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Of the many ways to understand the world, recording this episode made me think of two
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ways. Deep reading and deep engagement. I like to say that we make sense of the world
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by connecting dots. And the more we read, the more dots we have, the more high definition
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our picture of the world will be. But equally, one can't just dwell in lobsty abstract ideas
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or even the stories of others. We also need to embrace the world around us, to be mindful
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with people, to be involved in the ebbs and flows of our societies. That's another way
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of understanding. And perhaps we need both ways to make sense of the world. Deep reading
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and deep engagement. As it happens, both my guest today and the man he has written a beautiful
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biography of are people who read deeply and engage deeply. The book was a pleasure to
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read and this conversation really made me think. Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen,
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our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your
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host Amit Verma. Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is Rahul Ramagundam,
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author of a marvelous book called The Life and Times of George Fernandes. Rahul teaches
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at Jamia Millia, studied at JNU, but is an atypical academic in the sense that he wanted
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not just to study and read voraciously as a student, but to get involved in society
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and grassroots activism, see the villages of India, understand not just poverty, but
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understand the poor. This made him a deep nuanced thinker. He wrote books on poverty
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in Gandhi and was then attracted to the life of George Fernandes, a politician who began
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as an activist, a rabble rouser who was also a self-taught polymath, a man who both read
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widely and live deeply. And his life is so rich with so many ebbs and flows. Rahul's
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biography is non-fiction storytelling at its best. It's not just a story of George Fernandes,
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but many other luminaries of the age, as well as a history and social study of India through
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the last few decades. It's an incredible book. If you want to understand India or Indian
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politics or Indian society, or just dive into the fascinating, dramatic, tragic story of
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a flawed man who was also in some ways a great man, someone who contained multitudes, then
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pick up this book and listen to this conversation. But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love
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much interaction, and a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs
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a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and a clear
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idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you.
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Rahul, welcome to the scene in The Unseen. Thank you. Thank you so much. It has been
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a pleasure. Yeah. You know, your book is called The Life and Times of George Fernandez, your
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latest book, I should say. We'll talk about all of them. I love that sort of you have
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about a page describing how you arrived at the title, that various people said that,
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hey, you can focus on, you know, use him as a lens to look at the socialist party or use
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him as a lens to look at this or that or whatever. But your sense was that, no, the man contains
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multitudes and therefore the most apt title is The Life and Times. And also the times,
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not just the life, because your inner sense is not just a biography of a man, it's a biography
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of a nation in change and of a party and of so many other things. And I sometimes title
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my episodes The Life and Times of whoever the guest is, you know, Jerry Pinto, Shanta
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Gokhale, whoever. And I am very interested in beginning with Your Life and Times. And
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so I'm going to, you know, take you away from this book and the previous books you've written
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and even all your academic experience, even all your experience on the ground, take you
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before that. Tell me about your childhood. Like where were you born? Where did you grow up?
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Take me back to your earliest memories. Thank you. You know, the fact that you noticed this
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the struggle to name my book George. Yes, there were, of course, multiple ideas about naming
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that. But yes, as you asked about my childhood, I was born in a village in Bihar. And my parents
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kept moving to different places in India because of their central government job.
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And so I grew up with my grandparents. And my beginning with my grandparents is something which
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provided me moorings in some sense. I still feel that my grandparents are the first and the
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primary influence on me and which, in fact, makes me think at this point, because many parents do
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not have grandparents in the same family household now. And so how much a child might be lacking and
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might be missing. I sometimes it makes me wonder, you know, because I really got a lot from my
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grandparents. My grandfather, about whom I have written in my introduction in my book, Gandhi's
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Khadi, where I wrote about him saying that, yes, he was a man who always wore khadi for that
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matter. And my grandmother, let me tell you, she was illiterate. Her name was Aarti Devi. And she
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knew only two words to write. One was Aarti Devi, which sometimes she had to sign because
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my grandfather brought some bank papers and she had to sign it. Another was Sita Ram, which was
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my grandfather's name. And so she used to write Sita Ram by meaning two things. One, her husband's
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name, which she did not ever say or use the word. But she used to write that in copies that we used
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to give to her, like my parents used to give or my uncle used to give. And she used to repeatedly
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write Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, Sita Ram, which was, in fact, invocation of God, which those copies
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were later submerged into Ganges. It was taken to Ganges and put into the Ganges. That was a kind of
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a pattern that we had. And she used to only do that in the evenings or in the afternoon when she
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was free, she would do that kind of a writing, which was a part of her spiritual experience,
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perhaps. I remember also when in 1992, the Babri Masjid thing happened. My grandmother was with me
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at that time. And she was really hurt by the fact that somebody's place of worship had been demolished.
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She was not knowing at all anything about what was happening in the politics behind Ayodhya
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movement and all. But she was certainly somebody who was hurt by the news of demolition that had
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happened. So I think, and you know, one more thing about my grandmother, which in fact I learned,
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and I mentioned it in that book as well. She used to, every morning, she used to worship
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Sun God. And she would go near the Tulsi plant and pour water over it and say,
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give happiness, take care of everybody. And then if there is something left,
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give it to me and my family. So it was last that we came to in her prayer. And
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I think that was the greatest influence on me. So my grandparents, yes, my maternal grandparents
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also influenced me in the sense that in the beginning, immediately after my birth, perhaps
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when I was two or three year old, my mother was still with her own parents. And she used to take
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me to a Khadi ashram, which was in her village that time, and which is called Gandhi ashram,
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in fact. And there she used to, my grandmother, maternal grandmother, she used to do the charakha
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spinning and all. And my grandmother, my mother used to go along with her. And I used to go tag
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along with her. And so I think when I choose Gandhi's Khadi as my PhD subject, I think somewhere
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that influence was there. I was not really aware of these things, but when I started writing
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and researching upon Khadi, then somebody asked me or sometimes I asked myself, why did I choose
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this subject? Why not something else? Because in JNU, we are mostly Marxist for that matter. So why
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should we go to Gandhi and that too in the history department, which is a very different kind of a
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department. So I went into Gandhi, which is not a very accepted subject at that time, let me tell
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you. So I went into the Khadi movement, I think primarily because of these influences that happened
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with me, you know, that was put on me by my grandparents. And later I started, I was tagged
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along with my parents. So when they were moving from the places like Gorakhpur to Ramgundam to
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Baruni and all these places, and all these places, Rachi for that matter, and these places,
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I was not, I was part of it. I was part of growing up in what we call Nehru's India for that matter,
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because these were the all public sector units and they had their own ethos, their own culture,
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their own mini India concept whereby the people from the different regions came.
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I think that too submerge all your prejudices because you meet people of different regions,
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you meet people speaking different tongue, you meet people having different castes. You don't
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even aware of the caste, but I came to know about caste in JNU for that matter, about my own caste,
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I came to know in JNU. Before that, I was not aware of my caste for that matter. And my
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grandparents influenced me, then this growing up in the public sector colonies that we used to call
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which was in fact a mini India kind of a place. So that was the second influence that I had.
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And the third that I think to a large extent, my grandfather used to make me sit on his thighs
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and make me hear Ramayan slokas and all, you know, and which was in fact, I don't remember
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any of them now, but at that time he used to make me memorize it and then once again sing
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aloud those Dohas of Ramcharitmanas. I think these things helped me in developing a kind of a
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syncretic image of my own cultural moorings. And it did not really, despite the fact, as I said,
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my grandmother was totally illiterate, they did not really give me any kind of a narrowness, you know,
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or they gave me meanings, they gave me stories, they gave me a kind of a cultural upbringing,
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which in fact broadened my, and I had a very late start as far as the school is concerned.
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I think only at the age of eight or something, I started going to the school. So I had a long
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years where I was just free to do anything and everything for that matter. So I think this
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scramble for early schooling in fact is also against the child's own independence and his own
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independent thoughts, thinking for that matter. I guess I was, because I see my brothers for that
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matter, they grew up and they went into school from as early as three or four kind of a thing.
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And I can see the kind of impact that that kind of schooling had on them and on me who did not go
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to the school for a very long time and grew up with the grandparents. I guess two things, yes.
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One, late schooling helps, I guess late schooling helps, which in fact is against the current moors
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when you're talking about three as early as three people are sending their children to the school.
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So I guess, and being with my grandparents really helped. They gave me a lot of time,
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they gave me a lot of their own beliefs and things that they thought that is important as far as
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a family is concerned. And I really felt that in a way it helped me, it helped me being with my
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grandparents. So that was the first impression of first influences that influenced me. Then I,
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of course, came to JNU and by the time when I came to JNU, I did my post-graduation there,
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my MPhil, my PhD. In a way, in JNU the teachings do not happen in the classroom, let me tell you.
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The classrooms is the last place where we learn. Where we really learn are the walls of JNU.
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We learn a lot from the walls of JNU because the walls of JNU teach you not just about the slogans
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and the bookish ideas or the names of the philosophers, but they also teach you certain
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values. Where do you stand? With whom you stand? How do you stand? Even that is also talked to us
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by the walls. And so I guess JNU has a pattern by which the young people who go inside it,
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either their belief systems are reaffirmed by the kind of things that goes on on campus
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or it's engendered in them in that way. The second thing about JNU is this, that
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most of us while growing up had very activistic background, not exactly background. We became
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very activistic the moment you go into JNU. It's a bad idea today. In fact, that's really
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being stigmatized a lot, but that's where the real learning happens when you try to
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get associated with certain things happening in the far off places. Like I got associated
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with the Gandhian movement in Madhya Pradesh who were fighting for the rights of Adivasis and
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land rights of Adivasis or rights over the forest for that matter. And these were the issues where
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no books talked about and I was not really aware of all these things. I really got aware while I
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was in AMA for that matter and too early for me to get associated with the grassroots movement in
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Madhya Pradesh, but I got associated with that and it was a Gandhian movement. So I went to
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traveling around and all kinds of things and maintaining some kind of an advocacy office in
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my own hostel room, which I used to write newspaper articles and all kinds of things.
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And go into the field to meet people, do Jindabad, Murthabad and all kinds of things that
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as an activist people do. In 1999, we did a six-month foot march, which went from Gwalior to
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the eastern part of Madhya Pradesh, where at that time it was Chhattisgarh, not Chhattisgarh,
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Raigarh area. And we did a six-month march across Madhya Pradesh shouting slogan and
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demanding rights over Jal, Jungle or Jameen, Ho Kiske Aadheen, so Janta Ke Aadheen. So that
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was the slogan that was which really and before that, before 1999, I think since 95 perhaps,
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I was associated with this movement on the grassroots. And in 99, this march happened and
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then I think that was a great learning experience. I would also like to name you a person called
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PV Rajgopal, who was a Gandhian at that time. In fact, he's still there. And this group of the
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people who led, who was, which was led by him. In fact, he made, he used to dictate, take me into
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the train, like we are sitting in the train and he was used to dictate letters to other people.
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And I used to just write and that was a great learning experience. It was almost like learning
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about the issues that matters in this country, learning about how to communicate with the people
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across the world. In fact, he was writing letters to everyone in Germany, in England,
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in India, in different states and other places. And I could see that how these issues are cropping
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up, which are the issues which really matter and how he's communicating. In fact, how he's trying
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to build what we call alliance with the different sections and different sectors of the people.
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And this, I guess, was also, I think all my books, all my writings, all the choices that I have made
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about the subject have been influenced by this experience at the grassroots, which again is lacking
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in the present generation of India, in the sense that many universities do not like students to
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get in. I was myself part of, in 2009, I went into, into do a study of caste violence that had happened
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in Bihar, one of the villages. And I went there in 2009, December, just two days before the Christmas.
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And in this village, when I went there, I found the policemen already were there. And these policemen
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were all anti-Naxal force. And they were demolishing hearts of the people. And so, and there were some
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group of the people were just on one side, just watching the whole scene. And these people,
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the policemen, they were going around demolishing the hearts. And I asked one of those men, the
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village people, is there somebody who can ask them whether they have a court order to demolish
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these houses, these hearts? And these villagers said that, who will say that? Who will ask it?
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And then I thought, yes, they have no capacity for that matter to ask a policeman. And so,
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I went to ask. And then something happened, which was extremely violent for that matter.
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And I was called Naxalite and all. And in fact, one of my colleagues who went along with me,
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not exactly colleague, he was a local NGO activist. He went along with me through that village.
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And he was also beaten. And we came back. I talked to my friends in Times of India,
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which was in Patna. And they perhaps, this conversation met them. That became a news item
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next day in the newspaper. And the news item said that the Jamia professor has been called
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Naxal, beaten, and all kind of thrust. And then next day, my university vice chancellor, who was
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in fact quite an administrator of Delhi. He became a left-wing governor of Delhi later.
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He said that when somebody, because that was in newspaper, Times of India kind of a newspaper,
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publishing this news item and across the country in each of its editions that the news had come in.
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So, it was a matter for a university to take into account as well. So, I was told by my director
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that vice chancellor said to him that he has defamed the university. Now, that's something
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which really rankles in me because I feel that anybody saying anything in favor of poor in this
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country at this point, they are called Naxalites. I think we have seen how urban Naxal issue has
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come up. And the people are in the jail. And more and more people perhaps are branded as an
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urban Naxal. So, the point what I'm trying to bring about is that somehow this
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experience at the grassroots in early 2000, in fact, gave me a sensitivity to understand what
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are the kind of issues which really matters in this country beyond the caste and the community
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conflicts or the conflagration that we keep seeing it and which really may be politically
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very relevant, but actually not very relevant in our lives for that matter. And that gave me
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some strength and resolve to look into the issues which really I felt always that really matter.
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And therefore, I have a feeling that early grassroots experiences really helps in your
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intellectual growth, as well as in not only choosing your vocation, but also in forging some
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kind of a direction, some kind of a life roadmap, which I guess is needed. Because today, in fact,
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we have lots of social media coming up and a lot of people, in fact, see their deliverance in the
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social media platforms. But I have a feeling that actual dirtying hands with the people of this
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country will make our young people much more valuable and much more resolute about their
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thoughts and about their ideologies. I think these are the influences that really happened,
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which I really value. And all my work has been, in fact, my classroom teaching has been like that.
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In fact, my classroom teaching, I feel that I try to bring walls of JNU into my classroom at Jamia.
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I try to engage people with the kind of issues which really matter, despite the fact that most
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of our books are still repetition of what has been existing knowledge all about. I try to bring field
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into the classroom, which is in fact, I feel that's a contribution, little contribution that I'm
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making in my classroom to my students. Yeah, so these are the influences which really brought me here.
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It's such a rich life and such a rich narrative. And there are many, many things I want to double
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click on. So, you know, let's kind of go through them one by one. And I'm struck by something you
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were speaking at the start about your grandparents, which reminded me of two different episodes I've
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done and two different insights from them. One I'd done an episode with Mukulika Banerjee, the
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historian, who had written this book called The Pathan Unarmed, where she had travelled, she had
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lived for a while in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan. And the book was about
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the Khudai Khidmatgarh. And the Khudai Khidmatgarh, of course, was a nonviolent movement, as you know,
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aligned with Gandhi in some ways, but not inspired by him, merely aligned. And it had been crushed
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in Pakistan after they gained independence. It was very difficult for her to find surviving
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members of the Khudai Khidmatgarh. And one local friend took her on a trip across many different
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villages in the area so she could sort of find surviving members and speak to them. And during
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this, she realized that the staple food that everyone has here is beef. And a chicken is
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considered a luxury, but every family keeps one chicken in the house. So if a special guest comes,
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they give it to that special guest. And she felt guilty that wherever she went, because of the,
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you know, she is a special guest, they are cutting up their expensive chicken. So she started eating
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beef. Right. And she told me that then when she came back to India after it was over, and she
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told her mother about it, who was a staunch Hindu, her mother thought for a while and said,
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Right. And this is a story that really struck me. Because the other episode I'm referring to is
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with our mutual friend Akshay Mukul, who wrote that brilliant book on the Gita Press. And my big
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learning in that brilliant book on the Gita Press is that this resurgence of political Hinduism that
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is there today is just an expression of a cultural strain that has been with us for decades. A lot of
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these toxic political issues like banning cow slaughter, love jihad, and so on and so forth,
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were there in the 1920s, you know, 100 years ago, they were all there. This is not a new creation.
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You know, when you just look at the sales of some of the books of the
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Gita Press, Ramcharitmanas and all selling 80, 90 million copies, some of those books.
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And what Akshay's brilliant biography and his conversation with me sort of showed me is that
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we have always had this strain of conservatism in our society. And it was perhaps only a matter
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of time that it would find a political expression. However, what I'm thinking is that when you spoke
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about one, the religiosity of your grandparents, that your grandmother would write Sitaram,
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Sitaram, it would be immersed in the Ganga, and your grandfather would have you on his lap in,
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you know, verses of the Bhagavad Gita. But at the same time, you mentioned that your mother was very
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disturbed when the Babri Masjid happened. Your grandmother, sorry, that's what I meant. Your
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grandmother was very disturbed when the Babri Masjid was demolished. And you pointed out that
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she was an illiterate woman. You know, she could write two words. She would not have been exposed
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to these Western notions of secularism, as people like to call it today. So there is within us,
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yes, there is that religiosity, but there is also a kind of lived tolerance, a syncretism,
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another word you used, which is part of this fabric, which is part of our lives. And I look
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around today, and it seems that in modern times, with these toxic political narrative battles that
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are happening, that we are somehow taking that beautiful fabric and which has many problems with
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it, you know, I am an atheist, I don't like any religion, but which has many problems with it.
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But at a cultural lived level, there is a strain of tolerance, there is a strain of syncretism,
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but we are reducing it to something else. And there is now this politics of hate and othering
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that has come about. So I want to ask your sense because, you know, my lament about myself is I am
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an English speaking elite who has, you know, lived a privileged life in India cities. I have never
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known the real country. It took me to get into adulthood to understand this aspect of the real
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country. Otherwise, I thought, the whole of India is secular, the whole of India is like me. Obviously,
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not the case. So since you've had that lived reality, you've spent so much time with your
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grandparents, you've lived in villages, lived in towns, lived in cities. Give me a sense of
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this that, you know, what is the role that religion has played in our society per se?
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And you know, how tolerant are we really? Are we all closeted bigots who are lapping up this
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politics because it feeds into our innate prejudices? Or does this politics play to
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the worst aspects of our nature? But there are better angels of our nature, which view all of
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this in a different way. I think there was a one village that I was in and this was a Dalit woman
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I was talking to and she said to me that the people of the village say that the pig that eats
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is not allowed to read. You know, this is something which struck me and I was asking
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him her this question and then she was and when she told me, I think when you talk about the level
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of tolerance that we have, perhaps both the things exist, tolerance as well as the intolerance.
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It depends on the ruling idea, which can sometimes prod that tolerance or intolerance to come up at
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the fore. Now, it all depends on the kind of politics that is happening around. I remember
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at this point, let me tell you, I'm coming from academics, so I can give you some examples from
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academics. Before 2014, the ICCSR, that is a research body, ICSSR, or even UGC for that matter,
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or for other other, they were all giving funds on the question of caste studies.
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Okay, the funds are very small, you know, they are not really big funds. But whatever the
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proposals that you people used to write, sometimes those proposals centered on the
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issues of the caste discrimination, caste marginalization, and also the caste conflict
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for that matter. Suddenly, after 2014, I have a feeling that the caste question has vanished.
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You don't really see caste around sometimes, you know, you have some upsurge like what happened
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to Una or some caste violence here or there, but the caste suddenly has disappeared from the
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academic discourse. And now we have a different question coming up. We have a question of
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the intercommunity or the inter-religion violence or inter-religion discourse that has come up.
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Suddenly, we have Hindus becoming one monolith group for that matter. I think the people have
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both the tendencies within them, that is intolerance as well as tolerance.
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It all depends on what is the kind of ruling idea which is inspiring that. If it has inspired
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baser moments in me and baser instincts in me, that really will come to fore. And if the political
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leadership is sagacious enough to bring about, same Gandhi for that matter, he was also living
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the similar kind of a world where the tolerance and intolerance both were exhibited. But imagine
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everybody became so tolerant towards him. When you're talking about Badshah Khan, you have this
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Badshah Khan coming up to Sevagram and Gandhi asking people to cook beef for him and he was
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being fed beef. So you have a leadership which can prod the kind of tolerance and the
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respect for human life or mutual sensitivity towards each other and you also have a leadership
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which can go exactly opposite of that. It all depends on the political discourse of the time
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which can prod different kind of emotions from me, whether it can either become very baser emotions
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or it can also become very lofty emotions. It all just depends on the kind of political discourse
#
that is going on. I don't know if this picture which became a very famous picture during the
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Gujarat riots, this man who had been holding his hand in almost like a subservience and he was
#
asking for forgiveness when that picture has only that man being shown. And there was another man
#
who was once again it was a cover magazine photograph of some magazine whereby you had this
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man holding Jai Sriram kind of a thing and with a band on his head. And both of these men were
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brought together after 10 years or 15 years and they were both put together and they perhaps
#
opened a shoe shop in Calcutta where both of them were there and they were inaugurating.
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So the same 2002 which in fact created such kind of a baser emotion that they became almost
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flaring up, religious symbolism was so flared up that one was almost on the verge of killing the
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other. And here again 10 years after that not only emotions have subsided but they have become
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friends. So this is what I have a feeling it depends on the political discourse of the time
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how people will respond to their neighbors. If political discourse is full of toxicity,
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the people are going to take that up. I would not say Hinduism is a very
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tolerant or intolerant or Islam is extremely intolerant or tolerant. I would see that what
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kind of a political discourse is current at that time. What is a political leadership's main
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thought about it. I think that is a more important indicators of people's behavior
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rather than some kind of an innate nature of people. I don't think people
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innately are tolerant or intolerant or intolerant. It all depends on how they are
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herded together, how they are motivated. So I have a feeling that religiosity,
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I don't know if my grandmother would have behaved if she would have been young and if she would have
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behaved in a similar way because she might be swayed by the kind of political discourses
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is happening around because I see the videos that are coming up. Some of the students of mine shows
#
videos that are coming up from rural India whereby the crass kind of a communication is happening
#
between the two religious groups. I saw a video whereby a boy who was selling some kind of an
#
ice cream in a village and here is a man who asked him and he says that I am sorrow. He says,
#
Katwa hona, Katwa hona and then he keeps saying him Katwa hai, Katwa hai and ultimately he
#
accepts the fact that yes I am a Muslim but he is doing his earning, he is doing his livelihood
#
and how can you just do this kind. So it all depends on the, I think even rural India is
#
getting contaminated at this point. To say that Hindus per se are extremely tolerant,
#
I think it would be a far-fetched idea to go about. I think it's a political matter,
#
it's a political discourse. I have a feeling that way. Yeah and that's a great reminder of
#
how religions which in a sense cater to society and try to mirror it, religion, society, individuals,
#
they all contain multitudes. The two people you spoke about are Kuthubuddin Ansari and Ashok
#
Parmar and so you know that also is a great illustration of how you kind of make this
#
remarkable journey and I have therefore like a follow-up sort of thought that strikes me on
#
this and I'm just thinking aloud is that you mentioned that it matters what is a dominant
#
current of that strain, which part of your nature is it appealing to and you know and you know you
#
refer to Gandhi and you talked about how leadership matters and I'm thinking about the incentives of
#
politicians like at one point like it's been a popular lament among people often that hey
#
you know look at the great quality of the leaders who got us independence and look at the terrible
#
quality of leaders today and the argument I made was look at the incentives that the leaders who
#
arose during that time Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar all of them they had no chance of getting political
#
power so when they came into the field they were animated by something else not by lust for power
#
they were animated by higher principles and therefore that is a kind of people that politics
#
attracted the freedom movement attracted no personal gain really possible in there you just
#
believe in something so much you want to you'll die for it and today people who are attracted
#
to politics the kind of game it is a kind of power the state has are attracted by the lust for power
#
they want to get into that game there is that interplay between money and power and so on so
#
you're getting a different kind of politician and today the very like the the core existential
#
fact of politics is that to be a successful politician you have to win elections it is
#
easier to get votes in the name of hate than in the name of love I mean just a basic fact you know
#
the political theorist Carl Schmitt once said that in politics to be successful you need the other
#
you need an enemy you need to articulate who the enemy is which means your narrative necessarily
#
has to be simplistic and this has especially become this way in sort of Indian politics today
#
so if there is someone today with the temperament of a Gandhi or a Nehru he is more likely to be
#
doing what you are doing for example than actually entering the battlefield of politics because they
#
won't last a day they won't even you know because with the kind of rhetoric that they had then it's
#
very difficult you know and which is also why you see even opposition parties today all assuming
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and I don't know if it's a correct assumption I hope it's not but they're all assuming that
#
the Hindu vote is something that is there and therefore there are different strains of soft
#
Hindutva come up you know whether it's Ahmadmi party doing Hanuman Chalisa and saying hey the
#
abrogation of you know what happened in Kashmir 370 was correct and all of that you even have in
#
the congress you will have these noises you will have the Gandhi's going to temples and
#
you know doing all this show show and it is almost it almost seems to be a belief that this
#
monolithic Hindu vote as it were or the power of religion in the electoral battlefield is a given
#
and that's what makes me sort of wonder how the tide can be turned and that also makes me wonder
#
whether it was inevitable given the kind of society that we are and given the nature of politics
#
where hate will get get more people to the ballot box and love that we you know things
#
are going to take this turn and you have actually written a book which is a forensic account of
#
Indian politics through all of these decades right even if it's through the prism of one person but
#
it's a forensic account of Indian politics I got so many insights from it what is your sense of
#
this then that of course you know I agree with you that it you know we have all these different we
#
contain multitudes we have all these different strains within us tolerance and intolerance
#
but politicians today are more likely to appeal to the intolerance to appeal to our baser instincts
#
because that is what motivates people to go out to the ballot box I think before going to the
#
George biography I would I would talk about a little bit about my earlier book which was
#
a Gandhi's khadi movement you see Gandhi you know to large extent khadi movement became one of the
#
one of the greatest experiment in in the first kind of NGOs in the in in that sense you know
#
you had every town every village had khadi bhandars and gandhi ghar and and also
#
uh so you had all these every village had almost and this was done without state support let me
#
tell you this was done all by one man with one passion whereby he wanted to do this and he wanted
#
to bring two or three things out of it one is of course supporting political activists because
#
these political activists they needed livelihood to do and have to have a livelihood and so Gandhi
#
thought that with the help of khadi movement he can bring he can make political activists
#
independent of of any any dependency over outside sources of funding there he can just
#
generate fund out of khadi work and in the times when the political agitation is not going on he
#
would be working on the on that and then when the political agitation goes and he used to call these
#
khadi workers as the soldiers in the barrack so you have a barrack in which the khadi work is
#
going on and they are earning livelihood out of it and when it comes to political agitation which
#
used to have it some kind of a decade you know distance they would be drawn into it and they
#
will be acting in it what has happened in the post-independence time that slowly the grassroots
#
attachment or grassroots activism of the politicians have completely died down
#
you don't really have now people working in the grassroots what you really have is the emotion
#
upsurge you are you can only draw people because you are not at you are not really associated with
#
everyday livelihood issues or the turmoil that the people are facing so you start doing the
#
emotional issues you bringing emotional issues ram mandir is extremely emotional issue not many
#
people would be going there to do the worship and even if it become a center of tourism for that
#
matter it might become a center of tourism people might go i remember umbedkar doing a program for
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temple entry in 1930s of a of a temple called kala ram because the ram in that temple is is kala
#
because he is made of of black stone and they led the movement for very long time to enter into the
#
temple the untouchable so-called untouchables their entry point there now that what really
#
happened that after all these things umbedkar came to the conclusion that this would not lead
#
too much you know because this is an emotional issue for that matter what we really need is not
#
the entry into the temple but we need is the representation into the policy making bodies
#
now what is happening is that the policy making is becoming a very shrunken affair that is the one
#
thing second the political activism of the politicians are reducing day by day so the what
#
we need is the emotional upsurge and therefore i would not say gandhi was driven completely by
#
love i would not say that he did not have a other in his mind certainly the british were the other
#
for him you know and so there was an othering process even with gandhi and but he could also
#
make a distinction between man and machine he used to call british rule as as some kind of a satanic
#
machine and thereby he made a distinction between the british people and the british rule
#
and he was targeting the british rule but when you say that the babar ke santan then you are
#
attacking the the the the men you're not attacking the babar sultanate or babars you're talking
#
about the you're seeing today's muslims as somebody's descendant of of of babar and whatever
#
babar committed you want to take a reparation you want to demand reparation out of it the point
#
what i'm trying to mention that othering is an inevitable process of political mobilization
#
let's not say that let's not say that this is not true in that phase or this phase this is a true
#
phenomena a political phenomena whereby you need to have an enemy to mobilize certain people whom
#
do you regard as a mob as as an enemy becomes an important indicator of your leadership whether
#
you really regard that of your own people there is a one section of people who are your enemy then
#
it becomes a different kind of a politics gandhi never met any of his own people enemy he met and
#
that too when he regarded british as an enemy he always thought the british as a rulers not exactly
#
as a man who were the enemy of him so he when he talked about in hinsaraj for that matter when he
#
talks about about about british you know umpire he says that this is a satanic umpire whereby
#
and it is a it is a civilizational problem and we don't want independence to become
#
brown rulers of this country in the same same with the with the same parameters
#
what he is trying to say and that's he has a very graphic descriptive phrase where he says that we
#
you want tiger you don't want tiger but you want tiger skin you you so you want to change the tiger
#
skin to become once again similar you you want to retain the nature of the tiger by changing the
#
skin of the tiger so you don't want white white skin now you want the brown skin but you want to
#
retain the nature of the tiger so that's why he's his attack is on the systemic you know the the
#
system that is created by the british for that matter so he's attacking railways he's attacking
#
so there is a othering process existing even in gandhi i would not say that that doesn't exist
#
the important thing is that when you are making your own people one kind of people as other and
#
then the politics becomes politics of conflagration politics of of conflict politics whereby you have
#
majority and minority feeling gandhi did not have that his his his prayer meetings had all the
#
scriptures from the from the different religion and and those scriptures the selected phrases
#
from there he used to sing in his prayer meeting can we do that kind of a thing today we cannot do
#
that kind of a thing today we cannot do it because the political leadership doesn't want that it
#
wants to capitalize on our baser instincts it want to use our baser instincts to be in the power
#
and this is what i would say is a difference from the current from the from the from what we had in
#
the pre-independence time and what we have now otherwise the methods are the same methods are
#
the same you you do have othering which was earlier there you do have that's why i started
#
with you by giving you example of this lady who said that the so there is an othering process
#
existing in the village also let's say that okay and this is where sometimes when you you you either
#
you cultivate that the baser instinct or you try to douse that that depends on the political
#
leadership and what is happening today is that we are trying to conflagrate that we are trying to
#
prod that that that spores which to to make us more the the bitterness about the other the other
#
person you know and this is something which is crucial to into the in the current politics
#
which was missing in Gandhi's politics Gandhi was never ever even when he did the bonfire of
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the foreign clothes he didn't say that he was hurting the British for that matter he said that
#
Indian people by taking up these foreign clothes have crippled their own artisans and that's why
#
he's burning clothes he's not burning clothes and there was a big debate between Gandhi and
#
Tagore on the question of of just merely burning the clothes whether because Tagore said that this
#
is going against uh you know the the people's work or somebody must have been in Lanka Shire
#
or anywhere for that matter who has produced these clothes if you burn it you are going against the
#
man's work and so so Gandhi said that yes I believe in a house in which windows and doors
#
are open I will let all the bridges come in but my foundation will be so strong that my houses house
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will not be blown away that is the problem here problem 70 years or 80 years later we have a house
#
whereby not only our houses are are closed our windows and doors are closed but we are we are
#
making it some kind of a celebration of of narrowness you know that's something which
#
which is really painful for that matter because we started really well let me tell you we started
#
very well why did it happen and how did it happen that's really a long course as far as
#
George is concerned I tell you he had he had lots of Gandhian traits in him you know politics do
#
require a lot of things which we are not going to at this point but as far as the ideological
#
formation of the of of George is concerned he never in fact ever for that matter has has othered
#
people any people in this country in fact that's why he has somebody once again somebody who saw
#
the people of this country without the prism of dividing people even when he's fighting for the
#
urban laborers for that matter or he is fighting for the for for the municipal workers for that
#
matter or or or even for the railway workers for that matter he he is not othering the other
#
section of the of the of the of the people he is othering the ruling regime now what is happening
#
is there's a lot of a diametrically changed environment today we are othering a person a
#
people and that is a real I I think that's a real problem that's really I think that's really
#
problem because most of the two of the books that I did on one on Gandhi and another George
#
has given me enough inkling or enough enough insight into the into the politics of this country
#
and that's why I would say that George is in fact a very dark book in that sense that he talks about
#
a lot of things which we'll talk a little later once yeah yeah we'll get to George you know this
#
is fascinating and it's also you know you mentioned both Gandhi and Ambedkar and their journeys in in
#
how their thinking evolved is also so fascinating in the sense that you know Ambedkar initially
#
fighting to get Dalits into temples but then later saying quote temple going is of no consequence
#
at all stop stop quote when he realized that the problem is you know Hinduism itself it's not so
#
much temple entry per se and you go to tackle that problem and Gandhi also in Hind Swaraj you know he
#
ranted against the railways which he said spread disease he ranted against doctors and said we
#
don't need doctors and on a lot of that obviously he is sort of clearly and ludicrously wrong but
#
on a lot of that he changed his mind especially in his lived experience where he did travel by
#
railways where he did sort of use modern medicine and all of that and that whole journey is sort of
#
so fascinating fascinating I have a further question to dig down because I'm thinking about
#
you know a what you said about George Fernandez in the grassroots and we'll talk about him in
#
more detail later also but also I'm wondering if the incentives that play today in modern
#
electoral politics are also a consequence of the structure of government because what we did in
#
when the republic was founded is that government was extremely centralized it you know the
#
federalism was kind of in name but it was extremely centralized and what has also happened over the
#
last few years is that it has become more and more central and like in the late 80s we had for example
#
the anti-defection law which meant that you know you had to work with the party whip in parliament
#
and therefore you can run parliament from an excel sheet and that also has a centralizing impulse
#
within parties you had a centralizing impulse for example in the congress where indira gandhi in
#
the 70s basically made sure that you know she would appoint the chief minister of a state you
#
wouldn't have that vibrant local politics anymore and the consequence of the centralization is that
#
you have much less local governance now what happens is if i am on the grassroots let's say
#
that it matters if i win my municipality election which of course was the first election george
#
fernandez won that you know i am with the people they have immediate problems here is a pot hole
#
garbage collection isn't happening water supply isn't good i am the guy i can do something about
#
all of these therefore i ask for your vote therefore you vote for me there's a direct
#
link and these abstract issues of so and so is the other and muslims are this and all of that
#
don't come into play it's a governance thing and that happens because politics is local but today
#
the but there is not today i mean for all of our decades but even more so today there is no
#
link between power and accountability at the local level right who you can actually vote
#
for has no consequence on the garbage outside your house and the result of that i think is
#
twofold one is that a lot of people have just become apathetic about this their local issues
#
and assumed that governance will continue to be horrible and it is what it is and maybe if the
#
mla is from my caste i can approach him and i can get something done but otherwise there is a general
#
apathy about governance and therefore you can easily plug into these narrative battles which
#
are happening so when you have a great national election you know the villager who is going to
#
the ballot box in a general election is not voting on the basis of key you know the school
#
needs another story the teacher has to show up on time or any of the real problems that they might
#
face in their lives but this grand civilizational narrative battle which is so incredibly toxic and
#
again throughout the pattern throughout george fanandes's career is that he's there among the
#
people you know he slept on the streets you know he has been in the docks with the workers he's
#
gone through the same shit as them they know that they appreciate that they want him to be their
#
leader it's not just that he's campaigning for it and through the decades you kind of see that
#
pattern till a certain point that he is one among the people therefore he has a support he's fighting
#
for them immediately but then beyond a point local politics almost ceases to have meaning
#
because people are apathetic governance doesn't matter and then these larger abstract narratives
#
take over and i'm kind of just sinking aloud but you know so what are your sort of thoughts on how
#
the centralized structure plays into this i did i had george's private papers with me and
#
there were files after files in which the letters from the constituency people that is a file there
#
and these letters give you an insight into their aspirations and what they are and expectations
#
from their mp and in the 70s i found that these letters are mostly about their local needs they
#
need a school there or they need a road is not is not pliable or maybe they need a bank where
#
they can open their account and all and sometimes there are also complaints about somebody has been
#
murdered and police is not investigating or police so he their expectations from the mp
#
is almost enormous okay now what has happened that mp by himself cannot really fulfill these
#
demands you know he needs to mobilize the local administration for that and that has a limitation
#
because you have almost 10 lakh people in one constituency and you are representing them
#
now can you really cater to everyone's need because everyone has a need everyone needs to
#
go to hospital everybody needs to have their ward admitted into school or colleges or
#
everybody needs a loan to work out some kind of industry everybody needs a job everybody needs
#
what all these issues and there is a caste violence and bigger narrative as well
#
so so what do you do with this how do you do this can you really fulfill the needs of all
#
the people who come to you okay can you even see those 10 lakh people during the five years
#
that you are representing them that is the real problem with this country's representation system
#
now i think most of the mps do not win the second election because of this fact because they are
#
unable to fulfill the aspirations and demands of their their their electors and therefore they
#
they do the best thing they do is to change the constituency they keep changing the constituency
#
okay because that was the again you provide a newness to the other people and they have new
#
expectations out of you i was told for that matter who was the former vice president of of of india
#
he in fact never fought the election from the same constituency throughout his career he kept
#
changing his constituency now that is one problem you know this is a problem with the representation
#
system 10 lakh people cannot be satisfied by the need by by the by the activism of one mp so he has
#
to depend on certain brokers for that matter and this is the beginning of of what we call the
#
political delegations or or delegate or you delegate authorities to local people some people
#
and that's also the beginning of corruption in that sense that you you give some some kind of a
#
vat of notes to to some some you know local broker or local uh you know who might be aspiring for a
#
emily ship and kind of a thing and he wins the vote for you he brings the votes for you
#
and so the disconnect between the mp and the constituency people is for the first time what
#
it happens that it happened in fact in 1967 that it was the last time when the elections happened
#
the state and the central elections have had held was very held together after that the state
#
elections and the and the and the central elections were separated and now again there is a talk of i
#
don't know what the politics behind it but the point but the but the the separation what it it
#
happened that that many mps who were getting defeated because of the non-performance of mlas
#
or their own they were they said that we have nothing to do with the with the local issues
#
we are a legislatures of of central parliament so we need to be judged or evaluated on our
#
performance in parliament rather than what we provided to our constituency people and they and
#
this i guess is the beginning of many issues but this is also this also is an evidence of limitation
#
of indian parliamentary system for that matter why how would an mp cater to the needs of of his
#
constituency which can which should be catered by his municipal ward elected member in fact which
#
is the job of a of municipality to do or or or panchayat to do but why an mp is expected to
#
perform those kind of activities or those kind of functions which are in fact can be performed
#
or should be performed by the local administration the local administration has died down in many of
#
the places many of the like even if you take for instance the thing that is happening you
#
suddenly you see the streets of of hodge cast becoming very clean now why it is so clean the
#
somebody would ask a question why it is so clean and now why it's so i think what has happened that
#
the even that at the local level at the local administration level you don't really you have
#
not really diverse given them or or invested them with the power with the function functionalities
#
the defined functionalities and also with the finances and so they have no say in deciding
#
where the finance will come from and where it will be invested and so the all the things happen like
#
you are talking about the centralization so the decisions are made at the central level and these
#
are percolated down with the with the specific financial outlay defined the function defined
#
and also the manpower defined and how the recruitment or everything for that matter
#
now i'm told that the prime minister has said that everybody has to all the institution has
#
to recruit certain number of the people in in a given time frame and so everybody across the
#
country are putting out advertisements all the institutions and how many of those will be
#
recruited and how but they are doing it under the direction from the from the top so i have a
#
feeling that yes centralization has has created has has brought lot of new problems in this which
#
in fact at the in the times of nehru it was not so evident because that time you know we were only
#
thinking about certain institutions that came up but today when the people have become extremely
#
aware when they are having their own aspirations and they also have been exposed to the worldwide
#
living indexes they need to become much more self-dependent and much more they need to have
#
a much more say in the policy making designs in their own locality i have the centralization has
#
certainly sapped the energy centralization has also sapped the initiatives and centralization
#
has also sapped people's own attachment to their locality you know and this i think has started
#
with the with the with the kind of representation system that we have i i think there has to be
#
some kind of a zig of of representation system we need to engineer that again if we are serious
#
about involving people into the into the into the you look at the moody it's the man fridays for
#
that matter they are all bureaucrats for that matter who worked with him in bang in in gujarat
#
and so they are being after retirement they are being placed in the different different areas
#
so you don't really have even bjp people coming into into the into the into the process you have
#
the bureaucrats being you know so so i think that's really centralization is i very well
#
pointed out by you that is is a crux of a problem you be the week we have decentralization only in
#
the name uh which is in fact even evident even at the panchayat level when we have pradhan patis
#
being working out as representatives when their wives are elected you know so so this is something
#
which is a really crux of the issue uh yeah for listeners who want to sort of dig deeper into this
#
i had an i'll put some links in the show notes i had an episode with shruti raj guppalan on the
#
disconnect between power and accountability at the local level and recently i had an episode with
#
rs neelakantan on north south relations you know and one sort of illustration of too much
#
centralization is that if you look at a state like kerala they have problems of obesity and diabetes
#
because they have come so far and you look at a state like bihar they you have problems of
#
malnourishment and so on right and but all that delhi can see is not problems so there is a
#
centralized scheme which is just to increase everybody's calorie intake which is great for
#
bihar but totally doesn't match kerala you know and and so you need local solutions to emerge
#
which can only happen within a local structure i want to take a step away from politics for a
#
moment and go back to the personal and i was also struck by uh something that you said about how
#
you started school late and you said that starting school early can sometimes be a problem
#
and one thing that i've been thinking about recently is how underrated leisure time is right
#
that when we think of wealth we think of wealth in terms of money at one level wealth is also
#
leisure how do we grow we also grow sometimes because we have the leisure time to do whatever
#
the hell it is we could be walking in the garden we could be talking to people in the neighborhood
#
we could be reading books we could be doing whatever but leisure becomes an important
#
component and my friend ajay shah keeps talking about how too much of modern life becomes goal
#
directed right so a kid will start school at three parents will say you know uh get get get
#
get educated early coding sikhao and generally and you go through school and everything is
#
goal-directed iit kanna iim kanna city bank main vice president banna etc etc and you go
#
through all these goals and everything is defined for you and this is essentially what you do and
#
your world view doesn't expand beyond that and the people whose world view exp who have more
#
leisure are actually on the extremes of society you could be in a really privileged family for
#
whom this doesn't really matter so the kids are growing up with books around them interesting
#
conversations and their everything is not goal-directed or in the really poor family
#
at the village level where the kid can is never going to get into an iit
#
and therefore you have a little more leisure and the days are sort of have more scope for you to
#
try different things so tell me a little bit about this aspect of your growing up
#
that with the like one at uh at just a conceptual level uh you know what do you feel about this
#
importance of leisure and the fact that too often we push our kids onto treadmills right and then
#
they are stuck there and at a narrative level at you at your own uh this thing i'd love to hear
#
what you did with your free time like what games did you play did you like reading uh you know what
#
kind of books would you read when you started reading all of that you know that's really
#
fascinating to me not just the things that you did to arrive at where you are but that leisure time
#
that free time well i i never thought that i had a goal of becoming a writer or becoming a
#
university professor or something i think yes i like like when i was in the school my my father
#
used to take all these magazines and we were in ramagundam where the place used to be you know
#
this india today or that or delhi newspaper they used to arrive at at afternoon so i was used to
#
read those those newspapers and then you know stay whole night reading those newspapers it's a bunch
#
of newspaper that my father used to get so the newspapers reading and the time and the india
#
today and the front line front line has had been just launched at that time when i was in school
#
yes mainly these two magazines the front line and and illustrated weekly for that matter there
#
is still running at that time and these magazines i was reading not exactly as a syllabus or
#
something like that i was just fascinated with this this sudden exposure that i had to the world
#
outside my house or something and i had a room fortunately my parents gave me a room and i used
#
to remain awake till two o'clock or three o'clock even while it was a school and re and then you
#
know rush to school as i said to you in jnu we didn't really read from the learned anything from
#
the classroom in fact you know and but we still had to attend the classroom we had to go to the
#
classroom because there were there was course to be completed there were there were exams to be
#
given what i feel today in my own university we have a extreme emphasis on the timetables on the
#
on the classroom which in fact makes everybody very lethargic you have to just be in the classroom
#
and just give an attendance and be there and kind of and listen to the something and the teachers
#
also have to come every day for teaching it's just almost like you know you are manning a group of
#
of young kids who are not young kids they are 22 23 year old you know adults and they need to be
#
given some kind of food for thought rather than given some kind of a you know just monologue from
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one side of the t of a barrier i have a feeling that leisure is not really valued and and that
#
is the one thing but i would not even call it leisure i would like to call it this experience
#
to be with oneself you know it's nothing like leisure will be some kind of a like in Germany
#
i was told there is a leisure industry for that matter whereby people have different entertainment
#
field where people come and and and and be there you know i would not go into that kind of a
#
understanding here i would like to say that give some students to reflect upon some time to reflect
#
upon give him some like i when when the dilly rights happened i took my students to the site
#
where the riots happened i was with them and and that kind of a learning which we received
#
i think i would not have learned it if i had just read the newspapers and thought about it that okay
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this is i need to also go into into the field to understand and to get to you know to direct
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direct exchange but you know direct interaction with the issues and i think that is that that is
#
what is lacking because what what reflection what you say as a leisure reflection that can only
#
happen if i if i have a human interaction and that's an important thing it doesn't matter
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that whether you are having two hours or three hours in a day and you sit quietly you may not
#
reflect upon anything if you don't really have an issue to reflect upon you need to have an issue
#
and you need to to have an issue which has touched your chord you know it's very important to have
#
issues which have touched your chord or have defined you in some way you know like you when
#
i went to this right affected areas of delhi in 2022 march february end and beginning of march
#
the kind of scenes that i saw the cars and cars the whole garage being burnt out and all the big
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cars have totally been incinerated the schools being incinerated though the people you can see
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that whole whole structure masjids and mandirs everything has been you know burnt alive and you
#
see the people around and and i went inside the masjid and i could see that how what kind of a
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you know you know devastation that has happened so these things where when you read a book on
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riots or on the communal conflagration will not give me enough reflective
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push you know it i need to also go and get interacted with the people what is happening
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to one yes reflective time has been reduced you know we don't really reflect we have lots of
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you know the forms of engagement if we are not doing anything we are on the social media
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we are looking into the screen time you know the kind of a screen time that we invest now
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so we are not really spending time with ourselves that is the one thing second we have no human
#
interaction with the real issues okay we are not going into the field to know about what is
#
how is the nala not working you know and why it is so much of a pollution in yamuna for that matter
#
we are not doing those kind of things we are talking even in the newspapers nowadays we hear
#
there is a tourism of all kinds you know but i think we need to go beyond this touch and go
#
affair we need to really get our hands a little dirtied and by being actually i remember this i
#
was buying some vegetable and there was this lady who came and somebody who just went beyond her
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in the queue and she said that why do you do that i'm standing behind you i mean say you are going
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before me and he said that what is your problem okay i stand here you do you do your you you get
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your your your purchase first and then i said bhai he she only said to you please come in the
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queue why don't you do this what is the problem she has not really insulted or or hurt your ego
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by saying this why are you so angry on her she has only said to you that please come in the queue
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and then that lady says nobody speaks like this nowadays nobody offers support for this kind of
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a thing you know i really am feeling good that you at least spoke about it so the point is this
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that we are we are getting more narrower and narrower in our concerns that's the one thing
#
we are getting co-opted in our own cocoons and we are not really concerned with with our neighborhood
#
we are not concerned with our own people we are not concerned with anybody for that matter
#
we are there is a lot of self-projection happening that is a different thing
#
but more than the lizard there has to be a time for to reflect upon our action our deeds our
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thoughts and secondly we need to meet more and more human issues and human environment we need
#
to be in the human environment we are not in the human environment at this point i guess gandhi
#
could draw or ambedkar could draw so many people on on their agenda it was only because they could
#
touch their cord you know and they could bring those people i guess now that is not really
#
happening that's why you need these kind of issues you know you you don't need because you're not
#
really touching me you know so i see a video i get really conflagrated about it that okay
#
they are doing this they are doing that there was this lady who said that
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how do you know about it no that's why the census is not being done now that whole thing
#
was reversed the census is not being done because the 50 50 population
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so all this yeah i guess no that's a beautiful and very powerful and advanced point that you made
#
about leisure that and i agree with you that it is not enough to have leisure if you're going to
#
spend your two free hours on a smartphone just scrolling up and down and swiping left and right
#
you're going from sensation to sensation i also agree with you on the great point about
#
atomization like one image that i keep bringing up on the show and asking people about is that
#
nowadays you'll go to a cafe or charlotte better and they're all looking into their phones they're
#
not even together they're physically in the same space but they're not even together and to this
#
one of my guests gave me the counterpoint that is not so bad that they are you know engaging with
#
the world and all of that through their phones and and the point you made about self-reflection
#
is also great because i keep thinking about it because i look back at my own life i'm in
#
my late 40s i look back at my own life and i realized that for most of my life i did not
#
self-reflect or i did not self-reflect adequately and even now i'm probably fooling myself in the
#
self-reflection i do because you know there's always more you can do but most people don't
#
self-reflect at all most people have no kind of awareness you know we are we all by default we
#
fall into the main character syndrome that i am you know that we treat the world as a video game
#
around us everyone else is a prop everyone else is a character all human actions are instrumental
#
you know and that's how we live our lives and i think it's important to make the space and to
#
make the leisure time not to get lost in sensations like you said but to actually be able to reflect
#
on yourself and the world around you and my question here then is what do you feel about
#
the importance of reading in this right because one of the things that struck me about george
#
fernandez for example is his voracious appetite for reading like you describe how you know when
#
he was in the seminary in bangalore at the age of 17 in 1947 he'd use his stipend money he'd buy
#
books with that and he'd you know find soldiers who would have books and he'd pick them up he'd
#
cultivate friendships and he would get books from people and to the point where he once said i have
#
about 300 books and you know when he moved then to the saint peters major seminary you know he
#
took his books and even ordained priests would come and borrow books from him and that is when
#
he is 17 and then much later you know and he's been in jail at different times during the emergency
#
1963 he was arrested on third fourth april if i remember correctly and there also you point out
#
that and i'll quote from what you've written where you write in jail george was mostly doing two
#
things writing letters and reading books that he procured from outside he retained a handwritten
#
copy of each letter he wrote to friends colleagues and family members the solitude in jail gave him
#
ample opportunity to devour an entire an enormous amount of reading material and then later he said
#
the time of my life is here to read and study he kept a list of the books he read and he would give
#
critiques you know you you've written about how he for example he read the rise and fall of the
#
third rake twice because he wanted to understand how could people allow this to happen to them
#
which is such a valid question today also and you speak about how you know he read michael
#
foote's biography of anorin bevan and then he wrote to his friend with a very nuanced critique
#
of it which you've reproduced you know you've reproduced some lines from that and here's a man
#
who's making the effort to read and educate himself about the world so it is not only that
#
he is in the grassroots seems he's among the people he slept on the street he's with them
#
but he's also educating himself all the time taking every opportunity and more and more
#
like i won't quote the person who said this a former minister from a previous bjp government
#
said about modi's government at one point and he named four people in it and he said that you take
#
including mr modi and he said all these four people in the last four years have read zero
#
books between them right which is you know a really a sort of a to me an important point
#
what is your sense and again i'll break this question into two parts about one that what
#
you feel is the importance of reading especially in public life and you know at one level people
#
may read more for instrumental aims so that they can use the knowledge that they get but at another
#
level when you read novels when you read literary fiction you're not reading for that reason but it
#
is important it makes you a broader deeper person more empathetic gives you more dots to connect the
#
world that is one level and and do politicians today do you think do they read more or less
#
has something fundamental changed because you've written about so many politicians in your book
#
and the second question is about the role of reading in your life that you know you you've
#
sort of indicated in your answer that you just read whatever you could get your hands on illustrated
#
weekly hat or high ticket perling cover to cover much like me you read whatever you get right but
#
also is there an intentionality you put into your reading and not an intentionality obviously in
#
the sense of keeping a specific public route obviously i have a reading list but beyond that
#
that a reading habit is useful it should happen like you teach so many young people so you know
#
what do you notice among about their reading habits and what do you try to do to shape them
#
reading is a quite a limited enterprise i i think not many people read i would not say
#
anything against those people you know because reading is a luxury let me tell you it is it is
#
a luxury you need to buy a book you need to have a time enough to read that book and then if you
#
read that book and if you don't think about that book then again it's of no use so many i i would
#
say that reading is not a simple affair of of enlarging your knowledge or or or this reading
#
is required certain logistic support you know which is which is in fact not everybody in a
#
poor country like ours will have in fact you know but there are people like ambedkar for that matter
#
he had a massive library and he was so much concerned about his library than his own family
#
over that matter you know and he retained that and again and again he would spend a lot of money
#
on buying his books and he did not really come from that kind of a family where he had lots
#
of money and things like so he was earning and he was deploying back them in books gandhi and
#
nehru we all know and and most of the national movement leaders in fact they were well-read
#
people you know in the post-independence time i would not say people like lohiya did not read
#
okay i would not say people like jp did not read they read and they also reflected upon
#
and they also wrote okay i have a feeling george was the last of the socialists who was a good
#
reader for that matter okay because after that the socialism got devolved into the caste competition
#
for that matter so you had the caste groupings who acquired lohiyaite names for themselves but
#
it was mainly a caste-based parties that came up and reading did not really was was not really
#
necessary for these caste-based parties because they were had a they you don't have to create
#
a constituency you have a primordial loyalties to to to to cultivate which which doesn't require
#
enlarging your it is in fact requiring you to become more narrower and narrower you know
#
reading enlarges your your thinking in fact when i was doing george biography i read as many
#
non-fiction book as fictions i read i not many people have noticed it nobody has said to me as
#
yet but my book on george biography is is written very much in fact inspired i will not say that
#
anything for that matter let people say it but at but i would say that i was inspired by by garcia
#
marcus for the for the way he has done hundred years of solitude or the way he has done the
#
love in the times of colada or other books for that matter in fact no one writes to colonel or
#
even you know for many books for that matter and then the second second author which really
#
inspired me to to write the way i wanted to write i the basic premise that i began with when i
#
started writing on george was to make people read his story i was i had no absolute concern
#
about the about the academic purity and all i did not want to put any kind of argument i did not
#
wanted to bring any kind of his social science element into it but i did massive research in
#
that sense i did a massive research looking into the different aspects of it and i like ram
#
guha keeps saying about the number of the characters which are there in gandhi's
#
gandhi biography of his in in george book as well you will find number of the characters being
#
talked about you have people starting from his childhood and then people at the end of his life
#
you have women in his life you have political colleagues in his life you have you have
#
constituency people in the in his life and all these people competitors as well as the
#
compatriots and all these people and they all required a lot of reading in fact they need
#
i needed to do almost 100 biographies before i could do george biography because i need to do
#
as much about madhulimi as about george because i was tracing their friendship and the kind of
#
ups and downs that friendship meant i needed to know about indira gandhi and charan singh as much
#
as i was needing to know about george i was needing to know about jp and lohiya i was needing
#
to know about about about rajnarayan and and then of course jaya jetli and lala kabir and all the
#
people that came in his life during emergency he was writing circulars and in those circulars he
#
prescribes readings for the people and most of these readings came from the from the from the
#
from the anti nazi resistance like what happened in paris or what happened in stockholm or what
#
happened in in in germany and all those books like john standback's book the the moon the moon is
#
down or or electric Collins the paris is burning all these books he prescribed for the for the for
#
his underground colleagues to read and it was not about about and he in fact describes people he
#
says to those people whom he has prescribed for reading these readings he says that read it in
#
such a fashion that you imbibe the ethos of that character so that you behave in the same way
#
because he is trying to point out different characters in these books who could be helpful
#
if you adopt those characters in your life and you behave in the similar way or you act in the same
#
in in in the same way now george not only was reading himself he was also prescribing readings
#
for other people you know there in fact they went to the court in 1963 they went to the court when
#
when when they were restricted by the by the court by the by the by the police by the by the
#
jail authorities on the number of the books that they could keep in their room and so he went into
#
the court asking for the permission to keep as many books as possible and the court allowed it
#
you know the court allowed it to to keep him to to keep as many books as possible so so reading on
#
the two one yes george is a voracious reader in fact i i was not only i was private to his
#
his private papers but i was also private to his library and i could see that kind of books that
#
he had the kind of and it was not just of one kind that only politics he's reading a variety
#
of subjects he is in economics the the political assistance the the protest the democracy all kind
#
of subjects and the novels for that matter so you you have harman hasses you have miller all kind
#
of people he is reading and so his reading is certainly of of a widespread range when i started
#
writing it i need to needed to read all the literature that he has read it because i wanted
#
to get a feel of that that i wanted to get a feel that okay if he's talking about john stand back
#
then i need to read his book i need to read the whole whole text of what he has written about
#
in his book moon is down i needed to read that i needed to read leprechaun's book
#
paris is burning i needed to also read read all the literature that he like like he he when i
#
when i was writing about his days in the jail i i needed to read the people whom he has described
#
in his in his circulars and and see that how what kind of inspiration he gets and how does he behave
#
when he's being interrogated and how he does he behave when he is the jail so so so i i read a
#
quite a number of the books quite quite quite a number of the books just to do this biography
#
because i needed to get a feel of of his his own inspiration or his own own references that he has
#
in his mind so reading for me in fact let me tell you i have a big library at my own home
#
and since the time i was with my parents i was initially i was not having that exposure to
#
many books so i used to read newspapers and magazines later i started reading books when
#
i came to jnu and i think even even when i was living with my grandparents i we had lots of
#
different kind of books that i used to i think i i remember reading leprechaun's freedom at
#
midnight when i was a very small kid and i it was very inspiring book for that matter at that time
#
and it really left a deep impact on me not just with its content but also the way it was written
#
and i think when i started writing george i suddenly one day it occurred to me that i have
#
this is a writer's work this is not a historian's work and i was really baffled and i was also under
#
overawed by the fact that i'm doing some kind of a writer's work because i what i had conceived
#
myself as a biographer as a historian and it really you can as a historian you really you
#
know you don't have you can take liberty with a lot of things you can just write say long quotes
#
and and and do that kind of thing but when you're you're trying to convey a message that is a writer's
#
job and when you do that you need to keep reader in the mind when you're writing something and i
#
have i think i developed during writing of the george and because there were so many different
#
kinds of sources i was using like when i was doing gandhi's khadi i was dependent only on one kind
#
of a source that was a collected work of mahatma gandhi which i was using for my work and it was
#
a it was a one-lead reference point for me i collected everything on khadi from the hundred
#
volumes of mahatma gandhi which i read all of those and each of those volumes comprises of some
#
500 pages so i was reading those but when i was dealing dealing with the george i had a variety
#
of sources and and there were there were files after files of letters from where the story
#
was made like not much has been written on on the underground movement during the emergency
#
not much has been written on the municipal movement in this municipal workers movement in this country
#
and not much has been written also on the perspective of leadership of of railway strike
#
so and in fact also the socialist party and socialist socialism in this country we we know
#
how the trajectory of socialist party moved but we really don't know much about the loya jp
#
conflict we really don't know much about about how the party itself went into went through the whole
#
seasons and and and and and coming together and the mergers and how it happened what kind of so
#
the to go into those kind of things required a widespread reading in effect i was reading all
#
the party resolutions i was reading you know socialist party party resolutions and the the
#
and the leadership that came up and and this reading was not about the not of the books alone
#
the private paper collections of the people like madhulemiye in teen murthy which was stored in
#
teen murthy besides george which was with me ramamitra people like badri bishal piti jp loya
#
for that matter all these people's private paper collections they had to be read and they had to be
#
not just read but put into the context so reading of course i have i think i would not have been
#
able to do the kind of book that george book required me to the kind of treatment that it
#
required if i had been lazy reader no no no it is not possible not possible no i i i will just
#
say here that i think you have succeeded in the book as both a historian and a writer like one
#
of the adjectives that use for the book is novelistic one because of the storytelling and the way you
#
know the narrative takes you along but also in the in the in the way that there are so many
#
different strands you know that novels can be complex in a way that other books can't and this
#
is not only a book about george ferrandes i learned a lot about madhulemiye about lohiya about
#
you know jay jaitley and leila kabir and all of these characters are not you know they're
#
not side characters where only george is a book you know they all have their arcs and all of that
#
i want to sort of briefly digress and take a double click on what you mentioned earlier about
#
how as politics changes and politics becomes more caste oriented and all of that you speak about how
#
your ambit has narrowed down and reading broadens you so a politician would no longer need to read
#
if you are sort of in that game and i therefore wonder that while reading makes you capacious
#
does politics restrict that capaciousness like i one of the realizations i'm coming to is that
#
the form of what you do shapes the person you are right so even within the narrow
#
context of a podcast i would be a different person if i was doing five minute podcasts every day
#
instead of a five hour podcast every week because you know the longer form requires me to go much
#
deeper read much more listen with much more patience you know and so on and so forth there's
#
an essay where i elaborated on this where which are linked from the show notes and equally the
#
form of any damn thing you do you know shapes who you are and what you do you could be a manager
#
in a big firm and your work has a certain form and a certain structure and you begin to think
#
like that and along those lines and equally within politics you know you're being pushed
#
and pulled in different directions like what i also sometimes like to examine is how politics
#
modern politics modern indian politics corrodes character in the sense that you can get into
#
politics with the best of principles but then you know the nature of modern politics where
#
you're constantly for i mean you before you enter the electoral marketplace only you're playing a
#
kind of politics within the party and all of that rising up within it with all the manipulations it
#
involves then that whole circular game between money and power and ultimately it is inevitable
#
that no matter how you started out you will be corroded and changed a little bit by it and i
#
wonder how that how that changes a person because you know in in jrj tly in her memoir life among
#
the scorpions that talks about and obviously she's got her own sort of grudges against george
#
verandes but at one point she in your words quote produces his politics as merely dissentient or
#
anti-establishment a view held by critics as well stop quote and and you know this is you sort of
#
quoting her and i wonder about this i wonder that then what is the basis of your politics because
#
on the one hand i would imagine that the basis of your politics would be the way you look at the
#
world which is shaped by all the reading you've done and therefore it can be complex and nuanced
#
another basis for your politics can be your experience on the ground in grassroots politics
#
and what is happening but a third sort of impact on your politics i'm guessing would be just the
#
broader political trends that are playing out within you so you you know you begin as a socialist
#
even though you know you're initially a little skeptical but you begin as a socialist then you're
#
sort of you know in 77 he was in moradji desai's government who he had been vehemently against in
#
1951 that has changed then later on aligning with the bjp defense minister in the government
#
then that notorious speech where which he gave in i think 2003 where he defends the 2002 riots and
#
does a lot of whataboutery there and and i wonder if there these circumstances these broader
#
circumstances also change a man's politics in which case one begins to wonder that what is at
#
the core of this what is at the essence of this you know so slightly long-winded question i was
#
kind of thinking aloud but i'm just wondering about the many influences which shape a person
#
and which you know reading is one of them but at the same time your reading itself can be shaped
#
by the form that your life takes so what are sort of your thoughts on this because you've you've
#
articulated beautifully how he was how he went through all of these motions and one sense of
#
george fernandez that you get is an incredibly principled learned man you know true to his
#
convictions you talk about how in 1950 i think he lay down in front of a jeep or something
#
because he he didn't care if it went over him in that moment the principle was all that
#
mattered you know at various times at various demonstrations he was beaten up by the police
#
there's a description of how people spat on him so that his kurta got heavy because of all the spit
#
on it and yet he continued doing what he was doing man of great conviction but also a man who's
#
adapting to circumstances and changing and all of that and sometimes the adaptations that we
#
make can be hidden from ourselves you know so what's what's sort of your sense there are multiple
#
factors which goes into making us and one of the factor of course is the is the beginning in fact
#
how we began and the kind of motivations that shaped us at the very beginning to retain that
#
motivation in our successive you know encounter with the society and and polity is what perhaps
#
defines us you know even Gandhi would be said that he changed his opinion about caste
#
you know in the beginning he said that he would be believing in the chaturvarna and by the 1940s he
#
is talking about the intercast marriages and all so i think the consistency should not be
#
the indicator okay that would be that is the one thing that so okay let people change you
#
know and people should change according to the context in which they are working or they are
#
being so the change is not really the culprit the culprit is something else that's the first
#
point i would say the second point is this polity is not again polity is not constant
#
quality is changing and the parties are coming up in 1950 if you read Nehru's volumes the
#
collected or selected work of Nehru which is made by S. Gopal which are somewhere 100 volumes for
#
that matter even that too in the two series you would see that Nehru is concerned with the rise
#
of right for that matter if you say it right in that way i remember reading a later on here that
#
he writes to one one in that time madras district collector and who asked that what should we do
#
with the muslim league and he says that the muslim league is a beaten party at this time he's writing
#
in 1948 just 15 days before gandhi's murder he had in january and he says that muslim league is
#
taught to be disturbed because it is dying by its own self so why do you want to make it a martyr
#
by taking by banning it or something like let it exist and it will die by itself so but my chief
#
worry which he writes to curry which is who is the bombay chief minister at that time he writes to
#
him and saying that my chief worry is the rss now and at that time let me tell you rss is a very
#
in not sense that politically very insignificant element at that time in that sense and that same
#
rss which in fact george is opposing almost till 1977 and even after that for more that matter
#
opposing it and also befriending it in that sense in some way like 1971 1967 election
#
rss is supposed to have helped him and and and given him support for that matter
#
and he keeps having this high love and hate relationship for that matter does it happen
#
because of his ideological weathering or does it happen because of his ambition or does it happen
#
because he is somebody who doesn't have any ideology for that matter these are the three
#
kind of things that can happen you know one person can think about it that okay he doesn't
#
have an ideological conviction he is somebody who is just aspiring for for his ambitious
#
you know moving up and up kind of a thing to some extent i would say that he is much more honest
#
than many people who have met some kind of a you know fetish out of their ideological conviction
#
and saying that we will remain this that is a not acknowledging what is changing and how it is
#
changing and that will once again debar you from also affecting the politics of your world third
#
to large extent george is a product of anti-congress movement okay his whole political
#
upbringing has been in the congress environment okay to expect him to you know even in loja for
#
that matter he he he in 1967 the kind of results that went against congress it was mainly because
#
of loja it uh you know non-congressism that's what we say that uh the slogan that he gave where he
#
brought all against congress for that matter now this i think went deep inside george because he
#
was mainly a person born in with the loja its slogan understand understood him in a way in a
#
way in which i think many very few people understood him in in in that sense i think
#
they had a a complementary role loja brought his name into the parliament when he was nobody for
#
that matter in 1960s he was a bombay municipal municipal ward member and he brought him into
#
the parliament and and he himself spoke about him and all on the other hand the the kind of a
#
trade union work that george did in mumbai also fueled the the rise of socialist party in the
#
country for that matter so i would not say that they were not complementary but the point is that
#
george politics has lots of anti-congressism into it to expect him to change midway when at that at
#
a time when his energy level is down when the politics of the country has has still not been
#
freed by the congress for that matter in that sense because his his main opposition is against
#
the congress so he is at a time when the congress has certainly re-rosed in 2004 so it is not that
#
the congress is completely dead or out so there is a always a threat of communist congress coming in
#
and he has led all his politics against the congress all through his life so to expect him
#
to say that okay bjp is not acceptable okay i think that was a little too much for that matter
#
because he's already in the 60s at a time when he forges his his his relationship with the with
#
the bjp secondly i would say that the age has an important role to play in everybody's life let's
#
say that you know we we somebody has said that in the 20s we are all marxists for that matter
#
but when it as we grow up we become different different ideological holdings comes up into
#
us in in some sense george in 60s was was my analysis says that he was pressured by the new
#
crop of leadership in his own party or the supporters of him that has that came and they
#
were free out of this ideological you know holdings or scaffoldings and in fact they were the people
#
who were using politics for their own purposes and these purpose was solely power and power okay now
#
the power is certainly when once you get the power i would not say the power is of no use
#
for that matter or you only thinking about sitting in a chair power certainly is to be
#
used for certain purposes for that matter so i would not say that the man or the women who
#
came into the George ambit at that time they were only thinking in the personal glory it was not
#
like that but certainly there was a personal glory element into it there was a competitiveness
#
in that sense that the he has acquired the power who was my classmate yesterday why not me for that
#
matter so there is a kind of a range of emotions that comes up so george became some kind of a
#
you know some kind of a ransom to be to be held by these people who would use his name
#
in return for the for their own power and george would use them to to retain his relevance in the
#
center's politics or in the central politics he certainly had no electoral backing by 90s
#
in that sense but he had a political weight that is the difference between the electoral power
#
ms electoral backing and the political weight he didn't have electoral strength whereby he
#
could win by his own ways but he had a political weight which which carried weight and which gave
#
relevance and which also gave gave some kind of a salience to the political parties in which he
#
joined and so he had a name he had a name of of 50 years of politics that he had done in this country
#
and therefore to expect a man who is growing old to and and let me also tell you he has struggled
#
all his life he really was not in power for many years you know he has always been in the
#
opposition and so there is also some kind of a some kind of a you know you know i was talking
#
to a bjp mp who was a earlier former socialist and he said that after some time family starts
#
seeing you as a failure you can't go on struggling every day you need a little bit of
#
power to or to feel that you are you have achieved or you have arrived and so you need these these
#
things too otherwise family starts leaving you your sons and daughters start doubting your
#
credibility and your capacity so you need even some kind of a semblance of achievement for that
#
matter so i think i would not say that jord was such a weak person as to as to see a position
#
in the government as a as having arrived it's not i have written in the book that his power
#
did not come from the electoral arena it came from his non-electoral arena he was not in the
#
he was not an mp when he weighs the railway strike he was not an mp when he he was in the
#
underground movement and he emerged as a national hero at that time so he was he at any moment of
#
his life when he has even in 1971 when he was beaten in the parliament he was he was he just
#
after after two months he was defeated in the election for in mumbai so at every peak of his
#
his time like when he has become nationally popular he has become a national name for that
#
matter he was not in the power you know he was in the power and the election victory came to him
#
when for many people it might have been that he has won he has arrived but for him it was not so
#
big thing he had achieved bigger things without being into the power you know in 1963 for that
#
matter he remained in the jail for whole one year so to say that he was looking for some positions
#
of the of power or to some kind of a wealth of power i would not give that kind of a credence
#
but there was a this element was also existing you know and people who surrounded him were also
#
looking for some kind of a recompensation for for what what they had done to him and what how they
#
had and they also needed some kind of a you know some kind of a positions of power some kind of
#
things like that which perhaps also restricted his choices it's really hard to change your friends
#
and your your supporters at the at the late stage of that life you know so you retain that
#
you know that that group of the people who were with you from the from somewhat you know longer
#
time you retain their group that group even when you know that perhaps you know they are using you
#
for their purposes or things like that so to answer your question whether change is good or not or why
#
would somebody change i have a feeling that there are multiple factors which goes into
#
the choices that you make you know sometimes readings do not really are enough you know
#
you also go with the current of the time and the situations make you do certain things
#
which you do like a man like george though many people have seen that speech in a different
#
light that you talked about in fact even i have been i have written also a little bit harshly
#
that way but he is making a simple point he's making a point that the riots have been very
#
normal affair in this country people have killed each other for a very long time and this all has
#
happened during the congress regime and so to say that 2002 is something abnormal behavior of indians
#
is something which is he not believing he's not taking but i would say the much who harsh glare
#
falls on him when he takes a side about graham stain murder whereby which is in fact really
#
a an indictment of him you know graham stain even if he was converting or even he was doing
#
which he was not doing at all and there were two small kids with the same in the same van and any
#
person of george's stature would not come out with this with a statement saying that this is
#
an international conspiracy which has happened in fact that compromises him much more you know
#
abjectly and and and puts him in a in a very abject position then his 2002 comments i would
#
also say that his support for the nuclearization the pokhran too is also a reflection upon his
#
changed political priorities despite the fact that he in fact supports it by saying that as
#
a defense minister i would go to any extent to protect the borders of this country and i would
#
do anything for that matter but more than the 2002 more than the nuclearization support of
#
for nuclearization graham stain is a real blot on on george's politics because that's where it shows
#
that george has changed and why he changed we can only surmise we can only think about
#
you know yeah yeah you know many great points and one important point you made is that in one way
#
he was consistent all his life which was the anti-congressism and that anti-congressism in
#
a sense was there for a reason like i often say that people who both support and oppose this regime
#
can both make an interesting kind of mistake that people who support this regime can pretend that
#
nothing has happened after 2014 so whatever is wrong with the country neru ka fault a iska fault
#
and nothing has happened after 2014 and people who oppose this regime can often behave as if
#
nothing happened before 2014 you know and the point is that there is a reason that there was
#
a popular upsurge against the congress and they are practically finished today and and that reason
#
is decades of misgovernance decades of people but keeping people in poverty much longer than
#
necessary with bad politics and bad economics and also dynasty for that matter and and you know
#
that's something to be noted and i'm just thinking you know you you pointed out you know the the
#
reprehensible speech and the reprehensible comments about graham strain's murder where he said hey
#
you know bajrang dal has nothing to do with it and blah blah blah and i'm just wondering that
#
this also happened at a period where he was gradually losing it like there are some very
#
poignant scenes that you've described in one scene he is upset about something and he's in
#
his hotel room and he just shouts at the people around him and then he shits in his pajamas and
#
then he refuses to let them change it and of course alzheimer's is soon going to soon people
#
are going to know that this is alzheimer's and he's an ill man as as such and that seems very
#
tragic and poignant to me that and that shitting in his pajamas seems a metaphor in almost for the
#
bajrang dal comment right that this is a man no longer in control of himself this is not a man
#
who was what he used to be and you could argue that maybe this elemental sort of anger or this
#
frustration is fundamental to him that you know this is a part of him or you could say that many
#
of the other things that composed him and restrained him just perhaps influence of the amigdala which
#
controls our social behavior is sort of not there so his judgment is impaired with age and and i
#
begin to wonder then that you know how do we judge how do we judge this so the like at the end of his
#
like just apart from the issue of judgment and apart from the issue of doing something
#
wrong like the stains comments or losing control like shitting in his pajamas it's incredibly
#
poignant to me that your when you describe his last days which is how you start the book which
#
i thought was a lovely way to start because it really humanizes him and makes us feel that empathy
#
for him and you speak about how he is just not in control of himself you know his wife Leila
#
Kabir slash Fernandez comes and takes him away from Jayajit Lee and you know his thumbprint is
#
used in ways when he is really he has a blank mind as it were and he's not in control of anything and
#
you point out that in your first conversation with him like the only two words he ever says to you
#
or when you ask him how he is and i think he said fiercely fit fighting fit fighting fit yeah and
#
so ironic and i was also moved by that moment where you describe how you know Jayajit Lee shows you
#
into the study and he's sitting there and the two of you are sitting and there is this long moment
#
of silence as you take each other in and i can only wonder at what is going through each of your
#
heads but there is just a universe packed in there and then you ask him how he is and he says
#
fighting fit and that's it how difficult is it to write about this and absorb it and as a biographer
#
at some level you always reach that stage where your subject is not just a subject it's it's
#
somebody you feel close to that person you know you you kind of you feel like you know that person
#
it's a friend it's almost you're living with that person and i say this because i've seen this
#
process of Alzheimer's eating people up from the inside till there's nothing there and it has made
#
me self-reflect on what is this thing we call the self and isn't it hubris to be able to even say
#
something like this is me this is who i am and i'm like no boss you know and the in the end you're
#
nothing you know what are sort of your thoughts on this i mean this is not even a planned question
#
i'm just kind of going with those no i i think i lived with him almost 12 years you know lived
#
with him in the sense that not physically but but he was in my mind i was reading every bit of papers
#
that he wrote and collected for for himself and i was thinking about it all the time and in fact
#
those were the really difficult days because i was also having a full-time university job where i
#
had to teach my students and and and those are those courses were very different than
#
what i was writing upon and what i was thinking about or reflecting upon so it was a extremely
#
hard days for me but i think you know i i guess being with as a biographer as a biographer until
#
you are not into the character and and you have not collected enough material surrounding him
#
until that you can't even start writing you know so the process is extremely long for that matter
#
because you are dealing with a man's life which is a 80 year of old life a 80 year life and then
#
you are trying to also reflect upon his influences then you go into the history you go into the all
#
the you know history of christianity and the history of a conflict in karnataka the religious
#
conflict in mangalore and all kind of a thing so you need to do you you need to study the person
#
from the multifarious dimensions and you have to live with this person i have cried writing some
#
of the lines i have cried i have read some of the paragraphs and some of the chapters to friends who
#
have cried while reading it and i have you know i would not like to say that i sacrificed a lot
#
because i wanted to do this i wanted to write about george because here is a story which had
#
which had you know i would not say that very colorful personality but certainly had many
#
dimensions of indian politics to to learn from and and i he was not somebody also who would give
#
me power of pelf because he was already bygone by the time when i started writing it so there was
#
nothing like a gain out of it it was something a story which i wanted to convey to the this this
#
country and this people of this country to read about the my whole intention was to document it
#
as honestly as possible that is the one thing second i wanted to make it read by the people
#
how do i write it and so the writing style also has to be such a fashion as you said i'm so
#
so happy to note that you found it novelistic but the but the the difference between novel
#
and a biography is that i'm as a biographer bound by the sources i can't let my imagination go
#
berserk i can't use different experiences to bound in a one character i have to develop the
#
character with the with the with the with the with the sources which provides me the the the
#
fragments of it to do that kind of a thing on a person like george on whom there is no biography
#
in fact there is no template for existing so you need to have you don't even know when i started
#
writing about george i knew just one thing about him and that was the emergency photograph of him
#
which i saw him saw when i was in school where he raises his hand and and his hands are in fetter
#
and so that photograph was the only inspiring departure point for me i i began from there
#
i didn't know about the bombay i didn't never know about the about the whole this conflict
#
between the christianity and the islam that happened in is in in mangalore i didn't even
#
know about the islamic history for that pattern but i read about those things i started researching
#
so i went into almost it was a backward journey i was i looked at at at 1977 and then i went started
#
looking beyond it i went into that one by one one year after one year after and then the the
#
private papers are by themselves cannot give you the all the facets of that person the man who is
#
collecting private papers he's collecting the private papers of the papers of where he exists
#
but there are a lot of other contexts and other stories and other other events that where he has
#
influenced or where he has been influenced of but he doesn't have papers of that so you need to go
#
into different kind of archival sources to collect more and more out of him and this became almost
#
you know a tedious job for that matter because you had to go to different archives you'll have
#
to look at the almost i looked at the 80 years of times of india you know because most of these
#
times of india exists in the in the microfilm in in in teemurthy i looked at those and it and
#
the microfilm machine is extremely dark there it's not really very high technical technical
#
machine so so you really have to pure it off you know kind of a thing and then i looked at so so
#
what you have to do is to complement the private paper of one single person about whom you're
#
writing with the with the other kind of sources and other kind of papers and it takes a lot of
#
time but the process itself makes you go into the personality now the whole journey is almost akin
#
to like like somebody did a journey on some some 70 years after a journey of dandy yatra
#
and he wrote he went to the same villages thomas weber who did this book he went into same villages
#
where gandhi stopped and wrote about his experiences and so it's almost like retracing a life a
#
bygroffer's job is to retrace his life and and retracing of life it doesn't mean
#
retracing one individual's life you need to retrace all the people who came in his contact
#
all the people who were his friends or the competitors or the people who abused him
#
or people who befriended him or people who loved him people who stunned him you have to do everything
#
so you if you want to write in a holistic biography you need to go into even autobiographies
#
for that matter are about himself they're they're not really writing about about other people in
#
that way gandhi's autobiography is completely about himself you know and people have like when
#
i'm dealing with a jetly's autobiography writing i know that the autobiography is here written with
#
the purpose of affirming your own side of the story you are trying to tell your side of the story
#
which is doing a great job for that matter but when i as a biographer wants to talk about george i
#
need to look at at every every side of it because i'm a biographer which is trying to bring about
#
all the influences that came in it all the ideas and insights that he drew out of that
#
and the all the political ups and downs that he went through and that gives you a great pip
#
not only in his life and not only in his choices but also the times that he lived and that's why
#
this book is not only a biography of george but also a some kind of a history of post-independence
#
india whereby the issues that i pick up the the the the the event that i pick up are the
#
events which has not been really chronicled even today for that matter like i find no mention of
#
municipal organizations existing anywhere in the country despite the fact that we have such a
#
such a such a large number of municipalities existing but nobody has done that kind of work
#
although the the emergency for that matter so much of work has already been done on emergency
#
but what happened in the underground who were the people in the underground that we have
#
kumi kapoor did did did a book on her own personal experience with the with the with emergency and
#
seat writes about what turmoil he went she went through her husband being in the jail or or
#
pursued by the police and all such anecdotal writings are not existing such anecdotal
#
writings of experience of of emergency is not there people like lk adwani when they spend times
#
in the jail they have written about the jail diary jp has done jail diary madhuli meh has exchanged
#
his letters which gyan prakash uses that to write his his latest book on on emergency but
#
to say that but that once again is one individual experience but whole underground being unraveled
#
how it is happening what kind of a training that undergoes who are the men and women who come
#
together and and but a dynamite case is a seminal contribution for that matter as far as the protest
#
movement against the emergency was concerned that was the only talking point in doing the emergency
#
as far as the protest is concerned we did have other other other resistances but those were
#
not really of of of that consistent nature so what i think as a biographer i not only need to
#
understand the life and choices of george but to understand george i need to understand all the
#
people around him and who came in association with him in the and to understand the context of his
#
choices that is a very important thing because sometimes what happens we write biography of a
#
man without taking into consideration the context in which he is growing we don't describe the
#
political and and economic currents that are flowing around that time we need to bring those
#
things otherwise it becomes extremely one-off kind of a thing and and and some kind of a standalone
#
kind of a characterization of one person who who doesn't we we don't really get a feel of the
#
person when i i tell you when i read certain biographies of of 50s and 60s i see that i
#
don't get the feel of that time you know so my idea was that one i need to write in a manner in
#
which people would read it as if they are reading a kind of a novel and secondly they must get an
#
empathetic feeling for the character ups and downs i don't bother about it wrong or right choices i
#
don't bother about it the the kind of alliances he does i don't bother about it i just did do a
#
honest portrayal of that i bring all those things honestly make make people who are readers make
#
them understand what they are reading and let them conclude i don't even conclude it the book is not
#
even making a conclusion out of it i just say that he doesn't he doesn't require to leave a legacy
#
for that matter because he has no legacy he has whatever his life is that's a legacy he doesn't
#
have to leave the legacy for the kind of political figure that we have so let people judge if i can
#
portray his jail life the way he was jailed in red fort the kind of turmoil that he underwent
#
as a as living in a dungeon and then you know being tortured or being being mentally tortured
#
by the by the by the salutes so i am portraying george's time in a fashion with which the reader
#
can relate to and this exploration into you know because i see novel as an exploration of the human
#
heart here the mind also comes into it when i am writing biography heart and mind both has to be
#
explored and explored within the parameters given by the sources i cannot go beyond the sources
#
that is the limitation that i have but i can use the sources imaginatively i can bring certain
#
pain at a time when when there is a there is no such warning coming up into the writing and
#
suddenly i bring those kind of a thing so that kind of a play i have done certainly i have done
#
in writing this and which in fact mainly inspired by the by by the great writers garcia or ram guha
#
for that matter and also salman rusty because these two authors i read thoroughly and i try
#
to understand their craft and yeah so sources is an important aspect of writing historical biographies
#
second what is really your ambition do you really want just to document it for as an academic project
#
or you want to convey certain meanings that also determines where you are going and where you will
#
go i think and thirdly the wholesome presentation of the personality is important you cannot just
#
deal with one side of it you know most of our biographies deal just on the one side of it
#
that's why some some people have commented that i am dealing with his personal life
#
and giving many people did not like it because of because they think that why i'm talking about
#
his personal life in this way but to as a biographer i would like to present a wholesome
#
picture of george and without taking sides and i would be happy if readers make their own conclusions
#
i guess i don't know means whether i succeeded or not but that was my intention when i began
#
so you know you mentioned ram guha i should tell the listeners that the reason we are sitting here
#
today is that ram made what i would consider a very welcome intervention when he wrote to me
#
and we were just talking about other things but he said listen you have to get rahul on your show
#
he's absolutely fantastic and i am and i have kind of decided that i will not say no to ram
#
every time he recommends someone it's absolutely worth it so thank you ram if you're listening to
#
this and you mentioned the emergency books with kumi kapoor and gyan prakash they have both been
#
on my show so i'll link those from the show notes one of my favorite biographers is robert carrow
#
and robert carrow just to you know tell my listeners about him he was a journalist in
#
the mid 1960s he decided he wants to write a biography of a guy called robert moses
#
a sort of a bureaucrat kind of bureaucrat who wielded enormous power without ever winning
#
elections and who basically built modern new york but built modern you know new york with all the
#
skyways and flyovers and everything in really controversial ways and he said he told the
#
publisher i'll take a few months to do it and he took about a decade to do it and the book is a
#
masterpiece one the palitzer and all that and perhaps my favorite biography of all time it's
#
a biography of robert moses it's also a biography of new york city it is also this acute it's also
#
this acutely insightful study of how power corrodes character it works within systems and what carrow
#
then embarked upon after that in the late 70s in the mid 70s i think it was commissioned was a
#
biography of linden johnson he's still writing it you know many volumes have come out he's still
#
writing it i think his the volume he wrote about johnson's years in the senate took longer for him
#
to write than johnson actually spent in the senate right in a sense reminding one of you know another
#
sort of story i like to bring up on the show once in a while which is borges's story about the map
#
of the world where borges speculates that a true map of the world would have to be as big as the
#
world itself and obviously what borges does not say but is obvious that it immediately becomes
#
inaccurate because the world is changing right and to me then it seems that as a biographer there are
#
these two conflicting impulses that you must have faced and one impulse is i want to be as thorough
#
as possible i want to do full justice to the subject right i want to get into every source
#
you know your book is actually many mini books in one it's got a history of sort of it's got a
#
potted history of even goa you know portuguese colonialism and all the way to the modern day
#
you have a potted history of christianity in karnataka and how that is evolving you you have
#
biographies of various different people thrown in so at one level there must be that impulse right
#
to do justice to it i have to embrace all of the complexity but at the other level there must be
#
the impulse right boss time is finite i will also die i have to kind of i want to do as much work
#
as possible and there there are so many choices you can take 12 years to write one book as you
#
did you can take 30 years to write that book in different volumes or you can write a book a year
#
you know little potted histories little kind of bits which are also valuable and you can write
#
a bunch of little little books which is perhaps better for your reputation as a historian and a
#
writer or you can do your 30 year thing or you have done your 12 year old thing now i can't
#
possibly imagine what either of those other projects would look like i just know that i love
#
this book right maybe if you'd spend a year more i would have loved it more maybe if you'd broken
#
it up into five books that body of work would have been as impressive or would have taken
#
readers into different directions how did your thinking of it evolve like when you started
#
what did you think the book was going to be and also what happens is and a trap that you have
#
avoided so beautifully is that often when we start writing about something we have a set
#
narrative in our head and we begin with that narrative and then we are just fitting stuff
#
into that narrative and what you have clearly done is that you have just let yourself open to
#
everything and then build this narrative where till the end of the book honestly i don't know
#
your politics and i think that is a great thing but what you have captured is the complexity
#
of the political environment in that time the complexity of all of these people and the
#
complexity of george fernandez and the humanity of george fernandez and and that's a powerful
#
achievement but just give me a sense of how you're thinking about this book evolved like why were you
#
drawn to george fernandez particularly what did you first imagine the book would be what approach
#
did you take did you warn yourself ki boss i'm not going to get into an ossified narrative i'm
#
going to just keep myself open and at what point do you say ki this is enough or that i can now
#
you know at what point does all of that material become one narrative and it's out there and you
#
say ki ha ho gaya i can stop now because if you wanted to go on that you could still put in so
#
much more the first i'll answer the first question of yours about about how how the whole idea got
#
conceived i i had just completed my book on gandhi's khadi movement and which was published
#
and i was just thinking about doing something on the post independence and i i don't know why
#
because maybe ram guha's gandhi volume had come in at that just that time so i was and he he is
#
a master class biographer in fact i was i think some deep down he has inspired me a lot in some
#
sense which i am not able to articulate when and how but sometimes he that happens he is there in
#
your mind and i just thought that i should do something about post independence now i know
#
about the freedom struggle by doing gandhi's khadi so i now would like to know a little bit
#
about post independence time and one day i was talking to a friend and suddenly i don't know
#
from where it happened that it just came to me that george fernandez would be a good idea to do
#
study because he's a colorful in the sense that he is and he's he has like later i came to know
#
which is a very famous phrase of him that always with the people never with the government okay
#
so so that was some kind of a rebellious figure that he was in the minds of people and which i in
#
fact as i said to you i saw that photograph of him and so so maybe there was and also ingenue he had
#
come once to give a talk and all and i heard that talk and but those things were later
#
remembrance i was not really thinking about those things but i was just thinking about i was wanting
#
to do something about the post-independence history and here is a man whose biography could
#
introduce me to the history of post-independence and i just thought okay let's start with it but
#
i really didn't know the all complexities that you're talking about or even the even the the
#
vastness of the subject was now i was not aware of it you see when you are dealing with the job
#
you need to know about the history of christianity you need to know about the history of trade union
#
movement you need to know about the history of opposition politics you need to know about the
#
history of congress and the all the congress prime ministers you need to know about those people
#
because he has dealt with the dehrou even if he was a ward member in mumbai he is dealing with
#
nehru he even if any he is just a mere mp he is dealing with a with a with indira gandhi and then
#
comes to rajiv gandhi and all kind of so you need to know all these individuals figure
#
so i didn't know if i had known that these kind of a work will be required i would not have taken
#
it up but i just jumped into it and i got into it and so i think that is the one second point
#
so i i wanted to know about the post-independence india that is the one thing second i was inspired
#
by george's rebellious figure and the third i think i'm i'm also a little like him i'm not
#
really with the government all the time i'm i'm a little bit a little bit in a position all the
#
time you know so so i think i i liked his personality because i was like that kind of
#
a thing a little bit of it so i thought that okay here is something which and something where he
#
was also a self-made man and i really liked that in fact that i needed to write something about
#
where there is a gandhi had enormous struggle let me tell you it's not today in fact you can
#
say it's very easy to become gandhi for that matter but gandhi is a an epitome of struggle
#
of pain and turmoil somebody who has undergone enormous pain through all through his life but
#
which we we don't talk about it suddenly he has become mahatma so we don't have to talk about it
#
but otherwise gandhis khadi my book shows lots of turmoil in that so so it is that okay so i just
#
wanted to do that and the lastly i have i think george was somebody who was not of once again it
#
gets derived out of the fact that i like some people who are in the in the other side of the
#
barrier so here is a man who was in the government but never prime minister never a top man for that
#
matter so i really never wanted to chronicle a power man's journey you know i somehow i have
#
this abhorrence towards i could have done on sonia gandhi for that matter i could have done on
#
somebody else for the man because they were the people who were when i started in 2009 sonia gandhi
#
was on the top of the hierarchy you know so i could have done i could have done even on lalu
#
prasad yadav for that matter or but i choose george because here is a man who has been who
#
has struggled i just had this notion that he has a struggle and then when i started doing research
#
i started looking into the papers i started looking looking into the different dimensions
#
of it you know it started exposing me to the very different aspects of this country's evolution
#
and which was which really kept pulling me back again and again there was enormous pressures on me
#
to complete the book as early as possible because the papers that were given to me were not exactly
#
from me in fact they were given to me by some people and those people were putting pressure
#
on me to complete the book which in fact i had to withstand and also you know continue to do
#
despite the fact that there was pressure to complete as early as possible which i was not
#
able to do it and i didn't want to do it a biography takes a lot of time for you to get
#
into the character and so it cannot be quickie kind of a thing that's something which is yes
#
certainly you can do one aspect of it you can do it just emergency and george but you even that
#
would not be a correct reflection upon it because you would not know the previous years of his
#
struggles and things like that you'll be focusing just on one aspect of it but those things also
#
done i'm not saying that they are not done people can do on batch pay and poem for that matter so
#
they can they are batch pay in the 70s and by possibly in the 50s kind of a parliament kind
#
of thing but i wanted to do a holistic thing so so so george i started with this i started thinking
#
about that okay i need to do a holistic work second i needed to do something which was which
#
is related to post independence time thirdly i wanted to do a convey the george story to a
#
larger cross section of the people and so i wanted to write in a in a way which which makes which
#
connects with the people and and fourthly i wanted to do somebody who has you know who has shown the
#
possibilities of protest you know what are the possibilities of the protest it's just not always
#
beating and things like you can also extend them and thirdly i come from a center where i teach
#
my center's name is so center for social studies and social exclusion and inclusive policy we deal
#
with the issues of minority we deal with the issues of of marginalization so i also wanted
#
to study a man who comes from a minority he is in fact the book was going to be named a minority
#
rising but it was shelved because we didn't want to confine him to just one minority but certainly
#
constitutionally he is a minority so so we were and he comes from a region which is a which is
#
not very powerfully linked with the center of india for that matter his language to the company
#
is spoken by it certainly now in the eighth schedule but but spoken by a very small section
#
of the population also and he was a catholic christian so here is a man who is coming from a
#
marginalized community and sections and the linguistic group and doesn't have a caste
#
background and things like and the way he rises it is also some kind of a credit to the nehruvian
#
india whereby such kind of a rise could happen you know whereby he was not determined by which
#
religion he comes from which caste he comes from i i write about salman ruz these midnight children
#
one sentence that he uses he says that at in 1947 hindus and muslims were killing each other
#
and there was this character who is a christian who says that he wanted to convey to the his people
#
that color of god doesn't really matter you know you see the color of the god you know here it is
#
a white god so which we are against him against whom we should not you know go in our own fights
#
and this character i have a few many times in midnight children george is the inspiring point
#
for salman ruz that's what i found when i was reading this i when i was reading midnight
#
children i found that i thought that oh here is a reflection he gets from salman from george's own
#
life and this in 1947 48 when george is being being imbibed with certain kind of an ideology
#
here is a time a denouement where the muslims and hindus are killing with each other and there are
#
christians who are thinking beyond the religion of of white or white god and they are thinking
#
in terms of building and george is the embodiment of that kind of a thinking where the theology
#
is becoming more libertine and and and also the choices that he makes he's going for
#
municipal workers which is again to use a word they come from the lowest caste denominator
#
uh and george is somebody who is a caste list so the acceptance of george as a leader of municipal
#
workers the the the scavengers the people who are sanitation workers if something happens
#
because of the two things one nehrumi in india at that time and secondly because of the fact that
#
george is a caste list man trying to project himself as the as the leader of the people
#
who are seen as a as a one belonging to one specific caste i i think i answered you the
#
first the second question i was i was i'm just forgetting in the sense of the shape of the book
#
that it can you can do it in two years you can do it in 30 years and you know when do you know when
#
to stop when do you when when do you feel that you can start writing that you have enough to
#
start writing and when do you feel that i should stop now yeah it happened you see how in the
#
initial days and a lot of writings also depend on the kind of sources that you have what amount of
#
sources that you have i had george's own private paper collection was was very rich till 1985 or
#
85 or 89 you can say it it was rich for that matter from 1970s and 1980s you can say that
#
these two decades are well covered even 60s for that matter but only few years are there so and
#
then i have to replenish it with the different researchers now in the post 80 two things happen
#
the politics has completely changed from what happened what was happening in 70s in 70s there
#
was still ideologically run politics being done in the 80s the politics is mainly about survival
#
you know the the people are doing a padhyasthras or whatever it is you know and they are just
#
only doing for survival so the politics needs to be now understood in a very different
#
you know parameters and 90s is entirely different when the caste politics comes into the total
#
when the religion politics comes into a picture so you have so so so the first problem was that
#
that my sources were getting scarcer after 1980s that is the one problem second i had already spent
#
almost a decade working on the 60s on the 50s and and also the on the on the on on his back
#
backstories like christianity and all and so i was really a little tired okay thirdly i talked
#
to ram and ram said that i said that we'll do on the two volumes the first volume will be
#
dealing till 1980 when he is a real hero for that matter and 19 post 1980 has intricacies of the
#
modern politics and it's a real macavillian politics where you are doing the politics you
#
are not really thinking in terms of ideology you are talking about only about the power politics
#
so i just thought that i told to ram and ram advised me and told and we had a discussion with
#
also srinath was there we were talking about it and he said that the two volume acceptance is
#
little difficult okay so let's confine it to the one volume and then i started working on it again
#
so it happened i think the two things helped me one the covid and and the lockdown that happened
#
it helped me a lot in doing that and so i came back with renewed energy to complete the whole
#
work in the in one volume i am not really satisfied with the way i have covered 90s
#
i have not i'm not really satisfied with the way i have covered even 2000s for that matter
#
i would like to do a different kind of writing when i these two decades are concerned but i was
#
i think i was also becoming impatient i i'm in academia and i need to also produce certain
#
academic production to to just sustain myself and that was becoming difficult because i for 12 years
#
i was working on one subject and i had not even produced anything in it i had not even an article
#
in the in any journals for that matter so so from academic point of view from my own academic
#
ranking point of view i was suffering so i thought that okay let me complete but i really feel that
#
that the history of 90s and the history of 2000 or even the batch pay regime i could have i did
#
little less justice to it and i could have dealt with a little bit more but i had the feeling that
#
i would be finishing it off within 80s and then i will take more time to do with the with the 90s
#
and 2000 which did not happen i guess time that you write you are you are devoting on a book
#
is not exactly internally decided it is externally decided resources you know the kind of resources
#
who are there to support you if jamia milia islamia would not have been there i would not have
#
been able to do this work because there is no support for this kind of a work you can't really
#
spend 12 years on on one subject you know and without producing anything nobody will believe
#
you that you're working or you're producing something so i think the wages that came from
#
jamia milia islamia kept me going despite the fact that i had to do two jobs and that's why
#
i i had almost stopped eating my dinner for for 10 years 12 years i did not eat my dinner i used to
#
finish off my lunch and after that i did not use to eat anything because eating dinner would reduce
#
my waking hours because and then how do i work because i have daytime i'm in the university i
#
come back and then start working on my george book and so therefore i and i had to work almost
#
up to two o'clock in the night or three o'clock in the night sometimes the thoughts used to come
#
at those times so you you have to reduce your bodily intake so that you feel light and it
#
remained for 10 years in fact i did not eat dinner i you know just to just to keep doing this
#
and i think i didn't fall ill but yes the drive was there so because of which perhaps yeah
#
this is amazing and intermittent fasting by the way is an excellent health practice
#
and is supposed to be one of the first things you have to do if you want to
#
live a long life so i hope you live a suitably long life and write it was not intended many
#
more books but good thing happened good thing happened how did you how hard was it for you to
#
kind of discipline yourself and do something that was fundamentally self-directed like in the sense
#
that your job at jamia teaching and so on and so forth would have a structure to it that there are
#
timings you have to land up there you have to work in a particular place there's a structure to it
#
you gotta do it but then when it's coming down to the book you know it's just you you have to set
#
the structure you have to find the motivation and i ask this with envy because i find it extremely
#
difficult to get work done i mean i mean and people tell me okay you're doing a podcast you're
#
doing a writing course but those are weekly things they have deadlines i get them done
#
but i have vast amounts of free time which i managed to fritter away magnificently
#
right and not get any real work done so i'm curious about whether this was a struggle for you just
#
the discipline of getting work done and obviously whatever your work ethic would have been it would
#
have been there from before from your previous books and all of that but was it a struggle how
#
do you arrive at a work ethic how easy or hard is it for you it's it's extremely hard when you're
#
in a full-time job and that too in the teaching job you have to perform in the classroom you know
#
it's the performance best work so you have to prepare your lectures and you have to do that
#
and those lectures are not really in sync with what you're writing on and so and sometimes what
#
happens in fact that's the most painful way because you are right you are into something you are
#
writing about it you're reading about it and you are submerged into that and suddenly you have to
#
also think about your classes tomorrow and you have to go for the class when you don't like to
#
go for the class so you have all this conflict that keeps coming but somehow the mind and the
#
body starts behaving that okay you get detached with something and you get attached to something
#
so i was almost detached from my classroom performance i was just doing what i was doing
#
and i was not carrying my classroom agony or or even my my failures to my room and to my back to
#
my place where i was working and i was i was coming into it and submerging myself into writing
#
so that and and then i i lost a lot of things let's not talk about those things which is in
#
fact lost by many people who are in the similar kind of vocations and and work but i lost many
#
things and i used to have to lose those things you know i have to you have to lose your family
#
life you have to lose like i said i i had no social life i have i'm not on the social media
#
i had no social life i have very few friends and it was a extremely reclusive life for last
#
so many years when i was i i didn't not attend any seminars i did not go for any any lectures or or
#
even and these are the requirements of an academic life you need to attend seminars you need to give
#
seminars but i was not doing all those things i was just keeping to myself going to the classroom
#
doing my minimum work and coming back to my my my place to do this work and this required not
#
just being in my room because i was also traveling across which required a leave and all the one of
#
the things that i in fact somehow was helped by i received a university grants commission project
#
which in fact provided me certain kind of a leeway which gave me official cover to for my travel to
#
across the country and which i did that in the in the later part of it when i just had it started
#
writing george thing i started writing 2015 or research was going on before that in 2009 onward
#
but to 2015 i started writing and 2017 they made me the director of the center which was in fact
#
another burden because while you are just teaching you can only you know you can you can just speak
#
in the class and go away you know and but when you're a director you many times you don't like
#
to meet a person but you have to meet now because you are a director you have to be responsible
#
and you have to be which i'm just saying for for for because these are the constraints which i
#
faced you know where many times you have to meet colleagues and and do official work which is
#
distracting you taking away from your work from from your primary you know engagement so five
#
years well i was writing this book i think except for the corona nobody helped yeah it was but i
#
guess locked down because our classes became online for two years almost so that helped me a lot i
#
guess i was not supposed to go and i was speaking to a screen and unfortunately my students many of
#
the students i would not say all they don't have an interactive ethos so they don't really
#
exchange question answers and things like i'm sorry to say but they are developing and they
#
will be developing more there are more and more but we do we it's our problem because we don't
#
teach our students to ask questions you know it's from the day one from those from the kitchen
#
garden onwards we don't really teach our students to ask questions i think that's the problem that
#
we i have even at a postgraduate level with my students here or maybe they're like me and they
#
just happy to listen to you because let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back after
#
the break to talk more about your life which i want to get back to and more about mr fernandez
#
and this incredible book there's so much to look into 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 india uncut dot
#
substract dot 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
#
india uncut dot substract dot 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 india uncut dot substract dot com thank you
#
welcome back to the scene and the unseen i'm chatting with rahul still about his life his
#
work his book and george fernandez and i'm going to go back to your life now we digress a bit
#
talking about themes and mr fernandez and all of that but tell me about that journey from
#
childhood to college and then within college you know how did you take that journey towards
#
landing up enjoying you and what was during this time what was like your conception of yourself
#
like what did you want to do what were your interests how did you see yourself take me
#
through this i think the reading helped me to understand myself and somehow there was a vague
#
feeling that i wanted to be writer but i didn't know how and why and and what kind of a writer
#
i remember reading my writing my my first lines of gandhi's khadi and my girlfriend
#
she just was reading it and i think she was the first one to say
#
you will be writer and i didn't even know that time i was writing my thesis my dissertation i
#
was not so much concerned with the writer and all kind of a thing and i was writing history and
#
history is mostly dependent on the sources so so writing skill is less evident in those kind of a
#
thing you know so i was doing but i don't know why she said that but but but slowly so i really
#
i wanted to go in journalism i wanted to be journalist but then i didn't want to report on
#
the municipality so i thought that okay how do you go about it so i thought that okay let me read
#
history more and so i joined ja new when i joined ja new in the history department it gave me quite
#
a like history of course you know it gives you lots of material to think about it you you deal
#
with the past you and the past is related with your present and you and and has reflection upon
#
your future so i think that that that that whole two year of history course in ja new is quite
#
rigorous let me tell you we have to read 12 to 15 books every 15 days kind of a thing you know so
#
we have to write term papers and all it's a quite a master class class in that sense so the beginning
#
was there i guess but i i was very impressed with the vs noipal's travel writings i was reading
#
his travel writings when i was not in ja new and i was impressed by the way he was writing and so
#
i was trying to write that too but once again like you are in the university you don't have much time
#
around so you can't go around but whenever i i travel outside ja new and i used to come and
#
pen down those those were really not very quality writing but i started writing that way i started
#
thinking in the that i can also express the travel writings of vs noipal i was also impressed with
#
the premchand for that matter his stories are beautiful and i was also writing with a similar
#
kind of irony similar kind of pain that he could express i remember reading which has left a great
#
deal of impression upon me this is a story by premchand on a small child who is growing up
#
with his grandmother and and he is wanting to have some money so that he can go for the
#
eid celebration and and the grandmother doesn't have much money and so see he is she is pastoring
#
him she is asking him not to pester her and all and she says a sentence where she says that
#
in nigori eid you know and that's because she doesn't have the money to give it to her grandson
#
and ultimately she gives some money to him and he goes into the marketplace and the the bazaar that
#
has there on the eid and he thinks of buying some sweet that's what his grandmother gave money for
#
and he is not buying that sweet he's buying a tawa a kind of pan which is going to help
#
you know his grandmother and this is such a marvelous emotional story of a child and his
#
child's link with the with the with the with the grandmother premchand such kind of a story
#
has really impressed me and so i guess i really wanted to do those that kind of writings one i
#
wanted to write travel writings like v s noipal did i wanted to write short stories like premchand
#
did and and i was later time when when i started reading other people as well i saw how garcia
#
tells a story how you know so i wanted to write the way these people have done okay and history
#
was my source and i would i was not i think initially i wrote some stories but they were
#
also published in certain newspapers but i was not very i didn't devote that much of time in
#
writing fictional histories or fictional stories or or i never even thought about writing a novel
#
for that matter because of my training in the history department i became you know to small
#
extent whatever you call it is a historian so i started looking into the into the facts of history
#
and writing about it and i felt i felt fulfilled a bit fulfilled yeah so to say that i wanted to be
#
writer will be a little presumptuous but i grew up in slowly in that direction and i don't even
#
know even today whether i can call myself as a writer but yes history has remained my passion
#
and i think it will remain more of my passion but along with the history because of my association
#
with the grassroots movements i also became anthropologist so anthropology and history you
#
know they both really inspire me even today and after doing my khadi work i was awarded my phd
#
and then i had no job or nothing of that kind so i went to bodhgaya and and stayed in a in an
#
ashram which was called samanvaya ashram which was which which catered to the needs of musahid
#
children for that matter and i stayed in that ashram for six months and traveled into the
#
villages of of that area on foot on on hired bike on borrowed bike and also on with anybody
#
who can offer me a cycle or bicycle or even a motorcycle for that matter and i went into
#
far-flung areas naxal in naxal areas naxal controlled areas the poverty-stricken villages
#
different caste groups and so i was keen to portray what poverty feels like and that was
#
mostly i did not want to just bring in what was already i was witnessing but i was also wanted
#
to go into the back of the history and so the history and anthropology started mixing in my
#
writing and this happened in 2005 onward more and more and the i think the you know sometimes you
#
really don't know what you are going to become or you what you want to become you just do what you
#
know what what what comes to you you know and you keep doing things you know i think i have done
#
what at one particular moment has inspired me or and i have not bothered about all the constraints
#
or the restraints or or all the roadblocks that can come up i never thought that george book would
#
be any cakewalk but i felt that i need to do it and i did not really calculate all the roadblocks
#
that come up and it can come can come up so it all happened i kept doing i was i think so driven
#
that the roadblocks started flattening out and uh yeah so i have always done what comes came to
#
my mind that time you know that premchand story you mentioned idga is one of my favorites and in
#
fact i uh for my listeners i have an episode where i discussed premchand the fair bit with the
#
or great author sarah rai who happens to be his granddaughter and sarah just got a super
#
book out called burnt umber book of his book of essays and stuff and it's beautiful so do pick that
#
up and what you said about you know and and of course from gaja when you went there you a book
#
came out of it which was self-published called pausing poverty gaja in bihar and my question here
#
is that it strikes me then that when you're going there there are sort of two simultaneous
#
impulses which uh you must be feeling and one is a storytelling impulse and one is a sense-making
#
impulse i got to capture what i am seeing in front of me and two whether using history or
#
anthropology i have to make sense of it and it strikes me that in both of these a young person
#
would be limited by two things and would have to grow those aspects in storytelling you would be
#
limited by craft because whenever you start out you know nobody's good when they start you have
#
to learn the craft and you can do it by conscious application of mind you can do it by looking at
#
models and saying okay this is how nai paul constructs his sentences this is how he structures
#
his essays and that is one way of doing it so that is one question about the evolution of your craft
#
in a sense what were your models and for sense making your the restriction is frames that when
#
you're young you don't know enough about the world yet right and when and especially i guess in a
#
place like jnu when you first go there there'll be certain frames that are fashionable that are
#
the norm and you adopt those frames and they're on the walls also and you adopt those frames but
#
as you get older you realize that every story about the world is wrong because it is a limited
#
story because the world is deeply complex and your frames evolve and you gather more and more frames
#
and there's a complexity there and that's the second journey i want to ask you about like so
#
the first journey about the craft and how you learn storytelling and who were your models
#
and the second journey about how your frames your ways of looking at the world evolved because in
#
the george ferrandes book i see tremendous maturity and restraint in the sense that
#
you are avoiding the typical temptation people would have of giving gyan or passing judgment
#
or any of that you're letting it unfold and you know and and that's the power of it and so tell
#
me about these two aspects you know the the how you worked on your craft and developed your
#
storytelling skills and how you you know and obviously both are lifelong processes and
#
secondly how you then develop the way you look at the world your frames where you get away from
#
some simplistic ideological views which is how we all start i guess at some point in time we start
#
with a combination of instinct that is unjust and we imbibe whatever we are taught from the world
#
and we evolve that well i was i was in gaia i picked up a book by samuel heartington and he
#
talked about the culture how it culture matters and and how culture can be can be responsible
#
for somebody's poverty and somebody's prosperity for that matter and i wanted to question that i
#
wanted to really see that that whether this is true or not true so if you see if you ask you for
#
the model i think heartington's that that book whereby he talks about the culture and relationship
#
with the poverty and all i think that was what the model that i was carrying i wanted to question
#
that i wanted to question whether this is happening or not happening and so i went into a small place
#
near the temple that is the bodhgaya temple where the buddha was enlightened or given enlightenment
#
there is a this place called prem dasa nagar which is in fact named after a after the president of
#
sri lanka who in fact inaugurated that village and this was a musahar village very poor village
#
people living in the huts and these huts were uprooted and concrete houses were made
#
and given to these people and then when i reached there it was almost i think five
#
ten years after that i was doing this research these houses were now in dilapidated condition
#
and the the the poverty was of the same degree for that matter so i really wanted to understand
#
that what really is the cause now in the development literature you you see the lot
#
of people would talk about the lack of voices of the poor poor are not able to put their voices
#
across that's why the policy making is not inculcating or not incorporating their voices
#
and that's why policy making is a failure for beco because the poor is unable to put across
#
his point he is not having voice in the policy making bodies the second is that that the poor
#
the poor has not been incorporated in the struggle to uplift their own
#
strength that is a part once again a derivation of the of the of the lack of voice because if
#
you are part of the struggle to uplift yourself then you are you are airing your voice the third
#
point was that whether you have any constructive intervention or not that is whether the policy
#
intervention has been such as to uplift you now if in the bremda sanagar i found that they had the
#
voices and they also had the constructive intervention and despite both of these things
#
they they are still remaining poor so this question was really a big question to me that
#
you have a voices you had you had been a part of what we call bodhgaya land movement in which the
#
mutt that was controlling the land around bodhgaya temple they had been struggled against and the
#
land was redistributed to the poor people and and budhan movement happened in 1950s there many
#
people got the land out of this budhan movement and many of the villages were resettled villages
#
where the poor people had been given the land and also the homestead land and they had been
#
settled there and many villages have names like bapu nagar binoba puri kind of names that they
#
were new villages that happened only in the 50s and 60s and i was i was also staying in an ashram
#
which was an output of or outgrowth of binoba's movement in so they had been given land they had
#
been met to struggle against the mutt so there was enough voices that was given to these people
#
young it is these poor people and there were enough constructive activism that had happened
#
premadasa himself gave the houses and all these people and and and the government also came out
#
with the with giving them carousel oil dealership or rickshaw all kind of a thing
#
but then the question remained that why are they poor okay and this i was trying to explore and
#
therefore i went into the houses of these poor people and talked to them about their own
#
predicament i just asked why do you think people say that the poor are poor because they are
#
drunkards and they would answer me they would tell me that oh oh where are the money to
#
to have such kind of a drink that i'm i'm i'm splurging i'm not splurging there is no money
#
for that okay how much money i get and then i learned that daily wages in bodhgaya are not
#
enough the kind of daily wages they get second point people said to me that the course work
#
requires coarse food so if we drink it's a coarse food that we take so that we can work the next day
#
similar kind of a coarse work third i went along with these people they used to go
#
climbing on the on the on the on the on the goods train go to the place where there was a
#
mica mining happening and this mica mining was completely under next lights whether the whole
#
organization was under next lights and they the poor people would go with a with any kind of
#
tools dig up the rat holes bring the mica and these mica along with the soil were then then
#
sieved and then the mica was sold in the land i went with them i stayed with them i saw all
#
these things and then i realized that even when the land was given to these poor people
#
the best of the land was not given to these people the land that was given was a concrete
#
or or some kind of forested land or some kind of land which was a rocky and mountainous zone
#
so that second point the land that was given was not adequate enough to to give them kind of a
#
sustenance that was required so you have even government says that a five acre of land is
#
required for making a family sustainable and that was not there heard once the distribution logic
#
started then there were a lot of other people who came in to acquire whatever land now when you have
#
a temple which is a touristic center and many people international people from the international
#
from the different different countries they come there and they are making monasteries around it
#
so those land which was given to them now it was a very precious land as far as the commercial
#
market was concerned and these people would be keen to lease out that land so even if they if
#
land is being leased out and they're not really worried about somebody said that
#
it came from him only that a musaher looks nothing beyond his thali that he's so much
#
focused on his food daily food that he is not bothered about what will happen tomorrow and
#
so similar kind of a comments were met to me so what i found that the it is not like like even
#
at that time the food the right to food campaign was going on amartya sain and george was was
#
leading it and one of the slogan that i saw on one of the ngo in both their wall it said
#
he was not talking about any kind of accumulation for takeoff economic takeoff for people you need
#
an accumulation of certain kind of wealth he was talking about even the slogans led by the people
#
like george and and and you know amartya sain and right to food campaign with such a such a
#
conglomeration of urban intellectuals and activists were there they were talking about a weight system
#
which only sustains me not about accumulating certain kind of resources for taking off so the
#
poor is being patronized and the systemic failure is causing that poverty the poverty is not being
#
produced because of their culture poverty is being produced because of the systemic
#
and the policy failure that was what my conclusion was all about and this conclusion did not come
#
because of my economic studies that this did not come because of my studying statistical figures
#
and all this came because of talk that i had with the people around that area and i concluded that
#
they are extremely right in saying that the poverty is not produced because of my habit of
#
being drunkard or drinking mahua and sleeping through the day it was because of the fact that
#
the enough policy intervention is not happening and even when there is a policy intervention that
#
is happening it is not leading to sufficient uplift of me because of the lack of you know the
#
the kind of element that has gone into the policy making and this i this was a quite quite an eye
#
opener though it started with the huttington's point which was a model for me i wanted to just
#
question that that that that framework that he had given and then i realized that this is something
#
which i did but i think i tell you when i went to that village i was only having huttington in my
#
mind i wanted to just understand the point that he has mentioned whether this is being reflected
#
to the ground level or not ground level because he makes a point that the ghanians are poor
#
because of in comparison to south africans or south koreans because the ghanians are legy
#
he makes that point and south koreans are are rich or prosperous because of the hard work because
#
of the discipline of work because of their their commitment to the work and at this point i wanted
#
to explore and when i did this i was happy to note that this is what you know this is i was
#
creating some kind of a counterpoint to it i i studied and and in this league i i i studied also
#
the the causes of poverty so the two important thing in the rural india is of course land and
#
the irrigation i found that in irrigation case many of the government initiatives are not really
#
leading to the to the kind of irrigation that is required for for for agriculture because gaya is
#
once again a rain-fed area and you need to have some kind of a easy easy way to transport water
#
from the river or anywhere to the field they are in the very traditionally had a system of what we
#
call ahar and pine ahar is of a kind of a pool of water which is stored from the hill the water
#
which is slithering off the hill it is stored in some kind of a pool and then because and using
#
the gravitational pull they the water goes through canal to the villages all around both gaya
#
what did what the government did was the two important things one they they made the irrigation
#
capital intensive by by bringing what we call the diesel pumps so and the second they in the
#
name of redistribution of land they took over the land of ahar as well and so the upkeep of ahar and
#
pine after independence in the name of food for work and all kind of everything did not really
#
take place and it became almost perfunctory people government was not really bothered about
#
because they were more concerned about pulling the water from the ground and then sending it
#
both of these ideas really impacted the poverty of both gaya and this because the land irrigation
#
which was traditionally done although it was done only to the people who had
#
land the poor did not have the land so second by making it capital intensive they made it more
#
confined to the higher caste and the people who had the larger land and therefore the poor became
#
more poorer and the land consolidation became in a different went into different direction there
#
were more and more people with a bigger chunk of land and the poor started leaving and the migration
#
took up took off in a big way people who were still having land they were not able to sustain
#
out of the land they preferred leaving the land fallow and going for different kind of a work so
#
the many people who were going for mica mining in the both gaya area they were the people who
#
were not landless they had land but land was so uncultivable that is the one second land was so
#
unprofitable the agriculture whole process i calculated that the kind of investment that goes
#
into the into the land for one acre of paddy cultivation that and the kind of produce that
#
happens there is a almost 500 rupees difference so you are investing more into the land and you are
#
you're getting less out of it and your investment is you're not calculating your family's labor into
#
that why the children are sent into the into the into the farm because that is the way the
#
agriculture has to made into the profitable venture now if you don't if you take out the
#
children out of the out of the land or land work then it becomes much more non-profitable
#
enterprise and that's why the more and more people are leaving land and going into the
#
into into the urban areas for whatever work they get you know brick laying or rick supplying or
#
just manual labor people are leaving land and that is the another important you know discovery of mine
#
was that agriculture had not only become unprofitable rural people are migrating
#
from the village into the urban area and as long as the profit in terms of the policy intervention
#
is not there to withhold this migration the poverty will remain and the land consolidation
#
or production of poverty would be happening not because of the culture of the people
#
but because of the policy failure or the inadequacy of the policy intervention this this is so I
#
started with a model yes of course and in the beginning as you say that certainly we are not
#
so much into it you know we don't know much about the whole world and as long as you don't know the
#
whole world you will not able to make the point that you're trying to make and you don't even
#
know what point you want to make I went simply with this fact that okay I want to question this
#
herdington model and then see what what what reflection I get out of it but I think
#
this search for the model as well as the questioning of it happened only because of my
#
association with the grassroots movement in the 90s if I would not have become an activist with
#
the ekta parishad I would not have known the issues and the and the problems and then I would
#
not have searched similar kind of a texts which are questioning these things and that text would
#
not have become a model for me and that would not have brought back to me in both gaya to question
#
it much more deeply I think this was I think this is a trajectory so I would not say that
#
models are not there yes of course models are there but you search for a model the models don't
#
come to you just because you're waiting for it you search for the models to to come to you
#
and then you learn slowly either to question that model or work on that model you know yeah so I
#
I mean before we talk about your grassroots experience in 99 and all of that which of course
#
I will a thought and a question and the thought is that the one part where I push back is that the
#
migration from agriculture to cities and to factories is actually inevitable and desirable
#
like in all developed economies you have four percent to ten percent or normally less than
#
ten percent of the people engaged in agriculture whereas in India the number is disputed but it's
#
around fifty percent somewhere forty to sixty percent which is crazy not sustainable and all
#
countries sort of in their trajectory towards progress make that thing where a agriculture
#
gets much more productive and you have less people therefore required to keep farms running
#
and all of that and you know and but many of those countries had an industrial revolution had
#
manufacturing sectors come up we through bad policy we kind of restrained our manufacturing sector
#
but my question here is like that's that that's a very interesting insight that you challenge
#
Huntington's conclusion that culture leads to poverty and you showed that no systemic failure
#
leads to poverty and I'm wondering if there's a vicious cycle there that systemic failure
#
can change the culture and lead to behavior that then perpetuates poverty for example you know you
#
speak you mentioned I think him saying that in Ghana people are lazy in South Korea they work hard
#
and I'm thinking that laziness and work ethic are also responses to incentives so if you have
#
a completely paternalistic system where you're just handing out basic food and no one's looking
#
beyond their thali then you will do less work and you could call that laziness externally
#
and equally if you have a system where there is a reward for working hard and it is a visible
#
reward and you can get ahead then you will work harder and a single individual may therefore
#
respond to one kind of incentive by being lazy in one place and by working hard in another place
#
and therefore what what appears to be a cultural characteristic if you're lazy and you generalize
#
actually ends up being a rational response to a systemic failure or to a systemic non-failure if
#
you know if you're working hard there are two things like supposing a poor can get work
#
one thing that he needs to get work second he needs to get a proper wage
#
in the Bodh Gaya I found that both of these things are non-available you don't have the work
#
so you primarily depend on on on the forest collection of the fuel load from the forest so
#
that you can sell into the market or you can earn two or three rupees out of it
#
second the proper wage for your work is not there so what is happening is that you have not
#
properly implemented land reform that is the one thing second your wage is not determined by the
#
market but by the feudal relationship the third that you have the state's acts reach in enforcing
#
these relationships economic relationship is totally non-present so I would not say
#
that that agriculture is losing out or I would not even say that the culture you know because
#
they are lazy because they are lazy culturally lazy I would say as you rightly say there is no
#
incentive that is the first point but incentive is not there not because the because incentives
#
are not there because the state has purposefully created a system whereby the incentives for the
#
largest section of the population is not there you know that is what is happening with the Bodh Gaya
#
kind of a situation where you have a 30 percent of of Dalit population of the total population
#
which is a Dalit population which is 30 percent of the population and they are mostly landless
#
and the people who had been given the land by the Bhutan the land is so inadequate so unirrigated
#
so barren that you don't get out of it anything you know so I guess you know this is a complicit
#
kind of a situation whereby everybody has come together you know and and and some people in
#
fact would say that the poverty they have romanticized poverty as well they say that
#
oh Buddha you know he in fact got enlightened because of the poverty that he was living in
#
now that is the kind of a level people can go to rationalize their their iniquitous system that
#
that prevails upon in in Bodh Gaya whereby a large section of the population has been deprived of
#
resources has been deprived of education has been deprived of any kind of state support and that's
#
where I found that this lady telling me that the upper caste people of my village says that the
#
the Harijans in fact they use the Harijan word is still there and the who eat pigs will not be are
#
not entitled to study in the school and every village has a conflict raging on it you know and
#
this is where the violence happens that is where the mass killing happens that is where the next
#
light pops up and this needs to be seen as a fight for resource resource rather than
#
a kind of a social violence I would not like to see as a as a as a militancy or the violence I
#
would like to see it as a as a battle for resource distribution you know.
#
Vaisvazhan you know what you said about the village and what that lady told you reminds me
#
of what Ambedkar once famously said his famous quote quote what is a village but a sink of
#
localism a den of ignorance narrow-mindedness and communalism stop quote uh let's let's sort of
#
talk about your JNU years and how from you know being a student in JNU you suddenly you know you
#
go on this padhyatra with you know the Ekta Parishad and then you're traveling from Gwalior
#
to Raigar and you're actually doing so much work also like you've described it as you know building
#
linkages with urban intellectuals doing media media advocacy and and you even got a self-published
#
book out of this defeated innocence adivasi assertion land rights in the Ekta Parishad movement
#
so in your personal journey take me through how you know what are you doing at JNU you're learning
#
from the walls stuff is happening but where do you want to go how do you land up in this padhyatra
#
and what are the kind of interesting learnings that you have from here like earlier you spoke
#
about how PV Rajgopal was such an extraordinary influence on you and an extraordinary man so tell
#
me a bit more about that also you know bring it alive for me well JNU what it does like it provides
#
you a a nice place to stay and and and mess food is quite cheap so you really don't have to worry
#
about the money part in fact you know even if you get one thousand rupees a month you can live
#
nicely because you have a free room and you have a sixty we used to pay some sixty rupees for
#
six months of tuition fee so so it was just sixty rupees can you imagine and our hostel was almost
#
the same kind of a thing maybe two hundred rupees or three hundred rupees for a one semester
#
and our food bill used to come to around seven hundred rupees or eight hundred rupees
#
per month so i didn't really need that kind of a money if i could do something small kind of
#
and write an article get seven hundred rupees or five hundred rupees it was more than enough
#
so i got a subsidized place of living which funded my activism this is important you know
#
residential universities are important because of this they provide a subsidized place for students
#
extracurricular activities if you are not having that kind of a thing if you have a very
#
highly you know costing living in the in the in the universities you cannot do these things
#
i think i to large extent i would credit jnu for providing me a subsidized place a subsidized
#
living a subsidized food which in fact which enabled me to do this kind of engagement my
#
association with ekta parishad from 1995 onward have started happening after my my ma days so
#
ma doesn't provide you much time but from after ma when i was doing amphil on khadi then i met
#
some gandians and these gandians rajgopal was one of them and suba rao he died recently he was
#
another gandian of a very repute he both of these people introduced me to to and and as i said raj
#
gopal had a very peculiar way of training you he would not say that he's training you but he was
#
make you write letters or maybe dictate dictation from him and that would give me a lot of knowledge
#
about what was happening around so so that was the and then i went into the villages i started
#
writing about different villages different interventions i started documenting that
#
and the padayatra whole thing you know from six months i was going to the villages coming back
#
today jnu writing about it and and then once again publishing it the newspapers somehow the
#
friends in the newspapers really gave lots of space fine year was doing a lot of work on that
#
hindustan times and other people also did a lot of a lot of gave a good coverage to those but the
#
other thing i guess without jnu i would not have been able to do it i would have been looking for
#
a job i would have been even if i'm looking for a job in the social sector i would have been looking
#
for a for for job to earn some money and to live myself the way even in a small house of any kind
#
so jnu provided me a subsidized living so that i can i could active be active and and intervene
#
in the field which gave me added knowledge and also a kind of empathy which i was perhaps would
#
not have got from the books uh you know i it gave me by associating myself with the with the people
#
there i guess i would credit jnu in to a large extent not exactly because of what i learned in
#
his class it in its classroom but what i learned from its walls and the space it provided for my
#
art my expression i remember in some time mr lk advani was supposed to come in in jnu and
#
uh jnu students had debarred his entry and the next day indian express wrote a an editor saying
#
that jnu needs to be disciplined and i remember remained awake for whole night after reading
#
that's the whole day after reading in the morning newspaper uh edit the whole day and then the whole
#
night and by morning next day morning i produced some 12 page of of of rebut of that thing and
#
went to very i was not very sure about whether it will be published but then i just went and
#
put the article went directly to the to bahadur sahaja for mark and their indian express office
#
and gave them this this piece and the next day they published it not exactly in the same format
#
but they published in a in a in 1200 words kind of i think it was really 12 page art article trying
#
to cite instances of people from jnu who have contributed in the social field and and in the
#
in the movement and the article's title was jnu's culture is indiscipline okay so so and but we did
#
that kind of thing we did that kind of thing i think and this could happen only because
#
the kind of freedom that existed in jnu the kind of kind of acceptance that we had for these kind
#
of associations of students with the outside world and the kind of political understanding that was
#
there around us and also the free thinking some sense you know i was not part of any i i i
#
purposefully never was part of political parties and the political student groupings in jnu so i
#
remain myself awake from that and and also removed from that so i i i also had enough time because i
#
was not part of the students movement in jnu so i was part of the outside movement so so i had
#
that privilege as well you know i i think i think i really purposefully and very consciously i made
#
a decision that i won't be part of the jnu political traditions and i will use this space
#
for my outside engagements i think that was that was a little smart decision i feel i now feel
#
otherwise many people who have been very active in jnu politics they are they become very narrow
#
in the sense that they remain in jnu politics it's almost like you don't grow out of it you know
#
and i i think that was a smart decision on my part i guess so i guess so i because that that
#
made me that gave me two things one it gave me space to interact with the larger issues and second
#
it gave me an introduction to the real issues of this country and and i was what i was associated
#
with a group of the people who were already part of the movement and in the people's movement what
#
really happens that you are supposed to do everything you have you are supposed to do
#
slogans you're also supposed to write you're also supposed to talk to the people convince people
#
bring the people into the movement the intellectuals and and other people so you have and in the
#
people's movement you really don't have many trained people so you have your one person has
#
to suppose to do many things i think that opportunity enriched to a large extent my
#
cons my concerns and expanded my horizon perhaps and you mentioned famous people at jnu aren't
#
nirmala sitaraman and l jaishankar also from their yes they are this current government also has
#
luminaries and has benefited from jnu training did you become a star in jnu after your article came
#
out uh there are many stars in jnu so there's no but all the girls must have swooned and all that
#
nothing like that no exactly not exactly because the jnu has lots of stars and you know in our
#
times there were people yeah people came to know about me and they started thinking about that
#
okay but i was also as i said to you i was not part of much about the jnu social life in that
#
so i used to write and then go back to the field again come back again with that kind of a thing
#
so i was not really part of the social life of jnu but jnu has lots of stars you know yeah so
#
you mentioned earlier you know that when you read huntington's thesis you wanted to question it
#
and i noted the choice of word and i mischievously thought that if he was a true academic he would
#
have said i want to interrogate it not question it and i fully approve you're using the simpler term
#
because i think too many academics get trapped in their jargon in their in their frames of
#
thought even and everything is restrictive and i keep like my writing course is called
#
the auto clear writing because something that i'm at pains to stress is that you know clear
#
writing leads to clear thinking and vice versa it's a two-way relationship and if you write
#
unclear prose you will think in an unclear way and it simply won't work out but my question is
#
not so much about that my question is more about the traps that academics can fall into of sort of
#
entering this academic game where everything becomes about how many papers do i publish and
#
how do i if you're one of those people who needs funding for their work how do i get funding for
#
my work what is fashionable right now i need to fit in with my folks and it becomes sort of an
#
insular world speaking to itself with no connection to the real world now in your case right from the
#
time you were a student you said that you weren't just on campus doing genuine politics you were
#
outside engaging with the real world all of your work is like that you fought those incentives in
#
the sense 12 years to write this book you could have written four books or five books in this time
#
written so many papers so you've resisted that despite in a sense being an academic yourself
#
being at jamia milia you know training and mentoring future academics so what is your
#
sense of the academic profession and whether there is need for introspection on the way it
#
is going and the kind of incentives in play because you know some of our finest historians
#
today are really people who have like ram gohar who have come from outside who have received push
#
back from you know snooty academics here is not one of us but often the best work comes from
#
people who are putative outsiders who have all the rigor and methodology and all of that of the
#
finest historians but who are not bound by its constrained ways of thinking so what's your sense
#
of academia and how can you know what can academia learn you know what should young historians perhaps
#
who are listening to this you know take into account as as you know as a cautionary warning
#
on how to proceed i think from the because of my association with the grassroots movement
#
i developed this knack for or this urge to communicate with the people my idea was not
#
to get some papers written now my name my my need was to communicate with the people and when i did
#
or reach out my message to the people in fact that was the main concern i was not really
#
writing for academic laurels or or even getting acceptance you know because the choice of of
#
gandhi as i said to you was something something you know below par in jnu you would be talking
#
marxism and and you're going to labor history or something like that but you would not be talking
#
about gandhi so but i tell you one thing well reading gandhi's hundred volumes they gave me
#
a clarity about language they told me that a simpler words can convey much more than the
#
complicated jargon words and gandhi throughout his hundred volumes is not using one jargon at all he
#
is so simple in his writing and somehow gandhi's khadi when it came out many people thought that
#
i'm i'm in for shahid i mean was was one of them said that okay but you you have reached out to
#
in such a simpler way i guess it was gandhi's language which taught me to write in a simpler
#
way rather than writing and the urge was really to communicate reach out to the people and that's
#
why when i i did this this george biography i was not really looking for though it's such a
#
academically rigorous rigorously done book i was not really reaching out to an academic publisher
#
i wanted penguin to do it because i wanted penguin to publish this so that it can reach to many
#
people although there was a great urge in me as well you know as you say that getting into that
#
kind of a bracket and getting accepted by the by the by the scholars and and and admissions i i
#
would have approached some university publication houses to do this but i was thinking not about
#
anything else i was thinking about how can i make maximum number of people read it there was already
#
limitation i was writing in english you know so so there was already a limited class of the people
#
who was going to read it but i was still keen that okay academic publication houses can give
#
me some kind of a academic acceptance but will be limited to 300 copies i need to reach out to as
#
many people as possible if penguin can do that then i would go for with this and so throughout
#
since the time i began writing i think the urge to communicate to reach out to the people of this
#
country with the whatever understanding i could develop by that time that was a strong urge less
#
about my own academic success or my academic acceptance or even to reach out like ram keeps
#
saying about how homegrown he is you know i will because ram is a big man he could say that kind
#
of a thing i did get admissions in in in the universities of oxford oxford you know as well
#
as cambridge but i did not go for that because that time i was more keen on being grassroot
#
activist than going abroad and doing this kind of a thing so i'm i think consciously i decided
#
that i'll reach out to the people rather than look for academic laurels so i guess that was that so
#
you made this decision but otherwise if you look at academy or do you think that it's a bit of a
#
waste because in other fields what like you know in economics for example there is a point of view
#
that a lot of our finest minds are wasted in the academic circle jerk and are not contributing
#
their brilliance to solving problems in the real world even historians for that matter
#
yeah even historians for that matter we we have in the name of history we have facts collection
#
we don't have a perspective and perspective is not there because we have not really dirtied our
#
hands as a as a well while forming our perspective or forming our scholarship so most of the
#
historical books which are being produced and that's why you have a fictional history
#
historians coming up now which is a which is in fact fictionalizing history for that matter and
#
which has more readership than the than the university writing and or university scholarship
#
but larger question is about academia academia in this country is already dead it is not producing
#
the kind of scholarship that is required to run an academia it has happened because of the two
#
reasons one the environment in academia is so unfriendly to academics okay there is too much
#
of routine and too much of you know exercises in order to control and ran in the people rather
#
than giving incentive or creating environment for creativity now i think this is what is big
#
problem because the academia is not real like i i tell you if you look at them at the at the
#
studies on the muslim issues in this country for that matter most of our books which are
#
really seminal contribution on the muslim studies have been done by the foreigners
#
okay robin robinson talking about about about francis robinson talking about
#
deoband okay firangi mahals for that matter metcalfe barbara metcalfe she's talking about
#
richard ethan talking about the persianate age so we don't really despite the fact that we have
#
universities like jamia milia islamia or aligarh and other universities and we have lots of muslim
#
scholarship for that matter they should be working on on these kind of our biggest book on aligarh
#
university is by david levilleld so we really don't have indian academics working on the issues
#
which really pertains to us okay we have so we repeat what the foreign scholars have done on us
#
of on us and most of our our scholarship is repetition of what has already been
#
done and we teach the same thing in the classroom if you don't provide me enough leave to do creative
#
research how would i teach in the classroom so what i will do i will repeat what has already
#
been written about or what so the biggest problem is that there's a lack of environment
#
in the academia in the in the in the in the legal academia that we have they don't provide
#
you enough space there is no resources and there is too much of policing which doesn't give you
#
space for academic exploration and it requires risk for doing this kind of work so the most of
#
our scholarship are state funded because we work in the state universities and therefore we cannot
#
really take up issues which might go against the state or against the prevailing ethos of the
#
state and that's why our scholarship remains lopsided they are mostly focused on the fashionable
#
subjects and they are superficial we need time we need resources and we need freedom these three
#
things are prerequisite for real scholarship which is lacking in the indian academia so you
#
don't really have enough of fertile fertile imagination coming in we have people who are
#
doing nine to five jobs and which is extremely painful because you're wasting such a great
#
resource of this country and just because you are feeding some people enabling them to be a part of
#
the market rather than the intellectual activity that they should be doing and you know there are
#
there is a lot of material in the national archive which is not being explored by indians
#
we have a lack of linguistic proficiency we don't know persian we don't know arabic or to know about
#
our so most of our scholarship has become also limited to english language so so what the
#
colonialism produced that has become a source for reproduction of knowledge which again reproduces
#
the colonial thoughts again or colonial ethos and therefore we have not been able to put
#
fresh thinking or fresh material into it so we are repeating most of the colonial knowledge
#
in even in the post-colonial time yeah it's a it's a groundhog day of colonialism and it's
#
really funny i mean it's like a vicious circle then the colonialists train you and then you
#
train the next generation like the colonialists trained you and then it kind of goes on and on
#
when you the phrase that you mentioned too much policing i'm guessing that could mean two things
#
and one is that like you said that if the you know everything is state funded so your research is
#
therefore constrained by that there are certain areas where you will never get funding and the
#
other is i guess there are certain academic fashions also at different points in time
#
and if you don't go along with those passions or present work that is looking at something with
#
those fashionable prisms then again you're not going to get funding is that what you meant
#
there are there are not any there aren't any funding sources in india okay let me tell you
#
so the funding is not really the issue from the institutional way the funding is the salary thing
#
i get the salary so i remain bound to the institution there are not many independent
#
institutions to fund your research there is no in fact none existing i don't see anyone existing
#
you have icsr or you have ugc or ichr they are they are you know a petty fogging in fact they
#
are not really funders in that way and i guess someone like the new india foundation can help
#
certain individuals but systemically it is yeah there is no systemic support system for academia
#
second you know new india foundation kind of institutions are recent outgrowth you know and
#
which is in fact more and more such institutions would emerge if you want to reproduce or bring
#
some new knowledge but state institutions which are supposed to and and and most of these
#
institutions hire people like us they have i will not go into the recruitment issues i will not go
#
into that because that's again a new kind of a problem which which which needs lots of discussion
#
and and what kind of things happen how people are recruited and all kind of a thing and it's not
#
merit-based let me tell you it's so anybody who says that it's a merit-based and some kind of a
#
thing is this is all hogwash so what is happening is that i would i would assume that okay you
#
recruit whatever people you recruit and at least believe in that person that he will have his own
#
motivations to do some research provide him some kind of a space provide him give him some kind of
#
resources but it is not happening okay and in a poor country like us job is a privilege a state
#
job is a privilege now once you get a job and that too in a state institution you feel that you are
#
at the you don't need to work anywhere you know you know you are you and you don't have to dig up
#
anything now you have got a job you will get whatever you will get and even if you don't get
#
a job so even if you don't get promotions you are getting your money after every month and so you
#
know what as long as i was not working i was struggling for money there was no money in my
#
bank and i was struggling and once i get got into the job the money started coming in my bank every
#
month okay i could have become complacent right and but i have a feeling that though george book
#
took 12 years only because i was in the job if i had not been a job i could have produced this book
#
in three years or four years you know but because of the need to get this support money from
#
somewhere you need to be in that kind of a fettered situation where your work suffers and
#
your life betters out you know let me pose a thought experiment to you right what you've
#
just described and other guests before you have described both in the context of history and
#
other academic context is that we have a broken ecosystem and the incentives are completely out
#
of whack and here's my thought experiment question to you let's say that some benefactor listening to
#
this contacts you tomorrow and says i was really impressed by everything you said on our mid show
#
i'm going to give you 10 million dollars it's a start i'll give you more money if you need it
#
use it to build the ecosystem of your dreams which once you build it you know it gives
#
the good incentives to good scholars and eventually everything turns around and then people want to
#
imitate what you have done and you know it's a beautiful virtuous cycle all over again
#
new india foundation is that kind of experiment ram has done it i know and i i will say i will
#
consider ram's contribution in making new india foundation as a more seminal experiment than his
#
books for that matter because but but his books has brought him that place where he could use
#
his position to do this kind of a thing so i would not say that that's not possible so what would you
#
do you i'm giving you 10 million dollars i would i would i would create you see the point once
#
again is that you know the the money is not really the constraint the constraint you know money is
#
not really the constraint george book did not really i did not invest too much money into it
#
i was sleeping in the friends libraries you know but money is a constraint in the sense you said
#
it took you 12 years to write instead of three years to write because you had to do a job and
#
that's a money constraint that is a mindset problem i see okay okay i needed to be in a job
#
because of the social constraint that i have but the constraint could have been solved with money
#
so you get a big grant at the start but i need to also have that experience of choosing what
#
subject really matters okay i need to otherwise if if money would have been a constraint then i
#
would have been working on sonia ganti not on george fernandez okay money george was a passion
#
and so i went with this passion without thinking about anything else i all these 12 years i did not
#
look into my bank balance i was happy in whatever money i was getting so that i can just do what i
#
was doing and i promised myself that i will keep doing with my head low and without botheration of
#
anything as long as i don't complete this work and i completed this work and then i started
#
thinking something else but before that i was just so money is not an issue issue is about
#
perspective about motivation and in research i always tell my students love the subject
#
without the love you cannot do anything so love the lack of love for this this hierarchy based
#
country you don't really love your subject you love yourself so much that you want to have laurels
#
or you want to go up and down but you are not loving the subject that you you are into or you
#
want to you that's why sometimes why a doomo would come and spend 12 years in chinnai to do
#
a book on the caste hierarchy why james scott would go to is to the southeast asia and do a
#
book called weapons of the weak stay there learn that we don't do this because we don't love our
#
people you know that's a real big issue it's a because of hierarchy it's because of the
#
caste it could be because of because of the privileged condition between the poor and rich
#
whatever it could be there is a lack of love and that's why gandhi is great because he loved the
#
people and loved the people irrespective of caste class gender you know and that is something which
#
is the which is lacking even in academia you know i think even at the level of gandhi this
#
you never really know where empathy and charity end and self-aggrandizement begins you know
#
you could i mean i mean that's something that we all sort of i guess wrestle with or if you're
#
self-reflective enough should wrestle with that all the virtue that i show towards the world and
#
all the good deals that i do are they just for my ego am i am i just kind of maintaining an image of
#
myself i think gd birla if i'm not mistaken once said of gandhi it takes a fortune to keep this
#
man in poverty you know when he would travel by train you know they'd book out the entire bogie
#
and all of that but i mean that's an aside not a criticism i mean gandhi contain multitudes as well
#
let's talk about george fernandez and let's talk about love that you are attracted to him as you
#
mentioned earlier because you found that this is a man who's fundamentally an activist at heart like
#
you that's how he gets into the whole game and so on and so forth but as your knowledge and
#
understanding of him deepened what did you learn that you did not know earlier which surprised you
#
you know either in a good way or a bad way but i guess once you love someone you don't stop loving
#
them every nuance is welcome but what did you learn about him well one of course his untrammeled
#
passion okay there was nothing like there was a something in the beginning you could see that
#
how much passionate he was about his engagements and like the way you said slowly
#
the all the originality that he showed till 1970s in the 80s and 90s he started repeating that
#
okay he started as his energy got down or as his political fame or political space got shrunk
#
and and and the class mobilization that he used to do in mumbai or the in 50s and 60s and even
#
till 70s class was still an accepted form of mobilization that when it got distributed into
#
the caste and george had no way to to mobilize people under on on caste and his energy also
#
depleted he was trying to repeat himself and very consciously very consciously he writes a letter to
#
in 1985 saying that with rajiv gandhi it looks like the like emergency is going to be reclamped
#
in 1986 and and please understand that if it happens i will again go to the underground to
#
do that and there was no such situation happening there was no such situation coming up but george
#
was thinking of his whole his glorious days and and he was trying to create a mental image
#
of the situation whereby he would be again coming into the hero shape and trying to show show that
#
so the 80s and 90s are a sad days for george it also shows that the the famed longevity of
#
politician is not exactly that that long you know politicians also undergo some expiry date
#
and there should be an expiry date for the politicians as well there are rare people
#
like morarji desai who can become prime minister at the age of 81 or even for that matter mohan
#
singh for that matter but politicians cannot reinvent themselves they have to be they they
#
petered out and so sooner we recognize that they have petered out or they themselves recognize that
#
they have petered out better it is for their legacy george failed to recognize that and that's
#
why he became an appendage to the lesser politicians and lesser and he became an appendage
#
and very apologetic about about the whole thing that he he represented and and and he had to now
#
say a lot of words to prove himself which in fact in 70s and 60s and 50s his deeds proved it
#
you know and not words so he had to now say a lot of things to prove himself yeah you know
#
another bit you've quoted in your book from a letter at load to jr jetley in 1984 is a bit
#
where he says very very tells a quote there is a commitment to a cause that is much bigger than
#
ourselves however hopeless that cause may look and howsoever inadequate me we may appear to be
#
in fighting that cause the cause of remaking our country stop good and i wonder how much of this
#
is bluster how much of this is in a sense self-delusion pointing to that exact thing you
#
said that i imagine from everything that i read about him in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s
#
i'm just going wow and all the problems that he's talking about solving then are he's talking
#
about in concrete terms ki yeh karenge wo karenge railway strike for this reason this for that reason
#
and they are consequential and they are big and here suddenly it's the abstraction the cause of
#
remaking our country and later he quotes herman hess and you quote that as well and this is a
#
beautiful quote i love this where these are his words time in the world money and power belong to
#
the small people and shallow people to the rest to the real men belongs nothing nothing but death
#
stop good and here it is almost you know if you take a step back it almost seems as if he is
#
thinking that the money and the power did not come to him and therefore those who got it must have
#
been small people and he's almost consoling himself that i'm a real man you know it's also
#
that sense of sort of and it's very human it makes me feel closer to him this was written during the
#
underground days okay this was really written at a time when he was almost beaten he was going to
#
be arrested and he was his his closest companions are being arrested and so he wrote it as almost
#
an ode to to to his own it's a different kind of consolation it's a different kind of a consolation
#
it is a consolation really a consolation for for almost a prospect of being killed and so
#
he certainly did not had not achieved anything by that time the way we understand achievements
#
he was not in the government he was not in power and he was in the underground hiding from the
#
from the police and the police all around which was searching for him his brother is is jailed
#
his his his parents are pelted with a stone his second brother is also in the jail so and he's
#
running across the country so he harman has he he quotes at that time to console himself to
#
strengthen his his own resolve and so it's not at that time he it it is not that it's a different
#
kind of yes yeah yeah i also want to sort of ask about the contingency of circumstances and we
#
touched on this before like you know an interesting part of the book is his early years like when he
#
point out he's 17 he goes to the seminary in bangalore and he's training to be a a priest
#
and eventually he drops out of that and his father is really pissed off at him for that reason but
#
over there one of the reasons he gets pissed off is that he's not made to feel he belongs i think
#
at one point he goes with a list of suggestions about reform to one of the senior people there
#
and he's just treated badly and he's victimized for that and it is almost as if had those suggestions
#
gotten accepted and he was you know given the validation he wanted at that point maybe he
#
stays on and that's his life from that point on you know even in his childhood everything
#
that he sees you know his father beat his mother at times a mother left stayed away for a long time
#
he and his brothers were also beaten by the father you wonder how that sort of shapes a person and
#
these contingencies might also have and these contingencies keep happening you know at one
#
point when you're talking about the early 60s you write about another kind of contingency
#
which changes his career completely and this is at a time when he's in jail at that moment
#
and you write accidents constitute history mundane matters brought historical movements
#
on 24th november two days after an assassin snuffed out john kennedy's life in dallas
#
in bombay ms kannamvar the belligerent chief minister of maharashtra died of cerebral thrombosis
#
at the city st george hospital his disappearance from the scene brought yashwantra chawan back
#
into the reckoning his nominee vp naik took the oath of office on 7th december in the evening of
#
13 december george received his release orders stop code again a kind of a contingency of
#
circumstance and you know and different contingencies of circumstance take you to
#
different places and we've seen how that changed in the 80s and the 90s and the 80s when he's
#
you know defense minister and he's defending 2002 riots he's defending graham staines contingency
#
contingency all the way through when you're reading this book you know do you get like
#
beyond like one i guess there is a strand of a person's life and trajectory being shaped by
#
contingency but at the same time you clearly also got a sense of something essential within george
#
that no matter what the contingency is of the circumstances this is who a man is and this is
#
pure you know is that the case can you can you talk a little bit more about that that fundamental
#
person he is that whether he is a priest in bangalore or whether he is a politician wherever
#
maybe he's an academic somewhere maybe he's a poor farmer there's something fundamental
#
which is this person that's who he is you know did you have a sense of that is there something
#
yeah i think i think his his driving motivation was to fight against injustice i think i think
#
that is a core word that one can define george with injustice is something which in fact you
#
would see uh he cropping up anytime anytime anywhere in that way in fact i and this is
#
the lohiite once again for that matter lohi in fact brought this whole concept of a struggle
#
everywhere every you know anywhere kind of a thing and he would jump into the issues
#
from one jar and that's why he was being said that he's hopping from one issue to another issue
#
george is of that kind he is uh he if if anything defines george it is concerned for or his struggle
#
against injustice so i guess we can say throughout his that's why i would not go into the 90s and i
#
would not go into the into the 2000 where he in fact compromises of this question with of injustice
#
for that matter he is i think the 90s is not a good years for him and also the 2000 where he
#
all the things that he stood for all the struggles that he led and all the anger that he showed
#
against injustice across the country irrespective of where and how and who in fact here and the
#
people across the country understand him as a man who would take that issue of injustice i i have
#
letters being written by by panchayat leader from bihar saying that people from my village are being
#
taken to gujarat and met slaves there or as a as a as a bandhuva madhur and so he is writing to both
#
the chief ministers so madhya pradesh gujarat chief minister as well as a bihar chief minister
#
and saying that's the shame that you both don't see these things happening so he is doing that
#
kind of there is a man who has been jailed and like i'm talking about a man called jilani if
#
you know this if the car jilani who is the separatist person's son-in-law for that matter
#
jilani son-in-law jilani was was was was jailed and remained in jail for six seven months
#
and george was instrumental in his getting his release so and george what he says to him he says
#
to him forget this and keep seeing you know because he himself has gone through so much of pain so much
#
of torture so much of of injustice that if he keeps rankling about that if he keeps thinking
#
about that if dwelling upon that he would not be able to go beyond this so i have i i see the
#
another thing that what i have seen in george that he keeps getting away and seeing it as a
#
professional hazard rather than seeing something as a personal affront he's not seeing the torture
#
that happens in the jail he is not seeing somebody who is saying that that you know
#
you are a christian like like like sk partil who who leads a campaign in 67 tells that he is a
#
christian and he's an outsider in mumbai i am the your representative he cannot be your representative
#
he doesn't take it as a personal affront he doesn't take it as as a as a matter of personal
#
you know retaliation what he does is to take these things and move on in fact that is what
#
i have seen in george george fought for injustice across the country and second everything that
#
happened to him he did not see it as a personal you know case of of of something which is which
#
he should be worried about he never took things personally and that's why i felt that here is a
#
man who in fact lived to the dictum that in public life there's nothing personal
#
you know and and and he could and he should not be taking it too seriously and that was the very
#
beginning he learned about it when he was in mangalore and when he was accused of being
#
some kind of a you know some kind of a happening that happened and and he wanted to run away from
#
the from the socialist party and say that i don't want to be in this socialist socialism of liars
#
and there he later understood that in public life he has to fight for the things and not exactly
#
sulk or or or run away from the from the reality of it so i think two important things about george
#
is that one he fought against injustice and secondly he never took all the torture all the
#
all the depravations and all the jail and everything that happened to him personally
#
he took it as a as a public as a hazard that professionally attached to his work you know
#
one of the you know one of the interesting themes i often think about is how instrumental our
#
relationships are and you you have this great paragraph about him where you write quote his
#
erstwhile colleagues nurtured strong emotions when they were friends they were loyal but once
#
estrangement set in they distant themselves and warmth were thin the causes of estrangement were
#
not solely ideological they were also personal many thought george in power did not return the
#
favors they had bestowed upon him when he was in the opposition stop quote and elsewhere we see
#
that even in the universe of his personal relationships they all kind of break down
#
they all seem instrumental like you know the love that people have for him can seem contingent on
#
him remaining the same person that he is of body and mind and we see this especially when at the
#
end he's being hollowed out by alzheimer's that there is this sense that what people are fighting
#
about is something completely different not the man himself because he's kind of not there and
#
you pointed out about how jr jaitley doesn't really seem keen to take care of him she's going
#
through his motions at one point she writes to his brothers i think to michael saying why don't you
#
come and look after your brother and and it seems to be a battle over his assets or over reputation
#
or over whatever but not the man himself you talk about how when his wife lala kabir lala
#
fernandez comes and then takes him away from there and and basically the the tldr for the listener
#
who may not know the story of his life is that he was married to this lady called lala kabir for a
#
few years and then they were estranged and in the early 80s he was with his political companion as
#
he called it jr jaitley who was the wife of his one-time secretary and and and then in the late
#
80s the wife reappears from nowhere to kind of take him away and and and the speculation is
#
because of his assets or whatever you can just put his thumbprint on anything the mind is blank
#
and and all of that but the sense that i got right at the end was of complete desolation
#
and this is in a sense a political desolation which then transforms into a personal desolation
#
till he is all alone i mean we were just you know before the session joking about this he
#
was saying you live alone and you're not on social media or you keep a lonely life and
#
you're not on social media and all of that and i kind of quipped yeah what is true is we're all
#
going to die alone and maybe that's one of the things you meant when you said that this is a
#
dark book because ultimately this is this is a book about decline and death and death not just
#
in the biological sense but it's a book about decline and death we are all at the end of it
#
alone and you know what our relationship so what are sort of your thoughts on this because when
#
you write a book about people in the way that you have done you are not just writing a book
#
of history or of facts playing themselves out but you're writing a book about human beings and the
#
shit that they go through and in a sense peering not into just history but human nature itself
#
so take me a bit through you know your learnings your understanding through this and
#
were there times where it was hard for you to get deeper into the material and write about it
#
i think to see george i was prepared by gandhi because gandhi so when i was doing khadi i see
#
that how much he worked to clothe congress in khadi clothe okay and ultimately congress rejected it
#
and so gandhi has undergone too much of pain in in in trying to clothe congress with khadi
#
and congress determinedly rejecting that so when i started doing george i knew the story
#
in the way that this is the course the human life goes through all ideas have certain
#
acceptance at certain point to accept that to to expect that these ideas will remain constant
#
throughout one's life is very hard it doesn't happen like that so what really i wanted to do
#
with the george book was another was trying to trying to understand all of the scriptures
#
of the similar kind let's understand let's say that ramayana is of that kind the whole thing
#
that you have the a superman like ram who has a prince and then he goes into the into the
#
banwas and then again dies almost all alone kind krishna for that matter and all kind of a thing
#
so there's nothing new about george's life for that matter we have a kansi ram who became
#
aljama patient and all kind of patient and he was kept almost in some kind of a captive by
#
by my mother mayavati and other people for that matter not allowed to meet his own family people
#
either so the so that kind of a thing happens ultimately man is what he gives to the society
#
man is not what he is what we give to the society is the most important thing as long as we are
#
young we are giving something to society as we grow old and become incapacitated what we have
#
is what we are going to give now now people are clamoring for what i have some people are clamoring
#
for my reputation so that they can share it some people are clamoring for my legacy some people
#
are clamoring for my name so that they can use this name for their own political purposes
#
and some are clamoring for very petty thing that is money you know and this is what is being
#
reflected and that's why the my book begins with the death and and and and decline and and and in
#
fact ending with the with the haman has that the poem is in fact very purposeful because i wanted
#
to show that this is this is end is going to be this and this man is is might have a flourishing
#
carrier maybe a hero in fact but ultimately he's going to be consumed by death and decline
#
and so let's see what kind of a story it is all about how the the the trajectory plays out what
#
kind of an arc of life that you will be seeing it which is quite quite common in fact we all go
#
through the similar kind of experiences you know all families we will see our grandparents or anybody
#
for that matter going through the same kind of upside down but here is a glorious man who has
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been a hero of this country for some days and some time and let's see what kind of a life he
#
went through so i was not really talking about the political events but even when i'm looking
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at the political events even charan singh for that matter how what what a what a fragile person
#
he is he's trying to make his u.s return son legacy holder of his politics can you imagine
#
ajit singh who has no experience he is hell-belt upon making ajit singh as a as his you know the
#
legacy holder and that's why you have the all the work that that ajit singh that charan singh did
#
all through his life and great struggling life reduces to nothing you don't have any anybody
#
now even talking about charan singh not even his grandson will be talking about charan singh
#
so the this is a fate of ideas this is the fate of of human life and and there's nothing new in
#
what george undergoes but i was interested in charting out how this whole thing travels out
#
and that's why the idea was to to see from the from the day one the death and decline
#
it was the pinnacle was of course there i know that pinnacle was there 70s was george pinnacle
#
60s was george achievement 50s was his arise you know it was there it was all there but then
#
what happens to that idea what happens to that that whole human being who was such a hero in
#
mumbai people would make stories out of for his the kind of story that he had the kind of
#
movement that he created that novels written on him there are plays that were written on him you
#
know so so here is this man and who is now in the 90s or in the 2000s just to see that he
#
can become a compromise candidate of prime ministers in the post vajpayee days you know
#
he does things which are not really worth doing but he does it but that's a human story let's
#
understand this so what i am doing with indian politics is not trying to theoretically understand
#
indian politics but emotionally understanding the indian politics i was trying to understand
#
emotionally i was trying to understand indian politics how it charts out
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you know how it it it travels its journey its course you know so that's why the greater emphasis
#
was on the days when he became the hero and the decline was very swift and and and not very
#
heroic you know i was not so keen on the 90s that way but yeah i get the sense that in our lives we
#
have to maintain a balance of doing and reflecting right and one sense that i get through your book
#
is that this man is a doer you have him as a kid when he's still in the village and he's trying
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to learn hindi and his father stops him he's trying to do wrestling and his father stops him
#
and he can't do that stuff and he goes out early on at one point he has a job in the times of india
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and you point out that these are pre-internet days right it's 1950 or 90 late 1940s or whatever
#
so whenever so he's put on the copy desk he has to proofread shit and every time he needs
#
to check the dictionary for a word or something he doesn't have a dictionary so what does he do
#
he runs out of the building goes to the nearby bookseller picks up the dictionary there sees
#
the word he's supposed to see and then he runs back and then he finishes his proofreading he
#
doesn't last long in that job works in fotado's uh bombay institution for a while where he notices
#
that two of the female employees are not very well paid and he's like no he complains and he's
#
kicked out again and that pattern of doing continues when he gets into the when he wins
#
his election as an mp you point out what he's doing in parliament is that he will give these
#
fiery speeches where he will trash the statistics he will trash the government and then he will
#
present new statistics and then the treasury benches will be squirming they'll they'll say
#
where did you get this from and he'll say i got it from your papers so he's spending time going
#
through all of the material and all of the data and everything he's spending that time which
#
i'm sure MPs today don't do to to arm himself he is a man of action in every sense throughout his
#
life and my question is that in his personal papers do you also get a sense that it's not
#
just action that he's also doing reflection that he's thinking about it and this question becomes
#
i think particularly pertinent when the decline starts when the political scenario changes where
#
class considerations are no longer the main thing caste considerations take over he's becoming
#
irrelevant in the political scenario is he able to take a step out of himself and see what has
#
happened plan is stuff like what happens as we get older is that hopefully some of us develop this
#
sense of terror where we are not caught in the mainstream of life where we can get off the
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treadmill for a moment and look at ourselves and reflect and introspect so from his personal papers
#
do you do you did you get this or from your other sources do you get the sense that he's taking a
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step back that he's reflecting that he's thinking about stuff and if he's doing that is he doing so
#
with sadness or anger or a sense of entitlement or i'm very curious to kind of get a sense of
#
what's going on in his mind well as long as the politics that he started with remains as it is
#
he doesn't have to reflect much because he's his formative years in the is in the same ideological
#
framework so he remains that way and he is a doer for that matter he's his wife is writing in 1971
#
the moment they are getting married and she's writing to him that you're so busy with your
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taxi man union please don't do the strike so you go so that you can come on the time to get married
#
and and she says she asked him that do you get time to reflect because he's so busy with so many
#
actions and so many traveling he's traveling from one direction to another direction somebody said
#
to me that he always had three tickets three plane tickets in his pocket so he would be
#
going from here to there now as long as his ideology coincided with the kind of politics
#
that country was in he's he did not have to reflect upon because that action has made him
#
already given him some kind of a framework so he was doing that kind of thing he was a trade union
#
activist and all but when the politics changes and the nature of the politics changes that happens
#
in the 80s and 90s does he do that kind of reflection 80s is the time when he needs to
#
do some reflection because he has been defeated 84 he has been defeated 89 he gets elected again
#
so all these five four five years he is he has enough time to reshape reinvent himself
#
he does run if if reflection is about reading and writing then certainly he is running a journal
#
which is a partipaksh in hindi and also in english other side so he's doing this kind of a reading
#
and writing he's not doing and he's writing lots of things about it about about he is reviewing
#
books he's writing articles he's writing interpretations of the political event that is
#
happening and some some of them are very powerful let me tell you but are there reflections
#
you know it's difficult to say because once again i would not say that he is not learning
#
new things what he is trying to do he is i think he he he is lost in the kind of politics that
#
begins to take shape he is he is unable to to see himself or or place himself position himself in
#
the new caste oriented politics that is happening here he could have gone into writing for that
#
matter i i always thought that he could have been very great writer for that matter he had
#
a great experience he could have done a great memoir of him his own you know i would not have
#
been a person who would be writing that he could have done it in fact and he had a great
#
command over the language he had gone through those experiences and he could have done that
#
he could have at least dictated somebody to do that you know but that did not happen what he
#
i think by 90s he loses command over his politics and his own body he becomes dependent on the
#
people and those people are now using him for their own politics he allows his use for his own petty
#
needs and so there is some kind of a some kind of a diminution of of george in the 90s and 2000
#
even when the executively he is on the peak because he is the defense minister of india and
#
but his power is mainly non-executive and i would not go to the extent that he's not thinking about
#
all this fall that is happening around he gives the one region he says that no left parties came
#
along with me so i joined bjp because there was a no left party coming along with me or nobody
#
supported me for that matter joining bjp or not joining bjp is not really the issue issue is that
#
whether the kind of kind of policies he went along or the kind of kind of positions that he occupied
#
or the kind of articulations that he did are they consistent with what he was or what he
#
spoke earlier but i really don't know whether the consistency could be really a some kind of
#
a framework to analyze individuals you know because the times have changed his needs have
#
also changed he is no longer a street fighter of that kind nature of the politics have changed
#
and even for a politician to make a u-turn from a class mobilizer to a caste mobilizer is not easy
#
even for a politician let me tell you you know it's not easy because such a depth handling of
#
your ideological maneuvering is not easy your language is different you know and to reshape
#
your language i don't think it is possible because that your language is is is an output
#
of your internal churning you know and human life is a short life you know so it's not easy
#
yeah it's it's a short life another of the thing that interests is interested me during you know
#
the reading of this book is that at different points in time he plays different roles and
#
succeeds in most of them like at one point he is an activist and that's a role and activism
#
requires a certain skill set a certain attitude a certain approach then he's a trade union leader
#
which is slightly different now you're leading people you have to make strategic calculations
#
as an activist you can lie in front of a jeep but as a trade union leader you know as you've
#
described so well in the book that if you go into a strike you have to have an exit plan
#
and so on and so forth so it requires a different kind of strategic thinking and management
#
activist trade union leader and then politician you're campaigning you have to win elections you
#
have to win votes you have to broad base your appeal in a sense and that's a different kind of
#
electoral skill and so on and so forth fourth you get into parliament you're within the
#
parliament but now you're in the benches you're in opposition that's a different kind of skill
#
how do you build your brand there what kind of speeches do you give how do you research
#
in your book you show beautifully how initially he struggles he's confused he's like a fish out of
#
water but then he masters again then he's going with it then he you know he comes prepared and
#
he kicks some serious ass and the fifth role is governance that you are in government and this
#
is a different game you're appealing to no one nothing is for narratives don't matter now you
#
got to get shit done right and often you are playing a number of these multiple roles simultaneously
#
and they're different skill sets you need different you know different traits of your character
#
coming to play when you're kind of getting into this so and and you could even say that there's
#
perhaps a sixth sort of role that he could have played at the end of his life when you're the
#
elder statesman you no longer you know care about the spoils of office you're now an elder
#
statesman and you just want to you know you can guide others and you can be a benevolent force
#
for society and maybe writing your memoir would be one of the ways in which you contribute to that
#
so you have all these different roles what is your sense of how he navigated these roles
#
which do you think he was more suited for you know which fit him perfectly and which did not fit him
#
but he worked hard at it and which he was a complete misfit for
#
i would not say he was a misfit in anywhere i would not say that he did a exceptional work
#
as a parliamentarian he did a lot of research for what he was speaking on he had command over
#
the statistics and his and and and the the government policies and all and not only just
#
the indian state policies he was he had a command over international affairs and all
#
so yes so i would not say that he was misfit anywhere but where he excelled that's something
#
which i i think his glorious days were as a as a anti-establishment leader you know that is
#
something which i have a feeling that he could endure a lot of pain and and a lot of a lot of
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salvos for that matter i i think as in bombay for that matter to build a trade union organizations
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when he was politically nobody secondly his political party that he was associated with that
#
is the socialist party had just a fleshing start okay so you to build that kind of a trade union
#
movement in mumbai where the communist where the ruling rules and all the trade unions had
#
that kind of a you know lineage that is or or or even affiliation with the with the with the
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with the communist george success in building trade union movement of municipal workers
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i would rate as a first rate achievement because we as a society do not first of all value work
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do not value the manual work and do not value what we call the you know work which are which
#
are demeaning work for that matter and to organize municipal workers you know was something
#
exceptional you know it is not easy it was not easy people like ambedkar they had done it money
#
bankara had done it a lot of people had done it it's not that he was the first person to do it
#
but the kind of success that george achieved attained nobody else had it had achieved it and
#
so that is the one thing second his i would not go to the though he though his his victory against
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sk partly seen as a as a as a as a giant killer and all but that is not really that big achievement
#
again to become the a irf leader and once again against the established leadership of a irf that
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is all india railway man's federation established leadership did not like him the socialist did not
#
like him the the government did not like him because i tell you one thing in democracy
#
all the protests are sanctioned by the state no protest can happen without the sanction of the
#
state so the here is a man who is anti-state or seen as anti-state largely and who has been
#
defeated as an mp he is becoming a irf leadership there means it is not easy because the state is
#
against you the party that you are calling your own party they are against you the the prevailing
#
culture of a irf is against you and you bring a radical transformation of the the the the
#
conceived notion of organization itself the kind of a irf understood itself as somebody who would
#
be negotiating all trade unions are mainly negotiators they are not you know radical
#
they they don't this they sound radical but they are basically negotiators they are trying to
#
mediate between the industrial workers and the industrial authorities so they are the mediator
#
they are the brokers here is a man who brings politics in that brokering and that is important
#
thing as far as the jobs contribution to the railway worker movement is concerned
#
here is a man who brings politics into the into the people's into into the workers organization
#
and that is a radical here not even jp has done it not by not anybody has done it and it's already
#
an organization which is almost 50 year old organization he changes the ethos of organization
#
he changes the the the the slogans of the organization and he is and remember railways
#
is not about one state railways is across the country all kind of people are working in it
#
all linguistic groups are working in it all caste groups are working it and he welds them into one
#
and he were and all our trade unions are politically affiliated so they don't think that the the if if
#
if nccrs is formed most of the trade union bodies are coming into it because they believe in you
#
no the each of those trade unions who are coming into nccrs they are coming with their own political
#
baggage and they have their own political agenda you make them feel put them in your own shoe make
#
them do what you are doing this is a great achievement i and nobody can do that in the
#
hundred years of trade union movement today we don't have somebody can ask the question where are
#
the workers because there are no workers left in the country at this point you don't see any trade
#
union movement but in 1971 72 73 74 when these things were happening the workers were divided
#
politically workers were divided on the category basis workers were divided into the into the blue
#
colored and white colors so there were the n number of the divisions of the workers and george
#
succeeded in welding that that division into one and that became very important i think george
#
achievement that's that is the second kind of achievement third the underground movement
#
against the imposition of process of emergency was certainly inspired by the 1942 movement
#
the quit india movement that was led by loya and jp and other people and the congressmen were
#
already arrested and so here were the two heroes and they really emerged like heroes because jp
#
jumped out of the jail ran into the they really ran underground movement most of the elements of
#
the underground movement that was done in 1975 77 by george was inspired by what was happening in
#
1942 and many of those things so 42 was certainly an reference point for george second important
#
thing was how george saw the militant trade union movement in america and there he he had he was he
#
was a widely read person at that point the dynamite was a was not something uncommonly used in
#
america dynamite was a word or or a tool to make the powers that be here people and that was
#
something a tool of of protest for that matter and george used that he did not go in search of
#
tools he went to baroda in search of dynamite he knew that he wanted to have a dynamite so he
#
went to baroda so that he could get dynamite and then do that whatever he did the kind of underground
#
movement that he could and organize it required political propaganda that enough action so that
#
the political propaganda can happen and people can feel that there are some kind of resistance
#
happening the even if the ethos were born out of 1942 movement and the method came from american
#
militant trade union movements the implementation was inspired by anti-nazi resistance so there were
#
many things that i would not say that george was not having his own contribution into it and he
#
took elements from here and there but the very fact that he could mix and match those methods
#
and the and the and the kind of pamphlet that he wrote which was in fact coming out every fortnight
#
or even anytime it was very powerfully written and such pamphlets oh you know very were rattling
#
not only for the state but even for his comrades underground many people disowned him for the kind
#
of words that he used i think these are the three important contributions of george as far as his
#
politics is concerned i would not call making a konkan railway as his contribution i would not
#
even call nuclearization or that the second second poker and taste as his contribution
#
i would not even call samatha party as his contribution but these are the three important
#
you know markers that can be seen as george's contribution to indian politics how today if
#
something happens some kind of emergency happens and some resistance has to be formulated i think
#
he will be one inspiring person and inspiring methods will be drawn from his method that he
#
adopted if by chance there is a resurgence of workers movement in the country he will be the
#
reference point and if there is a a some kind of a sensitization by which we need to cater
#
enough attention on the on the meanest of our workers the be the who is the meanest of work
#
that they're doing the people who are doing that i think george would be a reference point you know
#
so that's really interesting because the picture you paint is of someone who was a brilliant
#
organizer who was sort of who would have been a great revolutionary who was good at you know
#
managing people rousing them up and all of that and therefore one wonders if he was perhaps
#
despite his success in politics a misfit in a different kind of politics and perhaps even
#
in this context a misfit in a different age because we entered a time where you couldn't
#
anymore mobilize people around class for example which is something that he was so good at and and
#
and that makes me wonder if everyone who ever reaches government is at some level a misfit
#
because all the things that you have to be good at to become part of you know a ruling party to
#
become a minister all of those skills are actually irrelevant to the skills you need in government
#
in government you're playing the game of governance and whereas all the skills you need to get that
#
far are initially the kind of skills george had of organizing and resistance and then a further
#
skill of winning elections and all of that which also he did successfully repeatedly and so on and
#
so forth but these are all such different games being played in 1970s he writes to somebody saying
#
that if a trade union becomes a government minister he becomes a sob son of a bitch okay
#
so i think he knew that but this is a logical march of the events and the and and somebody's
#
growth that you are an activist then you come into the government you become you know responsible
#
for some kind of ministry or something i think that's a logical i don't know if he had been
#
like for instance one one person that i can think of is a sankar guha nyogi for that matter
#
could he have been a nyogi for all his life you know i don't think knew he was nyogi in that sense
#
he was certainly a trade unionist but he was also in the politics and politics is all about power
#
and power is all about executive power so he was aspiring for the power power as well here is a
#
nyogi who is at the people's level he is he doesn't form because he wants to have power
#
he wants to have people's power george i think wanted to have executed power as well and that is
#
i think a political aspiration which is not so wrong to have it you know so he used opportunities
#
opportunities he can also be called as an opportunist sometimes but i have a feeling
#
that opportunism is a stepping stone of power you cannot have and that's why i would not say
#
opportunism as a as a as a cuss word okay i would not use that i see opportunism as something which
#
is which if if a politician is not then he's not a politician he has to be opportunist to acquire
#
what he is aiming for and all politicians acquire or aim for power because they think that
#
executive power is something with which they can do i will not go for the negative thing i will
#
not go for what accumulation of of personal aggrandizement a kind of a thing but even if
#
they do they want to do socially something they need a state in fact jp for that matter in 1930s
#
he's writing against gandhi saying that yes we need power and the same man in 1950 recognizes
#
that the state power will not really yield what changes he wants to bring about so he realizes
#
that change has to come from the people but george somehow came from the people sector
#
and did not realize that the executive power will not really bring the change he started aspiring
#
going deep and deep into craving for the power you know this is a tragedy of george
#
socialists are all tragic people they have their lives their movement their ideology is a tragedy
#
you know be it loja be it jp be it george and to lesser extent if you go to the some smaller fries
#
share the power share the other or anybody for that matter or even for that matter today what
#
we see in bihar or up for that matter all kind of a socialists somehow in fact if i see if i use it
#
in a very strong words they lacked an understanding of ideology of power they didn't understand what
#
is power and how to acquire and how to keep it and therefore what really they started aiming for
#
is the executive power but when they started they started with the people's power and which in fact
#
they started missing it because in the post-independence indian indian politics is all
#
about power you know political power it's about state power and
#
and nothing wrong with that perhaps the you know it's it's a that's the way the state craft is all
#
about but we still have the examples of newgi we still have the examples of baba amte we have
#
examples about also i would not say made a particle because he was also craving for political
#
representation in the parliament and other things but there are a lot of people in this country who
#
have been away from the political power or from the executive power and try to build themselves
#
into people's power and be a voice on in the gandhian line in that sense in gandhian traditional
#
there's a thought experiment question if george fernandez was 17 years old today what would he do
#
what is the direction he's going in is he a startup founder is he using his energy to do that
#
is he still getting into politics but maybe joining the bjp is he you know with the arm
#
army party i think george rebels in the street and even today
#
if you ask me this that what would he do at as a 17 year old person today he would have either gone
#
if he had been in like like he was ideologically guided by that time by demelo kind of a people
#
who had already been in the in the in the people's movement and the trade union movement for very
#
long time if you would have been guided by somebody like demelo today he would have gone
#
against moody for that matter because he is he is innately against the state power
#
okay so he would not have liked somebody being so domineering and somebody so somebody being so
#
much against or or or being so much domineering second so or he could have you know because
#
trade union doesn't exist anymore he could have gone with the with the kind of politics that we
#
have around dalit issues along with that he could have gone with that kind of a thing he could have
#
because innately he is pro-marginalized and so if the two indicators are are are to be just
#
on the basis of which we can see where george would have gone then the two is one he's innately
#
pro-marginalized pro people and secondly he is innately against the state power and so he could
#
have chosen you know some other way instead of being part of the at least 17 year old george yes
#
yes maybe a modern rebel is really a technological disruptor like if he's for the marginalized and
#
against state power he could just form a crypto company but who knows exactly yeah it's so you
#
know there is your book is so amazing and i feel like i haven't started talking about it yet
#
and it would take another 10 hours so go go through its content systematically so i will just
#
ask all my listeners to pick up your magisterial work you know it's got incredible accounts almost
#
mini biographies of so many fascinating people from well-known people like jp naran and you
#
know lemay and lohiya and and even someone that i hadn't heard of till i read your book which was
#
placid demello it's also a great account of the trade union history of india where also i learned
#
a lot of stuff that i had no idea of equally it's like sort of a potted history of the socialist
#
party of india and all the various forms it took through the years and how it evolved and it's
#
it's a biography also of his intimate life which is also so interesting in so many human foibles
#
so i'll i'll leave it to um listeners to discover the rest of the book there are such riches in it
#
that even if we sit for many more hours we can't really uh i i would not be able to do it justice
#
let me end with a couple of final questions and and one of them is that in the process of
#
writing and researching this incredibly rich book which is like an unveiling of human nature itself
#
and like what you pointed out about you know social social is being destined for tragedy
#
we are all destined for tragedy like the guiding motto of my life almost is that
#
you know we're all gonna die life is meaningless and you know that's a that actually is a useful
#
thing to believe because then you can take things in the right perspective but my question to you
#
is that in the process of writing this book of entering these lives of living these lives almost
#
how have you changed as a person like do you look at time differently do you look at memories
#
differently like you start your book at the beginning you've got this evocative passage
#
about the unreliability of memory how everyone you speak to the memory is colored by what they
#
have become and what they want to believe and so on and so forth and a lot of the things that we
#
take for granted when we are young where we have this illusion of immortality a lot of the things
#
we take for granted we realize are mutable and temporary and everything ends like it ended for
#
george so how not to get loomy but how has this book sort of changed you as a person are you a
#
different person because of this how do you look at life now and and also the mundane question of
#
you know what are your next projects what are you working on well i guess i've become more calmer
#
and i have started taking all the jolts that life provides you in a very different way now
#
i don't get perturbed now much i and the worst thing that i can see through a lot of people
#
which is in fact not so good because it takes away but i'm not so predetermined about anything for
#
that matter i still believe that the way i started with george i did not know many of aspects and
#
they all started opening up and then i started can you imagine when you start writing you feel
#
he is a hero for you and you want to write like that and then slowly you unravel his one after
#
another years of his life and then slowly you see the whole pattern how and how he it goes up and
#
then down and he you see his frailties you see his his strengths and and weaknesses and you also see
#
the compromises and the circumstances under which he makes that compromises so he starts
#
understanding human beings more pointedly and more holistically i impute motives less now i
#
give space to the people more and more so that they can express themselves i don't like to see
#
the world in black and white it's a book on in a gray area let's say that i am not portraying
#
although i i started with this this this need to give a hero to this country in george okay
#
but i have a feeling that slowly i started instead of giving hero if i can just portray
#
this man's struggle i would be you know done with my my my intentions and in the process
#
i learned so much of my own ways the way i have responded in the past with the people
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the way people have responded to me the human negativities like jealousies and all kind of
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a thing or even the even the the the fraisile nature of ambition itself you know i think i
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have become i have not become less ambitious but i don't see life in that kind of scales now
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anymore i'm calm in what i'm doing more sure about what i'm doing and less less negatively
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competitive you know i'm not in that what what gandhi says corrosive competition i'm not in
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that kind of a corrosive competition i like to do what i'm doing and i i would like to do
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whatever i think i should do without bothering about my my my professional success or whether
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my book will get published by this author or that or that publisher or this publisher
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all those thoughts have really gone out of my head now i'm more receptive and i think i'm
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less irascible as well now because i'm giving more space to the people earlier i guess
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i was too driven with what i was doing and now i think because this book i expanded
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many horizons to understand george and so now i see that a person saying something
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is not necessarily that person's real thought there are many other things that are probably
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it's a momentary kind of a thing which is a great learning that i did here so it has made me a
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a better humanly yeah and what are you working on now another book
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well this is a something again to do with the politics in this country since 1857
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in the hundred years since 1857 there were four pamphlets that were written one of them is not
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really pamphlet but i still call them pamphlet the first one was ahmed khan who wrote the causes of
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indian revolt it happened in 1858 the second pamphlet that came in 1909 by gandhi which is
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called hind swaraj the third pamphlet not exactly pamphlet but full-fledged book but i call it still
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pamphlet because it pursues one idea that is saavarkar's 1924 which is a hindutva is the
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essence cells of hindutva and the fifth one fourth one is another 10 years later that happens with
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1936 ambedkar's annihilation of caste now these four pamphlets are actually power pamphlets
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they are looking for power nothing else all these four pamphlets are building a case for power
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rivalries and replacement of the dominating people by the by the people who are aspiring for it
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all these four pamphlets happened really flogged well there are a lot of writings on these four
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pamphlets i want to compare these four pamphlets and i want to study them in comparison that and
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then one of the one of the core expressions that comes out of these four pamphlets when you read it
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in together keeping it together and compare it with their well these four pamphlets are power
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pamphlets this first point second they were i would not give them the timelessness
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they were contextually produced pamphlets with the purpose of acquiring power be it gandhi's
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hinswaraj or ambedkar's annihilation of caste or be it saavarkar's for that matter
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unfortunately all these four pamphlets still have salience in this country
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hundred years after okay
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this has two important implications one politically this country has not outgrown
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what was there in the colonial times it remains embedded in the thought processes that was
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dictated by the colonial process so four pamphlets are reflective of responses to a colonial regime
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and unfortunately in the post-colonial regime we still have these four pamphlets dictating
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our politics and each of these four pamphlets have extreme salience even in today i would say
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we need to study these four pamphlets but we need to start preparing for the fifth one
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which will be really reflecting this country's needs of today all these four pamphlets are
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outdated now be the caste politics be the hindutva politics be it hindu muslim issue
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or even gandhi's for that matter the kind of a technological ranting that he does against the
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british for that matter under the pretext of but it's all a power politics it's all about
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colonial times it's about responses to colonial time so the we need to study these four pamphlets
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which transformed indian politics let me tell you these these are not easy pamphlets but we
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need to have the fifth one which would transcend these four and give us new political agenda to
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think and also do i'm studying these four pamphlets i cannot wait to read this book my god it sounds
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amazing i feel like scheduling another recording with you for when this book is out so i hope we
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can have another long conversation on that and my very final question which is a customary
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question for all my guests is for me and my listeners recommend books films music any kind
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of art at all which you love not necessarily something to do with your work but stuff that
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you love that is a you know a cherished part of who you are and you know recommend it for us
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i i loved ram gohar's first volume of gandhi biography on the second one i have not yet read
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but the first volume are brilliant in fact to discover new material on gandhi is the hardest
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part of the scholarly job because there is gandhi has been written so much and and hundred volume
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is already there you know of his own work so it's a ram gohar brought a lot of new material into
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his biography of gandhi and also a great perspective and greater empathy with which he has written that
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some of the sections are brilliantly conceived and the kind of kind of overarching context in
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which it is being written it's quite a quite a quite a momentous from the point of view of
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my own growth as a person of literature for that matter i i would recommend read salman
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and read garcia for that matter the their writing has been seen as a magical realism and all kind
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of a thing but the way they deal with the human emotions the way every line is packed with certain
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message and the way they conceive the story it's they're brilliant in that sense and that's why
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they are the great authors for that matter so i'm nothing nobody else you know nobody to say that
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they are they have done a great job with their world recognizes them as far as if you want to
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really become a human being a better human being read gandhi's hundred volume i think there is
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nothing which can replace that gandhi has talked about each and every subject which is possibly
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under the human uh you know intellect or or considerations and he has talked with great
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empathy and i think whatever writing skills or whatever ideology or the intellectual empathy that
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i have garnered it's all because of the gandhi's hundred volume i don't see that kind of empathic
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writing anywhere else the hundred volume hundred volumes all hundred volumes yeah you can read it
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as a gita for that you can read it as a as a and you don't have to read it in one day you cannot
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do it you can dip into it yeah you can just dip into it and read it as a as a bite in fact you
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know and yeah read it and buy my book as well everybody should buy your book that will be
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my recommendation to everyone um rahul thank you so much this has been a fantastic conversation
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thank you so much amita in fact uh the kind of issues that you brought out the kind of the way
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you prodded me and i think uh it is all the conversation that we had it's all because of
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you and your skills in taking out things which i never expected that i had thank you thank you
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for being so kind thank you if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show
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notes enter rabbit holes at will go to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up
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the life and times of george fernandez by rahul ramagundam he is not active on social media but
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you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of
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the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n it's also available in all podcast apps
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