mahalanobis and says, you know, I can
#
come and work for a few years on India's first computers because I have all this technical
#
knowledge. And in his mind, he's thinking doing that will be like a calling off period
#
such that eventually I can go back to America. And so once I found that story and once I
#
had this really exciting archival material about how Mahalanobis brings India its first
#
computers, I knew that, you know, maybe I have a chapter there, maybe I have an article
#
there. So, you know, as you can probably gather, it's quite all over the place and it's not
#
very organized. But that's how it came together for me.
#
The Morton Nadler story is great. And you threw in a little bit about how he named his
#
daughter Maya after Mao, which is a little bizarre. Why didn't he just call her Mao?
#
And also that bit about how you had spies who were being spied upon by other spies because,
#
you know, it's so just a fascinating story of the guy. So how did you do knowledge management
#
in the sense you've got all these papers, you've had them scanned at Nehru place. So
#
now you have the scans, but you don't have the actual text. So how do you know I had
#
both? I took both. Oh, you took both. You had the text as well. Like when they scanned it,
#
they had a software that turned it into text.
#
So I had the photocopies from the National Archive, which I got scanned. And so I have
#
these photocopies, which I got spiral bound because I was like, I also needed to be, you
#
know, easily go through it and I don't like loose papers flying around. So, yes, I had
#
two copies of almost all the documents from the National Archive.
#
But what I mean by text is, you know, you can't copy paste onto the document that you're
#
writing. You have to actually type stuff out yourself and all of that. So how did it start
#
taking concrete shape in terms of DOU specific software for knowledge management? I mean,
#
No, I don't. I know many people who do. I don't. I am, I suppose, quite neanderthal
#
in these things. I just had these documents and I would just spend a lot of time going
#
through all the documents and trying to organize them in my head and organize them by themes.
#
And yeah, you can't cut and paste and there's no OCR either. And so you just need to, you
#
know, paginate all the papers and then make notes for yourself saying, if I'm building
#
this argument, page number 81 from this document, page number 236 from this document, all these
#
things will help in making that argument. And so that, I suppose, was the most rudimentary
#
knowledge management system I have. Yes, I know that to you, it must sound like, you
#
know, knocking two stones of flint against each other to make fire when we have so many
#
It's what I've done all my life and not managed to make much fire. And who were your, like
#
when you were thinking about what the book would read like, did you have any writing
#
models that I want to write a book like this? You know, you've mentioned, you know, wanting
#
to get away from the turgid academic writing and reaching a bigger audience and all that.
#
You mentioned that you did a lot of, you know, reading of writing advice to kind of get there.
#
And by the way, I totally agree with you. Like one point I feel strongly about and I
#
tell all my writing students is that there may be other domains where you need some natural
#
talent, like if you're a musician or if you're a batsman, you need hand-eye coordination.
#
If you're a fast bowler, you need fast twitch muscles. You do not need inherent talent for
#
writing. Anyone can learn to write well, right? And I'm at pains to emphasize this because
#
people will often come in saying that I find writing so hard and maybe it's just not in
#
me. And the point is everyone finds writing hard, right? You just have to work at it and
#
you kind of get better. But that aside, aside, you know, were there any historians or historical
#
books that you then looked at and said, my God, this person does it really well. I want
#
to write like her. And, you know, and how consciously did you, how aware did you then
#
become of matters of the craft? How mindfully did you read for that as well when you were
#
Yeah, I mean about academic prose, I think that to me, I don't think that there is necessarily
#
a one size fits all. I think that academic prose can sometimes seem turgid and it's because
#
some of it is meant for an academic audience, right? That there are, there are communities
#
in every field of specialization. And just like that in history, sometimes certain arguments
#
need for you to refer to other theories, et cetera, which aren't immediately accessible
#
to just the average person, right? Not accessible in that it's too smart for them, but that
#
they need to spend time learning those theories in order to be able to understand this argument.
#
So I don't think that every history book necessarily needs to be written in the same manner, but
#
I thought that I had a argument and narrative that lended itself to, if I tried hard, to
#
being able to communicate in a way that most people should, that everyone should be able
#
to understand. And so that's why, and that's, that was something that I wanted to do with
#
this book. And so the, I don't know if I had any specific models, but I knew that, for
#
example, that there were, for example, that the book India After Gandhi by Ramchandra
#
Guha, that that sort of was one of the first books that was doing a sort of survey of independent
#
India. And so I'd say that many of the books that are, that are monographs that are written
#
now about independent India, many of those cite that book because that book really did
#
sort of open a field and many other books came in its wake. And so that was a model
#
though in that Ram Guha and I think that he'd be the first to admit it was not a deep dive
#
on any one subject, right? Its aim was in a sense much more ambitious, which is to capture
#
all of independent India, which is why it's gone into like repeat editions because independent
#
India's history keeps evolving as well. Whereas I was doing a deep dive, partly because for
#
a PhD, you have to prove, provide original research on one particular subject, one particular
#
sort of something that you hone in on. And so while in terms of, in terms of the audience,
#
like a book like India After Gandhi gave me a sense that, oh, actually there are people
#
outside of academia who seem to want to know things about Indian history and are willing
#
to read about it, right? So that book was an eye opener in that it gave me a sense of
#
how much more history can and should be written about independent India. And also that there
#
is a, there is a readership for it in India. In terms of writing style itself, I've, I
#
admire the work of, of, of, of Jan Prakash, who does academic history, but that his writing
#
styles are supple in that he's able to move between writing for an academic audience and
#
writing for an audience that is academic and non-academic as well. And so I think that
#
his earliest book was much more academic and his first two books were much more academic
#
than his, his latter two books, such as Emergency Chronicles and, such as Mumbai Fables and
#
Emergency Chronicles. And so I found those, that those were books that managed to be academically
#
rigorous, engaging with, with a scholarship and with, with a lot of archival material,
#
but at the same time was written in a way that was, that people outside the academy
#
could read and understand and engage with. Apart from that, and I'm just sort of choosing
#
people in my immediate milieu at Princeton, Linda Colley is another historian, a historian
#
of, of, of, of Britain, who also is a, is a remarkable writer, just narrative, just
#
sort of sweeping, sweeping narratives, great textual detail, maybe coming from this British
#
narrative history tradition that is very rich. And at the same time is, you know, an extremely
#
well-respected historian whose scholarship is, is impeccable, but is able to write in
#
this way that, that allowed for even somebody who's not interested necessarily in British
#
history to read it and be sort of taken up by the narrative. So, so those are the two
#
that come to mind in terms of writing style of trying to bridge this gap. But, but otherwise,
#
in terms of the history itself, I mean, there are like works of history like Shahid Amin,
#
he's like Gandhi as Mahatma is his essay that I now teach in my undergraduate classes on,
#
on history, which is sort of a real model of how to do really fine-grained historical
#
analysis of like a very small event. This entire essay is based on a one-day visit by
#
Gandhi to Gorakhpur, to a village in Gorakhpur. But he uses that one event and all of the,
#
the press reports generated by it, all the rumors that it was, that it was generated
#
by it to come up with this portrait of Gandhi that's very different from the portrait that
#
we had of Gandhi from before, of Gandhi and about how the meanings of Gandhi were actually
#
much vaster than Gandhi himself had control over, that people imbued meanings onto him.
#
And so, so those are some of the models of research that I have found in terms of both
#
method and in terms of writing to be, to be, to be models. But I mean, I really feel bad
#
just singling these three out because I had a remarkable slate of teachers from Delhi
#
University and, and in, in, in JNU. I mean, you know, Dilip Menon, Shahid Amin, Sunil
#
Kumar, then at JNU, I had Tanika Sarkar, Niladri Bhattacharya, Janaki Nair. I mean, all people
#
who in different ways are able to combine writing for a public, I mean, these are people
#
who have written op-eds, et cetera, and are able to do that, but also write academic works
#
that are meant to advance the field and advance original research as well. So I think I try
#
to take, I try to take inspiration from them.
#
So let's talk about the book. And for me, you know, the, the part of the book which
#
really came alive for me and therefore brought the whole book alive for me was really reading
#
a bit more about Mahalanobis, who is just such an incredibly fascinating character.
#
But before we start talking about Mahalanobis itself, the thought kind of struck me on how
#
so much that happened was contingent on certain individuals. If Mahalanobis did not exist,
#
for example, if he got typhoid at the age of two and something unfortunate happened
#
and so on and so forth, you could argue that a certain part of the history of independent
#
in India might have been different. And that certainly holds true much more powerfully
#
for someone like Nehru, for example, right? As a historian, what do you think of the great
#
man theory of history? You know, and, and just for my listeners who may not be familiar
#
with it, Thomas Carlyle came up with this great man theory of history, which speaks
#
about how history is shaped by, and of course it's a gender term, but history is shaped
#
by people who come and they do remarkable things. And without them, history would have
#
been different. And the counterpoint to that is that, no, there are broad currents in history
#
and the individuals who are there just happen to be like right time, right place instruments
#
for those currents, but otherwise they don't matter so much. But really looking at Indian
#
history, it seems that these accidents of fate sometimes embodied in the shape of a
#
person can make a huge amount of difference. Like if Nehru wasn't our first prime minister,
#
say if it was Patel, for example, we would have gone in very different directions, maybe
#
not in the same directions that today's ruling party imagines, but it would have been somewhat
#
different across various different dimensions. Similarly, Mahalanobis was not there, you
#
know, things could have worked out really differently and who knows, you may not even
#
have had a book. So, so what's your sense of, you know, the importance of individuals one
#
and the importance of accident circumstance? Yeah, this is an internal question in history.
#
The interplay between human agency and structural forces. And one way to think about this, the
#
debate is between this sort of Carlisle position about the great man theory and a very Marxist
#
position that believes in materialism and ultimately structural forces determine everything.
#
No single individual, not even Karl Marx, determines history. I mean, some might argue
#
that actually Karl Marx himself is a refutation of that explanation. I think that I don't
#
have any dogmatic belief in either. I think that it is, and I think that that's true of
#
most historians that, at least the historians, most historians that I know of believe that
#
it's, it's an interplay of the two and the choice you have to make as a historian is
#
assessing how much of each. And so in the first half of my book as well, I am, I hope
#
it comes across, but I'm also trying to walk this fine line between saying that yes, Mahalanobis
#
was an extremely influential individual by the force of his personality, by the influence
#
he had, by this way he almost single-handedly is the person associated with national statistics
#
in India and the Indian Statistical Institute. But at the same time, I'm also making a structural
#
argument, which is to say that the reason that statistics becomes important, yes, Mahalanobis
#
might have become, been a great statistician, but why does he become an economic planner?
#
The reason and the structural argument I offer is that the reason he becomes an economic
#
planner is because India has adopted centralizing planning. Centralizing planning, centralized
#
planning requires these masses of data. And it's in that context that somebody so intimately
#
involved with national statistics comes to be seen as maybe a suitable person to pick
#
as a planner, because otherwise it's not natural for a professor of physics who's turned a
#
statistician to become the most influential policymaker in the country in economics. And
#
so what I'm trying to do is to tie together both the structural argument, saying that
#
it is the structural force about the rise of planning states, such as in India and the
#
Soviet Union and China, that opens up a field under this Nehruvian government for technocrats
#
like Mahalanobis to strut on the stage, right? For them to have this overweening influence
#
is possible because of the structure. Now, once you have this broad structure and the
#
stage set, then yes, the individual there determines what path it might take. And so
#
yes, there is individual agency and that matters a hell of a lot. But I do think that individuals
#
operate, all of us operate within certain structures, right? And it's, and no individual
#
entirely overcomes a structure, right? So even with Nehru, he is a part of a Congress
#
elite that is overwhelmingly, you know, a lot of them are foreign educated, a lot of
#
them are educated at Cambridge, a lot of them are lawyers. Nehru's own father is a lawyer
#
and a member of the Congress party. And so you think, well, it's not then so atypical
#
that Nehru becomes a leader of this party, right? In some ways, maybe Gandhi is more
#
atypical, even though he is also a foreign educated lawyer as well. And so I think that
#
when you start looking into any individual deep enough, you start seeing patterns. And
#
so I think that belies sometimes Carlisle's reification of the great man. And I think
#
that it's important to give individuals their agency, because otherwise you have these sort
#
of stultifying narratives in which it seems like almost, well, if you just figure out
#
all the structures, you could just predict the future as well. So I think it's a balance
#
between identifying the structural forces, but within that seeing where and how contingency
#
plays a role, right? That if, for example, so-and-so was born later or had died earlier,
#
what would have happened? So the counterfactual, though historians don't like doing counterfactuals
#
because, and that's why we do not do counterfactuals, because we do not have any evidence to predict.
#
But the structural forces argument would suggest that even if Nehru died of typhoid when he
#
was very young, statistics would have still played a very important role if India had
#
chosen centralized planning. Now, India might not have chosen the route of sample serving.
#
India might not have had a statistician who became the economic planner, but statistics
#
would have remained important because, as I tried to show through the book, it's not
#
just Mahalanobis who's talking about statistics. Lots of people recognize the importance of
#
statistics. So somebody else might have played not the same role that Mahalanobis did, but
#
a different role, but statistics would have been important regardless, I think.
#
I think along with these two forces of human agency and structural forces, I think a third
#
force that I might posit is just happenstance, just accident. If Nehru's mom gets a headache
#
nine months before Nehru was born, the course of history could be very different. We might
#
not even have centralized planning. Or when Nehru and Mahalanobis meet for the first time,
#
for example, possibly in Tagore's house, or possibly when Tagore was staying with Mahalanobis,
#
as you point out, and they don't get along well for some reason. Mahalanobis has missed
#
his breakfast and he's route to Nehru. You know, little things can just turn history
#
around. But I buy your point that it's a complex interplay of all of these things, and it really
#
doesn't matter what you want to necessarily privilege over the other. All of these sort
#
Now, I love your little pen portraits of all the people here that you've kind of created.
#
And about Mahalanobis, I'll read this bit out. For example, quote, you write, tall prominently
#
nose, stern of gaze, vast of brow, with hair severely parted and slicked flat by coconut
#
oil. Mahalanobis looked the part of a serious man. He was born into a family that belonged
#
to Bengal's landed elite, and his early milieu was that of intellectual inquiry and religious
#
reform in turn of the century Calcutta. He grew up to be a prim workaholic, seemingly
#
immune to frivolity, and usually found day and night stooping over his calculations.
#
As a friend of nearly half a century corroborated, he had no time for small talk and little capacity
#
to compromise with unreason. Even a smile, tight-lipped and partial to the right cheek,
#
could seem a grudging concession. Mahalanobis appeared to make a virtue of withholding expressions
#
of affection, believing it his duty to conceal it, except to pets, which included dogs, cats
#
Now, I imagine that in the process of, you know, delving into the life of a person like
#
Mahalanobis, there is that moment where the figure just becomes three-dimensional, where
#
you get that inside view of not just all the biographical details and the descriptive details
#
about the person, but about their motivations, about their insecurities, about their vulnerabilities,
#
so on and so forth. So, tell me about that. You know, was there a similar process that
#
played out with Mahalanobis? You know, I think you said you had access to his papers or his
#
letters or whatever. What did those reveal to you about him and how is it then, how does
#
it play out in that process that at first you are looking into historical events, but
#
then as you go deeper and deeper into a person, at some level there is a greater connection.
#
There might even be an emotional involvement. Maybe you start rooting for the guy. Maybe,
#
you know, the more vulnerable you find him, the more flawed you find him, perhaps the
#
closer you feel to him. So, what is that process like of writing something like this, actually
#
reading personal letters written to and by him? You know, what was all of that like?
#
I think that that is part of the role of a historian, which is to judge and to recognize
#
these different scales at which you are operating, right? You are operating at, so in my book
#
I am operating at the level of the national, sometimes even the international, and then
#
within the national to some important individuals then say at the planning commission and then
#
you get down to the nitty-gritty and the texture of just one person's letters to say his wife
#
or maybe to the prime minister or to the finance minister. And you are right that there is
#
a way in which, I mean, unless the person is just absolutely repulsive and like reveals
#
themselves to be an awful human being, but that when you are reading personal correspondence
#
like you have an emotional response, right? You are a human being. You are reading the
#
writings of somebody else and in which they are writing it not knowing that 70 years later
#
somebody else is going to read it and be analyzing it. So it has details about, you know, today
#
my stomach was not good, how are your children? There are all these sort of small details
#
that I know about the hair slick flack by coconut oil because not in the letter in which
#
I was reading about the rest of his personality traits, but in some other letter I saw a letter
#
from him from abroad to Pitambar Panth saying, you know, when you come, can you please bring
#
a coconut oil for me, right? So you get these little details that humanize the individual,
#
but I think the risk is also that you might start rooting for them. As you said, you might
#
start being seduced by the personality. And I think that that's when hopefully your training
#
kicks in and you realize that what you're trying to do is not, you're trying to present
#
the person as he was and not necessarily make a case for the person. And so I tried to convey
#
only that which I thought could be corroborated in some way. So the hair oil, even that I'm,
#
I was trying to make sure that I had something that gave me a reasonable enough interpretation
#
to say that, well, it's probably that he usually used, you know, coconut oil. When I talked
#
about the fact that he looked the part of a serious man, that is a sense that I just
#
got from reading decades of his correspondence, right? He was all, there was never a joke.
#
There is always unremittingly serious, right? And high-minded and talking about high stakes,
#
this being important for the country. And again, it is corroborated by what his friends
#
said about him, right? That he is, you know, very, very serious, unsmiling, unable to compromise
#
the unreason was usually sort of, you know, people who talk about how a conversation with
#
Mahalanobis was usually a monologue. So when I make even those comments there, I try to
#
keep it rooted in what I know from the sources as well. And so I knew that if I just mirrored
#
Mahalanobis' writings, I would basically be writing a pain and an ode to planning. I would
#
be writing about how great planning is, how it would do all these miraculous things, but
#
that's not what I want to do. I mean, not, not do I want to knock planning necessarily.
#
I just want to present, understand why planning became so central to India. And so using,
#
using Mahalanobis as a vehicle for that allowed me to show an aspect of planning that's not
#
about, you know, whether the growth rates were missed or not, but instead about the
#
growth of India's data infrastructure, about its data capacities through somebody like
#
Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute, both of whom actually have a huge influence
#
even today, you know, through the sample surveys, through the national sample survey, all of
#
which India uses till today. And so there is this way in which you try to measure the
#
evidence, you try to measure what they say in their letter, try to see if it's corroborated
#
by other people. And if you are using something that is affective or emotive from the letters,
#
you make it clear to the reader that you're quoting them, that this is not your view,
#
but you are quoting how Mahalanobis felt at that moment, and that this is not me, who,
#
the author who's conveying it. So I think that there is, you have to exercise judgment.
#
And I think that that's the only way to go about it. I think that any biographer also
#
has to do it. But I think that the best history is managed to do, to do that well, which is
#
to convey a sense of empathy, but not necessarily sympathy with the subject, that you empathize
#
with this person in order to make them come alive on the page, but you do not sympathize
#
with their political positions or their economic recommendations.
#
So you know, before India becomes independent, before planning happens, there are sort of
#
two fascinating narratives which are kind of weaving in and out of each other which
#
are going on. One is Mahalanobis giving up physics, falling in love with stats, you know,
#
forming the Indian Statistical Institute, and some of the pioneering work he did there,
#
which even if planning had never happened, you'd still recognize it as absolutely pioneering
#
work, just, you know, what happened in the forties before that. So that's one really
#
interesting thread that's happening. The other thread that's happening at the same time is
#
of our early leaders, including Nehru, recognizing the importance of planning. Like you point
#
out how, you know, in 1938 when Subhash Chandra Bose was president of the Congress, he says
#
that, hey, there has to be, we have to plan, there has to be a planning committee, rather
#
I think National Planning Committee, it was called. And he asked Nehru to be head of the
#
National Planning Committee, and Nehru is head of it. And now Nehru is thinking seriously
#
about planning because he's part of that committee. So it's, you know, come up, again, circumstances
#
kind of bringing him there. And as he's thinking about it, he, you know, these two threads
#
kind of come together. You know, you pointed out about how he's met Mahalanobis socially,
#
randomly, and how he meets him in 1939, where he goes to Calcutta to meet Tagore, because
#
he wants permission from Tagore for Janaganamana to be national anthem if it's, you know, if
#
and when we get independence. And Tagore happens to be staying at Mahalanobis' place because,
#
you know, family, friends and all that. And that's where he meets Mahalanobis, they chat
#
together. Next year, 1940, Mahalanobis comes over, meets him in Anand Bhavan, stays with
#
him over there. They're kind of becoming friends. And then over the years, this is sort of intertwining.
#
So tell me about sort of these two different narratives. Like, one is, what's happening
#
in the world of statistics? Like, I had an episode with the data journalist Pramit Pattacharya,
#
and Pramit made a similar point, that look, what happened in India in the, starting from
#
the 30s with 40s, 50s, was absolutely mind blowing. It would, we were trendsetters for
#
the whole world, in a sense. And this is a time before data is really advanced. It's
#
only around the time of the Second World War, you know, in the 30s, really, that the import,
#
that the need for a GDP is felt. Before that, you don't have a national measure at all.
#
And I've had an entire episode on the GDP, of course, and conceptually, there are big
#
flaws and whatever. But that's a decade when the world is coming to terms with the need
#
for something like this. Statistics, a lot of the things that we take for granted in
#
terms of statistics, statistics don't exist, or at a very primitive stage. And here is
#
this man Mahalanobis, who is, you know, whatever opponents of planning may think of him today,
#
and certainly, you know, there is a lot to be said. But in terms of that early statistical
#
work, we are absolute pioneers. And at the same time, there is a nation about to be formed.
#
And you know, and you have those leaders like Nehru saying that, hey, you know, the way
#
out of our poverty, the way out of our colonial past is planning. And for planning, we need
#
data. And therefore statistics is important. And hey, I happen to know this cool guy. He
#
smiles only from the right side of his face. He's kind of taciturn. But hey, you know,
#
he's a guy. So how is and you know, this could just be a web series, right? The people involved
#
are so interesting. So tell me about this entire period. And like you mentioned that
#
when you started doing this book, you did not think that Mahalanobis and the ISI would
#
be such an important part of it. And they became like that. So how did you discover
#
these narratives and how did they form? And just tell me about this period and what it
#
led to. Yeah, the story of Mahalanobis really came
#
alive for me when I came across some papers of Pitambarpanth, which are at the Nehru Memorial
#
Museum. It's a very slim set of documents and it's mostly letters between Pitambarpanth
#
and Mahalanobis. Pitambarpanth was also somebody who trained in physics, became, was a jailmate
#
of Nehru during the Quit India movement, then became one of Nehru's private secretaries
#
during the time that he was prime minister. And on one of these visits in the late 1940s
#
to the Institute in Calcutta, Mahalanobis says, you know, like ask Nehru, can you depute
#
two or three people to come help with the work of the Institute? Because I think that
#
apart from doing our research, we can help with national development as well. Nehru is
#
not able to send two, three people, but he sends Pitambarpanth. And then Pitambarpanth
#
over the next two decades becomes this kind of bridge between Calcutta and Delhi. He rises
#
to some prominence at the Indian Statistical Institute as I think the secretary of the
#
Institute there. But at the same time, he's also heads the manpower planning division
#
in the, at Yojana Bhavan in Delhi. And so, and because he has the ear of Mahalanobis
#
and Nehru, he's able to sort of play this role as a bridge. And so in his letters, in
#
his documents at, at Teenmurti at the Nehru Memorial Library, I found these letters between
#
him and Mahalanobis exchanged in 1954. While Pitambarpanth is in Calcutta and Mahalanobis
#
is just jet setting across the world. He's in Prague one day, he's in London the other,
#
in Washington the other, in Moscow another, and he's writing these letters back to Pitambarpanth.
#
And it's, it's during a time that Mahalanobis is discovering that he can play a role outside
#
of statistics as perhaps a planner as well. And that really brought alive this moment
#
of transition from a physicist to a statistician to economic policy. And so I thought that,
#
and in those letters, he's talking about both the importance of statistics for planning
#
and about the importance of computers for planning. And so I thought that this is something
#
worth pursuing further. And so that's why, that's really how those stories first appealed
#
to me. And I started exploring whether they can become chapters in my book. About the,
#
the broader context, I think that you put it very well, that there are these two, two
#
parallel stories that I'm trying to tell. And I'm trying to talk about them in parallel,
#
but also about how they, they don't remain parallel at all points. At some points they
#
do, they do have sort of offshoots that intersect. And the intersections are usually institutionally
#
through the Innocentical Institute, individually through Mahalanobis or C.D. Deshmukh or Pitambarpanth
#
or Nehru. And these two stories are, one is that, as you said, of a nation that is in
#
an, in the throes of an anti-colonial movement. One that we know today, but they did not know
#
now, was soon to win freedom for India. And that the people involved are a cast of characters
#
that are sort of household names in India. You know, Subhash Chandra Bose, Nehru, Gandhi,
#
Rabindranath Tagore, G.D. Birla, J.R.D. Tata. All of these people are discussing planning.
#
And so to me that is very fascinating. Why is it that on the eve of independence, planning
#
is such an important thing that they're all discussing and debating. Gandhi doesn't quite
#
understand why it's important. Tagore, in fact, thinks it's very important, doesn't
#
understand why Gandhi does not think it's important. And so supporting Bose and Nehru
#
saying that, you know, I think that you're the only two modernists in the Congress Party
#
and that you should push for this planning. At the same time, G.D. Birla and J.R.D. Tata
#
are also pushing for certain kinds of planning for very self-interested reasons, as you point
#
out as well. And so there's that story about a nation in the making about to be formed
#
about these weighty matters of what will our economy and polity be once we achieve independence.
#
And at the same time, there's a story about a discipline coming into its own. Statistics
#
was not considered a scientific discipline until well into the 1930s and maybe even 1940s
#
in India. In the late 1920s, there are letters between Mahal Nobis and a friend of his in
#
London in which he is lamenting how he is not. He's taken seriously as a physicist,
#
but statistics is not given the time of day amongst other scientists in India. He refers
#
to it in very costless language as being treated as an outcast. He says that it's seen as the
#
thing that politicians play around with, but it's not a serious science. He says that somebody
#
told him in the Indian Science Congress that if we were to grant statistics its own section
#
at the Indian Science Congress, which is a sort of annual body meeting of all scientists
#
in India, chemists, botanists, physicists, and Mahal Nobis had been petitioning for statistics
#
to get its own section within the conference for them to meet. And the Indian Science Congress
#
just flat out said no and said that if we were to grant statistics a section, we might
#
as well grant astrology one. So it was seen basically on par with astrology. And what
#
I try to trace in the first chapter of my book is how from the late 1920s through the
#
labors of the Indian Statistical Institute and Mahal Nobis and this alliance with the
#
National Planning Committee set up by the Congress government and advances in statistics
#
across the world aided by the Second World War, the rise of the GDP, the role of economists
#
like Simon Kuznets, et cetera, V.K.R.V. Rao, who comes up with India's first national income
#
estimates, that by 1946, when the Indian Science Congress has its annual meeting, the person
#
chairing that entire conference is Mahal Nobis, not because of he's a physicist, but because
#
of his work as a statistician. Right. And so you see the rise of a discipline that goes
#
alongside this, the progress of this nationalist movement. And just as and this is the role
#
of contingency, right, as just as centralized planning comes to take form in the minds of
#
the Congress party as being important. And they're talking about the lack of data. This
#
is something I find in Nehru's handwritten notes from the 1930s onwards, this bemoaning
#
the lack of adequate statistics in India. At the same time, India, it's not just that
#
he says, hey, I have this friend. It's that India is now making globally pioneering contributions
#
to sample serving, which is useful anywhere, but it's particularly useful in a poor country
#
where you do not have the state capacity to undertake plot to plot enumeration or very
#
painstaking, very expensive enumerations that do, you know, counting each item, which, by
#
the way, scientifically has also been proven to be more error ridden than sample serving.
#
So it's in sense there, there is that contingency of these two things happening at the same
#
time, which leads to the Institute being tapped as being extremely important for the growth
#
of India's national statistics, which is why the Central Statistical Organization, the
#
National Sample Survey, all these national level organizations tended to be staffed from
#
the Institute in Calcutta. Not because I would argue not because of a favoritism, but because
#
really it was the it was almost the only game in town. It was an internationally recognized
#
center of excellence in this, the very thing that the Planning Commission was looking for,
#
which is why actually the Planning Commission was jealous sometimes of the statistical institute
#
because they would have liked to have done it themselves, but they did not have the expertise
#
either. And that's why in some ways Indian statistical policy and then economic policy
#
kind of gets farmed out from Delhi to Calcutta for a decade, at least.
#
You know, you've written about how early on in the statistical field, Mahalanobis time
#
and again is almost proven right. For example, you know, there was this competition in Bengal
#
where there were arguments about random sample surveys, do they even work, are they accurate
#
and so on and so forth. And the Bengal government in 1944 actually said that, okay, let's use
#
both the methods, let PC Mahalanobis do his random sample survey kind of thing. And at
#
the same time, we will do our, you know, our detailed enumerations and all of that. And
#
as you point out that the government was off the mark by 16.6%, Mahalanobis was off the
#
mark by 0.3% and for all you know, and saved a lot of money and saved a lot of money. So
#
it was just in every aspect, it was much better. So, you know, in terms of the power of statistics,
#
in terms of, you know, what they can reveal about the world, Mahalanobis is onto something
#
has been proven right. And this must make him feel incredibly powerful. But is there
#
a danger here? And this is really more a question about human beings and about that particular
#
human being that is there a danger here that this can lead to a kind of hubris where you
#
have this incredibly powerful tool and you have actually been so successful with that
#
tool and whatever you have done so far. And you imagine therefore that you can use that
#
tool to reshape the world. And we see signs of this hubris in a lot of the things that
#
he does through the 50s, for example, where for, you know, he'll be going to foreign countries
#
and he'll be doing the things diplomats should be doing, right. And he of course looks down
#
on diplomats and considers them incompetent and whatever. And but he's talking directly
#
to other governments and Nehru is kind of, you know, not approving, but at the same time
#
not, you know, messing with him too much. And in other descriptions you've described
#
him as a benevolent autocrat as it were, where he is like a little dictator in the ISI and
#
he's kind of doing his thing. So he's become this figure who in his own head is sort of,
#
he's got it figured out. And his only frustration is why don't more people listen to me, which
#
remains a frustration for a long time. And eventually you point out that, you know, Calcutta
#
takes over Delhi and, you know, by the time the second plan comes around, Mahalanobis
#
kind of had his, has his way where for a couple of years he's dominant. And at the same time
#
while there is this tremendous hubris in Mahalanobis, you also have Nehru, who as you've quoted
#
famously says that he'd prefer one technocrat to four bureaucrats, right. And this reminds
#
me of what Harry Truman once said of economists, where he said, give me a one-handed economist
#
because he was tired because, you know, his advisors kept saying on one hand this, on
#
the other hand that. And he wanted sort of decisiveness. And one can imagine Nehru wanting
#
that same kind of decisiveness because as you pointed out, when he wrote Discovery of India,
#
he was sort of aware that the India that he would like is not the India that is out there.
#
In some ways he invented his idea of India. He created this idea of India within himself.
#
It was an act of invention, right. And I wonder if there was sort of a certain hubris there
#
that if he is getting so much done, you are an independent country, you are the prime
#
minister, you have sort of superimposed your vision of what society would be like in the
#
design of the state, in whatever influence he had in the constitution and so on and so
#
forth, that you just continue then thinking in that technocratic way and therefore favoring
#
technocrats where you are like, what complexity? I conquered it. You know, I won. I conquered
#
it. Here I am. I've created this. I am creating this. I will not let these people stop me.
#
And therefore, in a sense, these two guys are made for each other, right. And as far
#
as choosing planning is concerned, you know, what you said earlier in the episode, what
#
you've written in your book, I completely buy that. There is pretty much no other way
#
they could have gone. It was a logic of the times. It was commonly accepted throughout
#
the world. At that point in time, the Soviet Union appeared to be a success. You know,
#
free markets were allied in people's minds with colonial ills. So at that point in time,
#
that is a reasonable choice. I'm not debating that. But I'm just looking at these two really
#
fascinating personalities with their own individual fatal conceits as it were. And it seems in
#
a sense as therefore as a marriage made in heaven, that, you know, Mahalanobis has that
#
kind of hubris and the engineering mindset and what Pratap would call the tech solutionism.
#
And that's exactly what Nehru wants. He wants decisiveness. He is reinventing a nation. And
#
it's kind of, you know, therefore, you know, just a perfect storm.
#
Yeah, I think that what you said puts me in mind of an anecdote that Milton Friedman recounts
#
in the book about the one time that he met Mahalanobis. They met in the summer of 1955,
#
I think. Milton Friedman, of course, is the celebrity free market economist, you know,
#
one of the best known economists of the 20th century, and perhaps the most associated with
#
American Reaganite free market beliefs. There's a good story about how Friedman, Mahalanobis
#
was asking the American government to send some economists deputed by the American government
#
to the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. And the person, I think this was in 1954,
#
the year before, and the person they had recommended was Milton Friedman, who was then a very young
#
economist, not so well known as he was to become later. That was about to happen. And
#
Mahalanobis, since he was a jet setter, happened to be in Geneva because he was elected the
#
president of the UN Statistical Commission. By the way, he was elected president of the
#
UN Statistical Commission on numerous times, nominated both by the United States and the
#
Soviet Union. So he was in Geneva and he happened to come across another American economist,
#
John Kenneth Galbraith. And when he told Galbraith that the American government was about to
#
send Friedman to India to help with, you know, the planning exercises, Galbraith joked saying
#
that having Milton Friedman, a free market economist, coming to advise on planning was
#
like having the pope advise on family planning. Right. And so that tickled Mahalanobis enough
#
that he decided that instead of having Milton Friedman come, he invited John Kenneth Galbraith
#
instead. Anyway, Milton Friedman does come the next year to India and he meets Mahalanobis
#
in Delhi at the Planning Commission. And in his memoirs written with his wife called Two
#
Lucky People, he has a very, I think, insightful comment about Mahalanobis. And I think that
#
gets to your point about the hubris. He says that Mahalanobis reminded him, Mahalanobis
#
was a mathematically gifted person. And he said that the issue with people who are mathematically
#
gifted is that their gifts come to them very young. And so from a very young age, they
#
are accustomed to being able to crack the code, to being able to come up with one single
#
value neutral answer that is either right or wrong. And not only did they come to arrive
#
at that freak often, they come to expect it in other fields of life as well. And the problem
#
with that, and then he quotes Adam Smith. So you have Milton Friedman quoting Adam Smith
#
from The Wealth of Nations. He says that, unfortunately, they start to think of themselves
#
as somebody controlling chess pieces on the great chessboard of humanity. But whereas
#
you actually never have control over human beings, and humanity is not a chessboard.
#
And so you cannot predict the outcomes or the strategies of the people because you do
#
not hold, human beings and Indian citizens are not like the knight that you hold in your
#
hand that you can take across the chessboard. And so he says that that is the problem that
#
he saw with somebody like Mahalanobis is that he had good reason to think that he was right
#
because probably growing up he was always right because he was gifted mathematically.
#
And he said that this is a problem with mathematicians becoming economists and turning economists,
#
which is that they start to expect this kind of response. It is an irony of history that
#
it is the kind of economics that Milton Friedman was a spouse that would become perhaps the
#
most quantitative in the present day as well. So I wonder what you think about that. Were
#
he around today? But I think that it does lead to a hubris that at a very young age,
#
he's very accomplished. The kinds of people he's interacting with in Cambridge on his
#
long Sunday morning strolls are Srinivasa Ramanujan, the sort of mathematical genius as well, who
#
even for someone mathematically gifted as Mahalanobis, Ramanujan blows his mind. But
#
Mahalanobis before independence is only, I think, the 11th or 12th Indian inducted into
#
the fellowship as a fellow of the Royal Society, which is an extremely prestigious honor for
#
somebody in the British Empire at the time. And only 12 Indians had ever been a part of it
#
through centuries of its history. And so you realize that this is, you're not just talking
#
about a globetrotting academic in the way that a globetrotting academic is today because today
#
they're a legion. There are thousands of them. At the time, there are very few people like
#
Homi Baba, like Vikram Sarafai, like Mahalanobis, people who are eminent and distinguished in their
#
field internationally and recognized as internationally relevant and important. And I
#
think that that leads to a sense of hubris along with this mathematical predisposition. And I
#
think that that is also why Nehru comes to rely so much on these technocrats, who, as you said,
#
and as I quote, he says, I prefer one technocrat to four bureaucrats. And I think it's because
#
the bureaucrats all depend on him to make the final decision. When you're in the archives,
#
you see letters upon letters on the smallest, most mundane thing getting kicked up to the Prime
#
Minister. I mean, many things that, you know, like the chaprasis uniform, things that you feel like
#
the Prime Minister should not be bothering about this. But because it's a time of a new nation
#
being born, of everything becoming a precedent, Nehru has to answer all these questions. Or at
#
least he feels like he has to answer all these questions. Perhaps that was a mistake. But with
#
these other people, he feels like they, firstly, he feels a sense that they're similar to him and
#
that they come from a similar background. He knows that they're internationally respected. He knows
#
that they don't need to be, he doesn't need quality control because they're internationally
#
respected in that way. They're entrepreneurial. So they are getting things done that India might
#
not otherwise have. So for example, I talked about how Mahal Navas brings India its first computers.
#
Now it's a different matter that he becomes a thorn in his own side in getting one from America
#
because of his perceived communist sympathies. But, you know, India is not the second richest
#
Asian nation by a long stretch, but is the second Asian nation to get any computer, any digital
#
computer. Why? Because of Mahal Navas and because of how bloody minded he got about getting this
#
computer that he was just obsessive about it and would leverage every contact he'd developed over
#
his life to be able to get it for India. Another part is that unlike these bureaucrats who are
#
constantly need to be in this kind of like, you know, like an email chain from hell, but except
#
it's a letter chain from hell because it just never ends with the prime minister, these technocrats
#
get stuff done and many times don't cost the government a single rupee because they're paid
#
for by their institutions, which are often private as well. They have foreign grants as well. So
#
Mahal Navas is in Sweden, not paid for by the government of India. He's paid for by the UN
#
statistical commission. And on the side, he's doing this sort of side deal to get India a computer
#
stepping on the toes of diplomats, which is why diplomats like YD Gundivia are so incensed.
#
They're like, who is this random dude who just shows up and is talking to the Soviet ambassador?
#
That is a breach of like a hundred protocols, but he's talking to them. Then he's drinking with them.
#
Then he's getting a deal. And then he's promising saying that I will try to get X amount of dollars
#
for the UN to say that they will commission that for you to send a computer to India.
#
No, don't send it to the ISI because it should not be the property of the ISI. It should be the
#
property of the government of India. So I will now loop the government of India into this chain.
#
And so this sort of thing is appalling to diplomats and ambassadors because he's taking
#
their entire job and he's getting lots of stuff done much quicker than they would have managed to
#
because he's not hemmed in by the kinds of protocols that they have to.
#
But for the prime minister, a lot of this just comes as bonus, right? This is very good for him
#
that these people are doing these things without it costing India very much often, right?
#
India sometimes just has to be like, maybe like if he has to get from X to Y in Europe,
#
India might sort of pay some money, but otherwise it's taken care of by these international
#
organizations and private universities flying him in and out of different places.
#
So I think that apart from that, I mean, Sunil Kilnani says in The Idea of India that Mahatma
#
Nubis was the kind of personality that Nehru was bound to be seduced by. I understand where he
#
comes from, but I do think that the structural aspect of the importance of statistics and
#
about how integral and critical data became to centralized planning cannot be overlooked.
#
So yes, Homi Baba, yes, Vikram Sarabhai, yes, Mahatma Nubis. But again, if those things weren't
#
important to nation building at the time, I don't think that those people would be as significant,
#
right? So whatever the personality of Mahatma Nubis was, if he did not occupy that position,
#
what if he was just a physicist? He would not have been as important because he didn't work
#
on the kinds of physics that was as important for nation building, right? It's because he turned
#
from a physicist to a statistician with interests in economics that he came to play this role.
#
So I think that that structural aspect while keeping in mind the personality traits of hubris,
#
while keeping in mind the traits of Nehru's preference for technocracy and for expertise
#
and top-down management, I think that this institutional and social and intellectual
#
context needs to be always borne in mind. I love what Friedman said about Mahatma Nubis,
#
which of course you've reproduced in your book and Adam Smith's great essay of course is
#
I think called The Man of System, which is basically about, you know, the man of system
#
looks at the whole world as a chess board and I'll move this piece there, I'll move that piece
#
there, mate in three, but the point is the pieces are individual actors of their own
#
and there aren't 32 of them, there are millions and millions and you can't quite go there.
#
Regarding, you know, apparent irony of, you know, maths being important later for free
#
market economists and all that, I think Friedman's central point here was that,
#
you know, being that good in math gives you a kind of hubris where you think you can order society
#
and it's important to have the humility to recognize that no one can possibly do that
#
and therefore to respect human agency and trust that, you know, free markets and the price system
#
and spontaneous order and so on and so forth will, you know, that everything will work out that way
#
and I think that is a position he would have taken and it's completely orthogonal that
#
math just became generally important in all kinds of economics later on down the line,
#
but his point was more a point about go easy on the coercion and go easy on the state trying to,
#
you know, be men of system as it were. So one of the sort of impressions I had
#
before I read your book is that planning was all mahalan abyss and he dominated the entire
#
period of planning and so on and so forth, but reading your book, you know, I realized
#
that there's a different dramatic arc to the whole thing, that of course he's important,
#
but when the first five-year plan is being done and all that, he is kind of still a figure on
#
the side. He's not the head of the planning commission, but he's in charge of ISI and
#
statistics and data and all that. He's playing a key role, but then what happens is that between
#
that and the second five-year plan, he maneuvers his way to a position of dominance and then the
#
second five-year plan is all mahalan abyss and it's a very interesting dramatic arc because
#
there is that story of how he's maneuvering his way to get to that position of preeminence,
#
helped along of course by Nehru's fondness for him and a person like him, and at the same time
#
that there is a lot of internal opposition which is playing out in interesting ways and eventually
#
he manages to get, you know, the second five-year plan through, but eventually that also kind of
#
begins to go to pieces. So those six or seven years are really fascinating, so take me through
#
that period. In some ways I'd say, I mean, that in the mind of mahalan abyss, the battles begin
#
even earlier. Like I said, to him, he's fighting a battle from the 1930s onwards to try to prove
#
that statistics is a science, should be taken seriously as a science in India, and in some
#
ways the apex of that is when he wins out by 1946 where he is the sort of big dada at the
#
Indian Science Congress himself. But then in his mind, the battle moves to a different level. The
#
battle moves to Delhi where the structural factors that I've talked about, the contextual factors
#
ensure that statistics is going to be essential for nation building and is going to be important
#
for nation building. And as mahalan abyss always says to him, statistics must have a purpose. It
#
can't just be a science just for pure science purposes, but it needs to serve a social function.
#
And he sees that through the vehicle of planning. He sees planning as the way for that to be done.
#
But he finds himself on the outside of the Planning Commission. He's not a member of the
#
Planning Commission. He has absolutely no training in economics at all. This is something to remember,
#
which is why it is dramatic that this person with no training in economics
#
writes the single most influential economics document in the history of independent India
#
till 1991. The second five-year plan is the blueprint for India's economy till liberalization
#
and was done by a man who had no training in economics. And this comes through in those
#
letters that I talked to you about with Pitambar Panth. When he talks about especially this,
#
he writes to Pitambar Panth, I forget from where, I think from Europe, but he's going through Europe,
#
America, and then eventually ends up in the Soviet Union. And on these travels, he writes to this
#
very revealing letter to Pitambar Panth saying that, you know, the reason that I travel abroad
#
is because I want to make contacts with these foreign economists, because as you know, I have
#
no training in economics and I have an insecurity about that. It's very rare for a man like mahalan
#
abyss to actually say that he's insecure about anything. I mean, and the man is someone who has
#
like great achievements in one field, but was trained in an entirely separate field. Now he's
#
taking on a third field. So perhaps he had reason to feel insecure. And he says that because I'm
#
insecure about this and because Indian economists don't take me seriously, actually meeting with
#
and seeing that these, some of these foreign economists agree with me, gives me, you know,
#
sort of strengthens his spine, straightens his spine and makes him feel like he can have a policy
#
role. And seeing that their views in some ways echo his, or maybe, you know, some of it also might
#
have just been, as I say in the book, selection bias as well, that he just chose people who might
#
have agreed with him, made him feel like that he was going abroad in order to be relevant in India,
#
right? He left India in order to be relevant in India. He went abroad to get ammunition against
#
domestic detractors, against domestic critics. And so his, in his mind, he sees his enemies in
#
the planning commission as V.T. Krishnamachari and Tarlok Singh. Again, people that Nehru favors,
#
right? So it isn't as if Nehru is protecting him against other people because the other people
#
that are fighting with Mahalanubis are also people that are under, under sort of Nehru's patronage,
#
right? Nehru has picked V.T. Krishnamachari to be the deputy chairman of the planning commission,
#
which is the single most important position in the planning commission, and Tarlok Singh to be the
#
secretary of the planning commission, so much so that the planning commission comes to be referred
#
to as the Tarlok Sabha, right? The Tarlok Singh's sabha. The people there don't like Mahalanubis
#
and Mahalanubis's growing influence in the corridors of the Yojana Bhavan
#
because they see him as someone who has not been an administrator like V.T. Krishnamachari has,
#
having to deal with real administrative situations, not trained in economics like
#
Tarlok Singh has been, or someone who's been like the governor of a central bank,
#
like even Sadi Deshmukh has been. So to them, Mahalanubis is just this rank outsider who is
#
also just sort of infiltrating on their territory. And, you know, there's also this sort of territorial
#
politics. And what Mahalanubis manages to do is to put together the reflected influence of
#
foreign academics and the influence he gains from inviting many of these foreign academics
#
to his own institute and Bharanagar and Calcutta at the Institutical Institute such that the
#
Institutical Institute becomes really a hub of economists traveling from abroad to India.
#
And whenever they'd come to India, apart from being in Delhi, they'd go to Calcutta
#
because they'd been invited by the Institutical Institute. And so the fact that he was rubbing
#
shoulders with these very famous economists, and these weren't, I mean, some of them were
#
not so very well-known economists, but they did include some who went on to win Nobel Prize,
#
like Richard Stone, Gunnar Myrdal, other well-known economists like John Kenneth Galbraith.
#
So all of these people are coming to the ISI, they all know Mahalanubis, and they all agree
#
with different parts of his ideas. And as my book discusses, the Mahalanubis model, one thing that
#
I really think people have sort of forgotten about Mahalanubis model is that this was genuinely a
#
mainstream view at the time, right? That in some ways Mahalanubis is almost giving too much credit
#
for his originality, because actually this is what many economists, development economists across the
#
world were recommending, which is why I think it's a mistake to think of the second five-year
#
plan as some sort of Nehruvian idiosyncrasy. It's not idiosyncratic for Nehru to have chosen this.
#
In fact, if he'd chosen a free market model, that would have seemed idiosyncratic at the time,
#
because that was not the median position. The median position was for state-sponsored
#
industrial growth. The debates then were between export-led or import substitution,
#
and India chose import substitution perhaps to its detriment compared to the East Asian economies.
#
And so you have these letters that go back and forth between Nehru, between sorry, Mahalanubis
#
and C.D. Deshmukh, who'd sort of formed an alliance because Deshmukh had known Mahalanubis from before.
#
They became friends when C.D. Deshmukh was the governor of the RBI, and the RBI used to spend
#
the summer months in Calcutta. During that time in Calcutta, C.D. Deshmukh would land up at Amrapali,
#
which is Mahalanubis' house name, for these long, lazy Sunday lunches. And then they became friends.
#
C.D. Deshmukh even became the president of the Indian Statistical Institute. And then when C.D.
#
Deshmukh became finance minister of India in the early 1950s, obviously now Mahalanubis has an ally
#
in the finance ministry itself. But at the Planning Commission, they don't take too kindly
#
to this presumption by Mahalanubis interfering in their matters. And in fact, in the letters,
#
I found that Mahalanubis and C.D. Deshmukh even come up with this resignation pact saying that,
#
you know, if Tarlok Singh and Aviti Krishmachari keep whispering these things behind our back,
#
they won't even say it to our faces, but behind our back, they keep badmouthing us and the second
#
five-year plan ideas that we have. If this continues, then we'll just have to tender our
#
resignation to the prime minister. This cannot continue. But eventually, they do win out. And
#
the fact that he has the finance minister on his side, the prime minister also believes in these
#
views. Panel of economists that they put together, 19 out of the 20 economists, except for B.R.
#
Shannay, of course, all agree with the plan broadly. All of that in some ways outflanks Aviti Krishmachari
#
and Tarlok Singh, such that Mahalanubis is able to, is sort of able to come out on top
#
vis-a-vis them. But as I detail in the book, this was something that had really caught the attention
#
of the chattering classes in Delhi. I mean, you look at the pages of the Economic Weekly,
#
which is the predecessor to the Economic and Political Weekly, and almost every month there's
#
some reference to how Mahalanubis is, you know, is swatting aside these, the senile dodging crowd,
#
as they refer to it, at the Planning Commission, how economists have been left outside, out of
#
economic policy like, and I quote, like Vrindavan without Krishna, it is now like, because they say
#
that, you know, the people to whom this should be home are now homeless, that all the economists
#
have been swatting aside by the ISI crowd, that Calcutta has basically overtaken Delhi.
#
And so this is, this was a very dramatic moment, and this is in the early 1950s. And the pinnacle
#
of Mahalanubis's influence is in the two, three years right after, once the second five-year plan
#
comes into effect in 1956, and the first two years after that. You know, one lovely image I love from
#
your book is where you're talking about Mahalanubis's frustration being like he's on a rocking horse,
#
and he's moving back and forth and back and forth, but there's no movement. He's not actually getting
#
anywhere. It's just, you know, rocking, which reminded me of D.H. Lawrence's great story,
#
The Rocking Horse Winner, I think it was called. There's another sort of fundamental question,
#
which is at stake here, which is, as you pointed out earlier at the start of the episode and at
#
the start of your book, India's planning experiment is unique in the sense that it is combining
#
Soviet-style centralized planning by the state with liberal democracy. The criticism of planning,
#
per se, is that it leads to an authoritarian state, you know, by centralizing all this power,
#
by saying we'll plan the economy. The state takes more power into its own hands, and the danger is
#
that it will become authoritarian, and individual freedom will suffer, and the balance between state
#
and the society will, you know, remain dramatically in favor of the state. This is the criticism.
#
But what, you know, Nehru and Mahalanubis and others were implicitly saying is that, no,
#
this is a democratic experiment that will get the people on our side, that the people will have an
#
input into what planning is, and, you know, we're not going to lapse into becoming an authoritarian
#
state, which seems kind of rhetorical. But, you know, so how did that actually play out, like today
#
with the benefit of hindsight, you know, what do we see? Was it really possible for such a
#
centralized planning system to go hand in hand with a true liberal democracy,
#
or was it a contradiction that could not have been resolved despite the rhetoric for it?
#
Yeah, this argument, or rather the idea of democratic planning, that phrase democratic
#
planning first shows up in the archives that I look at. I saw a handwritten note by Nehru
#
in which he's also, you know, doing other interesting things like just doodling,
#
because you can tell that in some of these meetings he sort of loses patience and he's
#
just doodling on the side. But the phrase democratic planning is written by him in a letter,
#
in some of his notes that I found in 1939. So as early as that, he's thinking about this,
#
this sort of combining democracy and planning. And I think that democratic planning in some ways
#
served three or four purposes. The first was that there was this rhetoric of democratic planning,
#
and I think in the minds of some people, such as at least say Nehru, it was a genuine belief that
#
Indian planning had to be different from communist planning, that the Indian planning
#
experiment cannot involve force in the way that the planning experiments in China and the Soviet
#
Union did. And that part of being a liberal democracy is for people to be a part of the
#
grand experiments that the state is involved in. And that Indian citizenship, and this is something
#
that scholars like Taylor Sherman, Neeraja Gopal Jayal, et cetera, have written about,
#
is that Indian citizenship had a specific meaning in those early years, which is that
#
yes, you get the gift of this being a citizen, but it comes with certain, that their rights come with
#
certain obligations and duties. And part of the duty of that would be to work towards national
#
development, right? That that's the implicit expectation. Of course, not justiciable, not sort
#
of enforceable in any way, but part of the implicit expectation. And it's why you do actually see in
#
the early 1950s, lots of people just volunteering for these national efforts. So there's that aspect,
#
there's sort of the most highfalutin, romantic view of democratic planning. Another aspect that
#
is also ideological is that India needed at that time, at a time when, as you mentioned,
#
India was even being territorially sutured together, at a time when India's coming out of
#
two centuries of colonialism, coming out of the horrors and the extreme violence of partition,
#
India needed new national narratives. And development was meant to be one of the primary master narratives
#
of this. And how is development to be had? Through planning. And so planning became this kind of,
#
that's why in speeches and in, you know, in movies, in songs, it's why, it's why, for example, I found
#
a song, which is actually now you can find on YouTube, sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Muhammad
#
and Muhammad Rafi, in which the chorus is, Keh do yeh gaon ke jaat ko aur shehr ke gentleman ko,
#
kaamiyaab hum karke rahenge paanch saal ke plan ko. I mean, that's an absurd lyric,
#
unless you understand this context, right, of a nation in which everybody, including the movie,
#
this is not like patronized, this is not a movie that is funded by the government of India. It is
#
a private movie that is playing to its audience and its audience, it realizes, keeps hearing about
#
these panch varshe yojanas. And so part of the theme of this movie was nation building. And which
#
is why you have, you know, Lata Mangeshkar singing, haan paanch saal ke plan ko, that's the sort of
#
refrain in the song. And in that time, you needed unifying national messages and planning became
#
one of those. So those are two of the ideological reasons that I think democratic planning became
#
the sort of flip side of international non-alignment, right? So you have non-alignment
#
in foreign policy, which is that we will not ally with either of the superpowers, the United States
#
or the Soviet Union. Domestically, what that means is that we're not going to follow either of these
#
options fully either. We're going to have this sort of mixed economy, this mixture between what is
#
the sort of seen as on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But I mean, in practice, of course,
#
they weren't non-aligned for too long. Right, yeah. And so, but I think there is a more real
#
politique part of what democratic planning was. The most important part of which is that
#
India and India's elite realized very quickly that India just simply did not have the state
#
capacity to make these plans successful. India needed its citizens to participate in this
#
voluntary fashion, to invest in the fashion that these planners wanted, but could not enforce,
#
right? They needed people to buy into government to India issued bonds. They needed to have Indians
#
invest in the national plan loan. They needed Indians to invest, buy, save, do all these things
#
without the stick that communist regimes did, right? They wanted the same things,
#
but they did not have the stick. And nor did they in this thing, because it's not a market economy,
#
have the sort of the carrot enough for them to do it. And so they needed these kind of
#
contributions that are unremunerated by the citizens to participate in large public
#
undertakings like the Kosi dam project, like building dispensaries and schools in villages
#
and gram panchayats. They needed citizens to participate in the narrative of national
#
development in a way that did not require the state to always pay them. And that this idea of
#
democratic planning is the way in which it could be justified, right? That this is what we're giving
#
you. We're giving you a shot at development without taking away at least most of your basic liberal
#
rights. And you have the option every five years of voting us out of power. And I think the
#
final reason that I think that democratic planning was important to the Nehruvian state
#
for its own sake is that the idea of democratic planning legitimized the state in the eyes of the
#
people. This was the way in which the state, for example, and the government when it went to the
#
polls was saying, this is what we're doing for you. We're giving you, you have the right to vote,
#
you have all these liberal freedoms, and we're giving you development. And we are inviting you
#
to participate in it with us. And so I think those are the cluster of reasons because of which
#
democratic planning became, at least for the first 20 years after independence, this sort of
#
reigning ideology. And India would sometimes make these very tall claims internationally about how
#
India is providing a new path to the rest of the developing world, to the rest of the decolonizing
#
world, to the rest of the non-aligned world, about how you can put together these seemingly
#
fundamentally contradictory ideas during the Cold War. So Heinz Arndt, the Australian economist,
#
you've quoted him of talking about Mahalanobis and saying, quote, he must be nearly 70 immensely
#
vigorous, alert, and intelligent, but also domineering, vain, and bigoted, a Bengali
#
aristocrat who, in moving towards a Stalinist-type authoritarianism, has completely bypassed
#
democratic liberal notions, never in any doubt who would plan and who would be planned for or
#
against. Stop, quote. And everything that you just said explains very well why the rhetoric of
#
democratic planning is both powerful and appealing to the common person. But my question is that,
#
can we now look back and say that, as many of his critics alleged it would be,
#
that it is also incoherent, that it simply was never possible because it involved either state
#
coercion or relying on the voluntary actions of people. And you've pointed out how, you know,
#
in your book, you've pointed out how a tourist went to the Taj Mahal. He'd wanted to visit his
#
all his life, and he thought he'll be awed by it. But after visiting it, he said, what I was really
#
awed by is that an entire village on their own, without being paid, went and did some voluntary
#
work for some project or whatever. Which is fine, but it's an outlier. People are not going to do
#
that beyond a point in time. It is not sustainable to ask people voluntarily to do that. And then,
#
not only is there an issue of state coercion, but there is also the issue of autonomy being denied,
#
that when you have this mindset that the state will control the economy from the commanding heights,
#
you are also, you know, getting in the way of the private enterprise of people, you know,
#
their ingenuity, and just stopping all of that, putting an end to all the myriad voluntary actions
#
through which a society raises itself. And we saw the power of some of that after 1991, for example.
#
So, the fascinating part of your book also is the second section. Your first section is data,
#
where we talk about planning and statistics coming together and, you know, all of that.
#
Your second section is called democracy, and you have a couple of chapters in it. And the first of
#
those chapters deals with how there was a concentrated effort by the government in making
#
planning popular among the common people. One, because they wanted it to have democratic
#
legitimacy in terms of the people supporting it. And two, because they felt that the people have
#
to pitch in as well, right? So, tell me sort of a little bit about this. Like, you quote a piece
#
from the Economic Weekly in 1956, saying that planning has a touch of magic about it and an
#
element of weird ritual too, and what can appeal more to the average Indian mind than magic and
#
ritual. Stop, quote. And, you know, there are so many films that you point out that are, you know,
#
later made, Naya Daur, and, you know, songs like Chhoro Kal Ki Baate from Ham Hindustani,
#
which kind of clearly struck a chord with the popular imagination. At the same time,
#
you have the lovely cartoon you referred to by RK Laxman, where he's comparing, where I'll just
#
quote your words, in fact, where you say, quote, another cartoon years later and in a different
#
publication compared the plans to a donkey. RK Laxman, the beloved visual chronicler of
#
independent India, portrayed the plans as an obstinate ass that wouldn't budge in the direction
#
of prosperity marked by a road sign. Unmoved by pulling or pushing and not tempted by the dangling
#
carrot of foreign aid, the lazy donkey or five-year plan makes progress only when people lift it
#
over their heads and run with it. Stop, quote. So tell me a little bit about sort of two connected
#
questions. One is that you could argue that what the government did with the film's revision and
#
so on was run this incredible propaganda campaign at large scale to spread this message. So that's
#
one thing that is happening. And the other thing that is happening is that it's not just that the
#
state is doing everything from the top down. This is resonating with the people, as we see from all
#
the films and the books and so on and so forth, of which you've cited many. It's resonating with
#
the people. There is also a bottom-up sentiment that yeah, planning is a way to go. So tell me
#
about how all of this is playing out in the popular culture, because it's all kind of forgotten today,
#
right? Cinema of the fifties and sixties and, you know... Chhodo kal ki baate. Yeah, exactly.
#
Right. So, you know, thanks. I mean, this is actually a part of the book that I really enjoyed
#
writing. And I think it's a part of planning that is much less known about, which is this entire
#
aspect of democratic planning and how the government of India went about trying to actualize it.
#
It realized that it needed this informed and willing citizenry for plans to succeed.
#
And how do you let people know about the plans in a country that is overwhelmingly illiterate and
#
uneducated is that you use every means of propaganda at the government's disposal. So there were,
#
just to sort of run through a quick list, there was a song and drama division set up in which
#
the government contracted with these different dramatic troops across the country, in districts
#
across the country, where they would be given scripts by the Ministry of Information and
#
Broadcasting in which they were being asked to include their normal dramatic themes and try to
#
tie it together with the five-year plan and talk about the nation's progress. There was the films
#
division, of course, which was the greatest producer of documentaries in the second half
#
of the 20th century. And the vast plurality of the documentaries produced by the films division,
#
which was played at every movie theater before a commercial movie was run, or in fact,
#
taken across the country in villages through a projector onto like a bed sheet or something
#
and played. And a majority of these movies were about planning and development themes.
#
There were these roving publicity officers hired by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
#
in New Delhi. Each publicity officer was either assigned to a bullock cart unit or a jeep unit
#
or a boat unit, and they would go to different parts of India. And each of these units with the
#
jeep unit or the bullock cart unit basically was a person, two people with a bullock cart.
#
And on the back of the bullock carts were lots of pamphlets in the local language about,
#
and posters, you know, visual posters about five-year plans and the aims of the government.
#
They would have a projector. They would have some sort of material that they could share.
#
They would have, you know, maybe some sort of puppets and things like that with which they
#
could do make a small production. And the boat units had similar things and the jeep units had
#
similar things. The films division produced, you know, a wide variety of documentaries, including
#
one that I talk about in the book, which is quite inventive. It's about an alien visiting India.
#
And each of the visits by this alien is timed to the end of a five-year plan. And this kind
#
of bumbling villager is, you know, keeps complaining to the audience and looks through the sort of the
#
fourth wall and looks to the audience and says, do you see any change in India? I don't see any
#
change in India. But the visit of the alien every five years shows to the audience that actually
#
lots of things have changed. And so you see these different modes by which the government was trying
#
to reach out to people. And it included things. And the fact, as you said, that there is some
#
sort of way in which the public resonates with this, we can tell that the public resonates with
#
this propaganda because even private industry, sort of private popular culture reflects it.
#
Like I talk about this play that was very popular and was performed by a dramatic troupe in Delhi,
#
three arts club across the country called Hamara Gaon, which is about a village boy going to the
#
village, finding that the village is very dirty and people aren't adopting the ideals of the second
#
five-year plan of the five-year plan. And about how over his time in the village, he tells him
#
about what the government is doing for them, the five-year plans, et cetera. And basically,
#
the village's name is Barakpur. But this young city slicker says it's become mostly like Narakpur,
#
which is a play on hell in Hindi. And, you know, by the end of it, Barakpur has sort of regained
#
its name as Barakpur because it's improved. One of the sort of great novels of this era by Yashpal,
#
which is Jhuta Sach, again has, it tells you something that one of the great literary
#
novels of the period has one of the main characters as somebody who works in the Planning
#
Commission. And this person is one of the few good characters in the novel, somebody who comes to the
#
aid of a partitioned sexual assault survivor, Tara, who's the real sort of heroine of the novel.
#
And in the end, their marriage is sort of the only sort of happy ending in the novel.
#
And so I think that, and apart from that, there are these movies, you know, as you mentioned,
#
Naya Daur, Char Dil Char Rahe, Naya Daur, which has Shammi Kapoor and Raj Kapoor in it,
#
and Meena Kumari, Char Dil Char Rahe, which has Dilip Kumar in it. And these films in the 1950s,
#
again, give you a sense that planning had just become a part of what everyone assumed to be
#
natural about India and its future. And I think that that is what in this chapter I'm trying to
#
convey that we've lost the sense about, yes, it is top-down, yes, it is very state-centric,
#
yes, it is very, it is centralized, but it has become a part of the popular culture and not
#
necessarily forced into the popular culture, though, I mean, that's debatable. I like to think
#
that if it was such a part of the popular culture, I mean, the film division, you point out,
#
was the largest producer of documentary films in the world, and they produce more than 8,000 short
#
films, documentaries, and newsreels. And it strikes me that there's a tremendous opportunity
#
cost to that for such a poor country. You know, instead of spreading propaganda about planning,
#
just spend that money on the people. And I love these ironic words by you towards the end of the
#
chapter, when you write, quote, after more than a decade of planned publicity, the government of
#
India decided that it was time to assess the levels of planned consciousness in the nation.
#
And you give some details of that, and then at the end you write, ultimately, and unmindful of the
#
irony, the study team concluded that the signal flaw in the government's planned publicity efforts
#
was inadequate planning. Stop, quote. And so it's almost like a satirical kind of novel. The reason
#
planning did not work was we did not plan. Your last chapter is the most fascinating, and I didn't
#
know a bit of it. And that is about the interplay of religion and this effort to make planning
#
popular, where essentially the government decided that sadhus are the best messengers,
#
that we need religious symbolism to explain scientific planning to people, and so on and so
#
forth. So sort of tell me a little bit about all of that, I mean, which leads to something called
#
the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, and it's just like an incredible story. Thanks. Yeah, so in 1956,
#
the government of India and many members of the Congress government, including the then
#
minister of planning, Gulzarulal Nanda, who would go on to become India's home minister, go on to
#
become an interim prime minister as well twice. Gulzarulal Nanda and several members from the
#
Congress party meet with 50 sadhus at Birla Mandir in Delhi. And this meeting is about how
#
sadhus can help propagate the ideas of the five-year plan. Because apart from using every
#
publicity arm of the government, of this propaganda, it was believed that actually it would be good if
#
there's some voluntary organizations. And one of the voluntary organizations was the Bharat
#
Sevak Samaj, which actually had quite a bit of success across the country in sort of channelizing
#
India's youth and other people who are sort of unemployed to doing things voluntarily for
#
the development of the nation. So many bridges, many small dispensary schools, et cetera, come
#
to be built through the Bharat Sevak Samaj. The Bharat Sadhu Samaj is a sort of eccentric,
#
sort of offshoot of the Bharat Sevak Samaj. And the idea is that these sadhus can,
#
because India is an overwhelmingly religious country and that religion has a hold on the people,
#
we will try to use these sadhus to propagate the message of the plan, planning this, which is seen
#
as so technocratic and irreligious, but we will try to somehow bring these two together in order
#
that the sadhus, when they are talking to the people in their sermons and they're doing their
#
doing their lectures, that they will in some ways bring the Ramayan into conversation with the
#
Dvitiya Panchavarshya Yojana. I mean, it really seems harebrained, but this was an experiment
#
that the government spent years on. And its major patrons were Gulzarulal Nanda and Rajendra Prasad,
#
who was the president of India at the time. I uncovered some letters as I write in the book
#
that tell you, give you a sense of how much, how religious Gulzarulal Nanda was. He was this
#
very stern, honest Gandhian, who would, the story goes, sort of, you know, scold his
#
grandson for using official Government of India stationery, because how can you use, you know,
#
Government of India stationery, because it's a waste in this poor nation. He would talk about
#
how his father would attend these, would have conversations with visiting or itinerant sadhus
#
when they came through his village. So somebody who really had an admiration for sadhus, but also
#
somebody who had some views that were quite out there. I found letters that Gulzarulal Nanda has
#
with somebody who claims to be in conversation or in touch with Gulzarulal Nanda's dead father
#
through a medium in an ashram in Ranchi, who says, who refers to himself as Gurudev. And he says
#
that, you know, and keeps writing letters to the then planning minister of India saying that, you
#
know, your father said this, your father said that. And then when Nehru dies, he writes saying that,
#
oh, you know, I could not, the medium could not get in touch with your dead father. Otherwise,
#
we could have avoided Nehru's death. So this is a man who, you know, who is in charge of an Institute
#
of Psychic Research, constantly converses with his astrologer, Haveli Ram. So somebody who really does
#
believe in spirituality, in the power of Hindu religious symbols and of sadhus. And the position
#
of Nehru is really interesting on this. He has a very low opinion of many sadhus. He thinks that
#
many of them are fakes, that many of them are just people trying to shirk, getting a job, that they
#
are just pretending to be sadhus, that they engage in all kinds of illicit activities. And this is
#
actually borne out by newspaper reports from the time many sadhus were accused at the time of
#
kidnapping children, of engaging in with, you know, with prostitutes, with actually setting up
#
their own forts and fighting with the government. And so the opinion of Nehru is pretty low of these
#
sadhus. But Gulzala Nanda is committed to this, sets up this Bharat Sadhu Samaj, which basically
#
is a government-funded organization for sadhus to use religious symbols to propagate five-year plans,
#
which again seems like such a strange idea. And their main outreach is during the Kumbh Mela,
#
when of course, lakhs and lakhs of Hindu devotees are there. And then basically there would be a
#
pandal set up using Government of India money, in which the Bharat Sadhu Samaj would set up this
#
pandal where I found the daily sort of schedule of one of these, the routine, and it was like 4 a.m.
#
I mean, it's literally punishing, you know, wake up at 4 a.m., then snan, then shlokas, then lectures
#
on the holy motherland in the Vedic age, then about something very, and about how the ideals of
#
Ram can be made consistent with that of the Panchavarshya Yajna. So really strange stuff
#
that is going on at this time. But the Government of India is paying for it. And one of the ways in
#
which it is short-sighted is, and of course, Nehru's interactions with them is always entertaining,
#
because he goes from thinking, okay, maybe it's a good idea, maybe we need to do this,
#
to then when they finally come to his office, which seems like a coup because he doesn't really,
#
he's not very fond of them, he scolds them, saying that, you know, why do you have so many
#
fakes amidst you? Why can't you deal with these fake sadhus? Then when he goes and gives a lecture
#
to them on their home turf, again he scolds them, saying, okay, all this is well and good that you're
#
trying to help with development, but you know, we need to move forward, we need to industrialize,
#
we need to set aside superstition. But the biggest flaw that the Congress should have seen away from
#
a mile, but maybe we can see it because we have the benefit of hindsight, is that these sadhus had
#
their own agenda. They were much more concerned with getting rid of cow slaughter with all of
#
these, what we would call today Hindutva causes, than they were about planning and about any
#
economic policy. So for example, in 1966, this anti-cow slaughter rally gets out of hand and these
#
sadhus who are leading it with trishuls and swords and knives, they start attacking the police. The
#
police have to tear gas them. Several people die in Delhi. Ministers in the Congress governments,
#
their houses are attacked. Central Delhi is vandalized by these sadhus. And of course,
#
at the end of the day, when like, you know, dozens of people dead, more than a hundred are injured,
#
somebody has to take the fall for it. And who happens to be the Home Minister of India at the
#
time? Gulzar Lal Nanda. And so Gulzar Lal Nanda's political career in effect comes to an end because
#
of this one organization that he had been the most consistent patron of. And then I write about the,
#
going forward, the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, it would not only blow up in the face of the Congress,
#
and this time in 1966, but in the future, the president of the Bharat Sadhu Samaj,
#
one Sant Tukdoji Maharaj, would become one of the vice presidents of the VHP. In 1989, the VHP
#
pandal and the Bharat Sadhu Samaj pandal of the Kumbh Mela basically became identical.
#
And from 1989 onwards, the Bharat Sadhu Samaj is basically endorsing Ram Janmo Bhumi and that Babri
#
Masjid should fall. So in a sense, you have this creation of the Congress, so much so that its
#
critics at the time were referring to the Bharat Sadhu Samaj as Congress Sadhus, that these Congress
#
Sadhus become, you know, sort of shock troops in the army of the BJP. It's a fabulously entertaining
#
story, both Gulzar Lal Nanda and the Congress kind of hoisted by their own petard. And if I
#
remember, in 1966, March, they did, Karpatri Maharaj, one of their leaders, also got injured
#
in the eye or something, if I remember correctly. And Karpatri Maharaj, as my regular listeners
#
might have heard in my episode with Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press, Karpatri also wrote this book
#
called a book comparing Marxism and the Geeta and criticizing Marxism on the grounds of how it went
#
against Hindu religion. And one of those criticisms was, and this is hilarious, one of those criticisms
#
was that because communism abolishes private property, his argument was that every woman
#
will become like a bucket from which any man can drink. So this is one of the iconic Hindutva leaders
#
of the time, but he was, you know, and he got injured during this. So, you know, when you talk
#
about the schedule of the Sadhus in the Kumbh Mela, it's a crazy schedule. And it makes it even funnier
#
that Nehru actually referred to them as lazy rascals, because, you know, they seem misguided
#
to me certainly, but they don't seem all that lazy. And this whole chapter is such material
#
for a comic novel, like you've quoted from a Rajendra Prasad speech to a whole bunch of these
#
Sadhus, where basically he tells them, quote, you need hardly be told that there is an intimate
#
relationship between the world we live in and parlok, the world we strive for. It is not possible
#
to achieve anything in the other world without setting things in order in this world. Stop,
#
quote, you know, therefore talking of, you know, higher religious aims and saying that, hey, we
#
need the planning commission to get us there because we need to fix this world feast. I found
#
that hilarious. What I also found hilarious was that at one point there were like some 75 lakh
#
Sadhus in India, according to a census, right? And they figured out that a lot of these Sadhus
#
were fake. So there was talk of a central executive committee that would, quote, grant membership
#
only after a thorough review of the Sadhu's past beliefs and his activities from the time he first
#
renounced the world. Stop, quote, and then later you write about this registration bill where you
#
say, just months after the Bharat Sadhu Samaj was formed, the Sadhu's registration bill was
#
tabled in parliament in November 1956. It called for all of India's holy men and women to be
#
registered and licensed or face the threat of going to jail for up to two years for impersonating
#
real Sadhus. Stop, quote, this is wild stuff. I mean, it's the stuff of satire, though I don't
#
think anyone would dare to do satire on it in the current environment. But what was all this licensing
#
stuff about? Was it to, was it like, you know, elsewhere there was a carrot, but was this also
#
a stick to kind of tell the Sadhus that, listen, you know, whether you are called a Sadhu or not
#
depends on whether we give you a license to practice as a Sadhu. So you better propagate the,
#
you know, the five year plans or, you know, was there an element of that to this?
#
No, there was no stick. I mean, in some ways, and it's why, for example, when there were some
#
audits done later, they were, you know, some of the audits was quite scathing about Bharat
#
Sadhu Samaj saying that we're giving all this money and what are the results we're getting?
#
They are just printing, using our money to print sort of propaganda literature about,
#
you know, to propagate Hinduism, which is all well and good if they did on their own money.
#
But why is the government of India paying for this? But the Sadhu registration bill was due to,
#
like I said, a spate of newspaper reports and media reports about these Sadhus, which,
#
which to be fair, real Sadhus did decry. They were saying that this is a problem,
#
which is why the Bharat Sadhu Samaj itself, without prompting, but out of fear of this Bharat
#
Sadhu registration bill said that actually, yes, if we're going to get money from the government
#
and we want the government to support us and we don't want people to think that we're a bunch of
#
quacks and, you know, child kidnappers and all this sort of thing, we need to have, we need to
#
give identity cards. And that's what I found hilarious. The idea that this man has decided
#
to renounce all life and, you know, maybe move to the Himalayas and to, you know, to live this life
#
till he dies without any worldly attachment, but has to carry an identity card, right? But the idea
#
was that without this identity card, how do you, how, and this identity card will only be given
#
after like vetting by the Bharat Sadhu Samaj, which consists of other Sadhus of if you're a real
#
Sadhu or not, you know, I mean, or to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, right? Between
#
one Sadhu and other, like, how do you determine, like, you know, what is the credentialing
#
to prove that you've actually left the world? But I guess non-Sadhus like you and I can't
#
possibly come up with those metrics, right? There's got to be a sole examination committee.
#
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In which they all share these, uh, I suppose it has to
#
be like peer review by Sadhus, right? That's essentially what they're saying should be done,
#
that instead of the government giving you a registration, let Sadhus decide who's a real
#
Sadhu and who's not. In the end, it didn't go anywhere, but it was in this context that,
#
that, uh, Nehru, for example, is made fun of in the popular press. In numerous cartoons that I
#
talk about, Nehru is pilloried by more liberal leaning Indians saying, you know, what the hell
#
is our prime minister? Many cartoons showing him in basically a langot and a loin cloth pretending
#
to be a Sadhu and the, the caption is for whose salvation. There's another in which Nehru is
#
walking on a bed of nails, holding the sort of the, the sign of the atom on one hand, making fun of
#
the fact that this is a person who's promoting atomic energy in India, but is also indulging
#
in this kind of obscurantism. There are a couple of, you know, funny cartoons about how there's
#
this, you know, uh, this very typically Indian Babu or bureaucrat sitting at his table with the
#
obligatory, you know, image of Gandhi behind him. And there's this person who's been talking to him
#
like a very disheveled man who looks like a Sadhu who's been talking to him for hours and hours and
#
he's been, you know, giving him chai after chai. And then he realizes after many years, it's just
#
that like, it's just some beggar who walked in and that he's that this Babu is waste all the time
#
because he thought it's the Bharat Sadhu Samaj that, you know, after all Nehru is patronizing.
#
And there's another in which, you know, like a minister for finance is learning, you know,
#
about deficit financing from a Sadhu because of course Sadhus now seem to be running the show.
#
So there was all this sort of blowback to the Congress government about, uh, from the more
#
sort of liberal sort of, you'd say, elite sections of, of the media about why India was, uh, engaging
#
in this kind of alliance with Sadhus. But, uh, on the other hand, uh, Nehru didn't put a stop to it
#
and Nehru felt that maybe it was worthwhile. Maybe this was perhaps the price to be paid for,
#
uh, to, to spread the message of the plans and that in this way he shows himself not to be really
#
anti-religion at all. He is sort of engaging with them, uh, engaging with Indians on the terrain
#
that they would like, even though he's not very comfortable with it. He's not comfortable with
#
the idea. And you can imagine him sort of, you know, doing a big, I told you so finger wag in
#
1966, but of course he's dead by then. No, I mean, I mean, in, in this respect, perhaps I,
#
I feel Nehru was a very lonely man because, uh, a large part of the, of his party was sympathetic
#
towards a certain kind of benign Hindu nationalism. Like it's, it's worth pointing out that when the
#
Babri Masjid, when the idol was installed in the Babri Masjid in the late 1940s, uh, you know,
#
it was a Congress government in charge in UP and the orders from Nehru were get the idol out of
#
there. This is going to create trouble later. And the home minister of UP at the time was Lal Bahadur
#
Shastri. The CM I think was Govind Ballabh Pant. Both of them did diddly squat because they didn't
#
want to, you know, so if you, so, I mean, that's, uh, you know, just a fascinating scenario that
#
apart from Nehru, all the really tall leaders had, you know, were far closer to, uh, you know, uh,
#
were far closer to, uh, the Hindu sphere as it were. And it's, it's interesting to think about
#
what if Nehru hadn't existed and those leaders gradually, you know, whether it is Patel or Prasad
#
or, uh, Shastri for a very brief while, and he was by all accounts a humble man and a good prime
#
minister, uh, you know, if, if they had survived, could we have, uh, you know, prevented the rise
#
of this more toxic and reactive Hindu, Hindutva nationalism, uh, that we have before us today?
#
But that's a separate question. You know, your book goes into far more detail than perhaps we
#
have the time to, and that's a good thing because I'll just encourage all the listeners to buy it.
#
You, uh, you know, you describe in great detail, the shifting intellectual currents and how through
#
the sixties, the planning commission lost more and more, uh, relevance, you know, Muradji Desai as
#
finance minister wasn't quite cautious with it. And, you know, Dhananjay Gadgil, who had always
#
been, you know, against, uh, not a big water, your planning actually took charge of the planning
#
commission and all of that. So all that story is fascinating. And looking back, what would you say,
#
like at one level, you can look at that period and say, okay, we had an experiment with planning.
#
It was really interesting. It's an interesting story. Bollywood was there. Sadhus were there
#
and, um, very interesting people, but it didn't really work, did it? But on the other hand,
#
I would look at it also with the positive framework that look, what we got out of it
#
was a certain statistical infrastructure, which gave us key data. It also gave us a certain
#
scientific way of thinking about the world. Perhaps a mistake wasn't using it in a prescriptive way
#
and saying, we will use state power to do X and do Y. But, uh, you know, there is no doubt that
#
it is essential to use data, to use statistics in a descriptive way and to say, this is what the
#
world is like. This is what the world is like. How can we influence it with policy and so on
#
and so forth. And in fact, it was a lament to Pramit Bhattacharya that some of this
#
statistical infrastructure is kind of withering away and we are perhaps sort of losing it.
#
So looking back on this, what is your sense of that entire period? Like, obviously you've done
#
what every historian should do that we now understand through this book,
#
that period and those currents of history that much better. But apart from that,
#
what are the resonances for the current time and you know, what lessons can we take from it?
#
Yeah, I think the resonance is certainly, as you said, the shared data capacity that India has
#
and has had was seen in the 1950s onwards as a real outlier amongst developing nation.
#
No other nation, according to statistics across the world, had nearly the amount of data about
#
its citizenry, about employment, consumption, expenditure, all levels of granular detail
#
as India had and at the kind of low cost that India had. And that attention to data,
#
the attention to building data infrastructures through the Central Statistical Organization,
#
through the National Sample Survey, through bringing computers to deal with the data,
#
that was, I think, a real legacy and a good legacy of that period and one that, as you say,
#
regardless of what policies it's used for, that data is important. And it's important in
#
socialist regimes, it's certainly important in market economies as well. And that is a legacy
#
that is in trouble today. As you said, Pramit Bhattacharya has written about, as a piece in
#
The Economist a couple of months ago said, India's statistical system is crumbling. As I think a
#
piece in The Business Standard a couple of years back said, it bemoaned what is happening to,
#
and I quote, the house that Mahalanobis built, right? And so I think that, and this is a criticism
#
that, to be clear, is made by economists from the left to right, right? It's not
#
a ideological position on this. You have economists like Abhijit Sen from JNU to Thomas Piketty,
#
to Abhijit Sen at MIT, to Martin Ravalian in Washington, D.C. Like, across the economic
#
spectrum, all of them bemoan the increasing opacity in India's statistical systems. We've seen
#
from 2017 onwards that national sample survey data dealing with unemployment,
#
because it showed a 40-year high, was just not released and was leaked, actually, to
#
The Business Standard. We've seen that household expenditure data, household spending data from
#
2019 was, they just basically decommissioned the entire survey because it showed that household
#
spending was, again, at a record low. This, I think, as I write in the book, good data is
#
not always good politics, but that is to the detriment of all Indian citizens because,
#
regardless of the party in power, we need to have this data and it needs to be above politics
#
because you cannot deal with poverty unless you know, for example, how many poor people there
#
are in the country. I mean, the government, whichever government is in power, they can make
#
whatever claims they want about poverty, but we need to know, at least, to assess the claim,
#
to even clap in acclamation for what they've done, we need to know, in a way that is transparent,
#
that, yes, it has gone from X to Y, but the lack of transparency, I think, is what is really
#
troubling and I think that India has never been immune in its institutions from political
#
interference. We certainly had a lot of it, especially under Indira Gandhi onwards, but I
#
think that what is happening today is troubling because firstly, we shouldn't return to that,
#
but secondly, because it seems to be a part of a move that is anti-intellectual, that there is a
#
part of this populist moment is also an anti-intellectual moment in which intellectuals
#
are derided as being part of an elite and therefore immaterial and I think that that is
#
not a good thing. It's not, yes, of course, elites come from certain sections of society,
#
but the solution to that is to democratize education so that elites are not associated
#
with education and with high credentials, but that actually an expert could be from any section of
#
society. The solution is not to say that therefore expertise itself is bad and I would say that it
#
is this vehement attitude against intellectuals and expertise that leads to colossal failures such
#
as demonetization, something that no economist, again, from right to left has said was a good
#
idea and by the government and RBI's own estimation has been a massive failure in that 99.8% of the
#
black money seems to be back in circulation today. You can say that the Nehru government got many
#
economic policies wrong, but that was wrong despite the experts at the time believing that it was
#
right at the time, right? So, expertise is not a guarantee of good outcomes, but it is a hedge
#
against. It is one layer of safety that provides you some hedge against it and so I think that
#
this sort of thing of making such a huge decision without consulting any qualified economist,
#
right? I mean certainly don't consult historians, but consult economists about taking away 80% of
#
the money in circulation. That I think is a really troubling sign for a country as large and for an
#
economy as large as ours. Yeah, absolutely agree. In fact, demonetization is like a litmus test for
#
me. It was the largest assault on property rights in human history and if you called yourself an
#
economist and supported it, you were either a bad economist or a bad human being. It had to be one
#
of those two. There's no doubting the sort of importance of data. I mean, ideology doesn't
#
matter to this. Data is data. You want to know the state of the world and couldn't agree more.
#
I have a whole bunch of episodes. In fact, you know, I think I do two or three episodes every
#
year where I just bemoan about this. So, I'll link them from the show notes and I love the point you
#
made that, you know, even if experts sometimes got it wrong, don't deride expertise. And that's an
#
important distinction to make. I do actually think many of our intellectuals and experts and
#
especially our elites led us down the wrong road. And therefore, a lot of the criticism of these
#
elites is actually justified, even if, you know, criticizing the Latvians elite has now, you know,
#
gone so far as to almost be caricature. But a lot of the criticism is justified, but only
#
expertise again can really get us out of this and not just, you know, but I think we should have
#
better experts, better experts, yeah, better experts, more expertise. And it's a but I also,
#
you know, earlier we were talking about the state of our society, you know, in the context of the
#
anti-Muslim sentiment. And I think we were both in agreement that, listen, we have crossed a line
#
in the last few years. It wasn't that we were always a united society and it was hunky dory,
#
but we have crossed a line. And similarly, with the attitude to data and institutions,
#
I think we have crossed a line. You know, what has happened 2017 onwards, you know, previous
#
governments had a much better attitude towards data transparency and all of these discussions
#
being there. But I think at some level, this government has decided and these things are
#
always reversible, so one can hope for the best. But at some level, it seems this government has
#
decided that it doesn't matter what the state of the world is, it only matters how well you
#
control the narrative, you know, and I really hope that's, you know, not quite the case.
#
So my last question before I let you go is, I traditionally these days end my episodes by
#
asking my guests to recommend books, films, music, things that mean a lot to them, not necessarily
#
from your field, not necessarily from your domain of expertise or what the book is about,
#
but just stuff that strikes an emotional chord with you. You really love the book,
#
you know, you take them to a desert island or they have meant a lot to you.
#
In terms of books, I'd recommend a book that I read last year, and it was part of my attempt
#
at getting back into fiction, and it is just such a rollicking read. It is a book called
#
Circe by Madeleine Miller. She has two books, The Song of Achilles and Circe, both are based
#
on ancient sort of classic Greek classics and based on the Odyssey and the story of Troy, et cetera,
#
but you need to have no background in any of these to read this. I have no background,
#
I have not read the Odyssey, but it is, so Circe is the name of a female character in the Odyssey,
#
who is a very, who's kind of a bit part player and a very small character in this epic by Homer,
#
but Madeleine Miller, who is a wonderful writer and a classicist who's sort of trained in classics
#
herself, sort of breeds life into this one small character and in a sense rewrites the Odyssey from
#
the perspective of this very marginal character, and this entire epic that is about glorious
#
battles and men and men killing each other men looks so different from the viewpoint of the
#
one lesser god, as she puts it. I think from its very opening line, it's just a beautifully
#
written book. It's not one of those books that is literary and therefore a plodding read. It's a
#
great fun read, one that I sort of stayed up at night trying to read. When the power went out,
#
I was sort of by the fireplace in the sort of cold in South Bend in Indiana trying to sort of read
#
it. It is, yeah, I mean, it's from the perspective of, as she puts it in one of the first lines,
#
from the least of the lesser goddesses, and Cersei is the name of that person. That and the song of
#
Achilles, which is about the relationship between Achilles, the sort of hero of Troy, of the Trojan
#
War, and his relationship with Patroclus, who is often portrayed as this kind of platonic relationship,
#
but many scholars today and most historians today believe that actually there was a sort of
#
homosexual relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and that's why I think that
#
Achilles, and again, it's just beautifully written, just great story. It sort of reminded me of these
#
sort of the sort of comics and the stories I used to read about the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, right?
#
All the action and people with superheroes, with superhero powers, etc. So those are two books of
#
fiction I really enjoyed. Another one is by Richard Osman. It's called Thursday Murder Club,
#
which I also enjoyed. I read it on my flight from the U.S. to India. It's about four people
#
in their 70s in an old age home, and they decide that they're going to form an amateur detective
#
club, and they try to solve a murder. But it's full of humor. I mean, more than the murder mystery,
#
which is really good, it's just funny. I mean, you sort of pause and smile several times because
#
it's all about, it's really utterly charming. It's about these four old people, and so it's
#
all about, you know, the fact that, well, you know, they can't give up their game of bridge in the
#
afternoon, so they have to take a break from all the sleuthing. They have to attend their sort of
#
French class in the morning, then they go and have their lunch. So it's all about sort of aging and
#
old people, but sort of is not, doesn't look upon them with sympathy or look upon them with pity,
#
but they're really, they're full of life. They are full of intellectual vigor. They're very curious
#
and they're super smart, and they all come from different backgrounds, and so it's about life in
#
this old age home, and oh, by the way, they're solving a murder, which they do successfully in
#
the end. Well, that sounds great. Have you seen the show Only Murders in the Building? No, but my
#
mother-in-law has, and she recommends it very highly, so I intend to watch it. Yeah, I just
#
thought of that when you spoke of the Thursday Murder Club. The only two of the three people
#
are kind of older. Well, Nikhil, you know, thank you so much for being so patient. I know for a
#
historian, it may not be as difficult as for other people, but thanks so much for the patience. I
#
had a great time. Thank you, Amit. This was really fun.
#
Thank you for listening.
