#
There are a couple of things I want to talk about before we begin this episode today.
#
One is friendships, especially male friendships.
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When it comes to women, you sense that a friendship between two women can be deep and intimate.
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Female friends find it easy to share everything with each other and are not scared of making
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In a sense, the best thing about the friendship is that you can be vulnerable, that the constant
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effort of maintaining a filter doesn't wear you down.
#
Men, however, keep it more on the surface.
#
We are supposed to be strong, we are supposed to be stoic, we will not wear our emotions
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on our sleeve, and especially not our emotions for each other, God forbid.
#
We will find it hard to be vulnerable and our friends may go through a lifetime of knowing
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us without knowing what makes us cry at night, what makes us feel weak and helpless.
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My point is not that a friendship is only about sharing vulnerability, there is in fact
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no evidence that the friendship at the heart of today's episode did too much of that.
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But it's about getting past the filters we maintain for the outside world at large.
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And this can sometimes be a problem with male friendships.
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My second theme of this brief intro is about personal writing.
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Too often when we write, we are wary of using the word I.
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Now in some genres, that's not an appropriate word.
#
If you are writing history or economic analysis or doing reportage from the field, the I should
#
But when you allow yourself to do personal writing, whether in a personal essay or when
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you interweave yourself into some other narrative that benefits from it, I think the result
#
My favorite moments in the 371 episodes of this podcast so far are when people are talking
#
It's always a personal, because a personal is always universal.
#
I love that kind of conversation and I love that kind of book.
#
Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Ramachandra Guha making his sixth appearance on the show.
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Ram's latest book is called The Cooking of Books, which is structured as a memoir of
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his friendship with the publisher and editor Rukun Advani, who was known to be famously
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reclusive and who must have viewed with much bemusement and perhaps alarm the strange occurrence
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of an enthusiastic friend writing a whole memoir about him.
#
I love Ram's book not just for the touching account of this friendship, but also because
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it is a portrait of a time that is now behind us.
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And the act of looking back can also help us make sense of these present times.
#
Ram had just a couple of hours to give me for this recording and as listeners would
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know, he is the only person I make this exception for.
#
Everyone else, sit your ass down for 10 hours.
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Anyway, before you begin listening, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about.
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From the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday, we range widely across
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subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand the world.
#
Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
#
Please do check it out.
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Ram, welcome again to The Scene in the Unseen.
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You know, so much fun reading this book and over time what has happened as you might have
#
noticed is that we've done five episodes so far and I really like the trajectory of those
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episodes because initially we began by talking about your books and being kind of formal
#
and all of that, but it got more and more personal and the personal glimpses that I
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have got really charmed me and that's sort of what I look for.
#
And this book was completely personal in that sense and I had a broader question to start
#
with, which is that typically I would imagine what happens when you're writing history is
#
that you're editing out a lot of the truth.
#
You know, every book of history chooses one narrative, one set of things to focus on and
#
nothing can capture the complexity of the world, which is the way it is.
#
And in the act of sort of writing it down, we almost solidify the narrative that we have
#
and that becomes part of the discourse on whatever we are writing about.
#
And I wonder if that also happens in the personal realm, in the sense that what you've done
#
in the cooking of books is you've written about a personal friendship.
#
And until one sits and thinks about it, a friendship is this vast amorphous thing where
#
you have a bunch of memories, some are good, some are bad, but you never actually sit down
#
and try to define it for what it is and et cetera, et cetera, there's nothing particularly
#
And I wonder if the act of writing forces you to, you know, give a narrative to it,
#
to sort of define it in a particular way, as it were, and also maybe helps you understand
#
it better or, you know, look at some things in a new light, tell me a little bit about
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But before I do that, I'd just like to take issue with one of your phrases, which you
#
began with, that one when is writing a work of history, one is not editing out the truth.
#
One is being selecting from multiple facts to see which are more salient, more significant.
#
That's actually what I meant, I didn't mean it in that pejorative way, I had, oh, you
#
I had shaped the narrative in a particular way, both that it's compelling, convincing
#
and manageable in terms of length, though my books have turned out to be rather long.
#
I mean, this one, The Cooking of Books is at once my most personal and more or less
#
my shortest book, right?
#
And even there, there is a lot of shaping, reshaping, editing, chopping, changing, sometimes
#
in the interest of readability, literary artifice, sometimes in the interest of not wanting to
#
give offence, this book will give offence to many people, but you would have seen that
#
some names have been redacted, some have not.
#
And there are different reasons for why that is so, those of the public domain, their names
#
have not been redacted.
#
There were sections that I found in the earlier drafts that were too self-indulgent, though
#
this is a particularly short book by my standards, it's gone through more drafts than any other
#
I mean, there are 14 people thanked in the acknowledgments and I took their comments
#
sequentially, not all at once, and I revised each time based on the comments I got from
#
one of those 14 readers.
#
But I'm happy with how it's turned out, I mean, I think I also got, there was stuff
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in the penultimate draft that was self-indulgent, I mean, there's a long section on an article
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I'd written on St. Stephen's College which Rukul had rewritten for me, and I felt that
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there was enough on St. Stephen's College already, and there'll be too much for some
#
But yes, I mean, even a memoir, you see, this is a memoir, not an autobiography.
#
Now, it so happens that I've thought a lot about what an autobiography represents, not
#
so much about a memoir, because I've written two biographies of it.
#
The first was a Verrier-Elwin, and the second was a Mahatma Gandhi, and both my subjects
#
left autobiographies, and Gandhi's is of course one of the most celebrated works of
#
Indian literature ever written, the story of my experiments with truth.
#
But Elwin's is not an insignificant work either, The Tribal World of Verrier-Elwin won the
#
which is very rarely given to a work of nonfiction, it's usually given to novels.
#
It's a beautiful, compelling read describing the arc of his life and, you know, the controversies
#
and shifts in a career that he undertook and so on.
#
And when I was working on Elwin, people asked me, what is there that I'll not find in his
#
I stumbled upon the line that an autobiography is a preemptive strike against a future biographer,
#
which I quote in my book, and likewise with Gandhi.
#
So at a memoir, the same extent, you know, what it leaves out may be as interesting or
#
as significant as what it includes, less so than an autobiography, because this is not
#
an autobiography, this is a memoir of a friendship, a personal and professional friendship.
#
But it did go through many more drafts than more or less anything I've written.
#
I usually write quickly, clearly, excessively, you know, even India after Gandhi went through
#
two drafts at most, even though it's a thousand pages.
#
This one has been really reshaped and rewritten very many times, based on the comments of
#
people I respect and based on my own rethinking about what should go in and what should be
#
You know, I'll take issue with your phrase self-indulgent, because we say it almost as
#
if it is a bad thing, and once upon a time, I would have thought like that.
#
But I also think, and particularly when it comes to a memoir, that, you know, I would
#
think of self-indulgent as being the same as indulging the reader, the reader wants
#
to know more about you.
#
And there's no harm in kind of sinking into that.
#
By the way, I must say that the book read so well that I was surprised, I'm surprised
#
when you tell me it had so many drafts, because it just reads like, you know, you just sat
#
and you wrote it and everything just flows so kind of beautifully.
#
And I'll dive in a little bit into that self-indulgence point, because I remember even in the book,
#
you've got all these places where Rukun Adwani, and of course, we'll talk about the friendship
#
But you've got all these places where he's giving you comments on your books.
#
And one of the things that stands out is that there are times where he is like the third
#
book about cricket that you said you were doing, where you're expanding to the globe.
#
And I think the crux of his criticism there was that it is too personal and you've got
#
to have that broader social significance and etc. etc. built into it.
#
He had his own thesis about Pakistan and so on, which you've quoted at length.
#
And I thought that, oh my God, no, why didn't you write that?
#
It's fine to be personal, because, you know, I just, especially in the way that this podcast
#
has evolved, I find so much value in Beauty and the Heart.
#
No, but he was right about that particular cricket book.
#
You know, it's a, you see, I also don't use self-indulgent necessarily in a pejorative
#
It's a writer who is now 65, who has practiced his profession for more than four decades,
#
who's reasonably in the public eye, wants to say something about his story, but not
#
about his achievements or about his marriage or his family life, but about one particular
#
friendship that meant so much to him professionally and personally, particularly professionally.
#
And so it's revelatory.
#
And you're right, some readers would want that, others would be pissed off.
#
I mean, I think I say in the preface that this book will be read in various ways as
#
a partisan account of publishing, as a self-indulgent celebration of elite male privilege.
#
I think that criticism will come and there may be an element of truth in that, because
#
these are two men relatively privileged, educated in the best colleges and the best universities,
#
talking about themselves.
#
So, but in so far as it is, the exercise is novel, rare and possibly unique.
#
A writer writing at such length about his editor.
#
If I may just, and I feel vindicated in doing this, by recent experiences in literary festivals.
#
So I've been in two literary festivals recently, in both of which there was a writer more celebrated
#
than me, more famous than me, in conversation with his editor, and the editor was talking
#
of the writer about what a privilege it was to publish him, what great books he'd written,
#
how much they'd sold, what kind of fan mails were coming to the writer.
#
And the editor was a sort of deferential, you can say, not Sutardhar, but almost a
#
And this happened at two literary festivals.
#
And the next day, I was talking up my absent editor, who wasn't educated and wouldn't
#
So usually it is editors talking up writers, you know, sometimes the recollections are
#
tinged with bitterness, like Diana Ethel when she writes about V.S.
#
Naipaul in her book, Death.
#
But it's clear who is writing about whom.
#
So in that sense, since this was a book about a remarkable editor whose imprint is never
#
visible in the books he's edited, often his name is not even in the acknowledgments, you
#
know, because he'll never appear on stage, has never appeared on stage, and who's played
#
such a special role, an editor who's played such a special role, not merely in my life,
#
in nurturing dozens of high quality works by other historians, sociologists, economists,
#
and I've named some of the people he's worked with in my book.
#
And in that sense, he has been a credit to Indian publishing, who is not as well known
#
as inferior editors, who, you know, write columns, write about themselves, write about
#
authors, go to literary festivals, and certainly not as well known as absolutely obscure compared
#
to the writers whom he's made visible and successful and popular.
#
So I'm gratified by the reception so far that I think I've done some, it's been, and you
#
know, Amit, kind of paying tribute comes naturally to me, you know, of course, you would know
#
I do it to cricket writers, cricket writers of the past, and not just Karnataka cricketers,
#
I should say for the record, but cricketers of other states and other countries too.
#
But I often find that when someone dies, I'm the person writing a tribute, you know, when
#
Girish Karnat dies, even though I'm not an expert on Kannada literature, knowing him
#
has, you know, had an impact on me and I want to write about him.
#
Mahasweta Devi dies, and I don't read Bangla, but I had two or three meetings with her,
#
which is such a visible imprint on me that I had to write about her.
#
So in a sense, celebration of extraordinarily remarkable people, often dead, but sometimes
#
living, has been part of what I've been doing for a very long time in my writing, both in
#
my newspaper writing, in my books, in my essays, and I thought that this person, who
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has been, plays such a fundamental role in my life, as I say, next only to my wife Sudhata,
#
and yet is so unknown, and this is the time to write about him.
#
I found it very moving and very different from, you know, all the other sort of profiles
#
you've written of people or the memories you've shared of them, because this is, you know,
#
a personal friendship, it's not a hero of yours that you're writing about, or someone
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you knew at a distance, I found it very moving.
#
I was also wondering about the nature of memory, because one thing I have realized when I sit
#
with my friends and talk, or people I've known for a long time, is that we remember the same
#
things very differently, right?
#
It's like, you know, like what the hell is going on, we are just both characters in each
#
other's interior lives, and they don't really match up, and even in this book, you know,
#
you've got a bunch of places where Rukun's memory of something which you've just related
#
And I kind of wonder about that, and then does having access to the way that they looked
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at you also change the way you look at yourself in some way?
#
Like, for example, there's a delightful letter you've quoted when, you know, you were going
#
to go to Afghanistan for something, and Rukun wrote to Sujata and said, stop him, stop him,
#
he must not go, and Sujata replied to him, quote, I need hardly tell you that your friend
#
has never listened to anybody in his life, and certainly seems unlikely to start doing
#
While I agree with everything in your mail, I think you overestimate the children's in
#
He's decided he wants to go, and that's it.
#
And I wonder how you feel reading this, because at the time, you would not perhaps have thought
#
that you were so stubborn, or, you know, as a...
#
Unfortunately, the letter that Rukun wrote to Sujata has been lost, because he migrated
#
to another email address, and he couldn't save it, and that would have been, you know,
#
in his characteristic, forceful, blunt, direct style.
#
I mean, I just thought I'm going to Kabul, and that's it, I mean, what's the risk coming
#
as it happened a week after I went to the ambassador's house to attack, because the
#
foreign secretary was staying there, but I left by that time, right.
#
So yeah, I was sure, but going through these letters gave me a sense that there may be
#
a book on it, because it was not composed simply of memories, you know, there was a
#
kind of a documentary depth to my recounting of this friendship based on letters which
#
began in 1986, so almost 40 years.
#
And there were memories of meetings and memories of conversations, but I think had I not had
#
this personal archive of our correspondence, I couldn't have written this book.
#
I also want to ask about this correspondence, because it seems to me that there are two
#
aspects that this, you know, in which these long letters we used to write to each other
#
plays out, and one of them you've mentioned in your book.
#
The first one is that writing a long letter back in the day where you're taking the trouble
#
to actually get paper or an inland letter or whatever and you're sitting down at a desk
#
and there is a physical act of writing is really different, like at one level, you are
#
sort of communicating by the very act of writing that you matter to me, that is why I am making
#
all of this effort in writing to you.
#
And at another level, because of that, those letters tend to be much longer, there is thought
#
that goes into it, there is some terror, you're not necessarily typing them somewhere with
#
the backspace available to you.
#
So you're thinking about what you're going to write, perhaps you have been thinking about
#
it for a couple of days before you send it, there's a sort that marination of ideas happens
#
and changes you as a result.
#
And in modern times, a lot of the communication happens through almost transactional emails
#
like cold and yeah, okay, I'll be there at seven, you know, that's a typical kind of
#
email length that you will find, whereas it used to be different.
#
And I'm wondering, so part one of my question is that, you know, part two, of course, is
#
that how this makes life harder for the historian that we no longer have all of those letters
#
You've spoken about that in your book, I'm equally interested in, you know, what effect
#
it has on the person, like, I'm guessing from whatever excerpts that you have shared, that
#
you continued writing long letters to each other, even though the format changed.
#
But that is because you were letter writers of that type, and that is how you would communicate.
#
So what are your thoughts?
#
So this morning, well, I can share this because it's part of the book.
#
Now, the book ends with a great Kumauni historian called Shekhar Pathak, who was an old dear
#
friend of mine and whom Rukund has befriended recently because Rukund lives in Ranniket
#
and Shekhar Pathak is in Naritaar and Rukund has recently published his book.
#
And Shekhar wrote me a beautiful, both of us, a beautiful letter about this book with some
#
images from the mountains saying, you know, your exchanges are like the mountains and
#
their moods, sunny in summer and temperamental in the monsoon, you know, it's a lovely letter,
#
And Rukund wrote back a long letter saying that, you know, what Shekhar's friendship
#
And now similarly, he and I continue corresponding, Rukund and I, about all kinds of things and
#
sometimes in a day, there'll be four letters on each side of five or six paragraphs each.
#
You know, so there was an exchange about a writer we greatly admire, whom I will not
#
name except to say he's an Indian writer whom we both greatly admire and we admire different
#
So this exchange was going on now and because not only have we corresponded this way for
#
so long, more importantly, that's the only way Rukund likes to keep the friendship going.
#
If I go to see him in Raniket, which I did once, he will have lunch with me.
#
If I WhatsApp him, he won't usually return my message.
#
If I call him, the line will go cold, right?
#
And so one day, I will present the full archive of our correspondence, you know, to some place
#
because there's so many, as I said, an exchange about the mountains, an exchange about an
#
Indian writer, an exchange about, you know, music, which he's passionate about.
#
And he listens, of course, he's deeply knowledgeable about Western classical music, but mine to
#
And he, that's my other friendships, which sometimes means as intimate and as close,
#
not professionally as formative in my career, but say a friendship, shall we say, you know,
#
one of my closest friends was the remarkable civil servant and music scholar, Keshav Desiraju.
#
And I think of him almost every day, he died two years ago, shortly after completing his
#
fine book on MS Subbalakshmi and after spending a career in really reshaping health delivery
#
Now, we were very close friends, intimate friends, so unlike Rukund and I, we would
#
talk two or three times a day.
#
But I often think of him, but could I write a book on our friendship?
#
It would be diffused, unstructured, inchoate, all over the place, it would have some nice
#
touches, but it wouldn't have this, you could say depth, you know, that these letters provide.
#
And Rukund writes to a few other people in the same way, you know, at similar length.
#
And I think that's what he likes.
#
You know, earlier you spoke about how you've written at one point in your book about, you
#
know, two of the ways in which it can be seen, a partisan account of publishing in
#
India and a self-indulgent celebration of elite male privilege.
#
And none of those are actually true, but the other possibilities you lay out in the paragraph
#
about it in your book are as a memoir of friendship and as an elegy to a lost world.
#
And to me, it works beautifully on both those regards.
#
And I want to double click on friendship in general, you know, like there is this concept
#
of Dunbar's number that we can't actually, you know, remember the names of more than
#
That's a total number of people our brains are wired to, you know, adapt to.
#
And from that to further numbers that emerges that you'll generally have around five people
#
that are really close to you and an outer circle of 15 people who are friends and so
#
And it seems that even there, there are nuances because I'm pretty certain that in terms
#
of how much he shaped your mind space, Rukund would be in that five.
#
But in terms of actually physically spending time together, hanging out, chilling, he'd
#
probably be in the 15, if at all.
#
What is your sense of friendships over the years and how do you like, are you intentional
#
about keeping friendships going and how has your view towards friendship changed, especially
#
in the course of writing the book where you're actually writing about one?
#
No, so I mean, this five, 15 broadly applies to me, except there's an outer circle of maybe
#
And that's because of the circumstances of my life.
#
So my life has, first of all, taken me for extended periods to different parts of India,
#
you know, and this is pre liberalization and pre India on the move to use Chinmaye Tambay's
#
I mean, I grew up in Dehradun, studied in Delhi, did a PhD in Calcutta and now live
#
I've traveled to different states in the course of my work.
#
I live abroad for extended periods.
#
So I have American friends, Spanish friends, British friends, French friends.
#
And I've also done naturally Greek areas.
#
So I'd say, yet, there would still be eight or ten people with whom I have this kind of
#
long lasting friendship.
#
I mean, I mentioned one, Keshav Desi Raju, I can mention another, whom you should talk
#
to, if you haven't already, who is the educationist, Rukmini Banisdia Pratham, who again is a college
#
friend and in fact, I spoke to her just now before coming here.
#
And a few others, you know, there's a Spanish historian, a British biographer, whom I count
#
But I, Shekhar Pathak, the great Uttarakhandi historian, but I think friendships, I always
#
worry when a friend goes cold on me.
#
I'm the person who establishes contact.
#
You know, I write and say, hey, what happened?
#
I haven't heard from you.
#
And even if the friend is behaving badly, I'll be doing the making up.
#
So I think friendships have mattered a great deal to me.
#
And of course, there's an ebb and flow, sometimes you lose touch, sometimes you regain touch.
#
But yes, I mean, obviously, that Dunbar's number, which is the first time I've heard
#
of that, which you quoted, is roughly right.
#
I mean, I don't think one can have more than 15 really close friends in one's life.
#
And how do you think of friendships across age, like a moving bit, and I wish there was
#
more of it actually in the book, is about your friendship with Dharmakumar, who was
#
your cousin, Durukun at one point referred to her as your aunt, but who was your cousin
#
and they were 30 years between you.
#
And it seems that that was also a beautiful nurturing friendship.
#
And someone, one of my guests on a recent episode, but I've forgotten who because I'm
#
growing old myself and my memory isn't great, lamented that, you know, what he observes
#
among younger people today is that there aren't so many friendships that go across age.
#
And his point was that we should have friends who are 20 years older than us, we should
#
have friends who are 20 years younger than us.
#
And I myself find, you know, great value in this because, you know, you could be picking
#
up different things from people in different generations.
#
So what are your thoughts on that, do you have much younger friends?
#
That's a very rich insight and it's possible that now you mention it, that friendships
#
across generations have declined in recent years.
#
And one reason for that could be the internet and the smartphone, because you're on your
#
machine other than meeting people, right?
#
I actually have always had friends, close friends who are older than me, less so younger
#
I mean, I've had young writers whom I like and who mail me and whom I mail, you know,
#
who if I like something of theirs, I write to them.
#
But it may be a deficiency in me, Dharmakumar was extraordinarily generous towards young
#
people and that some of that comes from being a teacher, you know, unfortunately, I only
#
episodically taught in the university and I think teachers may have a particular interest
#
and aptitude for reaching out to young people.
#
You're also extremely, I mean, many, many people would say you're also generous to young
#
Yeah, no, I'm not disputing that, but in a different way, like if someone sends me a
#
manuscript, I'll comment on it and help them, you know, improve it and possibly find a publisher.
#
But actually, now that you ask this question and, you know, you have encouraged me to be
#
personal, if I was to think of people younger than me, significantly younger than me, with
#
whom I've got really close friendships, obviously, my two children will have to be excluded from
#
this, I'd be hard put to name more than four or five and all of them would be a decade
#
So I'm not 65 and I'd be happy to name these people because I love them dearly and you
#
know some of them or know of, if you don't know them, you know of them, know of them.
#
So I'd say Naresh Vanandis would be one and Nandini Sundar, the anthropologist, would
#
They're both about 10, 12 years younger than me.
#
The great Tamil historian A. R. Venkateshwara Lopathi would be a third, but not many more.
#
The others are young writers I've, you know, been interacted with and maybe given feedback
#
on their work and, you know, out of admiration for their work.
#
But there's been no long letters, no arguments, no confessions, no sentimentality.
#
Naresh and Nandini are, I really am very, very close to them and I really admire them
#
and I'm fond of them and Naresh, of course, is impossible to fight with.
#
But my friendship with Nandini, though she's only 10 years younger than me and Dharma was
#
30 years older than me.
#
It's a kind of replication of that, that it's, you know, it's a younger, older person
#
and there's a quarreling and kind of, there's a tension, but there's also great affection.
#
But I can't think of someone in their 30s, I'm, and that could be that, it could be many
#
It could be that the old I've got, I've become more solitary in my attitude.
#
It could be intimidating for people to reach out to an older and reasonably well-known
#
So, yeah, I mean, there are many young writers I admire and as I said, I mean, I've worked
#
with them and I love engaging with them.
#
I mean, they're usually historians or non-fiction writers and not always Indian.
#
I mean, there's some people, you know, for example, the historian Nico Slate, who's American,
#
who's just written a wonderful biography of Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, whom I've known
#
from when he was a PhD student, Jiniar Patel, I mean, lots of other younger people, Aarup
#
Jati Sakyar, the Assamese historian Akshay Mukul, Harish Damodaran, you know, Sohini
#
Chattopadhyay, who's written this lovely book on runners and I've been in conversation
#
But I'm not, maybe there is, maybe, you know, the fault is in me.
#
It could be, it's a very interesting question you raised, I've never thought about it before,
#
Why is it that when I was young, I befriended people who were 20 and 30 years older and
#
became very close to them?
#
And I haven't been able to successfully reproduce that in the same way.
#
It could be, I think, maybe a character failing on my part.
#
That I mean, or it could be that, oh, and when I mean character failing, I also include
#
an absolute obsession with one's work, you know, where I don't want to spend too much
#
time hanging around with people because I want to focus on my work, you know, that comes
#
at a cost to making new friends.
#
You're being too harsh, so I'll come up with an alternative explanation, I mean,
#
your openness and generosity is something that, you know, many have commented upon and
#
I've experienced myself, but my alternative explanation also, and that leads to my next
#
question, is perhaps a texture of our modern lives, where, you know, I'm in the middle
#
of writing a newsletter post with the tentative title, trapped inside the infinite scroll,
#
but the texture of our modern lives involves that we don't engage deeply with reality,
#
but are always skimming through it.
#
We are scrolling, scrolling, swiping, swiping, clicking, clicking.
#
Everything is happening in bite-sized chunks, even though we have all the knowledge in the
#
world available to us and, you know, all of those riches, whereas, you know, when you
#
and I were growing up, there was such a scarcity of books and knowledge around us, but our
#
You sat down with a book, there was really nothing much to do.
#
You would sit with it for two or three hours.
#
And I feel that, therefore, the texture of your life, the texture of your thinking changes
#
So, also conversations.
#
So, when there was no smartphone, you would tell us the two hours you spent with someone,
#
you know, rather than texting them, or when you're with them, you're looking at your
#
phone and they're looking at their phone, right?
#
So, it's much more deep and intense and engaged than the conversations used to be, when it's
#
absolutely, you're focused on one another, you know, totally, right?
#
And yeah, that could be, that could be part of it, yeah.
#
Is there a counterfactual world in which you and Rukun are young teenagers in this world
#
Because Rukun, the recluse, could find a way to be social with so much of, you know, where
#
you don't actually have to meet people, but you can interact with them.
#
And you, on the other hand, would be probably going out less, playing cricket less, etc.
#
Yes, I'm glad I grew up, for all the advantages of, you know, the smartphone and easily available
#
information and reaching people when there's an emergency and so on.
#
I'm glad I grew up at a time when there was no television in my hometown, you know, there
#
And radio provides a very different window to the world because radio stalks and excites
#
the imagination in which the television and YouTube does not, you know.
#
So yes, I mean, yeah, it's, I mean, I remember these are childhood friendships, which, of
#
a kind, which probably don't exist because there was no radio or occasionally there was
#
I remember, for example, growing up in Dehradun and I had four or five friends, they were
#
all in different colleges, they would come home for the holidays.
#
So I would come from Delhi, one would come from Pirani, one would come from Kanpur and
#
we were neighbors and then we would go for walks in the evening.
#
And I remember one and we would chat about many things, you know, usual things teenagers
#
And there was one evening when this is 1975, OK, it was a Wimbledon final, Arthur Ash was
#
playing Jimmy Connors and we sat on a grassy piece of grassy ground in Dehradun, looking
#
out to the Himalayan foothills, listening to this match for two and a half hours.
#
And that was an epic match because Connors had made some, maybe not racist, but pejorative
#
comments about Ash and Ash would never look at him through that and, of course, the first
#
black man to win Wimbledon.
#
And what that experience would have done to our friendship, you know, to the four or five
#
of us who really made it.
#
So, yes, that kind of thing, you would have that watching a television set together or
#
So, yeah, in a way, probably the world of the smartphone and the internet has made deep
#
engaged friendships more difficult, not impossible.
#
But you know, in that sense, this book is an energy to a world in which friendship is
#
It's also an energy to a world in which publishing operated on different principles.
#
You know, your anecdote gives me a nice little segue into your friendship because one charming
#
part of your book is where you wrote something about a match in which Richards and Lloyd
#
had a partnership in the mid 70s.
#
And I'll read out Rukun's reply because it's just so delightful.
#
And as it happened, he was also at that match.
#
And you know, 30 years later, for people thinking I did this and I did that, then I think to
#
find these common elements will be really hard.
#
But he was also at that match.
#
And he wrote, quote, I like your descriptions of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards.
#
I too was at the Kotla watching Viv hit all those sixes against Berry and go during his
#
190 or so exhilarating experience.
#
I thought the central difference really between Lloyd and Richards was that Richard's stylish
#
savagery was communicated by his face and body language.
#
Everything about him spoke when he was being lethal.
#
But with Lloyd, on the other hand, there was a hugely attractive gorilla like Langer, a
#
cordial and impassive ease about that brutal batting he was dishing out as a hitting a
#
four was a form of politeness like sipping tea.
#
He seemed so inoffensive and so casually benign, even as he whiplashed all those balls flat
#
To me, he communicated a philosophical rectitude on a job well done, something impersonal.
#
He was impartially executing rather than anything personal against any particular bowler or
#
That made him seem different and even more exalted than Richard's in a way, partly because
#
most of the power batsmen, example Tendulkar, are more in the Richards and the Lloyd mold
#
in the sense that they are so personally involved in their art and communicate that involvement
#
Lloyd seemed a kind of llama among batsmen, stop quote.
#
It's a wonderful passage.
#
You know, we talked earlier about this book I wanted to write on foreign cricketers.
#
And this letter was in response to that book.
#
And I'm glad I did not publish that book.
#
But I'm glad I returned this letter because it's so vivid and so beautifully crafted.
#
The llama among batsmen is what Lloyd was.
#
And there's a beautiful line at the end about what else is cricket watching except emotions
#
recollected as hype, which is such a lovely way to put it and kind of tragic that, you
#
know, writing such as this should just be in a personal letter and not available for
#
And when I read this, and this comes pretty late in your book.
#
So when I read this, I thought to myself that, yeah, everything that you've written about
#
Rukun would make it seem that he was like a Lloyd and you were like a Richards, you
#
know, in terms of kind of being reclusive, not really out there and you got to do what
#
you got to do and, you know, and yet just imperious and so good.
#
So that's a nice analogy.
#
I think Rukun would appreciate it.
#
Tell me about how you met him.
#
So there's something I don't talk about in this book, because it would have spoilt the
#
I first saw him on a badminton court.
#
I had finished in those days when you finished school, if you had six months holidays before
#
So I wanted to join St. Stephen's.
#
I finished school in December of 1973, and in January I visited St. Stephen's to see
#
my friend Akhilesh Kala, who makes a cameo appearance in this book, and he was showing
#
around the college and we just went to the gym and Rukun was playing badminton.
#
And he was playing badminton.
#
This is a sign of who we were playing with, of the time we then lived in, which is why
#
this book is also an energy for, shall we say, the pre-Hindutva era of Indian intellectual
#
He was playing badminton against a man called Rajan Habib Khwaja, a Hindu and a Muslim name,
#
and who was the son of Gandhian Nationalists Associated, who his father was a professor
#
and at one stage also a Congress MP.
#
And I just remember them playing badminton, and Kala walked in, and Kala was a showman.
#
He liked walking on his hands.
#
He started walking on his hands, and Rukun and Khwaja put down their rackets and started
#
That was the first time I saw Rukun, which I don't mention in this book.
#
And then six months later I joined St. Stephen's, where, you know, my first sight of him was
#
as a badminton player, and within a week of my joining the college, six months later,
#
in July 1974, there was an aura about him because he was one of the two most brilliant
#
people in the final layer, the other being Shashi Tharoor, and they were both brilliant,
#
both formidably well-read, both very erudite, both wrote elegant prose, and yet they were
#
so spectacularly dissimilar in their personalities, and each had an aura of a different kind.
#
Shashi was debating, wanted to be president of the college, and clearly was destined for
#
great things, and Rukun was in his room listening to Beethoven, and a kind of elusive, enigmatic
#
fellow who barely befriended anyone.
#
So that was the first real memory I have of Rukun, was the reputation he had in college
#
as a brilliant, reclusive, arrogant, and basically altogether antisocial and unfriendly man.
#
You've quoted these lovely lines by Amitav Ghosh on him, where Ghosh writes,
#
they said, and soft-spoken, so stealthy that you never sensed his presence until he had
#
you square in his side, stop-quote, and you know, the bullying, bellowing senior sounds
#
just like Viv Richards again, and it sounds just like Lloyd, and of course, apparently,
#
you know, Amitav and him got along really well because he took Amitav to his room, as
#
you describe, and played him some music, so identified that, and he was able to identify
#
most things which I would not have been able to, which you would not have been able to,
#
and 99% of students in college would not have been able to, so Amitav was the charm circle
#
of five who had knowledge of music or of poetry, and hence was befriended by Rukun.
#
And you know, from the outside, a person like this would also seem arrogant, like you describe
#
one time where you were kind of, perhaps, you mentioned, might be the only time you
#
spoke to him, that you were coming from somewhere, and he was driving off on his scooter, and
#
you said hello, and he just glared at you and drove off, right?
#
And you know, so you would think, like, who is this arrogant guy, who the hell does he
#
think he is, you know, etc., etc.
#
So tell me about, you know, how you actually thought of him, because what also happens
#
is that when you look back, your recollection of that time can be coloured by everything
#
that you know subsequently of the person, which of course is a great relationship that
#
But at the time, what was it like, and from what you have come to know of him subsequently,
#
what was he really like deep inside?
#
Was he arrogant, or was he just, you know, matter of fact, I just want to be with who
#
Brilliant and unapproachable.
#
I think that would be the way to describe him then, and possibly even now, you know.
#
And of course, with occasionally vicious turn of phrase, I mean, sometimes very elegant,
#
very beautifully put, but sometimes vicious, and that kind of remains.
#
He's become slightly, I put it, till he was in his forties, he would occasionally like
#
to meet people, one on one, or in groups of two and three, he would never like parties.
#
But now I think he's absolutely withdrawn, except for his wife, and whoever visits him
#
in Raniket and his dogs, and he's still, you know, he's very close to some old friends.
#
But I don't, except for Shekhar Pathak, I suspect he hasn't met a single new friend
#
How much of a part did his background have in shaping him, because I'm fascinated by
#
how his dad Ramadwani had that legendary bookstore in Lucknow, and would go out of his way to
#
help young people to shape their lives, as it were.
#
You mentioned how someone finished an MA and he gave him a book specifically because he
#
was so happy this young man had done well and wanted him to have that book.
#
And it seems to me that when you later describe, he might not be like his father in the sense
#
that he's out there in the public square and constantly, you know, meeting all of these
#
people who come to him and etc.
#
But otherwise, he seems exactly like that, in the sense that he's interested in people
#
He's immersed in the world of ideas and he wants people to get ahead in that sense.
#
I think he was very proud of his father and what the father represented, you know, as
#
I quote Ira Pandey in all Ramadwani, an oasis of civility and ever-changing, you know, in
#
a kind of city becoming rapidly barbaric or something.
#
She puts it much better.
#
And he was proud of his father, also of his mother and his aunt.
#
His aunt was a very respected teacher in Lucknow, and I saw a letter he wrote to his cousin
#
when his aunt died, which was really deeply moving and showed how much he cared for, you
#
know, his parents and his aunt, who gave him an understanding of literature, of music,
#
of, you know, the word that we would always associate with a place like Lucknow, tamiz,
#
you know, which can't really be translated as civility or courtesy, but something more
#
and refinement of that kind.
#
In fact, when his father died, he went to close up the store and he found, since he
#
knows I like biography and he knows my son Keshava likes poetry, unlike me, he found
#
the first edition of a biography of Byron, which he posted to us with a description which
#
said to Ram and Keshava, from the ghost of Ram Advani, it showed that he obviously admired
#
his father and what the father represented, and as you say, his own way was carrying it
#
on out in a different sphere.
#
So books, ideas, arguments, knowledge, a certain kind of integrity, you know, along with attitude,
#
I think that's what probably defines him.
#
I sort of wonder about the self-image and the interior life of people who are in a particular
#
place where they see themselves as just as thinkers and, you know, just in terms of how
#
refined they are, just sort of a cut above the rest, and there are dangers that this
#
could make you a little arrogant or you could simply end up being more aloof, but then there
#
is that question that how do you then see yourself because there is a tragedy in that
#
that you could see yourself as not fitting into this world and that could take you into
#
a particular direction, or there is that sort of uneasy negotiation where you find
#
your place in the world, and it, tell me a little bit about the sense that you get of
#
So I think, so he was a brilliant student, he got a gold medal, first class first BA,
#
first class for MA, and in those days, if you did that well, your old college offered
#
you a job straight away as a lecturer, and he was obviously probably conscientious in
#
class, but not that excited about meeting all these undergraduates.
#
And then he went up to Cambridge in his PhD, Cambridge is a beautiful place, he liked it,
#
he wrote his doctoral thesis, and then he was offered a job by Ravi Dayal to join the
#
OUP, and I think Ravi Dayal mattered a great deal to him.
#
There was, I spoke about the book in Bangalore last week, and someone who knew Ravi Dayal
#
asked me, she said, from your talk, it doesn't appear as if there's as much about Ravi Dayal.
#
And I said, there is some, but if Rukun was to write his memoir, it would be, he would
#
write about Ravi Dayal the way I have written about Rukun, and one or two of his teachers
#
in college, because Ravi Dayal was, unlike Rukun, more gregarious, utterly charming man,
#
like Rukun, devoted to producing high-quality works of scholarship, and he made OUP the
#
force it was, and Rukun took it to the next level.
#
But because Ravi recruited Rukun, Rukun found the calling that he loved most.
#
He was a teacher, he was a writer, and then he became a publisher, which is what he was
#
best at and which suited his temperament, and Ravi gave him the space to grow in the OUP.
#
And then, of course, the OUP changed, and after 20 years, I mean, Ravi had a wonderful
#
successor called Santosh Mukherjee, who was equally understanding of Rukun's gifts.
#
He knew that Rukun would never wine and dine the authors, Rukun would never be, you know,
#
promoting them, but he was absolutely indispensable to maintaining the OUP's intellectual standards.
#
So Ravi and his successor recognized that, a little later, the people who came after
#
that were much more interested in the bottom line, and Rukun was an audience with them,
#
and then he left and started his own publishing house.
#
But by then, he was established enough, had worked with enough authors who so respected
#
him that they migrated from the OUP to Poblen Black.
#
But probably, he found his calling, and a way to fulfill his career as a publisher in
#
a way that did not damage his personality, that was in keeping with his reclusive, inward
#
style, because of the space the OUP, and particularly, Ravi Dayal, gave him in those
#
So, I mean, my book is about Rukun, so I could not say, there are some paragraphs from what
#
Ravi Dayal meant, but if Rukun was to ever write his memoir, I suspect that there would
#
be two teachers, his undergraduate teacher, Birzad Singh, and his postgraduate teacher,
#
A.N. Call, and Ravi Dayal, who would essentially figure in that book.
#
Actually, Ravi Dayal, you have written, you know, I perhaps remember it as more substantive
#
than you now say, because it painted such a vivid picture of him in my mind, particularly
#
how when he had an office, he would not have an air conditioner in his cabin, because he
#
felt that everyone should work in the same circumstances.
#
That's a quote from Rukun, but…
#
Oh, that's a quote from Rukun, there you go, so I'll digress and ask a larger question
#
You know, in the past, in a different context of a broader history, we've spoken of the
#
great man theory and so on and so forth, and here, again, I wonder if it sort of applies
#
in the sense that you just spoke about the centrality of Ravi Dayal to Rukun, that Rukun
#
might have been someone different, somewhere different, if not for Ravi Dayal, and you
#
have certainly spoken, not just in the book, but elsewhere, about the centrality of Rukun
#
to your own life, how he shaped you, all your books came out of him.
#
I mean, there is a counterfactual in which if there is no Rukun Advani, we might not
#
Absolutely, absolutely.
#
You know, it's completely, so that's number one, that these individuals were so important
#
and without them, the course of life changes, and number two, it seems to me that these
#
individuals are outliers, in the sense that later on, of course, you talk about the decay
#
of publishing and all the things that happened, but it seems regardless of that, that in this
#
narrative that these are extraordinary people, and everyone they, you know, nurtured or came
#
in touch with were really lucky that they existed, but they were outliers, they were
#
not a type, they were not inevitable from the world around them.
#
Like, I think of this often in the context of the community of economic reformers in
#
a sense, that 91 was shaped by a community of economic reformers that worked together
#
from the late 70s, Montaic was brought here by Manmohan, a whole bunch of other people,
#
and that carried on for about 20-25 years, and then completely died out.
#
And I did an eight hour episode with KP Krishnan, perhaps the last of them recently, and I,
#
and my point to him was you guys were outliers.
#
It was not inevitable that you would emerge from the system, we are very lucky that you
#
did, but now the system is what the system is, people responding to incentives, but to,
#
you know, to go back to that publishing thing and, you know, the whole sort of, the happenstances
#
that have this particular individual exist in a particular place, and because of Ravi
#
Dayal, he finds that perfect calling as a publisher, where he can, you know, he doesn't
#
have to meet people all the time, but can immerse himself in the world of ideas and
#
shape their work, which just seems like such a good fit.
#
Listen to you, if you think of Indian, Hindustani classical music, a subject about which I have
#
some knowledge, I mean, by no means an expert, but you see, you had princely patrons, and
#
then princely patrons started declining.
#
And then you had some gurus who, three or four, I suppose, Aladia Khan, who, from whom
#
came all these great vocalists like, and from Aladia Khan and his sons, vocalists like Malik
#
Arjun and Kesar Bhai, eventually Kishori, and even down to Ashwinidhi Bidae Reshpande,
#
Alauddin Khan, without whom one would have not had Ravi Shankar, Adi Akbar, above all,
#
but also Pallalal Ghosh, the great flotist, and possibly Chaurasya and so on.
#
So, over there, Chaurasya was trained by Alauddin's daughter, and one of the daughters,
#
maybe Sawai Gandharav, from where you get, you know, then, you know, Abdul Karim Khan,
#
who trained Bhimshel and Gangubai.
#
So, I think, and they were, they were not associated, I mean, Aradia may have patronized
#
them, but these three or four gurus, all operating in the 30s and 40s, at a time when the princely
#
order was declining, and the radio was coming out, coming up to take the music of their
#
disciples to a wider world, you know.
#
So someone could probably have to write a history of Indian classical music around this,
#
you know, wonderfully beneficent coincidence of these three or four ustads, you know.
#
Not me, I don't know enough about it.
#
I'm just putting out the idea.
#
I mean, I have a sense of sociology and history, and to give somebody an idea, but I don't
#
have the, by no means do I have remotely the musical or technical expertise to write it.
#
So yes, obviously, individuals play a much more important role, not just great individuals.
#
Rukunath is not a great individual, Ravi, obviously, just a very capable publisher.
#
Yeah, and at one point, you know, when Rukunath is involved in a campaign to sort of save
#
Peter Heese, a scholar from deportation, he writes about Heese, that it was not patriotism
#
that motivated me, though quite the opposite of foster-influenced view of life in which
#
the individual's fate is more important than the nation's, and even more important.
#
When the individual is a decent underdog, Heese is a low-key scholar writing high-quality
#
history for the love of it, sucking up to no one, never trying to thrust himself into
#
the limelight for all the fine stuff he is writing quietly in the backwaters.
#
And this sentence, low-key scholar writing high-quality history, seems to me in spirit
#
to describe him himself, that he liked to be low-key, he didn't want to be in the limelight,
#
he didn't want to write himself, but he just loved engaging with ideas, and he didn't
#
care if it resulted in work for someone else.
#
And in your life, you have come across many people, I'm sure, who are either shapers or
#
creators themselves, and he seems like a quintessential shaper who was simply happy
#
that way, and you, in a sense, played both roles.
#
So these gurus I've talked about would be them, I mean, the holiday recordings of Alladiya
#
Khan, there's the odd recording of Alauddin Khan, but barely, right?
#
So they would have played the kind of nurturer, shaper role.
#
And so would many teachers across generations, not just in music, but in other professions.
#
This is, I'm talking about my life and my work.
#
I think I should put it on record that Rukun, I've written a whole book about Rukun, because
#
he's played an important role in my life, and because I have these 40 years of correspondence.
#
But there are at least three other people who possibly have played equivalent roles
#
in shaping me, and then I'll answer your question, and I'll briefly mention them.
#
That is my wife, Sudhata, that's a personal thing, but I mean, what a spouse can mean
#
to you, if it's a sustaining and happy relationship is something one would not want to trivialize
#
by talking about it, it's very deeply personal.
#
But there are two other people.
#
One is my first teacher, who is briefly mentioned in this book, who was a man called Anjan Ghosh.
#
I mean, I'm privileged in some ways, because I was middle class, I was English speaking,
#
but I'm not privileged in other ways, in that, by the standards of Indian scholarship.
#
I mean, if you look at all the leading Indian historians and political scientists and sociologists,
#
they either studied abroad or studied at JNU or Indian University.
#
I did a PhD in sociology in the most unlikely place, the Institute of Management, which
#
had a small, unglamorous, not very good sociology department, but when there was one young brilliant
#
scholar called Anjan Ghosh, who took me step by step through the classics of sociology,
#
Marx, Weber, Durkheim, through the classics of social anthropology, taught me the craft
#
of research, encouraged me to be interdisciplinary, to be a sociologist, to learn from history
#
and from literature, to go into the field.
#
And without him, I could not have written a single book.
#
Now, I don't have that archive of correspondence to write about him.
#
Another person who played an equally important role in my life was the late editor of the
#
EPW, Krishna Raj, who published my first essays when I was again unknown.
#
Now, Petri Dey plays such an important role in the academy.
#
You know, I quote MNCD Masters asking me, who is writing the forward to your book thinking
#
And I think, so I think because these three or four people, Krishna Raj, the editor of
#
EPW, my first teacher, Anjan Ghosh, Rukun, and support I got from my family, including
#
my father, not just my wife, I think allowed me to overcome the barrier of a indifferent
#
academic record to become a published scholar.
#
I think some of what I have done since in, you know, working with younger people is recognizing
#
how lucky I have been in having, you know, if I look at my peers, you know, they studied
#
with great philosophers in Princeton and Howard, historians in Cambridge, I mean,
#
and they still mention it.
#
I mean, the other day I was reading a CV of someone a little younger than me, and that
#
person mentions who they did their PhD with, because, you know, 30 years later you want
#
to say I did my PhD with some superstar, right?
#
No, I had none of that.
#
I was, as I said, I was privileged in other ways, I was middle class, I was a Brahmin,
#
I was male, I spoke English, but Anjan Ghosh, Rukun, and Krishna Raj made me a public scholar,
#
and the debt I owed him is so colossal and irredeemable that at least I can do a little
#
bit by, you know, any young writer or scholar who has a book idea which I think I can provide
#
some modest assistance with.
#
I think it's my obligation.
#
Tell me a little bit about Anjan Ghosh because I read about him in the book and I thought
#
I must ask Ram to elaborate because I was curious.
#
Tell me a little bit about him.
#
So he, it's like this, I mean, I don't know how much of this will interest your listeners.
#
It might be really very self-indulgent.
#
But when you think of chance and accident, Anjan Ghosh grew up in Kolkata, did a first
#
degree in literature, then went to JNU when it was just established to do an MA in sociology.
#
He was regarded as one of the two most brilliant sociologists, young sociologists of his generation,
#
the other being a person whom you surely know of, who is Shiv Vishwanath.
#
So Anjan was in JNU, Shiv was in Delhi University, they were contemporaries doing their PhDs
#
together, regarded as the rising stars of Indian sociology.
#
And then Anjan's father died and he was an only child, so he had to go back to be with
#
his mother, only son, go back with his mother in Kolkata and take the first job he got which
#
was in a management institute, which was totally uncongenial compared to Delhi where he was
#
And actually it was when I got interested in sociology, it was Shiv Vishwanath who told
#
me that the Delhi school will not give you admission because your grades are bad, but
#
my friend Anjan is in Kolkata, try there.
#
So here he was, he was stuck in Kolkata, the backwater of sociology in a management institute
#
where what was valued was marketing and finance and computer science, and in a city where
#
sociology was regarded as a bourgeois science, because Marxists actually had officially classified
#
sociology as a bourgeois science.
#
And for the reason that Marx talked about political economy and historical materialism,
#
which meant history, politics and economics were kosher, but sociology was a bourgeois
#
science, it was officially classified as such.
#
So it was a completely inhospitable intellectual environment for him.
#
And then I turned down at his doorstep, the only student in the department, and he is
#
so he just pours out all his energy and enthusiasm at me, I mean he has at least someone to nurture.
#
Whereas in Delhi you would have had hundreds of colleagues and peers and teachers and students.
#
So four years we talked almost every day about what I was reading, what he was reading, what
#
he was writing, he got my first articles published, and then of course some years later he died
#
of cancer, he died in his fifties, not that young, but before he could really fulfil his
#
own intellectual potential.
#
So without him, as I said, I would not have written a single book.
#
He really made me a scholar.
#
Rukun published the books and made them even better through his editing.
#
But the transition from an indifferent economist to a keen and energetic sociologist was really
#
overseen by Anjan Ghosh.
#
Something that I got a deeper sense of while reading the book, and this is another digression
#
but we'll come back to Rukun, but you know since you mentioned Anjan being in Calcutta
#
in this relatively obscure sort of institute, something that I got a deeper sense of during
#
this book was really how much of an outsider people like you and Rukun were in the sense
#
that the Marxist historians dominated everything.
#
You've got this fantastic passage where Ranajit Guha lectures to a hall full of Marxist historians
#
and somebody asks a question and he kind of comes back at them.
#
But at this time you are, despite being a student in what is a serious subject, the
#
of sociology, you are outside the mainstream of academia.
#
No one really takes you seriously at all.
#
Everybody has their prisms of looking at the world.
#
You have to fit into the theories of class warfare and conflict and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And how was that, how was it navigating that?
#
Because on the one hand you are having to navigate as someone who used to play cricket
#
and has now come into academia.
#
You must have had so many self doubts and you must have questioned yourself so much
#
that am I cut out for this and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And at the same time, even if you were cut out for that, given the discipline that you
#
have chosen, you are still an outsider within the system.
#
Give me a sense of what that was like for both you and in a certain sense Rukun as well
#
because he also did not regard himself as part of that set.
#
I can't speak for Rukun, but I think maybe there was, I think it was the discovery of
#
the Zipko movement and environmentalism that made me realize that just as Marxism had
#
dismissed sociology as a bourgeois science, it dismissed environmentalism as a bourgeois
#
deviation from the class struggle.
#
And my travels to the Himalayas and the recognition that contrary to what was believed both among
#
the Marxist left and the free market right, that environmentalism was a luxury a poor
#
country could not afford.
#
Actually, it was even more vital to the life, I mean, sustainable, careful management of
#
natural resources like air and water and forests and pasture, but absolutely vital to the livelihood
#
of hundreds of millions of Indians.
#
So I think that was a kind of epiphany and gave me a purpose that I will be a historian
#
That was my first field of research and then I moved on to other things.
#
And then I acquired the self-confidence and particularly after Krishna Raj published my
#
papers in EPW and they got some attention because no one had worked on this before.
#
I think then I was, and maybe I always had, I don't know how that came.
#
I think it came from the confidence of having discovered my calling that I would do what
#
There are these beautiful lines from Rukun where he talks about the intelligentsia and
#
they are so powerful that which he brought in a letter to you.
#
So I'll actually quote it because you put it in your book.
#
Please, please, please.
#
The trouble with the narrow-minded, blinkered, bureaucratized, malicious and petty semi-intelligentsia
#
of this fucked up country is that the moment someone writes well in an informal, freewheeling
#
manner on unacademic subjects as you do, and he's talking to you, obviously letter to you,
#
his virtues or writerly virtues are used to cast doubt on his equal and separate credibility
#
as a first-class academic.
#
These chutiyas talk about the desirability of blurring distinctions and categories, but
#
when someone blurs the distinctions between the academic and the unstuffily popular,
#
they feel hugely uneasy and threatened and uncomfortable, which is because these bastards
#
can't blur that distinction themselves and subconsciously know they can't.
#
In short, if an academic casts doubt on your calibre as an academic on the grounds that
#
you have written well on cricket, they do the same with Mukul Ke Suwan on the grounds
#
that he can write wonderfully on Hindi movies.
#
Take it as a compliment and tell them to stuff their stuffed shirt comments up their asses.
#
And this passage literally stands out because dear listener, Kunatwari does not write like
#
this from what I can make out from the rest of the book or his other writing that I've
#
read, but this is such a delightfully candid explosion, mincing no words.
#
So, I mean, several readers have said that they're glad I've quoted so extensively from
#
Rukun because it gives them a sense of what a wonderful stylist he is and also gives them
#
a sense of sadness that there's not more of him in the public domain because he used
#
to write for newspapers and he completely stopped 20 years ago.
#
But I'd say reflecting on that passage and also on the questions you asked before, I
#
think the people I admired as a young man and as a young scholar worked on the margins
#
So, Elwin, it was reading very early on which inspired me to move from economics to sociology.
#
And Elwin wrote many books, had an honorary degree from Oxford, but never had a university
#
job and was partly scorned by academics because he wrote so well.
#
Then later on when I moved to history, my first hero and relatively long lasting hero
#
was the great historian E. P. Thompson, who also only episodically had a university job.
#
And then when I got interested in the socialistic cricket, I stumbled upon C. L. R. James, who
#
wrote major works of historical scholarship without a PhD and without a university job.
#
So, I think it so happened that many of the people I admired, I mean to that list of Elwin,
#
Thompson and James, I should add two more who played an important role in my intellectual
#
evolution. One was the American environmental scholar and urban theorist Lewis Mumford.
#
And the last was the Indian nationalist M. Krishnan, who I grew up reading.
#
And all wrote major works of non-fiction stroke scholarship without, in most cases,
#
without having a PhD. In fact, in all cases without having a PhD and certainly without
#
though I had a PhD without holding a university job. And I think choosing the exemplars like that
#
made me shall we say more defined, less caring about academic convention and academic procedure,
#
academic language. And I reflect on this pantheon of five heroes because
#
the one lesson I took from them, cautionary lesson, is that all five of them were principally
#
historians, cultural critics, broadly non-fiction writers and scholars.
#
But all five of them at some stage in their career wrote a novel. And their novels all bombed.
#
And I think that's among the reasons I will never venture into fiction as I describe in this book.
#
You know, you describe in the book about how you almost wrote a novel and then I think you
#
read something by Mukul and you said, oh, you know, I can't write as well as that.
#
The conversation was Mukul. He was telling me, you're describing something. I could never do this.
#
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a terrible reason you should, you know, I don't know whether it
#
would have been good or bad, but I wish you'd done it because why not sort of stretch yourselves.
#
You know, on a related note, I remember I accidentally stumbled into a job in wisdom,
#
which later became Crick and Four back in the autees. And I remember that somebody asked me
#
that, why didn't you, you know, become a full-time cricket writer and just focus on that?
#
And my answer was because I read Rahul Bhattacharya. Because Rahul Bhattacharya
#
was just so remarkable that I thought that, oh my God, I can never do that.
#
And the reasoning is kind of silly because everything has its own place. I recognize that
#
now, but it was ugly blind that day. You know, so this sort of reminded me of that.
#
I want to continue down the line of what we were talking about and ask about
#
India's intellectual life. Like where does an intellectual ecosystem come from? Like I do the
#
show on YouTube now called Everything is Everything with my friend Ajay Shah. And we had an episode
#
called Fixing the Knowledge Society. And Ajay's central thesis was that there was a time where
#
universities were the center of the world of knowledge. That is where knowledge was produced.
#
That is where knowledge was sought for. That is where knowledge was disseminated. And that public
#
purpose and the function that it performed in society is completely lost. Our universities
#
across the world have degenerated completely, have become prey to fads and fashions and so on
#
and so forth. And exactly like everything that Rukun described in that passage I quoted out
#
applies so vividly for me today. And I can see that fine, you know, through these strokes of luck,
#
someone like you emerges and, you know, you speak about how for Permanent Black you edited
#
the Indian century. Writers like, you know, Srinath Raghavan, Neerja Gopal Jayal, their books
#
came out in that. So there is a generation of people doing really good work. But at the same
#
time, I feel our intellectual ecosystem is so incredibly lacking in depth and quality. Like
#
you'd once written an essay for Caravan where you'd spoken about how the right-wing ecosystem,
#
they were no thinkers at all. Of course, I kind of agree. But it seems that even overall,
#
that kind of holds. How many intellectuals of a quality are there and where does an
#
intellectual ecosystem then evolve from if the universities have failed us?
#
So, you know, Avid, the universities became inward-looking, self-absorbed, jargonized,
#
chasing fashion rather than true in-depth scholarship. I mean, I'm talking about the
#
humanities and social sciences. All that is true. But now the danger comes from elsewhere. It comes
#
from the political class and the regime that rules us. That is profoundly hostile to ideas
#
and debate and reflection and critical thinking. And even the small centers of reasonable work that
#
were going on in Delhi and other places have been basically destroyed by this regime. So I think
#
that's one aspect of it. The other is, of course, with, you know, WhatsApp and social media,
#
everyone is their own economist, their own sociologist, their own historian.
#
Clearly, you need to democratize knowledge, but you need to decertify deep research,
#
critical thinking, original sources in the way that's happened now. So at least humanities and
#
social sciences, the world over, are in a crisis for multiple reasons. And university professors
#
are only partly to blame. There are also larger political, technological, cultural forces at work
#
that are undermining the quality of scholarship. Yeah. And what you said about, you know, how a
#
particular regime may clam down, you know, earlier we discussed how it just happenstance that you
#
have individuals like Ravi Dayal and this thing. And equally it is happenstance that there's a
#
great institution like CPR. So when you gut that institution, the damage it does is huge. It is
#
enormous. There is work that would not exist today without them. And there is future work that
#
absolutely will not come into being. Absolutely. And the Danish School of Economics,
#
now many of the appointments are basically on political considerations, things like that.
#
Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, just probably not entirely German to this conversation,
#
one of the less known aspects of this regime's attack on intellectual work
#
is the undermining of our best scientific institutions by putting pro-Sanghi directors.
#
The government now more or less vetoes who can become an IIT director based on their
#
political, cultural, religious views. So that's deeply worrying.
#
That's deeply worrying. Let's take a quick break and on the other side of the break, let's continue.
#
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I can help you. Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen. I'm chatting with Ram Guha about his
#
wonderful book, The Cooking of Books, which is not about accounting and how you, you know, do
#
financial frauds, but instead about a deep personal friendship. And, you know, going back
#
to firstly, I'm delighted that you quoted so much from his letters to you, because they gave us a
#
sense both of how intensely he shaped your work and also what a fine thinker he was. And it struck
#
me that in a lot of that writing, there is obviously no self-consciousness at all because
#
he is writing to a friend. And that makes a writing even better in the sense that wherever
#
you quoted from things that have appeared in the public and all of that, it feels like here's
#
someone making an effort to be witty or to be smart because they know people are going to read
#
them and there's that self-consciousness. But some of these letters are just magnificent. They are
#
so eloquent, you know, so perfect at points that they cannot possibly be edited. And it's just a
#
remarkable intellect at work. And yet in, you know, so how do you think that plays out? Because I was
#
kind of teasing these thoughts in our head that was there then an anxiety of, you know, when he's
#
around other people and does writing in public sort of reproduce that kind of anxiety in a sense
#
that he thinks he has to be impressive, et cetera, et cetera, because the writing...
#
So, I mean, I can't answer on his behalf, but there is a performative aspect to writing. You
#
want to impress, you want to shock, you want to startle, you want to amuse. And because it's for
#
a large audience, I'll later is just yourself expressing your thoughts to someone you love and
#
like. And it's not supposed to be anyone else. And both the good and the bad in the writing of
#
public writing of shall we say, if I may list a few names, both the good and the bad
#
in the public writing of Shashi Tharoor, Rukun Arvani, Mukul Keshavan, Upamanyu Chaitaji,
#
Ramachandra Guha, Swapan Das Gupta, I mean, a wide variety of males and I'm deliberately mentioning
#
only males. A lot of this can be attributed to the college in which they studied, which was about
#
wit, argument, contestation in public. Abhitav Ghosh's writing is an exception.
#
Alan Seedy's writing is an exception. There are two Stefanian writers who are maybe from the
#
beginning, they only accidentally went to St. Stephen's. I mean, their writing was not really
#
their style of argument and their polemic and their wordplay. So that's part of it. I mean,
#
there is the aspects of the Stefanian prose style that are charming and evocative and the
#
aspects that are just dreadful. I mean, there's love of alliteration, PJs, bad jokes. So I think
#
maybe that's what it is because you're writing to impress a fellow Stefanian rather than writing
#
what you think. And I think that's how I would express it. And it also seems in his editorial
#
notes to you that not only is he adding a great deal and making suggestions about where you could
#
take a particular narrative or what you could look at, what he is also doing is that he's actually
#
cutting down a lot of the BS. Like I don't remember the particular example, but there is
#
this particular example where you had like a clause, you had half a sentence about, you know,
#
where you were being witty. I think, yeah, I think it is about Verrier Elvin being called
#
by the tribals. Not big brother in the Orwellian sense. Yeah. And you had half a line about his
#
not big brother in the Orwellian sense. And he was like, stop showing off. That is obvious.
#
And he made you cut that half line out. And it would seem that then he has an eye for that
#
in your writing. And in other people's writings too. So, you know, tell me a little bit then about
#
that how your writing evolved, how your work evolved as a consequence of knowing him. Because
#
one of the things that I seem to see is, and I think you mentioned it somewhere, that you were
#
so in awe of him or you respected him so much that you would defer to him always. If he would say,
#
cut this out, you would cut it out. And obviously from all the chunks that you reproduce, he's giving
#
you great reasons and all of it makes sense. But at the same time, he is shaping you. And there is
#
a lot of good in that shaping, that it is expanding your worldview and showing you things about your
#
own writing that you may not have seen. But there are also dangers in it. Because I think sometimes
#
you have to let young people play their shots, as it were, make their mistakes, find their own parts.
#
And there is a part dependence to encouraging them to think in a particular way also. So in the,
#
when you look back at the trajectory of your intellectual development and your development
#
as a writer with him, how do you feel? So I think Rukun was not micromanaging my prose.
#
He was expanding the range of my interests and maybe shaping the way an essay or a book was
#
structured, cutting out the fluff. But the prose style was mine. And so that's it. My PhD thesis
#
was written under the supervision of Anjan Ghosh and my co supervisor, Kamini Adhikari. And Rukun
#
had nothing to do with it. But he read it and he said, there should be more on women. The stuff and
#
the bravery of hill soldiers, not put it up front. You know, give some larger context about the
#
landscape. So he was working with what he saw, appreciating its virtues, not trying to homogenize
#
it and make it sort of uniform in a Time magazine or India Today kind of style, you know. But pushing
#
you in new directions. So he was, with other writers, he may have rewritten much more because
#
there would be other writers who maybe for whom writing was not so comfortable or easy.
#
I think what, where he particularly helped me was in my Elvin biography, because
#
a biography is the most difficult of literary genres, at least when it comes to nonfiction.
#
It's far easier writing a book of social history, political history, travel,
#
even autobiography. Because to get a person's life in the round, you know, both their private
#
life and their public life, to properly sketch out the other characters, you know, in their journey,
#
their parents, their siblings, their friends, their rivals, their lovers, their own children,
#
you know, and to do so in both a scrupulously honest way, but also while recognizing that
#
a life is lived in context with other lives. So the relationships come out. Too many biographers
#
just write about their main characters. People write on Gandhi, purely on the basis of Gandhi's
#
collected works. So it's only Gandhi's point of view. And I think that's where he really helped me.
#
But, and also giving me ideas. I mean, one of the letters when I read this book, I mean,
#
after it was published, one of the letters that really stood out, written by Rukuntumi,
#
was in 1987. I was in Bangalore. I come back from Yale. I was working here. And I write to him
#
saying, I've started resuming playing cricket with a club here. And you think you might think the
#
sociologist has regressed to becoming the cricketer you knew in college. And he writes back saying,
#
not at all. Why don't you write as a sociology of cricket? And this is what it should be about.
#
You know, look at how the game has changed. Who's watching it? Who's playing it? How cricketers are
#
coming from different backgrounds? How the game is being funded? How the fan base is changing?
#
And no one has written about all of this. Why don't you write about it? And effectively,
#
that's what I did many years later. So the germ of the idea of my book, A Column of Fallen Field,
#
was planted by Rukuntumi. But he saw someone who was passionate about cricket
#
as a young college student who had later become a sociologist and who could now marry his
#
professional training and his personal passion into a social history of cricket. So he saw it
#
that long ago. And so that's what a great editor does. You know, a great editor is,
#
I don't know, a kind of entrepreneur too. You know, I won't say a venture capitalist,
#
but maybe, you know, put a person and an idea together and say, why don't you just go for it?
#
That's what Peter Strauss did later on for me with India after Gandhi. I had no idea I would
#
ever write that book. And he comes to me and says, you know, why don't you write a history of
#
independent India? But in terms of my writing style, large or my prose style, I think it was
#
already there before I met Rukuntumi. Obviously, it was further refined, further shaped. But he
#
wasn't rewriting what I wrote. He was encouraging me to go in new directions, to probe deeper,
#
and to take on new and more challenging subjects. You begin your book with this wonderful quote by
#
Norman Podhoretz about editors, where he says, good editors, really good editors are very rare.
#
In fact, even rarer than good writers. It is a special kind of talent because it takes two
#
qualities that rarely go together in the same person. On the one hand, great arrogance. And
#
on the other hand, great selflessness. The arrogance lies in the fact that you, the editor,
#
thinks he knows better than the author, who is usually a specialist on how to say what it is he
#
wants to say. The humility or selflessness, which is very important, is that you are willing to lend
#
your talents to someone else's work without getting any credit for it. Stop quote. And
#
it therefore seems to me that this almost, is there a particular kind of person who is rarely
#
like this? Because to my mind, to not, if you're incredibly smart, if you're incredibly, like you
#
said, he was not an expert just in language, but in thought, he had a PhD from Cambridge,
#
for someone like that. And to look at relatively less sort of, you know, colleagues who were
#
probably not at the same level, like Shashi Tharoor going out there and writing all these novels and
#
making a name for themselves. And it would have been, you know, irresistible to kind of write
#
yourself and join that sort of league of people. But he never did that. And it seems both a little
#
baffling to me and at the same time, I completely get it. And so what is sort of your sense of that?
#
Like, what would his self image have been like? How did he see himself? Was he never tempted by
#
the, I mean, he did write Beethoven Among the Cows and so on, but you know, what is wrong?
#
He was tempted. And so after he wrote Beethoven Among the Cows, I remember chatting to him.
#
And he said he wants to write a novel from a female point of view, with a female character
#
is the main protagonist. And he had thought of it, but he never wrote it. He was also a very fine
#
essayist. You know, there was a, I still remember 30 years later, a review he wrote, a long review
#
he wrote of Robert Kanigel's biography of the mathematician Ramanujan. And the review started
#
by saying in the year, whatever, 1910, two of the greatest scholars in Cambridge,
#
independently, without knowing of the other, got letters from unknown people.
#
Russell, the greatest philosopher of his time, got a letter from an Austrian, which he looked
#
at and said, is this guy a crank or is he a genius? And a few months later, a few months before,
#
I forget, he had the chronology right, mathematician, the greatest, I beg your pardon,
#
Hardy, the greatest British mathematician of his time, got a letter from an unknown Indian,
#
and he looked at it and said, is this guy a genius or is he a crank? Now this was Wittgenstein
#
writing to Russell, and Ramanujan writing to Hardy. And in both cases, the great Cambridge
#
professor decided to give this person the benefit of the doubt and to punt, to take a chance and
#
invite them. And in each case, the protege outstripped the teacher or the mentor. Now only
#
Rukun could have drawn this comparison because of his scholarship. And so in that sense,
#
it must be reckoned a pity that he stopped writing for public consumption. He could have
#
still written all these letters, he could have still shaped all these books and nurtured all
#
these young writers, which he continues to do. But for whatever reason, he decided that he would
#
just stop writing. And I don't really, I have some speculations, but they're not well-founded,
#
so I should not share them as to why he simply stopped writing for the public.
#
At one point where you refer to your doctoral thesis period, you write, quote,
#
while Rukun's doctoral thesis was an example of literature from above,
#
mine was an illustration of history from below. Right? And that seemed to me to be very striking,
#
especially because what history from below indicates is that you have to put in a heck
#
of a lot of work to actually get there. You can't really sit there and you might have read a lot,
#
and you might know, oh, Wittgenstein wrote to Hardy and so and so wrote to Hoso and so.
#
But to write the kind of books that you went on to write, it's really a question of, you know,
#
sitting your butt on the chair and putting in all of this work. And that might not be
#
congenial for someone who just wants to live in a world of ideas, but not necessarily do all the
#
dirty work. I mean, you have to, if you're a historian, you have to, or an anthropologist,
#
you have to love the research. So anthropologist means living in a working class community or in
#
a, you know, or even if you're, now you will have ethnographies of IT companies. So living
#
for a year with people and talking to them and observing them. If you're a historian,
#
means going to the archives, it means seeing, for example, when I wrote my first book on peasants
#
and forests in the Himalayas, it meant not only looking at government records unpublished, but
#
also runs of Hindi newspapers, you know, week after week to look at them on microfilm and see
#
what they are saying about, you know, Garhwali peasants in the thirties and the forties and
#
fifties and then taking notes. So without that industrious hard labor in the archives or in the
#
field, you can't really begin even to construct a narrative or tell a story. Whereas if you're a
#
literary scholar, you just take a book from the library and, you know, pass it and analyze it
#
and gloss it. Yes. Tell me also about then how you came at your work ethic, because, you know,
#
in your book, you have this detailed section about how for the Elvin book, you wrote four or five
#
drafts practically from scratch and which involved not just, not just a hard work,
#
which I marvel at that you just put your bum on that chair every time and you get the job done,
#
but also the humility of being open that something I have worked on for so long is not working and I
#
should have the brutality to take it up and tear it again and start again. So tell me about how
#
you kind of arrive at that, because for a lot of lesser people, lesser minds, people who accomplish
#
much less people like me, it's very tempting that you write something and you think that,
#
oh, wow, this is so great. And it breaks your heart to touch it. But, you know, you somehow
#
kind of managed to do that. So, I mean, it does the work ethic. I think it has something to do
#
with my having been a cricketer and only a moderately good cricketer. So bowling three
#
hours in the next, trying to get Arun Lal or Kirti Azad out, because they were the two people
#
who were in my team who played for India. I'm just mentioning them. They were other very good
#
batsmen too. You have to try, try very hard. And all through my life, when I, I, of course,
#
I've enjoyed my work. It's not drudgery, but I go to an archive. I go at nine. I take a break at one
#
and I go back to my desk at two thirty. And then I am there till the archive closes at five, taking
#
notes from files. And I don't like taking photographs or photocopies. I just like taking
#
notes so that I assimilate much better. And when I'm back in my study in Bangalore, I'm at my desk,
#
not the whole day, but from nine thirty to one thirty writing. Now, it may have come from having,
#
I mean, it's, I mean, what a cricketer does is very different from what a historian does. But
#
having spent eight or nine years of my youth, absolutely devoted to trying to become proficient
#
at a sport in which I was never really proficient. I mean, I was an ordinary college
#
cricketer. That's it. I never really graduated to anything better than that. But I gave everything
#
to wanting to play cricket and wanting to play to the best of my abilities.
#
And I think that has remained with me. So I think I know other examples of people who played a sport
#
when they were young and then migrated to some other profession. And then I think also had this
#
ethic. I think playing a team sport is particularly valuable because it's not about yourself.
#
You know, you fail, but your team wins. In terms of writing and rewriting,
#
I think even my columns I rewrite and I always print out what I write.
#
And this is I often tell young people that don't think you can edit on the screen.
#
You can edit a bit on the screen, but you need a physical copy to see how the narrative flows,
#
where it stumbles, where it may be repetitive, where it may be confusing, unclear.
#
So even my, I mean, I've written now a fortnightly column for 25 years. It used to be a weekly
#
column. It's now fortnightly. And I always revise and print out. And I try usually to write it two,
#
three days in advance. So it has the benefit of two, three divisions. I think that's extremely
#
important. And the last thing I again tell young people when they ask me is never have
#
your mobile phone with you while you're writing or reading. The one difference that strikes me
#
between cricket and writing is that in cricket you get that immediate feedback loop. You can't
#
hide, you know how good you are. You know, you go out there on the field, you have a great bowler
#
bowling at you. There's no place to hide. And in writing, it often isn't like that. Sometimes
#
you have no idea. Sometimes you are too harsh on yourself. Sometimes you are not harsh enough
#
on yourself. And there is the added complexity. Like I often tell my writing students that if
#
you write something that you do not like, it is a reason to continue not to stop. Because all it
#
means is that your judgment is more evolved than your ability. And it's just endless iteration
#
that eventually, you know, makes your ability catch up with your judgment. But as regards to
#
judgment itself, you know, how was it for you? Because you were an outsider in a field that
#
itself was an outsider among other fields. And how would you possibly kind of know like at one
#
point, I think in the mid 90s, you quote from this letter that you write to Rukun where you say,
#
I am increasingly coming around to the opinion that the only thing I can do well as distinct
#
from competently is write about cricket. My depression these past weeks has been terrific.
#
Stop good. And I felt heartbroken when I read that. And thank God that Rukun replied,
#
you do tend to oscillate in a somewhat extreme manner for something and despair over the same
#
thing. So I'm reading that despondence over Elvin has a pendulum swing, which will soon go in the
#
right direction. And indeed it did. So thank God for that. But how would you sort of deal with this?
#
Because I think what a lot of young writers, young scholars often face is this extreme self
#
doubt, the imposter syndrome, and frankly, women feel it far more than men. And then how do you
#
even evaluate yourself in what is a sea of content and a sea of judgment floating all around you?
#
So I'll try to answer that question. But that letter you read out where I say 1995, the only
#
thing I feel I can write competently about is cricket. 30 years later, I think that's the only
#
thing I cannot write competently about. People often ask me why we stop writing or create.
#
That's because I started writing about cricket in an era as you discussed earlier in this
#
conversation where there was no television. And where you had to recreate an image of how
#
G. R. Vishwanath played the square cut or Sunil Gavaskar played the straight drive or Prasanna
#
Bould is straight A1. Now that's all there. You can see it. And my style of writing is as
#
extinct and as irrelevant as the Dodo, right? So I can't write about cricket anymore. People
#
often ask me. And the reason is if Bishan Bedi dies, I'll write a short tribute because I admire
#
him. But even that wouldn't have the, I still believe that it wouldn't have the kind of flavor
#
and energy and youthful exuberance of my early writings on cricket. So I cannot write competently
#
about cricket. I think I could write competently about history and politics and biography and so
#
on. And a lot of that is through experience. The older you get, the more you practice your craft.
#
And historians fortunately can go on to a much older age themselves. And we say mathematicians
#
who kind of peak at 23 or 25. I was almost writing great works of history into his 80s.
#
And so that's, but I also do have a feedback loop. I think you're right that as a cricketer,
#
you know immediately when somebody hits you for a six, that that was a bad ball. It may be a lucky
#
shot, but more likely to a bad ball. And you have colleagues who tell you, you know, to how to change
#
your approach to that particular batsman. Now of course you have a whole support staff and computer
#
analysts and video analysts. But I also do have a feedback loop. So, and it depends on the book I'm
#
writing. So I've just finished a book which will be out towards the end of the year, which is a
#
return to my first field of research. It's a history of Indian environmental thought,
#
starting with Tagore and ending with a writer in the 1970s. So kind of pre-Chipko history of
#
thinking about the environment in India. And there were half a dozen environmental scholars
#
of whom the bulk were actually not Indians, whom I got to read it and who provide me immensely
#
valuable feedback. For my journalism, if I'm confused or not sure about my argument,
#
now it is generally my wife or my children who will have a look at it and always improve it.
#
So I think you know with experience whom to trust for what particular piece of writing.
#
And you must not be afraid to share it with them with two caveats. The first is,
#
you should never show it to too many people. I think this book went through 13 drafts because
#
it needed it. But my other books would go to three or four people I trust, you know. If it's a
#
biography, the British historian David Gilmore would always be my first reader because he's a
#
magnificent biographer and one or two other people depending on what the topic is about.
#
And you must finally trust, the second caveat is you must finally trust your own judgment
#
based on what you get. But it's very different from a novel because I think novelists have a
#
much more difficult life because it's much easier being a historian than a novelist because you're
#
in command of your data, your research, your sources, your argument. You know what's there.
#
Who is written on Gandhi? So what can you add to what they've written on Gandhi?
#
Whereas if you're a novelist, you can't say I'm writing against Tolstoy or Dickens. You have no
#
basis for comparison or for judging how good your work is. But there are a few people I would always
#
add an important piece of writing. It used to be Rukun. Now I don't burden Rukun too much
#
because there are other things on his plate. Occasionally I still run something by him.
#
And of course, there are also some good editors around the place. I mean, I find that magazine
#
editors in India are not generally very good. But overseas, you know, whenever I write for the
#
Financial Times, which is very rarely about once a year, I get fantastic feedback and they always
#
improve my articles. Tell me about the evolution of the publishing ecosystem in all of these years
#
because it appears from the descriptions that, you know, in the 70s, it's a little bit of a
#
cottage industry. There are these committed individuals like Ravi Dayal who are building
#
something around themselves. And, you know, that is one strain of what is going on. But then the
#
90s, India opens up, Penguin comes here and things get corporatized and things go in a
#
sort of a different direction. Like even the definition of editor, as you point out,
#
it was Rukun who commissioned you and Rukun who went through all your text and shepherded your
#
books to where they went and even shaped your books in a sense. Like earlier, you know, when
#
you said that they're a little bit like venture capitalists, actually, I completely agree that
#
that's what a good editor is, that you're planting a hundred ideas. And then out of that, one will
#
take shape and become something great. So it is exactly the same kind of thinking. But tell me a
#
little bit about how that ecosystem changed. I mean, luckily, by the time it changed, you were
#
already a grandee of sorts, so it wouldn't have affected you personally. But you saw the change
#
and many of the changes were unedifying, like your descriptions of what happened in OUP,
#
which forced Rukun to leave, which were just petty politics playing out under other pretexts.
#
I think clearly, I have a criticism of Rukun in a footnote where I say,
#
but permanent black, world-class in editing, but not in marketing and publicity, right?
#
So plenty of books have to be sold. Rukun has a ministerial disregard for, you know,
#
making his books more visible, more known, and some of his authors have rightly complained about
#
that. On the other hand, you have people who simply treat books as, you know, FMCG,
#
fast moving and don't think of quality or how long a book endures. OUP was important because
#
it kept books in print. Now, for example, the death of OUP, what that has meant is,
#
if somebody today writes, shall we say, since we are in Karnataka, a biography of a,
#
say, a great Kannada writer, Shivram Kauran, or Ram Krishna Hengde, or Deva Rajars, two of our most
#
important chief ministers, or to take other states, EMS Nambudri Path, who ran the first
#
democratically elected communist government anywhere in the world, and had a very transformative
#
impact on his state, which is 30, 40 million people. Now, Penguin or Harper would publish that book.
#
They won't give it the same attention that the OUP editors would have done.
#
It'll sell 3,000 copies in the first year, and three years' data, you can't find it.
#
Whereas OUP would keep that book alive. It would not sell 3,000 copies in the first year. It only
#
said 750. But 15 years' data, if you wanted to know more about the history of communism in Kerala,
#
that book would be available. And that's the job of a scholarly publisher, to both improve the
#
quality of the writing, and the research, and the presentation, and to keep it alive.
#
The job of a commercial publisher is to sell many copies quickly. And they're complementary.
#
Some books can serve both purposes, but not all. I mean, Eric Hobsbawm's books still sell,
#
and they're first-class works of scholarship. Amartya Sen would be another person who's got
#
to bridge that gap. But broadly, you need both kinds of publishers. And I'm glad that you have
#
Penguin, and Harper, and Westland, and Aleph, and all of them, to nurture young writers. But I think
#
sometimes, in terms of scholarly writing and scholarly publishing, I think there's acute
#
deficiency in India today, after the death of OUP. I mean, if you look at some of the names,
#
and how they transformed our understanding of what India is all about. I mean, Ashish Nandi,
#
Veena Das, Romila Thapar, M.N. Srivast, Andhrae Bette, Subaltern Studies, Partho Chatterjee,
#
Nirjah Jeyal. Now, Permanent Black does some of that, but not enough. I mean, OUP had a
#
establishment. It had warehouses in every major city. So it could at least partially
#
compete with the commercial presses in getting their books out. And that is, as the death of
#
OUP has hurt the world of ideas in India, I mean, it's dealt with a body blow.
#
So I'm just thinking aloud here, but you know, earlier we were talking about, you know, the
#
intellectual ecosystem, and agreed that universities have kind of failed us, and the prospects seem
#
pretty bleak there. And at the same time, the publishing world is also bleak in the sense that
#
a publisher like Venture Capitalists will play the numbers game. They'll bring 100 books out,
#
one works, makes up all the others, that's what they want. They're not going to nurture a person
#
through five drafts of a biography of Verrier Elvin. No one's going to do that today. And I'm
#
like, then where does that come from? Because you need that also. Part of the answer, of course,
#
is the New India Foundation, which you've- That's one, but there must be several,
#
like the New India Foundation on this whole country. It's a drop in the ocean,
#
eight or ten like this. Absolutely, yeah. So what we do, for example, I mean, what the New
#
India Foundation does is we now have one of the filest OUP editors who worked with Rukun, and who
#
has a cameo appearance in this book, Rivka Israel. He's now a full-time retailer with the New India
#
Foundation. So before the book by a New India Foundation fellow gets to Penguin or Harper
#
Collins, it's already had top-class editing, which you can take it from me, given the kind of books
#
they're doing, Harper and Penguin cannot provide, or LF cannot provide it. So Rivka has done that.
#
She's reshaped the arguments, improved the prose, plugged the end. We are lucky,
#
but that's just one organization. The New India Foundation has just published 33 books,
#
which is not bad, but OUP would have done 300 in the same, because it's a major organization with
#
a large staff to sustain it. And I have a feeling that there is actually a hunger for knowledge of
#
this sort, in the sense that it's pretty frequent. Yesterday, you and I happened to bump on a flight
#
just before that, someone on the same flight said, are you Amit Verma? Thank you for what you do,
#
great conversations. Later at the baggage belt, I saw another gentleman talking to you, and I presume
#
he would have said something similar to you. There is a hunger out there for people who want
#
this kind of deep knowledge. And I actually wonder, and I'm thinking aloud here for the benefit of
#
perhaps future publishers or problem solvers who are listening to this, that I think the conventional
#
thinking is that we have short attention spans, everything must be shallow, everything is a race
#
to the lowest common denominator. I think that isn't true. And I think there's an opportunity
#
for someone who figures it out. Absolutely, without question. I mean, you know, whether it's
#
cross subsidy, whether shall we say Penguin or Harper does a scholarly list, which is for prestige,
#
which is maybe just breaking even, not losing money, but just breaking even with other books,
#
but does it for prestige, you know, upmarket. Something like that could be done.
#
Yeah. So I was sort of struck by another beautiful quote about Rukun, where at one point,
#
you quote him in a letter saying, we badly need fewer human beings in this world. The world needs
#
to become more like Rani Khet in winter, when you see more foxes around our house than people,
#
stop quote. And you know, Rani Khet in winter seemed like a perfect metaphor of the Rukun
#
Advani kind of world. So I want to turn that question on you and ask you what is your Rani
#
Khet in winter? My Rani Khet in winter is in the mornings. Currently, I have an aging back
#
problem. So walking is difficult, come and park in the mornings and in the dark in my room with
#
listening to music in the evening. So that is my Rani Khet in winter. So how have you changed in
#
terms of how you look at life ahead? Like when we are young, I don't know what kind of daydreamer
#
you were. I would imagine all your early daydreams would be just about cricket and,
#
you know, scoring centuries and test matches or taking five wickets or whatever.
#
But how much was your time horizon? What were the kind of things that you would dream of for
#
you? Always a kind of person who would just be one project at a time. Like in your book,
#
you describe at various points of how Rukun almost gets exasperated because you keep throwing ideas
#
at him. Let's do this series and I'll edit it for you. Let's do that series. I'll edit it for you.
#
And at one point he tells you that, you know, shut up and write, you know, you don't get into all of
#
this. So tell me a little bit about how your ambitions, you know, not in a crude sense of
#
achieving some worldly goal or the other, but how your ambitions for yourself, how they've changed
#
over the years. Do you look at time differently and so on and so forth? So I've always had from
#
very early on two or three irons in the fire. So there are always two or three book projects
#
at various stages of completion and conceptualization. So it's not only one at a time.
#
I now recognize that I'm towards the end of my life and my end of my writing career.
#
The Gandhi biography is the last really major books I'll do. I mean, I'll write a series of
#
books with varying length and varying importance, but I would like to carry on contributing in
#
other ways. I am no longer associated with the New India Foundation formally. I'm an emeritus
#
trustee, but I've sort of as a substitute, I've started a series called Indian Lives,
#
which is books published by Harper here and Yale in America, written by first-rate scholars.
#
Biography is written by first-rate scholars and three have appeared, two have appeared. Patrick
#
Oliver's book on Ashoka and Chitra Lekha Juchi's book on Sheik Abdullah, both first-rate and her
#
third book on Kamala Devi by Nico State is coming soon and I've commissioned about 20 scholars to
#
write on 20 different characters of Indian history whose lives illuminate wider social,
#
political, cultural, intellectual trends and currents. And the idea of this series is as
#
follows. The general reader, the kind of educated reader finds it easiest to approach history through
#
biographies. I've mentioned EMS Nambudri Pat, so the story of modern Kerala through EMS Nambudri
#
Pat. The book on Sheik Abdullah is the story of modern Kashmir through Sheik Abdullah. That's
#
something that people want to know about lives and significant interesting lives.
#
On the other hand, scholars have traditionally scorned the writing of biography because I think
#
that they should not be wasting their time writing about a single individual when they could be
#
writing about larger processes. A typical scholar would want to write a book called
#
Politics and Society in Modern Kashmir rather than Sheik Abdullah in Modern Kashmir.
#
And to bridge this gap, what's happened is recognizing that there's a gap in the market.
#
People want lives biographies. Young entrepreneurs without the scholarly training and sometimes even
#
without the scholarly scruple have rushed to fill the gap. So the market is awash with really bad
#
books on particularly people like Subhash Bose and others of that kind who deserve much better
#
than they've got. So this series tries to fill that. And each book, I've kind of become like a
#
venture capitalist. So like Patrick Oliver, who wrote this book on Ashoka, he's one of the world's
#
greatest scholars of ancient India. And he and I were in correspondence about something totally
#
different. And I asked him, Patrick, have you ever considered writing a biography? He said,
#
no. I said, would you write on Ashoka? Because that brings 50 years of your scholarship to bear on
#
you always written around Ashoka. And he's produced this absolutely magnificent book.
#
So I'm very excited about this series because I think this is something I can do. In a way,
#
I'm not really capable of writing thousand page books anymore. I mean, the Gandhi biography or
#
India After Gandhi took a decade each. It meant visiting archives all over the world and I don't
#
have that energy or that, you know, I maybe even my intellectual powers are declining.
#
So I recognize when you ask me about time, I recognize that I may have a few small books
#
to write, which I will continue writing. But perhaps whatever I've learned can be more
#
fruitfully used by promoting and nurturing and shaping and curating a series like this Indian
#
Lives. So one of my friends Ajay Shah, in fact, two of my friends do this, Roshan Abbas does this as
#
well. They keep talking about how you're going to live till 120. And their whole point is that,
#
no, you must not think you have 20 years left. We have many decades of work ahead of us.
#
I don't want to live till 120. I'd be happy to go even today. I have no desire to live a long life.
#
So I would say the same thing. I would say the same thing. But my reason for that would be that
#
I don't want to spend 50 years in dementia. But what I have been convinced is that along with the
#
concept of lifespan, there is a concept of health span, which is how long you're healthy for. And
#
these people are trying to convince me that, no, no, the 100-year-old of 30 years later will be
#
like the 60-year-old today. So you could forever be 65 by that reckoning. So I would encourage you
#
to at least keep writing these small books. Here's my next sort of question sparked by
#
something that you said, that one, that there is a flurry of books out there which are of dubious
#
quality and all that. Now, my belief always is that everything eventually finds its own level.
#
And it strikes me that just the fact that you are doing a series with a particular branding Indian
#
Lives just means that after two or three books of that series, people will just take it more
#
seriously. If there's something in that series, it is automatically more credible. And that brings
#
me to the role in this modern world of, I mean, I don't know what is the appropriate term for it.
#
I use sense makers. Some use curators in the sense that we are awash with knowledge. We are
#
awash with propaganda also. We are awash with news, awash with information from all sides.
#
And increasingly what happens is that we look at, look to individuals as sense makers or curators
#
who make sense of it. For example, during COVID, when there was such a fog of war, you know,
#
eventually I narrowed down on three or four people who I can trust and I will follow them on Twitter
#
and I'm getting my dupe from there. And similarly in matters of history, there will be names that,
#
you know, people will trust and so on and so forth. And do you, you know, and I'll ask that
#
question in two ways. One, do you feel that in your own consumption of everything that is happening
#
in the world, is that sort of a factor that, you know, are there people who play that kind of role
#
for you who you come to trust more than others? No, obviously there are some writers I respect
#
and admire more, including columnists, and which may be why I tweet their columns more often than
#
I would others. But not, not, not, not really. I mean, for music maybe more, you know, the amount
#
of people who's done music, I trust a great deal. Yeah. You remember the last time we recorded two
#
years ago in February, you said you really must do an episode with Keshav Desi Raju and, you know,
#
I doddled as always and alas that opportunity is gone. So, you know, coming back to this book,
#
you said that it went through 13 drafts and all of that. What did Rukun think about the shaping
#
of the book? Because here there is obviously the editorial instinct would be alive in him because
#
he's been your editor all your life, even when you haven't directly been working with him.
#
But at the same time, he can't go too far because he's a subject.
#
So he let it be, he barely intervened, except in the preface. So the preface talks about
#
the changes in the world of publishing. And there he helped me expand it because it was very brief
#
and personal and he wanted the book to reflect this, the changing character of Indian publishing.
#
But in the text itself, he did not interfere, partly because it was about him, partly it was
#
my book. The odd name he wanted redacted, which I obliged, the odd name I wanted redacted,
#
I redacted, which he obliged. But otherwise he let it be. I mean, it was really his letters
#
that sparkle and that's his contribution to his book is what I've quoted from him in that. Which
#
is quite a lot and very revelatory and I hope will grab the attention of readers.
#
Yeah, I was curious about some of the redacted names. One particular redacted name, I tried to
#
figure out who it is by Googling furiously, but like I'm an expert searcher, but 20 minutes of
#
search could get me nowhere. As soon as this recording is over, I'll ask you for that name.
#
I might not tell you, so I'm not revealing anything. The two names not redacted are of
#
Shashi Tharoor, which is a public figure and I won't ask who headed the OUP editorial department
#
in Oxford and whose part is responsible for the destruction of OUP India. But other names
#
are redacted and you can make your guesses, but I'm not revealing anything.
#
We shall make our guesses. So my penultimate question in a sense refers to something that
#
you pointed out is sort of a difference between you and Rukun. And in a sense, the whole book is
#
this lovely charming story of a relationship of opposites almost where you are outgoing and
#
gregarious and et cetera, et cetera. And he is just the opposite and it's just such a beautiful
#
relationship. And one of those contrasts is optimism and pessimism where you're always out
#
there doing stuff because you're optimistic that change can be possible. And he's sitting in
#
Raniket and he's like, just chill man, you know, people are shit. I know them. So not my words,
#
not his, but so tell me a little bit about that because, you know, I think every time we record,
#
we speak a little bit about current affairs, which we haven't this time and we won't after
#
this question, but I'm just wondering about how does one stay optimistic? What are the things
#
that actually make you optimistic and give you hope and keep you going? Because it's not just
#
Ajay Shah and his friends, but the people who rule us will not leave till 120.
#
That's one thing that keeps me optimistic. Also large parts of India are, you know,
#
including where we are living in, you know, there's a different kind of, I mean, the change in
#
Karnataka, as you know, I'm not a great fan of the Congress party. But after the Congress party came
#
to power in May, the issues of hijab, halal, love, jihad and Tipu Sultan have disappeared
#
from the newspapers. Occasionally the Congress party, because it plays soft Hindutva, wants to
#
police and wants to ban alcohol and so on. But I think the politics of this country does not make
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me that pessimistic because it will change. What makes me pessimistic is the global situation,
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you know, the superpower rivalries, which are just terrible. I mean, what the America,
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America and China, the wars, the environmental crisis, that is, those are much more challenging
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and we don't really have an understanding of where that will lead us.
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And there's something that I absolutely do not have a handle on, which is that
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when I think of the political marketplace, I think of supply and demand and I think that always
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supply will respond to what they feel the demand is. And that is also from where the soft Hindutva
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of Congress and AAP comes from. And I believe it is a misreading. I believe that there is more
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to India than that and it is not just Hindutva and there's an absence of imagination there.
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But equally, I can't get a handle on what future demand will be because on the one hand,
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I can fall prey to the selection bias and look at the young people I see around me and say that,
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hey, it's fine, we'll turn out fine. But on the other hand, that is, you know, the selection bias,
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it's a small sliver of people like myself in my echo chamber. So what is sort of your sense
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of how we are shaping up as a society? You know, it's very hard to, I mean,
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I resist broad generalizations. So all I can say is that as far as I'm concerned,
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I'll continue to do what I have to do, whether it's the books I have to write or the columns
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I have to write or the friendships I have to sustain and not till 120, but maybe till 75 or 80.
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I hope it's still 120, but nevertheless. So a final question for the day, because I know
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you have to go. Recommend to me, since we last met in the last couple of years, therefore,
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in the last couple of years, books, music, films that you've really loved and loved so
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much that you just want everyone to go out there. So maybe music, because it's personal.
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I've been listening a lot to party serendipitous, to the great, some great Agra Karana singers.
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So Sharafa Soosran Khan, Latafa Soosran Khan, Lalit Rao. And they've just been quite wonderful.
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And I just keep on listening to them again and again and again. And so that's my great,
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I vaguely knew about them, but the Agra Karana vocalists, I've been listening to them a lot.
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And the second is our instrumentalists, who are from Calgary. And I think the Karana is technically
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called Senia Shahjahanpur Karana. But two great artists, both Seroth players, Radhika Mohan
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Moitra and his disciple, Buddha Dev Dasgupta, who have a magnificent repertoire and a particular
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tone and timbre to their playing, which is different and distinctive from Ali Akbar or Amjad,
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who are much, maybe for good reasons, more celebrated. And it's just been just absolutely
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joyous to discover them afresh. I vaguely knew about them. When I was a student in Calcutta,
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I heard Buddha Dev Dasgupta play once or twice. Lalit Rao lives in Bangalore, so I know a little
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bit about the Agra Karana, but I've been discovering them a lot. And I think compared to most celebrated
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vocalists, they're equally good and incredibly enriching. So I'd say Sharafa, Latafa, Lalit Rao
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and her disciples, the one side of the Agra Karana and Radhika Mohan Moitra and Buddha Dev Dasgupta
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on the Saroth, you know, it's just been, it keeps me optimistic in a sense. It keeps me sane whole.
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More than books and films, it's only the music. You're going to decline my request because you
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will feel that it would be, you know, you don't want to be self-indulgent. But if you ever wrote
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a memoir about your journey through music, what you discovered and what it did to you,
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I would love that so much. So I cannot because I don't know enough about it. So cricket I did.
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But it can be impressionistic. You don't need to be an expert. No, I've been encouraging
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our mutual friend Saman Subramanian to write a memoir of that kind because he knows much more,
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you know. I mean, the odd column I've written, I've written about four or five columns about music,
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which I'm not ashamed about. One on Bhim Sen, one on Ulaas Kashalkar, one on a particular
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Bade Guram composition of Hamsar's Bani. But that's the length at which my knowledge,
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my limited rudimentary knowledge can sustain expression, 1200 words, not a whole book.
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I would write other memoirs. I mean, I would like to write a memoir one day of my life with Gandhi,
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you know. So my journey with Gandhi as a scholar, as you know, meeting Gandhians,
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the changing landscape of how people are thinking about Gandhi, why the world has turned against
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Gandhi. So I will write a memoir of that. I may one day write a full-fledged political memoir
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of all that I've seen in my 65 years in India from the time of Nehru to the night time of Modi.
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But music, I just don't, I know, I know. I can't write a novel. I can't write a book on music.
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I mean, what it gives me is incalculable. But the other people will have to write,
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as Saman is one, you know, maybe there's a, I won't put Nazar on her, but there's a young scholar,
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not young, younger than me, scholar and writer of music in Bangalore. And she's writing something,
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a kind of memoir of her guru. And I very much look forward to that, but I just don't have the
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competent. You don't want to jinx her like you jinxed Shekhar Pathak where, you know, at the end of
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the day. But 30 years later it came out. 30 years later it came out. You know, you use the phrase,
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we've used the phrase literature from above and history from below. There is also a memoir from
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within. So one day I hope you do write about music. You don't have to be an expert. I would
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certainly jump out. Ram, thank you so much. It's been such an honor and a pleasure.
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Thank you, Amit. Always so nice to talk to you.
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Thank you for listening.
