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Tell me what you think of the following sentence.
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The world is a messy place and we can't be sure what will happen next.
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Now, at first glance, the sentence is so obviously true that it is almost banal.
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Of course the world is messy, of course we don't know what will happen next.
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But here's the thing, transplant that sentence from the present moment and place it anywhere
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in the past and it will still hold true.
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The world has always been messy.
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The future has always been uncertain.
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People have always been complicated, they've always contained multitudes.
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And yet, those among us who study the past are often expected to reduce these complexities,
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to present a simple narrative so that everything makes sense and everything almost seems inevitable.
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This is especially so in modern times when there is no longer a consensus on the truth,
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when narrative battles abound, when history has been weaponized.
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And for many historians, it must be tempting to fall in line with whoever they feel ideologically
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You don't even need to lie to do this, you can just choose to focus on ABC narrative
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about a period in history when XYZ is also true.
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It is a rare historian who doesn't care about fashions of the day, who doesn't care about
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all these incentives, who only cares about the pursuit of truth.
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Many such historians are featured on this show and many more will.
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The past is not past, it lives on in these present times, it projects itself into the
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a superb historian and thinker Vinayak Chaturvedi.
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Vinayak first wrote to me a couple of years ago when he published his book Hindutva and
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Violence – VD Savarkar and the Politics of History.
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We kept chatting online since then and I wanted him to come on the show but I wanted to record
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He is based in the US where he teaches history at the University of California in Irvine.
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Well, we finally made the stars align when he happened to come down to Bombay and he
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came over to my home studio and we recorded this episode.
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Now as you will find out in this conversation, taking Savarkar seriously was frowned upon
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It was almost like you can study anybody else, the most evil of people except Savarkar, who
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was almost, in Vinayak's words, like Voldemort, he who must not be named.
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But Vinayak, and I mean Chaturvedi not Savarkar, realized that Hindutva was too potent a force
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It needed to be studied and so Savarkar needed to be studied.
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This book is not just a great biography, it's also a powerful book of ideas which can help
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us better understand the times we live in.
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Vinayak is a deep thinker not just about history as in what happened in the past, but also
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history as in the study of what happened in the past and why that matters in the present.
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I'm sure you'll love this conversation as much as I did, but before we begin, let's
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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, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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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.
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Please do check it out.
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Vinayak, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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I've got to tell all our listeners that people look back in history and they say that some
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people know how to play the long game.
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A long game was played, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I want to say even we know how to play the long game.
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This podcast was planned, I think, two, two and a half years ago, a long time ago.
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And finally, we are doing it.
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We are doing a podcast whose time has come.
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I'm so happy that you could get and make it here and we are having this conversation face
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And so, you know, I want to start off by getting to know you a little better.
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You know, your books are amazing, especially Hindutva and Violence.
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It was so illuminating, even though I've read a lot about the subject before, but it still
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made me think in a bunch of new ways.
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And we'll talk about all of those as we go along.
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But first, I want to get to know you.
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So tell me about, you know, your childhood, where did you grow up and so on.
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Yeah, I think it's I was born in in India.
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I mean, I was born in Madhya Pradesh in Gwalior.
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And I always sort of when people ask the question, I always sort of think of this.
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I was watching an interview with Salman Rushdie and he was on his regarding his book Imaginary
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And when people ask him where he's from, he says, you know, there is a biological and
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historical fact that I'm from India, but the rest is very difficult to figure out where
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And so I sort of like that kind of explanation that he gave there.
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So I was born in India and then we moved to London very briefly and then Northern Ireland
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very briefly and then moved to New York.
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So I always say I sort of I learned how to speak English with a New York accent.
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And I became a New York Yankees baseball fan.
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So I learned the two things, English language and baseball in New York City.
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We were there for about six years and we moved to rural America.
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My father wanted to leave the big city and had some fascination with small towns.
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And so we moved to a very small town in the middle of the desert in West Texas.
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I always say it was the closest city was El Paso, 200 miles.
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It was 200 miles east of El Paso and 200 miles south of Lubbock.
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And if people don't know about these places, I always say that if you've read Cormac McCarthy's
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books, The Road, or if you've seen No Country for Old Men, McCarthy says that this is the
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landscape where he imagines the future dystopia that's coming.
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And so my father decided that leaving New York City to move to this what McCarthy describes
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as this dystopic future of the world.
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But we didn't last very long there.
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We then moved to even a smaller town in Southern California, which had no streetlights, which
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had no grocery store, which had mainly dirt roads.
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And it was about as rural as one could imagine California in the late 70s.
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So these were the main places I sort of grew up.
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And then I ended up studying at UCLA as an undergraduate and did my master's there.
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And then I became interested in wanting to be a historian and I ended up going back to
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So that's kind of the sort of abbreviated version of the journey.
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And then I got a job back in California.
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So I moved back to California.
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So I've been at the University of California Irvine since now more than 20 years since 2001.
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You know, you mentioned Cormac McCarthy and The Road, of course, is about a father and
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a son, you know, in that desolate landscape, as it was your father taking you to that desolate
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landscape to live is pretty interesting.
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And tell me about your dad, because just before we started, you said your dad warned you not
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So, of course, therefore I will ask you to talk about him.
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My father, I mean, grew up in Gwalior.
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He trained in Gwalior and there was a group of friends that he studied with who ended
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There was a shortage in the NHS and they were recruiting doctors.
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And so I think he was just kind of wanting to experience something different and move
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to Britain a couple of years before my mother and I moved there.
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And he found Britain to be problematic in the early 70s due to issues of racism.
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I think that was the main problem.
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And he has never gone back, actually.
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I mean, this is the interesting thing.
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Once he left, he's like, I'm never going back.
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So when I ended up moving, when I told him I'm going to Britain, he was sort of horrified
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by this decision that I was making of going back to Britain.
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And then we moved to New York for the same reason we had moved to London.
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I mean, that there was a shortage of doctors in the US and they were recruiting.
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And interestingly, there were doctors in this one specific hospital and we all lived in
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the same apartment building.
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And it was sort of this mini compound of Indian families living together who were all doctors
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and doctors' families in this building.
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And so that's where I grew up in New York City.
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Similarly, he had a friend who moved to Texas from Gwalior and we moved to Texas.
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And then when he decided he didn't want to be in Texas anymore, there were a group of
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Gwalior doctors in Riverside County.
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So we moved to Riverside County.
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So there's been this interesting kind of trajectory of movement that's happened from Gwalior.
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And so the joke in the house is that I grew up with more Gwalior kids, kids of Gwalior
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folks in Southern California and New York and Texas than perhaps if I hadn't stayed
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And I think that he always had wanted to come back to Gwalior and he had bought a house
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and wanted to retire in Gwalior and he's 88 now.
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So I told him that he needs to, you know, figure this out quickly in terms of retirement.
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So he didn't retire till COVID, COVID forced him to retire, but I think he would have continued
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working even till today as a physician.
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So he was very committed to being a doctor.
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So that's sort of a brief history of his kind of background.
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And you know, when you're a kid, you think of your parents as parents.
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You know, your dad is your dad.
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You see him in a particular way and that becomes a frame through which you view him through
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You view your mom the same way through a particular frame.
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But I'm just thinking that when I take a zoomed out view and I just think of biography, young
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doctor going from Gwalior to London, doesn't like it there, goes to New York, you know,
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struggling to fit in, struggling to find himself, decides he doesn't want to live in a big city,
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goes to Texas, decides it's too small for him.
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Maybe it's not good for the family, whatever, you know, and I would imagine that your parents
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at this time are young people going through intense turmoil in their minds, going through
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so many changes, trying to figure out where they fit, who they are, et cetera, et cetera.
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And all of it is perhaps invisible to you at the time.
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And there comes a stage, I think, in people's lives when they suddenly take a step back
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and look at their parents, not as parents, as a fixed point in their head, but as actual
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flesh and blood human beings.
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And I guess that's when you can make the process of both reconciling with whatever grievances
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you might have, but also becoming actual friends with them, because now you kind of get it.
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And, you know, the fact that they're your biological parents kind of begins to recede
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when you see them as real people.
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So tell me about both your parents.
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Like, how did you see them then?
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And what is that process through life where you where you began to see them differently
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and kind of understand them?
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I mean, my mother came, grew up in an old deli in Chandni Chowk.
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So, I mean, she described herself as a city girl.
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And so the idea of moving to London and then New York was an easy transition.
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Moving to rural America was less of an easy transition.
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And also because, I mean, it was like I said, I mean, the town we ended up moving to in
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California was extremely I mean, it was about as rural.
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There was about 1200 people.
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Everyone kind of knew each other and everyone knew of each other.
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I mean, so it was literally a village.
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And even when I go back now, my parents still live in the same town.
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I mean, there are still people there that I grew up with, that I see.
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And so it's still I mean, it's about as close to sort of sort of thinking about, you
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know, a village in India that where you have these kind of long generational connections.
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And and so I still have that.
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I think I think to answer the question, I think it the transformation was probably when
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I had a kid myself, I think that was the the moment I sort of realized what parents
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actually went through and did.
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And so I would probably say that that was probably the transformation where I sort of
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began to see what they probably had to deal with and also the, you know, the challenges
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of being in a new place and a new diaspora.
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I mean, I sort of think, imagine, OK, if I left and moved to a place that I'd never
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been to before, I think that would probably be really challenging.
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I mean, this is pre Internet, pre Google.
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So you can't really, besides reading books and talking to people.
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And so I think a lot of the talking to a lot of my parents, friends who, you know,
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how they became doctors and how they decided to move, they all have similar kinds of
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stories. But I think at another level, I think they took certain kinds of risks, but
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they were professionals. So they had a safety net around them as well at the same time.
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Right. That if you didn't like London, you could move to New York.
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If you don't like New York, you could move to a rural part of the country or whatever.
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So I think there was a great deal of flexibility and autonomy.
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And I think that was that was really important for both of them.
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But at another level, I think being raised in a house that was I would describe as
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fairly strict, not in terms of discipline, but in terms of language.
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And I think for me, that was really, you know, at that time, I didn't really understand
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what this meant. And my father and mother had this requirement that we would have to
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speak Hindi at home. And I remember him saying, you know, that as soon as you step out
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the door, you can speak whichever language you want. But inside the house, you have to
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speak Hindi and it has to be proper Hindi.
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And you have to it has to be the pronunciations of the words have to be correct.
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He didn't like the neither did my mom.
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The kind of the the American accent for Hindi, which at that time I didn't understand.
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But now I see it as extremely powerful as coming back to India, people always assuming
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I'm from living outside the country for however I look.
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But as soon as I speak, there's a there's a disconnect.
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And people, I mean, the number of times in the last few days, people have told me about
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this disconnect is pretty stunning.
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But this is that this happens.
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I mean, I remember talking to someone in London where they were from.
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And we started he's he said he was from Lucknow.
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And so I started speaking to him in Hindi.
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And he's like, where are you from?
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And I said, where did you grow up?
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I said, I grew up in New York, Texas and California.
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So I think that was another important part of our interactions was the the language was
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really important. And it also meant that coming back to India was easy.
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I felt very comfortable in terms of being able to communicate.
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And for some of my friends, many of my friends, even the children of these Gwalior doctors
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in New York, Texas and California and all over the US or whatever, it was difficult for
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them to speak when they came.
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And so I think that the issue of language was, I think, really a way to kind of create a
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certain kind of anchor. And I think he knew that.
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I mean, he knew that deep down that if if I just am able to insert this issue of language,
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I'll be the kids will be able to communicate.
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And so even today, my sister and I mostly speak in Hindi.
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We don't speak in English, you know, even though we both grew up there.
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But it also, I think, was directly influenced the kind of professional and educational
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decisions I made as well in terms of studying history.
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And this was also really important for for for him was to have a and and I you know,
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he is and describe himself as an Indian nationalist even today.
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And and so for him, this was really important that we understand the issue of history.
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For my mother and I, I think it was more understanding the relationship of popular culture
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and cinema. So this was part of the kind of daily conversations.
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And I thought and I think that is kind of important in terms of how they were able to
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cope by sort of holding on to certain things to the extent that even the food culture at
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home was very, very particularly the kind of food we would eat in parts of U.P.
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or Madhya Pradesh. So I think these are the two things, the food and the language was
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and the kind of the idea of history was central to the kind of house where my sister and I
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grew up in our kind of connections with with, you know, quote unquote India.
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I had the linguist Peggy Mohan on my show and she told me something fascinating and
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eye opening for me. She said, you think you're bilingual or, you know, so many people
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think they're bilingual or multilingual. Well, you're not, you know, bilingual, you're
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diglossic. And I said, what does that mean?
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And she was like, it means that in one particular context, only one language works for
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you. In another particular context, only the other language is natural for you.
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You're not actually using both languages across all contexts.
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And that leads me to thinking about when we are like that, that perhaps if I can, you
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know, ask, think, think aloud and ask you about this, it strikes me that it is therefore
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possible that you have a you have a Hindi self and an English self which are distinct
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from each other, perhaps in some way analogous to, you know, there's a public self,
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private self, secret self kind of division that people often make.
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And of course, all of these are simplistic, but they are useful frames sometimes.
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So is that the case? Is the Hindi Vinayak different from the English Vinayak?
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I think that's really interesting.
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I mean, Partha Chatterjee has written about this regarding himself, right?
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His his Bengali self is, you know, so he sort of thinks about and I've written
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about his kind of autobiographical writings and his and the relationship between his
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autobiographical writings with his theoretical writings, because he has this kind of binary
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that he sets up in the nation and its fragments and other places as well, where he's talking
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about that, that the real Bengali political self emerges in the Bengali language itself,
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And then I think that's why he's sort of so interested in thinking about the relationship
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of English versus Bengali in the creation of Bengali nationalism overall.
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For me, I think, I mean, I haven't studied as much as he has, but now you've provoked me
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to think about something. So what happens, there's a shift that happens periodically.
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And this happened in the US recently, which has never happened before, is when I come back
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to India, I speak, it takes me about a couple of weeks to kind of get full speed ahead with
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with my Hindi, because in the US, I'm mainly talking to my parents and my sister and a
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friend from Kanpur who lives in Chicago. And so I sort of want to speak to him regularly
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because and he prefers speaking Hindi as well.
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So so I don't get that much of an opportunity to speak.
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But the shift that happens when I come back to India after about two or three weeks is that I
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start dreaming in Hindi. I rarely dream in Hindi in the US.
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So recently, I was dreaming in Hindi in the US, which has never happened.
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And maybe it was in anticipation of coming to India that it was.
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And for me, that's a moment of kind of almost a certain kind of psychic completion.
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If you want to think of it that way, that I find there's a certain kind of comfort in that.
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I mean, for me, when I come to India, I that's one of the things I enjoy.
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I enjoy the food and I enjoy speaking in Hindi as much as I can.
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And and I think that's what I sort of miss when I'm in the US.
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So I don't know if I fully answered the kind of question, but I think there are these lines
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that blur, at least for me, sometimes I think that they blur.
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And it happens when I least suspect it. You know, I mean, what's.
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Yeah, I think that's probably for me.
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I haven't still fully thought about it.
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And part of me has resisted kind of deeping, doing a deep dive and sort of thinking psychically
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what this means. But I've always felt comfortable in sort of Hindi.
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And if I could speak more Hindi in in the US, I would prefer that in a certain sort of way.
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Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you said you don't know if you answered my question fully,
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as you know, and Savarkar did not.
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You can never answer a question fully.
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And yet every answer is valuable.
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So, yeah. Tell me a bit about your sort of interior life growing up,
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because one, it's itinerant, you're going from place to place,
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you know, London, New York and then to Texas and so on and so forth.
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So what is your interior life here in the sense that are those sort of displacements
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something that are a problem for because you have to make new friends everywhere?
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How do you cope with that?
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And also, what's the imaginary life like?
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Like, is it a reading habit that your parents are cultivating?
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What do you what do you speak about at the dining table?
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What do you speak about at home?
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So what's happening in your head?
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I think what we're I mean, my dad is extremely political and an avid newspaper reader.
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So that is something we were constantly discussing.
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The I mean, so when he'll even today, when he, you know, when he'll call, he will ask.
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So, you know, what did you read in the newspaper?
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And this is kind of our daily kind of conversation and sharing different items of news
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that, you know, that either appeared in The New York Times or The Financial Times.
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I mean, those are the two papers I subscribe to or any of the online papers that I was reading.
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So I think that has I mean, I do remember reading The New York Times as a seven year old,
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because this was something that we were doing as a family since I was a kid.
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And strangely enough, this is something that I have it that I've kind of
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very carefully manicured for my son as well as is the value of newspapers
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knowing that they're going to be extinct in our own lifetime.
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Right. We're sort of seeing the extinction happening in front of us.
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And it's it's almost impossible.
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So there is a certain kind of fetish for the newspaper, the kind of the physicality,
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the materiality of the paper as something that is part of the past,
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that, you know, and part of my own childhood that I think was very important.
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So I think those kinds of things were important.
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Now, regarding kind of the interior life, I
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I thought this was just normal, I mean, in a strange sort of way.
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The moving around, because we weren't the only ones moving around.
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I mean, this Gwalior gang was moving around.
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And but the kids that I grew up with in New York City
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in the apartment building were the kids who I was hanging out with in California
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because they had also moved.
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And they're the adults that I hang out with now.
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So we have these kind of long, you know, decades long connections.
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And I think one of the reasons we sort of are still connected is
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is because of this kind of moving around.
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And our parents wanted us to interact with each other.
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There was some resistance to becoming Americanized, whatever that may mean.
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But I always realized that when I'd come back to India, that all the things
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that my parents and my uncles and aunties were saying is American
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were just things that teenagers did. Right.
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So they would say, no, drinking is is is becoming an American.
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Smoking is becoming an American.
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Dating is becoming an American.
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And you'd come to India and your cousins are drinking, smoking and dating.
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So it was that was a nice moment where you sort of realized
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that this was not a true explanation of what being an American means.
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So I think that was that's always been a challenge.
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But at another level, as an adult, because I was moving,
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I went back to Britain to study and then coming to India for research,
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living in India for a while and then going back to California
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and kind of triangulating between the three for a couple of decades.
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That what struck me at one point was I realized that when I'm in New York,
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I mean, when I'm in the US, I'm reading British and Indian things.
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When I'm in Britain, I'm reading American and Indian things.
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When I'm in India, I'm reading British and American things.
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So it's like wherever I am, I'm thinking about where I'm not. All right.
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And and I think that's part of this whole problems of the diaspora
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that, you know, that emerge. But I think I've.
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But I've come to initially, there was a questioning why I was doing this,
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you know, was I replicating in part what my parents
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and their friends were doing as kind of immigrants.
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But at a certain point, I sort of realized I'm actually OK with it.
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I'm OK with triangulating between these three places
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that I feel very comfortable in.
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I'm OK with not trying to resist it.
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I'm and the option is simply just being in all three places at different points.
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And so then it's also a luxury, right?
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I have the luxury of being in these places.
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And when I realized that it just, you know, so whenever I was missing India,
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I could just go to India.
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I could go back to London or whatever. Right.
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So so in that sense, being an academic allows me that privilege to to do that.
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So so I think there is a point where I realized that I didn't need to resist
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or or kind of want to be somewhere else.
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And it just sort of I felt, you know, over time has kind of worked out in that sense.
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You know, what you just said about wherever you are,
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you think of being somewhere else, it's not just an immigrant condition.
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It's a human condition in a sense. Right.
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It's sort of universal in that way.
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And I'm just thinking if there was a rush among you,
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there would have been this grand novel called Gwaliorana,
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which, you know, about tales of Gwalior, which are all over the world.
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You know, nice magic realism can emerge from there.
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Tell me also about your developing conception of yourself,
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because I imagine at one level, you are a brown kid in largely white places.
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And back in the day, they were, you know, more white than they are today.
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So there must be that sense of wanting to fit in and that awkwardness sometimes,
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even if you are surrounded by other kids around you.
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Like you said, in New York, it was practically, you know,
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your little building of Gwalior doctors.
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But despite that, there would be that anxiety where you want to fit in
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and you want to, you know, show that you're a cool kid.
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You know, you're one of the cool kids, et cetera, et cetera.
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And that anxiety would also, I think, as it is in most young people,
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be mirrored by the simultaneous search for oneself.
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Like, who the hell am I and what do I want to do?
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And it's a tug in different directions.
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On the one hand, you want to be someone who others validate
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and approve of and think of as cool.
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But at the same time, you're also finding out things about yourself, perhaps
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in terms of what you don't want to do as much as what you want to do.
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So take me through that process of the kind of shaping of you.
#
And I realize it's a lifelong process, but I guess that, you know,
#
when one is young, it is particularly intense and things happen fast.
#
Yeah. Maybe one way to answer that is to actually talk about when I'd come back to India,
#
because I think that one of the interesting things I've written about this as well
#
is that when I what struck me coming back to India was the number of individuals
#
who would tell me I had a strange name.
#
And that struck me as very odd, because that's the same thing that people were
#
the kids were telling me in the US that you have a very strange name, right?
#
They're coming from two different perspectives.
#
But I was as a kid, I was still told that I have a very strange name.
#
So these are like my grandfather's generation or even some of my father's generation.
#
Folks would say, you know, you have a very odd name.
#
And in the US, I kind of rationalize, OK, they don't know any better.
#
But when it came to India, I was very confused.
#
And and I think in part, that has helped me think about some of the,
#
you know, the writing I've done as well as is that the the kind of naming that I have,
#
the name that I have is both, you know, it it reflects a certain kind of
#
the last name betrays, you know, it's it's kind of background.
#
I always tell my students that someone can look at my last name and pretty much figure
#
out a hundred mile radius of where our family originates from.
#
My first name is Maharashtrian or South Indian.
#
And it and when I tell people that it has become nationalized due to the process of
#
that that Vinayak doesn't necessarily go with Chaturvedi.
#
And I was constantly being told in India that this is not like how did this happen?
#
Right. Both your parents are from North India.
#
How did you have a Maharashtrian name?
#
And so in the and so that's what I mean, like if I think about what happens in India
#
for me when I was coming to visit, it was similar to what was happening in the US.
#
So I sort of felt a certain I'm not sure alienation would be the right word, but a
#
certain sense of curiosity regarding this response.
#
Right. So I have a name that doesn't really fit in India.
#
And I have a name that doesn't really fit in the US, especially in these small towns.
#
And I I've sort of forgotten many of these moments earlier in my childhood.
#
But I have a childhood friend who I grew I've been very close to sort of best friends
#
with since we were 12 and he comes from Mexico and he's a Mexican-American.
#
And we were out of touch for a little while and we got back in touch and he would
#
start sharing stories of our childhood that I had completely forgotten.
#
And for him, he said our friendship was also part of that.
#
We were the only two brown kids in our school.
#
Right. And and that kind of drew us together that we both came from immigrant families.
#
His family had moved from Mexico and but I had completely blocked out that our
#
relationship had had some kind of founding in this.
#
Right. And so the question is, why?
#
Right. I mean, like, why would I have sort of pushed this to the side?
#
Whereas for him, it's still quite central and important.
#
He still lives in the town that we grew up in.
#
Maybe that has something to do with it.
#
Whereas I moved to L.A. and he did as well.
#
Nobody kept coming back to the town.
#
But that kind of as you asked the question, it reminded me of my conversations with him
#
and thinking about the the place of the immigrant in these small towns.
#
And I mean, I was the only Indian kid in our high school.
#
So when I moved to Los Angeles, it was, again, quite fantastic.
#
Right. There was such great diversity and so on.
#
But I'm I mean, I'm sort of struggling to sort of fully kind of unpack
#
the kind of the question of the interior.
#
Were there moments of certain kinds of being slighted or marginalized?
#
Absolutely. But then I think coming from a family of a doctor and
#
there were also great moments of something else that was going on.
#
And I think my father and mother had instilled in me this idea that that.
#
You have options, you don't have to, you know, there are ways to resist this.
#
You have to be independent, autonomous, you have to work harder, you have to.
#
And this is, I think, part of the immigrant experience, too, that the way you resolve
#
social problems, cultural problems is just work harder, just be smarter than everyone,
#
just be, you know, just dominate more academically, intellectually and everything will be fine.
#
Right. And that's not always the case, of course.
#
But I again, I think for him, my father and for my mom, I think this these were moments
#
where any issues of conflict emerged, they instilled the idea that you have to sort it out.
#
Even when I was 10, 12, 14, 16.
#
So they had a great confidence that there was a way in which it could be sorted out,
#
which is a very different way than of being the kids are today.
#
So I thought that was kind of interesting.
#
And it's interesting, I think, that, you know, the differing memories that you and your friend had
#
could also perhaps be explained by the difference in the stories that you tell yourselves about yourselves.
#
And maybe in his story, that difference, you know, kind of stands out that he's a brown kid in a white place.
#
And maybe that stands out more for him and less for you.
#
Because you've kind of already internalized it and you're like looking at something else.
#
So, what was that story you told yourself about yourself?
#
That who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going? What's the game?
#
And I think it had to do with, again, this issue of language and India, right?
#
Because my parents were very interested in me maintaining this Indian identity.
#
My parents were very interested in me
#
maintaining this Indian identity,
#
that there was this long history attached to it.
#
This is just a temporary setback, you know.
#
I think they both had some vision
#
they were gonna come back.
#
And so I think the anchor was still in India, right?
#
So living in a small town,
#
if there are any issues that came up, it's okay.
#
I mean, India is much greater than the small town.
#
I mean, this was the shadow of India was forever present.
#
And the conversations with these kinds of kids from Gwalior
#
who were growing up in Southern California as well,
#
was also a space in which these things could be discussed,
#
these things could be sorted out.
#
But, you know, I mean, interestingly,
#
I mean, we moved to a place that was not only rural,
#
but it was also extremely poor.
#
So I think the issue of class has a lot to do
#
with the ways it gets sorted out as well, right?
#
The resistance to a certain kind of, you know,
#
professional who's there, but also the need for doctors.
#
But simultaneously at school and sort of things,
#
it has a different kind of manifestation.
#
But again, I really haven't,
#
I mean, I'm sort of struggling right now
#
in terms of thinking through this,
#
because I think it is that distinction
#
between my friend and I,
#
where I've sort of, maybe I've suppressed it,
#
maybe I've moved on, I don't know.
#
The psychoanalyst will say I've suppressed it.
#
The cognitive behavioral therapist would say
#
So I think that's, maybe both things can be actually be true
#
And so I think that that's kind of my answer,
#
I think would be that, you know,
#
that probably both are true,
#
that I have resolved certain issues
#
and other things that I probably have pushed deeper down.
#
From that distance, what did India look to you like?
#
Like A, what was your vision of India?
#
Like, how did you see India?
#
What did it mean to you?
#
And B, what did your Indian-ness mean to you?
#
Because I think what often happens with NRIs
#
is that they move away from the country
#
and they have a static image of the country in their minds
#
and the country keeps evolving in a different ways.
#
For example, you know, your parents characterizing
#
drinking and smoking and dating
#
and something that's American
#
because, oh, we don't do that in India,
#
People are doing that in India, right?
#
And I wonder then, you know, for you,
#
what did India mean and how did your visits to India
#
kind of change that image and so on and so forth?
#
Because in a sense, there is a lifelong difference.
#
And I would actually say that life difference
#
in the way you look at India that is.
#
And I would say in the context of the work you do
#
and the books you write,
#
that's actually a feature, not a bug.
#
And it's a feature because you can see things
#
that other Indian historians may not be able to see
#
and you can look at things in different ways.
#
There might be things abnormalized and they don't look at,
#
and there might be things which they have just been
#
subconsciously trained that this is not something
#
that you talk about, you know?
#
Like you mentioned the reluctance of the left
#
and the right in India to even engage with the question
#
of Savarkar at a particular point in time.
#
And we'll get to that later, but in general,
#
just how do you think, like, how was your vision of India
#
and your vision of yourself as, you know,
#
someone who has that India within him?
#
How was that evolving over the years
#
and in what ways do you think that set you apart
#
So I think coming back to India every year
#
and not for short visits, sometimes one month,
#
meant that it wasn't a static vision for me.
#
The fact that I was sort of a correspondent
#
with my grandfather's, a correspondent with my cousins
#
in sort of the old aerograms, the blue ones,
#
and I actually just found one recently
#
and I sort of took a photo of it
#
and sent it to my other cousin
#
and who was living in Lucknow at the time.
#
And what was interesting to me was, you know,
#
he was talking in the letter,
#
it's sort of very kind of straightforward letter,
#
things are fine, this, that,
#
but he has one line in there about, you know,
#
things are difficult right now in Lucknow
#
because of communal violence.
#
And I'm like, okay, so this was in 1980,
#
I mean, I think we were probably teenagers,
#
we were 13 and 14 at the time.
#
Yeah, and so he's writing, and this is, you know,
#
and I saw wrote to him, I said, you know,
#
it's really interesting that, I mean,
#
look at what you wrote as a 13-year-old.
#
You know, these were your observations.
#
And so in that sense, I was constantly,
#
this is pre-internet days,
#
so we were writing letters to each other,
#
and this was something that I was doing with my cousins.
#
And I think that's also allowed me to, through them,
#
have points of comparison for many different kinds of things
#
and feel connected in a way if I hadn't been writing
#
and hadn't been visiting
#
and hadn't been kind of constantly reading and engaging,
#
that it would have probably been very, very different.
#
So I didn't feel as if I wasn't Indian in that sense.
#
I mean, and in a strange sort of way,
#
I held my Indian passport till the end of the Obama term.
#
And when we knew that Trump was gonna be coming in,
#
Obama fast-tracked US passports.
#
You could get it within three months
#
if you were a green card holder.
#
And so that was the moment I decided,
#
okay, I should become a US citizen,
#
worrying what was gonna happen with the world of Trump.
#
I probably would have held onto the Indian passport longer
#
if that hadn't happened.
#
And so in that weird legalistic sense,
#
I never saw myself as not being Indian, right?
#
I always, and people would say, oh, you're an NRI,
#
you have an American passport.
#
And my sort of moment of pride would be, no, no, no,
#
I still have an Indian passport.
#
I can't travel to Europe either.
#
You know, I have to stand in line to get my visas too,
#
much the shock of everyone that, you know, this horror
#
that why would you not get your American passport?
#
So I guess this was kind of a long-winded way
#
of sort of saying that it wasn't a static vision for me.
#
It wasn't, and I think for me it was, I mean,
#
and this was the kind of the often conflict
#
often I had with my parents was,
#
theirs was more static than my vision.
#
And because, and the more,
#
and as soon as I started studying Indian history,
#
it became even more dynamic, right?
#
The disparities became even more, right?
#
Because I was reading stuff
#
that was coming out instantaneously
#
and as whereas they were not, right?
#
So I think that was, that would be sort of my way
#
of sort of thinking that I didn't distinguish myself.
#
You know, I sort of, as both an American and an Indian,
#
I just, I was an American who had an Indian passport,
#
Take me through the next part of your journey
#
where you decide what you want to do in life.
#
Like, tell me about the tennis,
#
because you were a sort of a keen tennis player
#
you mentioned while we were having lunch
#
and, you know, took it really seriously.
#
So, you know, what's happening there?
#
Was there a time you wanted to be a tennis pro or,
#
you know, how did you get into, for example,
#
the kind of historical work that you've done?
#
Was it a natural inclination towards that?
#
Was there serendipity involved in some way
#
and could the path have been completely different?
#
Take me through that phase of your life.
#
Yeah, so I started playing tennis seriously.
#
It was probably when we moved to Texas.
#
New York City is probably where I got the tennis bug.
#
So we lived for three years in Forest Hills.
#
And Forest Hills, the time was still
#
where the US Open was held.
#
So it was held two blocks away
#
from where our apartment building.
#
And if you went to the roof of our apartment building,
#
you could actually see some of the matches.
#
But so as a kid, I went to a lot of matches at the US Open.
#
I saw Connors and Borg and McEnroe,
#
Ilya Nastassi and Roscoe Tanner.
#
And, you know, my father would take me
#
to these night matches and we would be there
#
until, you know, wee hours of the night.
#
And so tennis, you know, I sort of became fixated
#
at a very young age with tennis.
#
And I guess the other sport was baseball.
#
I mean, as I said earlier,
#
I was a fan of the New York Yankees from the age of five.
#
And so baseball was this kind of part of my being
#
that was independent from everyone else.
#
And again, not to keep coming back
#
to the Gwalior gang of kids.
#
That's one of the things that kept us together as well
#
is that we were all Yankee fans.
#
No matter where we moved in the country,
#
even though we became very, very different people,
#
the one thing that connected us
#
was that we all followed the New York Yankees baseball team.
#
Or the Gwalior Yankees, as it were.
#
The Gwalior Yankees, exactly.
#
I like that, that's good.
#
So when we moved to Texas,
#
that was the first time we lived across a street
#
And so this was the place where I could now fully exploit
#
started training at that point.
#
Moving to California, again, the training continued
#
because the weather is great
#
and there's tennis courts everywhere.
#
But I didn't, I mean, I played competitively,
#
but I realized that at a certain point,
#
I didn't have enough training.
#
I didn't have enough experience competitively
#
to go any further with it.
#
And so that was always kind of fun.
#
And even till today, I sort of follow tennis very closely.
#
I follow baseball less so.
#
I mean, that's a different story
#
why I follow baseball less,
#
but I would still say I was a Yankee fan.
#
But baseball has changed as big sports have overall
#
and they've become sort of this kind of global phenomenon
#
with the, you know, I enjoy reading this sports writer,
#
Dave Zirin, who, you know, has this book called,
#
I think it's called Bad Sports,
#
about how owners have ruined the games we love.
#
And reading that, it's sort of just,
#
it was kind of the realization
#
that what was nostalgic about, you know,
#
what was happened in the past with sports
#
was the fact that it wasn't as vulgar
#
as it's become today in a certain way.
#
I was sort of the third generation tennis player.
#
My grandfather was a tennis player.
#
My father played in college.
#
so he's the fourth generation tennis player.
#
So it's been part of our, you know,
#
sort of family history to a certain extent.
#
And that's sort of what got me interested
#
in thinking about history of tennis overall
#
was this kind of personal connection
#
that I've had with tennis.
#
What was the other part of the-
#
The other part was the direction that you took
#
in terms of studying history and all of that.
#
So I started as an undergraduate at UCLA
#
And I studied science for three years.
#
But within the American system,
#
you have to take these general education classes.
#
And so what I was doing was I was taking
#
as many Indian history classes
#
and Indian art history classes for all my GEs,
#
Indian literature classes.
#
And so I would take my science classes
#
and then I would have these fun classes as I called them.
#
And I sort of, by my second year, third year,
#
I sort of made the switch.
#
I had already, and I think that switch became easier
#
because I'd already done all these classes
#
And I started, when I finished my undergraduate degree,
#
I felt I hadn't had enough of history.
#
I sort of felt like I'd missed out.
#
So I then started my master's program at UCLA in history.
#
At that point, I became very interested in Marxism.
#
I had a couple of professors who were at UCLA
#
who were extremely influential.
#
I sort of, thinking back at the days at UCLA
#
in the late 80s, early 90s, what struck,
#
what was amazing was that, for example,
#
half the editorial board of the New Left Review
#
So Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, Mike Davis,
#
And it was sort of this vibrant place
#
where people came to study social theory and Marxism.
#
And I was just, I just happened to be there
#
because I was interested in studying science.
#
And I became more interested in sort of the questions
#
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism
#
because of Robert Brenner who was sort of famous
#
for this debate called the Brenner Debate that he was.
#
And I kind of, at that point, stopped looking back.
#
I was like, okay, this is what I am really interested in.
#
And I became interested in thinking about the question
#
of the peasantry in India
#
because I'd been studying all this stuff about India,
#
but through him, I began to think about
#
the peasant question overall and the fact,
#
at one point I read very early on in my academic career
#
that 90% of not only India, but the world's population
#
were living in the countryside.
#
And it struck me that you have to understand
#
that part of the world if we're gonna try to understand
#
what's happening in India or anywhere else.
#
The French at Annales School folks, the British Marxists,
#
the American social historians
#
had already, the German micro historians
#
had been working on the peasantry.
#
And I hadn't been exposed
#
to the Indian historiography at that time.
#
And so I thought the logical thing to do
#
would be to come to India.
#
So I remember on a visit, I went to JNU
#
and everyone at that time who I was meeting in the US,
#
who was doing a PhD in the humanities or social sciences,
#
all had trained at JNU.
#
And so I thought, okay, this is fantastic.
#
So if I really wanna be a good Indian historian,
#
South Asianist, I need to come to JNU to study.
#
I'd already at that point developed some interest also
#
in thinking about communalism.
#
And so I thought the obvious person to work with
#
was Bipin Chandra because he had written
#
both on communalism and on the peasantry and Marxism.
#
So I remember I wrote to him saying,
#
can I come and meet you?
#
And so I remember meeting him.
#
But what struck me about my meeting with him,
#
he was very kind, very generous, very almost curious.
#
I was a curiosity for him that why am I here, right?
#
He was like, all the kids wanna go to the US
#
He had gone to study at Stanford
#
and during the McCarthy period,
#
he was thrown out of the country
#
because of his links to the communist party.
#
And socialism, so, but the thing that struck me
#
and going back to what we were talking about earlier,
#
he said, you've grown up in America.
#
You can never understand the communalism, right?
#
And I thought this is, it was a little disheartening.
#
I'm like, what do you mean I can't understand communalism?
#
And I sort of intellectually,
#
he's like, you're an American, you can't understand.
#
So my response to him of course was, I'm not an American.
#
And he's like, no, no, the way you speak,
#
you're an American, you're, I mean,
#
and I would say, no, I'm not an American.
#
And so it struck me, it was the same conversations
#
I was having in different ways with other people.
#
And unfortunately, so he said, yes,
#
you should come and study,
#
but the JNU administration sent me my admission letter
#
two months after the term had already started.
#
So the JNU plan didn't work out.
#
But in the meantime, I'd also wanted to then go to Cambridge
#
because I wanted to learn how to use archival material.
#
And so I ended up, instead of going to JNU,
#
I did an MPhil there and I worked with Chris Bailey.
#
And even though he wasn't a Marxist,
#
he was sort of very influenced by Marx.
#
He was asking similar questions
#
that Robert Brenner was asking regarding merchants.
#
And I thought this was a good fit.
#
Several people had recommended that if you wanna learn
#
how to use archival materials
#
and learn how to read primary sources,
#
working with him will give you that training.
#
So my plan was to study with him for a year
#
and then come back to the US.
#
But I found him to be intellectually and ethically
#
someone I enjoyed working with.
#
And so then I sort of just decided to stay in Britain
#
And that was sort of the long journey
#
between starting off studying in the sciences.
#
I enjoyed my chemistry classes,
#
but I didn't see myself pursuing chemistry in the long run.
#
I enjoyed organic chemistry especially.
#
But again, I didn't see myself working in a lab
#
or in a pharmaceutical company.
#
I wanted a different kind of intellectual rigor
#
and history and doing archival work
#
was a good fit for me in that sense.
#
It allowed my brain to imagine and explore things in a way
#
that I found kind of very satisfying.
#
I mean, I've talked about in the past.
#
UCLA was also the place where my favorite historian
#
of all time, if I can put it that way,
#
was teaching as well, Carlo Ginsberg.
#
And Carlo Ginsberg didn't work on India.
#
I mean, he was sort of a soft Marxist.
#
But what struck me about his work
#
was that it was extremely imaginative.
#
And when I read The Cheese and the Worms,
#
it's about the 16th century Miller,
#
it was kind of transformative
#
that history could be written in a different sort of way,
#
in a different kind of mode
#
with a, in a different kind of style,
#
in a different kind of form as well.
#
And the more I read Ginsberg
#
as to why he was writing the history the way he was,
#
the fact that he was influenced by novels,
#
his mother was a novelist.
#
His father was a literary scholar
#
who was also imprisoned by Mussolini
#
at the same time that Gramsci was imprisoned.
#
His father died, was tortured and died in prison,
#
that there was this kind of autobiographical connection
#
to thinking about the 16th century Miller
#
who goes through the Inquisition and is tortured himself.
#
But Ginsberg had this kind of really interesting kind of
#
links between the autobiography and history writing
#
that I found extremely compelling.
#
He was a literary stylist as a historian,
#
but he was also a deep archivist
#
in the sense he found history extremely valuable and important
#
and to doing archival work.
#
And so for me, I was kind of inspired by his work
#
and the fact that he was also at UCLA
#
led me to kind of thinking about the certain sets
#
And the thing that struck me the most was he says
#
that when you walk into an archive,
#
you have to have imagination and you can't,
#
and if you go with just a specific set of questions,
#
You have to go in and think about
#
when you're sitting in the archive,
#
that this is a space where you can,
#
if he says, you know, if you can imagine something
#
happened in the past, it probably did.
#
But the historian is not the novelist.
#
The historian has to have sort of evidence
#
and an evidentiary base by which to make
#
certain kinds of truth claims.
#
And I think at a certain level, my science training
#
with sort of the interest in sort of the literary
#
came together through Ginsburg.
#
And for me, when I would go into archives,
#
I would always have that in mind.
#
And for me, that still remains sort of the,
#
my favorite part of being a historian
#
is the place of the archive, right?
#
And I know that there's a lot of criticism
#
I'm not trying to romanticize the archive,
#
but another level, I think it is something
#
that provides a way of asking questions
#
and understanding the past, not simply for material,
#
but how people thought about the world
#
back whatever time period you're looking at,
#
that is so fundamentally different, right?
#
I mean, this is something that Ginsburg also talks about,
#
that when you look back at the past,
#
we know that they're humans, but they're not us, right?
#
And I always found that to be an interesting formulation
#
that we're looking at humans, but they're not us.
#
And I think that's part of the problem
#
that they are us and we are them.
#
That is part of, I think that's what's also influenced
#
the ways in which I've thought about
#
the Savarkar project as well overall.
#
So those are the kinds of things
#
that got me really kind of excited
#
about shifting disciplines and wanting to be a historian.
#
Have you read the short story, The Egg by Andy Weir?
#
I'll quickly give you a synopsis
#
because it speaks to something you just said.
#
And the synopsis is this guy dies and he goes to heaven.
#
And while he's in heaven,
#
it's perfectly pleasant there and all of that.
#
And he's kind of chilling out.
#
And I forget the details, but at some point,
#
God, who is a standard bearded guy,
#
kind of comes to him and says that,
#
okay, it's time for you to be reborn.
#
So he says, yeah, I'm getting reborn.
#
Does this mean that this whole Hindu thing
#
of reincarnation is true?
#
And God says, nah, not exactly,
#
but you're gonna be reborn.
#
We're sending you back to earth.
#
So he says, okay, okay, where am I gonna be?
#
And then he's sent back as a 15th century peasant
#
or something of that sort.
#
And he's like, hey, this is weird.
#
I can be reborn back in time.
#
And God says, yeah, happens all the time.
#
So he says, wait a minute,
#
that must mean that at some point,
#
one of my cells must have met another of my cells.
#
So God says, yeah, happens all the time.
#
So he says, what do you mean all the time?
#
So he says, I mean all the time,
#
because you see, all of you, everyone who's there,
#
you're the same person reborn multiple times, right?
#
So you were the Buddha, you are Hitler,
#
you are the Josie Kale, all of them is you, right?
#
And so he says, so do you mean
#
that all of them is me, is you?
#
Are you part of the equation?
#
So God says, no, the universe is the egg.
#
All of you have to live out all these lives.
#
And then I come, something to this effect,
#
but I found this fascinating when you point to Ginsburg
#
saying that, remember, they are people,
#
So I instantly thought of this story.
#
What I get from the story is a sense of Ginsburg's,
#
I mean, it's probably not an appropriate word,
#
but it's the first word that came to my head, aliveness,
#
that you are not looking at all this material
#
as something that is dead static matter,
#
words on pages, printed ink on pages,
#
and you're going through them.
#
There's an aliveness, some of it, I'm sure,
#
comes from that personal connection
#
which the imagination gives you
#
that his father died in Mussolini's prison,
#
so therefore that gives him the connect to other people
#
who've been through other struggles and so on.
#
But in general, what I have noted is that
#
in every single profession, whether it's yours or mine,
#
you will have 95% of the people essentially becoming zombies
#
and going through the motions.
#
That there are things that you do,
#
there are boxes that you take, oh, I want tenure,
#
got to publish there, got to publish there.
#
This is fashionable, this will get me funding.
#
Let me kind of do this.
#
Even if I'm examining something,
#
when I go to the archives,
#
I go there with just a set of questions,
#
while the other 5% go there with imagination,
#
as you know, you pointed out.
#
So I also want to ask about, you know,
#
like the questions that you have asked in your work
#
makes it completely obvious
#
that you are in that 5% as it were.
#
Is this something that you arrived at
#
or were you always this kind of person
#
who's like energetic and curious
#
and you want to find out shit and that drives you?
#
Or is it something that you pick up from the mentors
#
that you're lucky to have at different points in time,
#
like Ginsburg and Bailey and whoever else,
#
you know, tell me a little bit about that,
#
how do you arrive at this?
#
And, you know, the observation I made about other areas,
#
is it also true of academia
#
that most people are going through the motions
#
and there are just a few people who'll do the kind of work
#
that like, for me, the way you describe Ginsburg
#
and from whatever I've read of Chris Bailey,
#
obviously these guys are outliers, right?
#
I mean, academia is changing
#
and I think the neoliberal university
#
is transforming academia
#
to the extent that you are required
#
and it depends on, every country is slightly different,
#
so Great Britain is different,
#
they do a lot more bean counting regarding publications
#
but it's not to say that the Americans
#
aren't sort of following close behind.
#
The publishing world has changed,
#
libraries have changed, right?
#
So if they're not buying books,
#
Stanford University Press,
#
I mean, a university that is as wealthy as Stanford
#
is now thinking about ending its print house, right?
#
And it's publishing academic books
#
because it's not of, you know,
#
the price-cost ratio zone add up
#
and this wasn't always the case
#
when it came to academic publishing.
#
So I think there's been a radical shift
#
that's been happening and that's directly connected
#
to the kind of publishing that takes place.
#
I mean, there's also a technological shift.
#
I mean, I remember one of my graduate students asking me,
#
you know, when I look back at professors
#
in the 70s, 80s, 90s even,
#
I mean, they were so much more prolific than they are now
#
and what's your explanation for that?
#
And I said, well, one explanation is the computer.
#
I mean, it has certainly helped us
#
to do research in certain ways,
#
but it's also hindered us in other ways.
#
The fact you would sit in an archive
#
because you knew that you had limited time
#
or you would sit in a library
#
and you would maximize your time there.
#
Whereas if you go to archives today,
#
you see graduate students taking their cell phones out
#
and clicking page after page after page,
#
clicking thousands of pages.
#
I mean, I have one student who, you know,
#
clicked thousands of pages and I'm like,
#
when are you gonna actually go through this, right?
#
Versus actually going through it when you're sitting there.
#
So I think there's been a shift at multiple levels,
#
but I think the biggest shift has come from above
#
where university administrators are,
#
see academics oftentimes as inhibiting them
#
from doing what they need to do,
#
which is very strange, right?
#
That those who are actually doing the research and teaching
#
in certain disciplines are now seen as being obstructing
#
the purpose of the university
#
because administrators have a different role as well.
#
I mean, they see themselves as CEOs
#
and they openly talk about this.
#
If you listen to the presidents
#
or vice chancellors of universities,
#
they'll describe themselves as CEOs.
#
If it's a public university,
#
they often describe themselves as government officials,
#
right, who are in this bureaucracy
#
to maximize what's going on in the university.
#
So I think that has led to different kinds of pressures
#
put on academics as well.
#
he would always ask me what's going on in the university
#
because he was always following university politics.
#
you academics haven't figured one thing out,
#
the administrators have tricked you.
#
I said, what do you mean?
#
He goes, you're the content providers,
#
but you don't treat yourselves
#
as the content providers, right?
#
He goes to use the language of today's
#
sort of media landscape, right?
#
That you're producing the content,
#
but they're the ones who are benefiting
#
from the kind of the financial perks of the university.
#
So I thought that's always been an interesting
#
that within this neoliberal economies
#
and the transformations in higher education
#
has led to less kind of exploration
#
and productivity of academics
#
because the clock is on, right?
#
So as soon as I got my tenure track job,
#
my very first meeting with my department chair,
#
he said, just remember the clock is ticking, right?
#
So you're fully aware that this is going on,
#
but then there are requirements of teaching
#
and administration that have exponentially increased,
#
especially administration, the requirements for,
#
which has, you know, so you have to balance your time.
#
The University of California, for example,
#
right now is trying to pass legislation
#
by the UC regions that run the university,
#
the 10 campuses that faculty members
#
cannot write certain kinds of things.
#
And so you're beginning to see a shift that's happening
#
because if it hurts the reputation of the university,
#
if you take a position on a certain kind of work, right?
#
So the question for, you know, for me would be,
#
well, as a historian of South Asia,
#
can I write about Hindutva
#
or is that the university is gonna say,
#
no, in the future you can't write about Hindutva.
#
Can people write about Zionism or critiques of Zionism
#
or can you write about, you know,
#
things that the university deems
#
that donors will not like?
#
That's also now happening.
#
So it's sort of a longer way of kind of addressing this issue
#
of the shifts that have happened in publishing
#
and spaces for academics to have time to explore, right?
#
Whereas graduate students today are also on the clock.
#
They get funding for a very limited time
#
and they have to produce in a very limited time,
#
which also means that they can't study as many languages.
#
They can't go to as many archives.
#
They can't give themselves time to explore.
#
I mean, sort of Amitav Ghosh's in an antique land
#
is this exploration of a graduate student.
#
I can't imagine how that would work out today, right?
#
Where he would just leave his project and go to Egypt
#
and learn a specific dialect of Arabic
#
and then several years later come back
#
to finish the dissertation.
#
So you have these kinds of transformations taking place.
#
And I think, unfortunately, I think you're correct, right?
#
I mean, regarding academics,
#
there's a shift into moving into administration.
#
The pressure of publishing is not as much.
#
You don't have to teach, right?
#
So, or you have limited teaching.
#
So I think for a lot of folks,
#
that is a certain appeal where I don't have to know,
#
I no longer have to do research.
#
And for me, it's the, I feel sort of the opposite.
#
I mean, I feel that what sustains me is the research
#
as opposed to the other aspects of being an academic.
#
And so I think for figures like Ginsburg or Bailey,
#
as you were asking, I mean, I think, yes,
#
they are outliers because I think they came in a time
#
where you could explore in ways
#
that I think are limiting today.
#
But I think, but there were also individuals who,
#
I mean, Ginsburg's still writing.
#
But, and I don't know Ginsburg personally,
#
but with Chris Bailey, I think what was interesting
#
was that he was continually writing
#
and was working on multiple books.
#
I remember asking him one time,
#
how many books are you working on right now?
#
And he said, I'm working on four books right now.
#
And he of course finished those books.
#
And I said, do you ever take a break?
#
And he says, I give myself two days after I finish a book
#
for a break where I'm not writing.
#
Because he goes, I worry that if I stop writing
#
for too long, I won't be able to start up as quickly
#
or as efficiently as I am right now.
#
So I think there's a generational shift.
#
There's additional professional pressures there.
#
There's pressures in publishing.
#
Publishers don't wanna write, publish long books.
#
I mean, this is another issue, right?
#
So even when I was writing the Savarkar book,
#
one of the publishers I was speaking to said,
#
even before I even wanted to have a conversation,
#
he goes, I want you to cut the book.
#
I said, but why don't you look at it first?
#
And he said, no, right?
#
I mean, that we're not gonna look at a book
#
if it's beyond a certain number of words, right?
#
So the challenge if you're writing long form writing
#
is also a challenge because not every publisher,
#
academic publishers interested
#
in publishing long books also.
#
So you're beginning to see shifts in the landscape
#
regarding a whole set of institutional pressures.
#
I think the other major pressure that's happened is,
#
whereas when I started as an academic teaching,
#
something like 80% of the jobs are tenure track
#
or tenure positions in the United States,
#
Which means that 70% are PhDs
#
who don't have security of employment.
#
So they're sort of like gig workers basically.
#
I don't think that's good for long-term
#
for higher education as well, right?
#
So I think these are sort of both
#
the political economic explanation for the shifts
#
that are happening in academia.
#
But I think you're correct that there are people
#
who produce a lot and I think they create a time
#
for the research as well.
#
And I think the more research you're doing,
#
the more exciting it is and you're more connected.
#
Your brain is operating on a different register.
#
But the big problem in the humanities
#
and for many of the social sciences,
#
you're doing this alone, right?
#
Which is very different than the sciences
#
and engineering where you work with teams.
#
And the isolated space of the historian
#
or the anthropologist or others is also a problem.
#
Doing archival work in India
#
is becoming more and more difficult.
#
So if you can't do archival work,
#
entry into archives becomes more challenging.
#
It's gonna create a shift
#
and we're seeing that shift happening
#
in front of us right now, I think.
#
Wise words, lot to process in everything you said
#
and I agree with all of it.
#
My question originally was the human tendency
#
for human beings and whatever they're doing
#
to kind of get into the groove where they coast
#
most of the time and very few make an effort.
#
I'll push back slightly against your phrasing
#
of neoliberal university because everything
#
that you described seems to me
#
to be a manifestation of the opposite.
#
I mean, when I look at academia from outside
#
and I've had many guests who have spoken about this,
#
including the guest who was sitting right here yesterday,
#
we had a long chat about it.
#
Is about the takeover over the last few decades
#
of universities by the far left
#
and recently the stranglehold they've got over there
#
where ideological diversity has been completely
#
shot to death and destroyed.
#
If there is censorship happening on what you can write
#
or what you cannot write, it is censorship from the far left.
#
You adhere to their dogmas or you're out.
#
You have to think in a particular way.
#
Everything you described about the administrators
#
is absolutely true but this seems to me
#
to be a mirror of statism rather than anything
#
that would emerge from markets with its competition
#
and its openness and so on.
#
I had the great Timur Kurran on my show
#
and he was talking about all of these things
#
but he was telling me that, listen,
#
the books that he wrote about preference falsification
#
or the Middle East would not be possible today.
#
He would not be able to write those books today.
#
And he told me about his struggles
#
with his graduate students who, on the one hand,
#
they want to do a particular kind of work
#
but on the other hand, they are worried
#
that there will be repercussions.
#
And the question is, do I blunt my soul
#
and conform to what I have to do,
#
the fashions of the day or whatever the incentives
#
take me towards, or do I try and follow my heart?
#
And I think in any other field,
#
I don't even know what the term neoliberal
#
is supposed to mean because no one's defined it to me
#
but it seems in many ways to, by many people,
#
the way they use it, and I'm not saying
#
it's used that way all the time,
#
but many people use it almost as a lazy,
#
convenient pejorative that you tag on to something.
#
So I guess I would probably clarify my point
#
by saying that I think,
#
and it addresses some of what you're saying, right,
#
is that the job, I'll give you an example,
#
the job of a dean at a public university today
#
is primarily fundraising.
#
And I think what gets missed out in a lot
#
of conversations about academic freedom
#
and the kind of shifts that are happening in the university
#
is the perpetual loop of what's happening
#
the state's cutting funding to the university
#
and saying you need to privately raise the money now.
#
And that's what I meant when I said sort of one
#
of the shifts in the neoliberal university,
#
there are more administrators
#
than there are faculty members, right?
#
So there's a self-sustaining,
#
and these administrators are there under the guise
#
that they're gonna be fundraising for the university.
#
And once that cycle begins
#
and you've gutted the amount of money
#
that you're giving to students,
#
and I don't think that there's enough discussion
#
of the role of donors, political donors
#
who want to influence what is happening at the university,
#
donors who are interested in dictating curriculum,
#
donors who are interested in wanting to interfere
#
with tenure cases, donors who are interested in,
#
I mean, the most amazing one was,
#
I'm forgetting his first name,
#
but Munger who worked with Warren Buffett.
#
Charlie Munger wanted to give $200 million
#
And he had this wild idea to build dorms,
#
to build these high rise dorm buildings
#
in which there would be no windows.
#
But that was, for some reason,
#
this was one of his kind of ideas
#
that having windows in the dorm rooms is a problem.
#
So he had this experiment
#
that he was interested in pursuing.
#
So, but the condition was,
#
I'll give you the 200 million if this is what you,
#
so that's just one example.
#
But what we're beginning to see,
#
whether it was the Harvard case,
#
whether it's the UPenn cases,
#
whether it's even at my university,
#
whether it's up at UCLA,
#
and I mean, every major universities
#
in this current climate of seeking donors.
#
So I think that that is part of the calculus, right?
#
Of the formula regarding what's happening
#
with universities as well.
#
And that's what I was really trying to address that.
#
I mean, you have, I was talking to a student
#
who was telling me in biomedical sciences
#
you have the professor standing next to a venture capitalist
#
who has brought a team of lawyers,
#
patent lawyers, and a couple of experts.
#
And they will go through student by student,
#
whether the project that they're working on
#
is a viable project that can be patented.
#
And funding to that lab will be determined
#
based on these kinds of interactions,
#
which I couldn't imagine this kind of,
#
and it's happening in the open.
#
I mean, that there are these kind of shifts
#
that are happening vis-a-vis within the university
#
due to both funding cuts, donors,
#
political politicians interfering with curriculum.
#
But on your point regarding sort of censorship
#
of the far left, I mean, I would sort of say
#
the far left has actually been marginalized in this.
#
I don't, I sort of think that the kinds,
#
it's sort of, it's liberalism gone bad
#
is how I would describe the kind of intolerance.
#
It's sort of bad liberals who are,
#
as opposed to sort of the left,
#
I think the mainstream sort of media oftentimes
#
wants to label what's going on as the far left.
#
But those who are on the far left will go, that's not us.
#
Yeah, but those who are on the far left
#
aren't condemning these woke excesses at all,
#
because they'll get canceled
#
and their careers will be destroyed.
#
So it is therefore a reasonable assumption
#
because wokeism has emerged out of this far left.
#
I agree with you as liberalism gone wrong.
#
I think wokeism begins where liberalism ends,
#
and it is actually a betrayal of the left.
#
But the left is not speaking out,
#
whether it is scared or whether it is,
#
Like when I think of, and I actually agree with you,
#
like the research lab example that you gave
#
is horrendous and terrible.
#
And what I really meant when I said universities
#
I was focusing on the humanities.
#
For example, what happened in Harvard is a good example.
#
Claudine Gay was a disgraceful scholar.
#
She should never have gotten to that position that she did.
#
She wrote 12 papers in her lifetime.
#
Seven of them were deeply heavily plagiarized
#
which people have used euphemisms to kind of justify.
#
One of her early papers had incredibly dubious data.
#
None of that shit would really have passed
#
a usual regular process.
#
Any PhD students studying in that university
#
would have been severely disciplined, if not kicked out,
#
if they did one-tenth of the plagiarism that she did.
#
And yet she got to this heavy administrative position,
#
destroying careers of people like Ronald Fryer in between
#
and I'll put all those links in the show notes.
#
And to me, the money had nothing to do with that.
#
It was really the far left or the betrayers of the far left,
#
if you want to call them that, who created this.
#
It was, at least in the humanities,
#
the universities have certainly been captured
#
by the strain of thinking.
#
And part of the reason is, of course,
#
the comfort they get from this incredible endowments,
#
which act as a kind of debt capital.
#
And the donors aren't having that much influence.
#
I mean, what you say of Charlie Munger
#
and the windowless dorm seems completely bizarre to me.
#
I have no idea what the reasoning there would be.
#
But I think if the donors had more of a say,
#
this kind of shit would not be happening.
#
And it's astonishing to me that we think in such tribal ways
#
that so many people rushed out to defend Claudine Gay.
#
If she was your PhD student,
#
you would disassociate with someone
#
with that level of ethical behavior and mediocrity to boot.
#
So, that's my sort of brief response.
#
No, I mean, I think you're correct
#
regarding sort of the plagiarism issue, right?
#
And I think where it gets caught up
#
is the fact that who outed her as a plagiarist, right?
#
No, no, no, I'm saying that I'm not in agreement
#
I'm just saying that that is part of the kind of the response.
#
And certainly, I mean, graduate students would not,
#
this would not be acceptable, right?
#
But at the same time, the funding,
#
I mean, so places like Harvard in which,
#
and I think maybe there should be a distinction
#
between which kind of donors we're talking about, right?
#
So if you're donating 30 to a hundred million dollars,
#
If you're donating a million to two million
#
or even 10 million dollars, you don't have as much say.
#
And I think there is a distinction that,
#
and these people have figured this out, right?
#
The hedge fund guys that are donating money
#
to Harvard or UPenn who are saying
#
we're gonna withhold a hundred million dollars,
#
that can get the president of the university fired
#
as it did at UPenn, right?
#
I mean, she got fired for not just that.
#
I mean, she was at that congressional meeting
#
where she was asked that,
#
if someone stands up and demands a genocide of the Jews,
#
would you consider that hate speech or whatever?
#
And she refused to take a stand against genocide.
#
All three of those people did whatever.
#
And to me, this is really simple.
#
It doesn't matter who you sympathize with
#
or which side you're on.
#
Genocide is bad period.
#
If the same question said genocide of African-Americans,
#
then of course they would be up in arms
#
and said, yes, we would condemn that.
#
But when you say genocide of Jews, suddenly,
#
I mean, it boggles my mind.
#
She deserved to be sacked, of course.
#
Yeah, and I think the ways in which they answered
#
those questions, I mean, it was completely unacceptable.
#
And it was clear that they had bad lawyers
#
that they all consulted.
#
I mean, this was as opposed to sort of offering,
#
yes, we condemn genocide,
#
but we are for academic freedom and free speech.
#
And the fact that none of the people who were protesting
#
or most of them were not calling for genocide, right?
#
And answering the question in a way
#
that were answered in the past
#
when it came to the McCarthy hearings of the 50s and so on,
#
that we are for free speech.
#
We are for academic freedom.
#
We are for condemning this kind of call for genocide.
#
But give us an example where genocide was,
#
give me an example of where this actually happened.
#
Where did someone actually call for genocide on our campus?
#
And we will investigate it.
#
I think that would have resolved the issue.
#
But they didn't do that, right?
#
And I think this is part of trying to figure out what,
#
I mean, figure out what is the best way
#
to manage donations at one level.
#
I mean, I do think that this is part of what their job is.
#
And I think if you ask,
#
if you talk to administrators behind closed doors,
#
off the record, they're much more honest
#
in terms of how much money is gonna get them
#
And when they're lawyered up, you see what happens.
#
Anyway, let's move on from that to something else.
#
You know, when you were talking about Bailey
#
and your time with him,
#
yeah, you mentioned that intellectually and ethically,
#
he changed the way that,
#
you know, he affected you, he influenced you.
#
Double click on that, on both of those aspects.
#
So he was, you know, I mean,
#
I think intellectually, he was interesting to me,
#
perhaps because he represented sort of the best
#
kind of English liberal.
#
He was interested in argumentation,
#
interpretation, and with evidence.
#
And so what I thought was really interesting about him was
#
you did not have to clone his ideas.
#
I mean, there's plenty of academics
#
who demand that their students replicate
#
maybe with just a different example.
#
I mean, this is a sort of a vulgarized version of this,
#
but he was actually not interested in creating clones.
#
I mean, in that sense, intellectual clones.
#
What he was interested in creating
#
were individuals who knew how to do research
#
and could interpret and argue, right?
#
And so what I thought was really interesting about him
#
is that he would try to figure out
#
who you were intellectually and politically.
#
And then no matter what that position was,
#
it was argue against you.
#
And I had never had anyone who took that as a project.
#
And he demanded that when you worked with him
#
the first year, you have to meet him once a week.
#
And once a week, all you do is you discuss what you read
#
and how you interpreted it,
#
and the questions that you didn't ask.
#
And that kind of weekly training of, you know,
#
I'm gonna give you 50 things to read.
#
I know you're not gonna get through 50,
#
but, and he wanted you to read primary archival sources
#
at the same time you're reading secondary sources.
#
So it's this kind of daily kind of ritual training
#
of reading, writing, and then knowing that the end
#
of the week, we're gonna have to have the conversation
#
of what you read and how you interpret it.
#
And you always felt leaving there that, you know,
#
I certainly have missed more than I.
#
And so for me, that's what I meant.
#
I mean, intellectually that, and,
#
but yet he was someone who was also very influenced,
#
he says, by historical materialism
#
and the arguments of the Marxists,
#
but he wasn't a Marxist.
#
He said, till this point, we don't have a better explanation
#
So in that sense, he was an intellectual pluralist.
#
He didn't need you to agree with him,
#
but he wanted to understand how you were gonna
#
offer an explanation of historical change.
#
And honestly, you had a better explanation
#
than historical materialism.
#
This is, you know, so he was very interested,
#
but he was also interested in issues of ideas
#
and the relationship of process and ideas.
#
And I think in part, his own work shifted
#
from being a social historian to intellectual historian.
#
And I think he trained his students to think
#
both as social historians
#
and shifting to intellectual history.
#
How do those two things combine?
#
And I think his work on sort of Bunya's in, you know,
#
EUP was important because he said, you know,
#
what I realized I didn't think initially was
#
that I'm doing this kind of social economic history,
#
but as traders and travelers,
#
they're also exchanging ideas.
#
And how do we try to understand ideas?
#
And in many ways, he kind of anticipated
#
the development of intellectual history back in the 80s.
#
And he was writing about this,
#
that the way the direction the field should shift
#
is really thinking about intellectual history.
#
I mean, to kind of just give you one kind of anecdote,
#
I mean, the first conversation I had with him
#
is that he called me when I was living in Los Angeles
#
and when I was still at UCLA to tell me
#
that I'd been accepted to work with him.
#
And, but he called me at 5.30, no, he called me at 5 a.m.
#
And I picked up the phone, I was asleep and he said,
#
oh, I'm assuming you're up already.
#
And you started your day.
#
And I was like, ah, sure.
#
And he proceeded to read what I had written
#
and line by line told me what I should read before I come.
#
And I remember sort of being over, kind of overwhelmed
#
the very first time I spoke to him on the phone
#
where he had given me 50, 60 things to read
#
in a month before I showed up, right?
#
And I was like, what have I gotten myself into here, right?
#
And, and so I think intellectually
#
that kind of constant support, he was also,
#
you know, you'd give him anything in writing,
#
whether it's five pages or 50 pages, 100 pages,
#
he'd have it read within a day or two.
#
And ready to discuss it with you.
#
So for him, the productivity was actually
#
about the writing, right?
#
The production was, and when you were producing,
#
that's when you needed to kind of be constantly
#
giving feedback, it's not like months go by.
#
So that was, I thought then that's what I meant
#
There was a certain kind of both demand for work ethic
#
because he was working, but simultaneously
#
an intellectual kind of rigor that was attached
#
But I also thought he was extremely ethical
#
in his interactions with students, with, you know,
#
I mean, he was, because he was based in Cambridge,
#
he was constantly, especially in the North American Academy
#
and also in the Indian Academy was criticized
#
if not condemned for some of the things
#
that he had written about.
#
And he kept, but yet for me, I thought both as intellectually
#
and ethically and personally, he was much more,
#
it was much more dynamic than that.
#
And the fact that he produced over 80 PhD students
#
who came from, who do, we all, I mean, I don't know,
#
I don't know most of them, but the ones that I do know,
#
I mean, we all do very, very different kinds of work,
#
but he clearly has left a kind of intellectual stamp,
#
if you want to use that metaphor,
#
not for the kind of interpretations we have,
#
but for kind of the rigor that is required to do,
#
to do for the projects that you're working on.
#
I first read Bailey when I read Birth of a Modern World,
#
but he's, after that I went on to read
#
all the great writing he's done about 19th century India,
#
18th century India, and I'm struck by, you know,
#
a phrase that you quoted him as using in your book
#
where you speak about how he described, you know,
#
the times of Savarkar as it were,
#
as there being a fluid intellectual economy in the country.
#
And that phrase, fluid intellectual economy struck me.
#
Now, if we, for a moment, take that word away
#
from the context of the time he used it for,
#
and just look at it as a value on its own,
#
thinking aloud, it feels to me that that fluidity
#
is an ethical value by itself.
#
That, you know, too often what happens is that,
#
and I think the point of the phrase really is that
#
later on in time you solidify,
#
and so Savarkar for you is a right-winger,
#
and no one will engage, and M.N. Roy is a communist,
#
and they are on a completely different ends,
#
but at the time they are engaging with each other.
#
M.N. Roy is touching his feet at that function,
#
At the time, it doesn't matter.
#
You also point out elsewhere that, you know,
#
when you joined the group that Bhagat Singh was part of,
#
you had three essential readings,
#
and one of them was something like
#
The Life of Barrister Savarkar,
#
or whatever it was about Savarkar itself.
#
So those lines weren't hard and fast.
#
It was fluid, but later on,
#
because of whether it's intellectual laziness
#
or whether it's because of tribalism,
#
those lines get ossified,
#
and you cannot cross that line anymore easily,
#
and I'm thinking at some extent,
#
like when you talk of his intellectual pluralism,
#
that even though he admired Marxism,
#
he wasn't a Marxist in the historical sense, you know?
#
And it seems to me that that is such an incredible value,
#
and that also would explain why he didn't create clones,
#
why he created a diverse bunch of people,
#
because what really matters is that fluidity,
#
and then, of course, all the rigor and all that
#
you guys are taught, you know,
#
the work ethic and all of that.
#
So is that something that you'd agree with,
#
that openness to ideas, to not put things in boxes,
#
that's an essential part of doing history?
#
No, I mean, for me, yes.
#
I mean, I think, and for me, that phrase was,
#
when I read it, it was very important for me,
#
in terms of the realization that it might be,
#
the reason he was fascinated by it
#
was because he was kind of doing that himself.
#
And he was someone who was very interested
#
in not only breaking sort of the barriers
#
between, let's say, the 18th and the 19th century, right?
#
So temporal fluidity, right?
#
That we can't sort of, the fluidity between
#
sort of these narratives about the Mughals and the British,
#
the fluidity between, you know, social and economic,
#
and then from the social to the intellectual.
#
But also geographically, I mean, you know,
#
he saw himself because,
#
he saw himself as a world historian as well,
#
that, you know, he's writing about the Safavids,
#
the Mughals, you know, he's writing about,
#
and especially in the birth of the modern world.
#
I mean, what struck me about that is,
#
he's talking about examples
#
about what's going on in South Asia,
#
but then he very quickly moves to Japan,
#
I mean, there is a certain kind of acrobatics,
#
that he does in the birth of the modern world,
#
because he doesn't need to go deep there,
#
that he's able to move,
#
but he's moving with this kind of, again, fluidity,
#
showing you that don't be exceptionalist about,
#
wherever you're working on, don't be exceptionalist, right?
#
And I think that's an important lesson as well, right?
#
That, you know, that every time you think that
#
whatever is unique about whatever you're working on,
#
that there are parallels,
#
or what he'd like to use sort of analogies, right,
#
or analogs that are important to study
#
in order to confirm whether you're correct or not
#
about your own understanding of what is exceptional.
#
So I think you're actually correct in your reading
#
that there is this commonality between that formulation
#
and kind of the work that he's doing,
#
but I think what he's also emphasizing
#
in that book on liberalism is that
#
when we look at these moments in the past,
#
that we break out of these kind of categories too, right?
#
That the categories that have limited the historiography,
#
right, I mean, I remember he jokingly would say,
#
I can write freely because I don't have to make a commitment
#
being an Indian nationalist or a British imperialist.
#
I'm neither of these things,
#
so I don't have a commitment to either, right?
#
You know, I think that allowed him
#
to say certain kinds of things,
#
which created problems for an entire generation
#
of historians who work on India,
#
who saw him as not taking a nationalist position enough,
#
right, and I think we see the same kind of pattern
#
that happened with Perry Anderson's Indian ideology,
#
the kind of that he, because he's so,
#
I mean, Perry Anderson gave his talk up at Stanford
#
where he was so antagonistic to the idea of nationalism
#
that he said, you know, at one point he was told,
#
and when he was much younger, by Isaac Deutcher,
#
that, you know, remember even Lenin made a distinction
#
between nationalisms that are anti-imperialist
#
and nationalisms that are imperialist.
#
So you have to make that distinction.
#
You have to allow for that.
#
But I think, and he said he described himself
#
as a nationalist nihilist, and I mean,
#
I'm not sure Bailey would use that category,
#
but I think there was something there as well,
#
and some of his work where, you know,
#
he was liberated from the burdens to a certain extent
#
of making claims about Indian nationalism,
#
and to look at the kind of connections allowed him,
#
I think, as you said, I mean, this formulation
#
of the intellectual fluidity,
#
the economy of the intellectual fluidity
#
was an important, at least for me,
#
I don't know if other intellectual historians
#
have picked that up, but for me,
#
in terms of my own writing about Savarkar,
#
I mean, that was something that was part of what informed
#
the way I was thinking about the project.
#
Tell me, what else happened in those years?
#
Like, who were your other mentors,
#
and how were your frames of looking at the world developing?
#
Were there books that deeply influenced you,
#
thinkers that deeply influenced you?
#
Like, at one level, it seems that there can sometimes
#
be a certain part dependence to the way that you develop,
#
depending on where you happen to be
#
and who your mentors happen to be.
#
Like, I'm guessing that you, at least one part of the reason
#
that you could approach a subject like Savarkar
#
in the way that you did is because you did not have
#
to put yourself in a box or care about
#
those intellectual fashions,
#
and Bailey being your mentor could be one reason for that,
#
and I guess there's a lot else that is going on
#
So tell me about how you were being shaped at that time.
#
You know, what were the big influences on you and, you know?
#
I mean, I've mentioned Carlo Ginsburg,
#
but I think what allowed me to think about subaltern studies,
#
I mean, subaltern studies was by far the most exciting thing
#
that was happening coming out of South Asian history
#
when I was in grad school.
#
So for me, that was very important in the ways
#
in which I understood the problems of history writing
#
and the possibilities of history writing.
#
I mean, shy of the means writings,
#
especially event metaphor memory for me was, again,
#
something that was really important,
#
in part because it was also,
#
it reminded me very much of Carlo Ginsburg.
#
And I think what interested me
#
about the subalternists also is that
#
there were these really interesting parallels
#
between Ginsburg's writings, who was also a Gramscian,
#
and the subalternists who were very interested in Gramsci,
#
but the fact that they never communicated with each other
#
was really interesting to me too.
#
So I've written about this more recently,
#
sort of thinking about sort of this missed opportunity
#
of collaborating with someone like Ginsburg.
#
And then there was another Africanist
#
who was really important at that time,
#
Stephen Freyerman, who wrote this book
#
called Peasant Intellectuals.
#
And he worked on East Africa,
#
but again, he was a Gramscian.
#
And so for me, it was like sort of,
#
there were these Gramscians who were interested in peasants
#
as thinkers, as political actors.
#
But what again, comes out of all this
#
is the commonality between these kind of thinkers
#
is that methodologically,
#
they're trying to be innovative
#
in challenging kind of normative ways
#
in which history is written, right?
#
So Freyerman does something completely,
#
what I would describe as crazy.
#
He first does a PhD in, I think in anthropology,
#
and then he does a PhD on the same subject in history.
#
I think he interviews something like 10,000 people
#
to write this book that took him over 20 years to write.
#
So for me, it was like, okay,
#
like this is kind of a kind of intellectual commitment.
#
And so these Gramscians,
#
and then even like Ranjit Guha's
#
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency,
#
I mean, it took him 20 years to write this book.
#
But again, there was an intellectual
#
and political commitment to doing work,
#
thinking about the peasant,
#
thinking about agrarian society,
#
that I think in the end is directly connected
#
to me working with Robert Brenner at the time.
#
And I guess what I got from Robert Brenner
#
is the aspect of inserting the aspect of the political
#
in thinking about both productivity and conflict.
#
I mean, he's a good Marxist and that was very important.
#
But the one thing which he also kind of was pushing for
#
is he described himself as an anti-determinist.
#
And so when he's studying and a comparativist,
#
so when you look at different examples
#
with economic change in thinking about the transition debates
#
from feudalism to capitalism,
#
far too long we've been thinking about them
#
in terms of deterministic terms.
#
And so this idea of anti-determinism,
#
it was quite, for me, thinking about that as a concept
#
that each case is different.
#
And so let's not go in there with preconceived notions.
#
So I guess one could make an arc between the anti-determinism
#
and the fluid intellectual economy.
#
And so maybe I was working between these two things
#
that struck me as very important.
#
And I think as probably theoretically
#
among the South Asianists,
#
Partha Chatterjee's writings were important in part
#
because one of the first things I read by Partha Chatterjee
#
was his critique of the Brenner debate
#
and of Robert Brenner's writings.
#
And so immediately I had an entry point
#
because I'd been thinking about the transition debate.
#
And the fact that Chatterjee was also arguing
#
about anti-determinism struck me as that this was something
#
that was really exciting and interesting that was going on.
#
So I think all of that kind of constellation of thinkers
#
in many ways at that time was important for me
#
to think like moving away
#
from any kind of straightforward work,
#
which certainly creates problems for myself
#
because now you're thinking with and against lots of things
#
in order to produce anything
#
of not trying to be deterministic,
#
not trying to be rigid with categories and so on,
#
which, I mean, for certain kind of subjects
#
in the humanities, this is part of what they do.
#
For historians, oftentimes it's not actively what we do.
#
So even when you're reading any text,
#
not to be deterministic for me was, I think, quite important.
#
All this is incredibly fascinating,
#
but I feel I'd like to dive a little deeper
#
because this is a subject I know nothing about
#
and yet it sounds interesting.
#
So I'm gonna ask you to treat me like an undergraduate
#
for a moment or even a high school student
#
and explain all of this in terms of determinism
#
and anti-determinism in a historical context.
#
What do you mean by the anti-Brenner debates?
#
What are the different pulls and pressures on you
#
when you're looking at all these different schools
#
So kind of take me through this process
#
so I can understand better where you end up.
#
So, I mean, the Brenner debate in many ways wanted,
#
I mean, so he wanted to look at why England develops
#
capitalism in the ways that it develops capitalism
#
and as opposed to France,
#
which doesn't develop it in the same format,
#
or East Germany versus West Germany,
#
or parts of other parts of Eastern Europe.
#
And so he wanted to move away from a sort of a formulaic,
#
A leads to B leads to C arguments that were dominant
#
in the mode of production debates regarding capitalism
#
to socialism, to communism.
#
And so for him, the idea that we need to study each
#
on its own terms to see the differentiation
#
and the historical differences
#
because they're not all the same
#
and we shouldn't treat them as the same.
#
And that also moves away from talking about certain cases
#
as being failures, right?
#
That that country failed to develop.
#
And so it moves away from the counterfactual of the failure
#
to sort of saying, okay, if we look at the evidentiary base
#
by which we can understand
#
this specific kind of transition, right?
#
And I think Partha Chatterjee's intervention was useful
#
in thinking about India,
#
because what Chatterjee does in taking that argument
#
is sort of says, okay, I wanna understand rebellions in India.
#
And if I wanna understand rebellions,
#
we also have to understand why other places didn't rebel.
#
And why didn't, but yet why didn't all of this,
#
all the rebellions lead to some kind of revolution?
#
So there's a counterfactual that's there too.
#
But I think what more important for Chatterjee
#
was that there was a differentiation of development
#
that was happening within South Asia period
#
that we cannot treat it just as a national case.
#
We have to not only treat it as a regional case,
#
but maybe we have to treat it even as a local case.
#
And case by case, we have to understand
#
that you can have certain aspects of feudalism
#
that coexists with certain aspects of capitalism.
#
But how does that happen, right?
#
Why does it happen in India?
#
And if we can start understanding that dynamic
#
and try to understand the local, the regional,
#
as opposed to just starting saying India,
#
we might have a better explanation
#
to understanding rebellion too,
#
because each rebellion is also contingent
#
on whether it's a feudal case to a development,
#
to a capitalist case and so on.
#
So he kind of exploded this idea for thinking about,
#
economic development, but also rebellion.
#
So linking those two things together.
#
So that's what I was trying to,
#
that as a historian, not thinking about A leads to B
#
leads to C, and if it doesn't, then it's a failure.
#
And then Chatterjee is adding a political context
#
of the rebellion and not that we should expect
#
that there should be a revolution,
#
but yet if we have to understand how colonialism functioned
#
and how the coexisting systems of zamindari,
#
batidari or, I mean, the many plural systems
#
that existed in India in the 18th and 19th century,
#
that the task of the historian is to do the hard work
#
to provide those layer, those explanations
#
at multiple levels by which you can have
#
a better understanding of why something happens
#
So a friend of mine was recently telling me
#
the story of George Everest,
#
who was in charge of making maps in India,
#
and he had a grand vision to map out the entire subcontinent
#
and the grand vision obviously is not enough.
#
So he would have surveyors who would do the boring hard work
#
which would take days and months and years, right?
#
And these surveyors would be like,
#
climbing a little bit of a hill,
#
measuring every bit of it, going into a forest,
#
detailing all the topography there, et cetera, et cetera,
#
without ever seeing the bigger picture,
#
without ever knowing what that map is going to be.
#
Maybe a generation later, they could see that map on a wall
#
and it's all the work that they've put in.
#
And I'm thinking also in terms of history
#
that there is that, that if you want to understand reality,
#
the world is deeply complex.
#
So complex has to be basically unfathomable in its entirety.
#
Whatever claims Savarkar may have made of a full history,
#
but it's essentially unfathomable.
#
I like to speak about this Borges short story
#
in which a map of the world has to be
#
as big as the world itself.
#
And it's instantly out of date the next moment
#
because the world is fluid and it's changing constantly.
#
And here, I guess the dilemma for a historian
#
is how does one decide that particular trade-off
#
that you can either look at a broader narrative,
#
but a broader narrative inevitably means
#
that it is simplistic at some level,
#
that you're missing all kinds of nuances.
#
So you can say India this, or you can say Haryana this,
#
or you can say, you know, that particular area near Karnal,
#
this is a history that is this, right?
#
I'm just picking places out of thin air.
#
And I wonder how that works because at one level,
#
you need the thinkers who can do what a George Everest
#
is doing where he's conceptualizing the entire project.
#
And at another level, you need the surveyor
#
who doesn't care about the big picture,
#
but he finds love in the smaller picture
#
and for whom that dharma is that you do the work,
#
you measure the hill, you map out the topography
#
of the little one mile by one mile region,
#
but you never get to see the big picture.
#
And I sort of wonder about that as well,
#
because, you know, you'll have your rarities
#
like Chris Bailey, who after a lifetime of work
#
can ride both of the modern world,
#
where you know that the depth of information is there,
#
even if he's not going into it in every instance out there,
#
so he can paint that great broad picture.
#
But for most of us, you know,
#
it would perhaps be a matter of temperament
#
what we are attracted to.
#
And unfortunately, you know, the incentives of academics
#
often take them into narrower and narrower silos per se.
#
So I wonder how that process was for you
#
of figuring out that what is a precise thing I want to do
#
and what is a granularity to what I, you know,
#
in terms of how far I take it.
#
I guess, before I answer the question,
#
I mean, I think one way, as you were describing
#
the differentiation between the micro and the macro,
#
that this is exactly the conversation
#
that was happening with the French annals school, right?
#
Sort of writing sort of the big history of 500 years,
#
and then also writing a history of like a village, right?
#
And so both those things are part of, you know,
#
this kind of intellectual tradition of the annals,
#
but it's also the big picture
#
when it comes to sort of world history as well.
#
And sort of also the kind of historiographies
#
that the Marxists were producing for a number of years.
#
And it just, and I think that both of these kinds of things,
#
and I like reading the annals school a lot.
#
I thought, I mean, I guess that would be the other,
#
to your earlier question, kind of exciting work,
#
but also work that Bailey very early points out
#
in rulers, townsmen, bazaars,
#
is almost impossible to do for India or South Asia,
#
given that we don't have materials that will allow us
#
to do some of the kind of work that the annals school did
#
over a 500, 600 year period.
#
And so I think that's also kind of, you know,
#
that the way, whatever you captured there
#
was exactly what the conversation has been.
#
Even Ginsburg's cheese in the worms
#
begins with sort of this critique of the macro
#
But yet saying that there's something important
#
about the micro, sort of like microbiology
#
and climate biology, right?
#
It's like both are important for different contexts.
#
For me, I think the projects I've chosen
#
have allowed me to burrow deep the first book,
#
but also the Savarkar project.
#
And I think that's something, it wasn't planned, I would say.
#
I don't think the Savarkar book was planned.
#
I sort of think it was sort of an accident
#
of a couple of things that happened.
#
Because I, and even the first project was an accident.
#
I don't think I planned when I went to grad school
#
to write on the specific politics of Keda in Gujarat
#
and I was fully set to be a Gwalior Yankee,
#
as you pointed out, because I wanted to work
#
on Gwalior state and the princely states around Gwalior.
#
That was my initial interest.
#
But as I, when I arrived to do graduate work in Britain,
#
Bailey immediately pointed out
#
that I wouldn't be able to do this project.
#
In part because the Sindhya family, mother of Sindhya
#
and his mother were in a legal battle,
#
which meant that most of the documentation
#
for the kind of stuff that I was interested in
#
would likely be sealed till the court case was over.
#
And he goes, you know, this court case
#
has been going on for decades.
#
He goes, the reason I know this is because
#
when I was a grad student,
#
I wanted to work on Gwalior as well.
#
So I thought this was kind of interesting.
#
Like 30 years on, he's like, I'm not sure.
#
And then he said, you would also probably have to learn
#
a couple of like, you know,
#
and then he said, you would also probably have to learn
#
a couple of languages in order to do this project.
#
And so I wasn't sure that time-wise the practicalities,
#
but because I'd initially gone to do a one year degree
#
with them, he's like, oh, why don't you work on Gujarat?
#
And this sort of came out of left field.
#
I'm like, what do you mean work on Gujarat?
#
I mean, he goes, I think Gujarat
#
will be really important in the future.
#
He says, I think Gujarat will be really important.
#
He said, that's one area of South Asia
#
that has not been developed historiographically.
#
There's limited amount of work that's being done on Gujarat.
#
If you're interested in the agrarian question,
#
that's a great location to do this.
#
And his other selling point was
#
the Bombay archives are great, right?
#
It's interesting how these practical considerations
#
come in the way that you can't access the Gwalior papers,
#
but the Bombay archives are great.
#
And I figured, okay, I'm doing this for a year.
#
I came to learn how to use archival materials.
#
He's saying that, so I'll trust his judgment.
#
What I didn't realize was that he took
#
most of the batch of students he had accepted
#
and converted them all to working on Gujarat.
#
I met another student and he's like,
#
oh yeah, I was planning to work on Calcutta
#
and now I'm working on Ahmedabad.
#
And so suddenly there was like
#
this little Gujarat cohort forming.
#
And so that's what I meant by, it was accidental.
#
And then by the time I started learning Gujarati,
#
I liked the Bombay archives, as he said.
#
I liked Bombay, as we were talking about earlier.
#
So it just became a project that, you know,
#
I didn't, the conceptual and theoretical questions
#
that I was interested in certainly were there,
#
but they became more developed because
#
what I quickly realized about Kehda,
#
Kehda becomes important because initially,
#
because of Gandhi's Satyagraha in 1918,
#
but also because, you know, it was also known as
#
where agrarian capitalism in Western India was thriving.
#
But then the third thing that really kind of convinced me
#
I should think about Kehda and central Gujarat seriously
#
was that it was classified as the most criminal region
#
So for me, this paradox between the rise of capitalism,
#
the rise of nationalism and it being the most criminal area,
#
I thought, you know, there's something going on here.
#
There's something that the three are somehow connected.
#
So that's why I said, you know, it wasn't sort of planned.
#
It was by actually doing this kind of archival work
#
that I sort of became intrigued by thinking about
#
the three variables together, which opened up that project.
#
And the Savarkar project develops out of the fact
#
that I was working on Gujarat in 2002.
#
As I was finishing research, I'd already finished my PhD,
#
but I was finishing research for the book,
#
the 2002 violence happens and all the explanations
#
that are going on regarding why the violence is happening,
#
that Gujarat never used to be violent
#
and suddenly became violent.
#
And I'd been writing that it was actually quite violent
#
and Gandhi knew it was violent and Gandhi, you know,
#
was asking the agrarian populations
#
who were being victims of violence
#
to forgive those who were the perpetrators of violence
#
and talking to various Dalit writers in Gujarat,
#
they're like, no, violence is an everyday occurrence.
#
What are you talking, what are they talking about?
#
And yet there was this kind of conversion
#
from the Ahimsa of Gandhi to Hindutva's violence,
#
that there was this kind of neat kind of binary
#
that was being discussed.
#
And I'd already been reading Savarkar a little bit
#
and it struck me that it's almost as if the ghost
#
of Savarkar was there, but no one was saying his name.
#
Like sort of like that was the Voldemort figure
#
that, you know, we cannot utter his name.
#
And that got me curious as to why we can't utter his name.
#
So that's how, but coming back to your larger question,
#
the smaller versus the bigger,
#
I think because I hadn't planned, I don't think,
#
and I just kept going deeper and deeper.
#
And I was actually quite comfortable doing that.
#
I do think that these bigger projects
#
are actually quite fascinating.
#
Some of them are quite stunning,
#
but it's a question of time more than anything else.
#
I like reading both kinds of work.
#
And probably as a practitioner, I probably do the micro,
#
just it's become sort of second nature at the moment
#
So, you know, we'll talk about the Savarkar project
#
after the break, but before we go in for a break,
#
tell me about Peasant Pass and tell me about like,
#
what were the questions that you asked yourself going in
#
and how did those questions evolved
#
and what were the questions that you asked yourself
#
you know, what did you discover in that journey?
#
what got me convinced that this was actually a project
#
and coming back to the criminality thing
#
was reading a police report
#
and that was kept in the Cambridge University Library.
#
And it was a police report that came out in 1918
#
talking about the fact that the partidars of Gujarat
#
of this area of Gujarat and central Gujarat
#
were using the Criminal Tribes Act,
#
which was this legislation to criminalize
#
various populations in India under the British.
#
So they were using the Criminal Tribes Act
#
to criminalize these low-caste peasant groups
#
to control their labor.
#
And simultaneously participating
#
in the anti-British satyagraha with Gandhi.
#
So I thought, okay, that's the story, right?
#
That there's something interesting in the story
#
between using colonial legislation to control labor.
#
That means they were threatened that labor
#
of these various agricultural populations
#
was getting out of control,
#
but they're gonna use the colonial legislation
#
simultaneously as they're gonna demand freedom.
#
But yet the narratives about the partidars
#
as being Gandhi's greatest supporters
#
was that they were the most dynamic peasants, right?
#
But within that dynamism was this idea of servitude
#
and controlling low-caste peasants
#
and preventing them from participating
#
in different kinds of politics.
#
And as I got deeper and deeper into the project,
#
what became immediately evident was that these,
#
and I was specifically looking at this community
#
or they also go by the name Barayas in Gujarat.
#
And this community had already in the 19th century
#
was already breaking the labor servitude agreements
#
informal or customary with the partidars
#
and demanding a different kind of future.
#
I found the case of this one partidar Bhagat,
#
I'm sorry, this one Baraya Bhagat
#
who declares the end of the British Raj
#
and declares himself a king
#
and basically creates a ritual,
#
a ceremony that mimics what Shivaji had done
#
and having a coronation ceremonies,
#
serves edicts, circulates them.
#
He basically created his own state
#
with modeling to a certain extent the Gaikwar,
#
memories of Shivaji issuing land orders for taxation.
#
So he had set up, he had this idea.
#
My question was how did he have these ideas
#
But he was imagining a future after the British
#
and already had imagined a future
#
without the partidars controlling them.
#
And I thought this was quite fascinating, right?
#
And this was, and I went to these villages
#
and I would speak to the sort of the descendants
#
of those who participated in these movements.
#
And so they had these shrines for this Bhagat
#
and then there was this other Bhagat
#
who was providing food during the famine.
#
And then basically doing all what statecraft,
#
the kings and princes and the British government
#
should have been doing during a famine.
#
And so, but by the time the nationalist movement comes
#
and the Criminal Tribes Act is imposed,
#
the Bhagat movements come to an end.
#
Every activity of the Baraya, the Herala community
#
is now criminalized, right?
#
And what also struck me as really interesting
#
was the fact that after independence,
#
you have the denotification of these Criminal Tribes Act
#
and then they are now classified as habitual offenders.
#
What was interesting is that the Dharalas
#
were never denotified, right?
#
And so that was part of what got me really interested
#
in sort of thinking about the question of the peasant,
#
the question of the conflict within the countryside.
#
But the fact that this region of central Gujarat
#
and the Patidar domination still persists,
#
the fact that many of those who were criminalized
#
continued to live in great sort of poverty
#
was what kind of got me really interested
#
in thinking about all of these things together,
#
nationalism, agrarian capitalism,
#
and then this whole issue of criminality.
#
And I think that's what this project of the Patidars
#
and the Dharalas was really trying to explore.
#
And I've been struck by the brutality
#
of the phrase denotified tribes,
#
because the moment you say,
#
okay, you're not a notified tribe anymore,
#
you're a denotified tribe,
#
but that appellation itself indicates
#
that you were once a notified tribe
#
and were considered criminal and all of that.
#
And only the state can think like this,
#
like 30 seconds of thought tells you,
#
don't do this, don't put that appellation there,
#
just try to, you have to get people out of the habit
#
of thinking in these kinds of categories.
#
But they came up with habitual offenders instead.
#
Which is horrible, which is nuts, which is...
#
I mean, it's estimated over 100 million people
#
are habitual offenders in India today.
#
I mean, I should also go to some government office
#
and demand I be deemed a habitual offender
#
because in so many different domains,
#
such as getting distracted and procrastination
#
and asking digressive questions,
#
I am also a habitual offender.
#
So, you know, as you delved into this,
#
as you got learnings out of it,
#
and I'm sure that there would have been many, many micro TILs
#
and gradually bigger frames forming in your head.
#
How tempting was it for you to sort of stretch
#
those narratives and build a bigger story
#
that could explain more than just Kheda
#
and more than just that area?
#
And eventually at the end of the project,
#
you know, which of those broad narratives you think now
#
would actually help explain, you know,
#
some of what is happening in the country?
#
I mean, that's a really good question.
#
I mean, one way to answer the question, I mean,
#
would be that, I mean, Jan Breyman,
#
the anthropologist who's worked on South Gujarat
#
has kind of expanded some of this
#
is that the discourse of the Partidar
#
was taken up by many agricultural communities
#
who weren't necessarily identified themselves as Partidars
#
till after the nationalist movement, right?
#
So to call oneself a Patel meant something, right?
#
It had some kind of prestige attached to it.
#
And that led to a certain kind of transformation
#
I mean, that's a good question.
#
I mean, I would have to think about it a little bit
#
in terms of, I think in terms of the caste question,
#
in terms of the issue of class,
#
that sort of the intersections of class and caste.
#
And this has been written about
#
in sort of other Gandhian movements
#
that were taking place, for example,
#
in UP and North India and other parts of India where,
#
or even in other parts of Gujarat in Ahmedabad
#
that those who were sort of the victims
#
of any kind of marginalization were asked to be forgiven,
#
were asked that they should forgive their perpetrators.
#
And I think that legacy has led to certain kinds of problems.
#
I mean, I wrote a piece after Peasant Pass came out
#
after the violence in Gujarat called
#
From Peasant Pass to Hindutva Futures,
#
which I got into a little bit of,
#
from some of my colleagues weren't happy
#
with some of the arguments that I was making.
#
And I think it goes to addressing
#
at least one part of your question,
#
which is that what struck me about the 2002 violence
#
when I went back to Kedah.
#
And then the Telka reports when they came out on the riots
#
were also interesting because what both the things
#
that both being there and then also the Telka reports
#
confirmed that they identified specific communities
#
So there was a, this Dalit writer who I met in Anand
#
when I was doing my PhD research, Joseph Macklin,
#
and I thought Joseph Macklin wrote perhaps
#
one of the most interesting pieces after the riots,
#
after the violence in 2002,
#
in which he went through the people who were identified
#
as perpetrators of the violence,
#
and he lists them and sort of says,
#
it's interesting that you have Adivasis and Dalits
#
who are participating in this violence.
#
In the Telka reports, they identified specific communities,
#
members of specific communities
#
who participated in the violence.
#
What I did was I looked at the list of names
#
and because I'd been looking at the Criminal Tribes Act
#
and the Denotified Tribes Act,
#
what I realized was that pretty much both the lists
#
included primarily criminal tribes
#
or those who were previously criminal tribes.
#
And it raised a set of questions
#
that I hadn't asked in my book,
#
which was, because the book has a happy ending.
#
I sort of felt that was the zeitgeist,
#
that independence happens, there's great possibilities
#
for these Dharalas and Barayas to participate as citizens.
#
And perhaps it was slightly naive,
#
but it was also part of the zeitgeist of the time.
#
I mean, you have a whole bunch of scholars
#
who are sort of seeing this as a moment of transformation,
#
perhaps even revolutionary kind of change,
#
however revolutionary it was,
#
now we can sort of question that.
#
But at the time, I think we were still in a moment
#
of that something was really possible here
#
that was transformative for large sections of the population.
#
But yet the groups that I'd been writing about
#
had now shifted and moved towards Hindutva.
#
And if they hadn't shifted or moved towards Hindutva,
#
they actually participated in the violence.
#
And for me, what was really interesting at that moment
#
was even within Joseph Maquon's writings,
#
he didn't attribute agency to those individuals.
#
And neither did most of the activists
#
or the journalists or the NGOs
#
or others who were writing about Gujarat
#
that it was basically these people had been duped
#
and co-opted into participating in Hindutva politics.
#
And that struck me as something that was not correct,
#
deeply condescending, yes.
#
That at the moment when certain marginalized groups
#
that go and vote, political scientists don't say
#
that they don't know what they're doing, right?
#
But when these individuals participate in violence,
#
they don't know what they're doing.
#
So for me, there was something that didn't sit right
#
in thinking about what was happening in Gujarat.
#
And so that also got me thinking
#
about reading Savarkar as well, right?
#
That there was a strategy that Savarkar had laid out.
#
There was strategies and tactics
#
that people had written about
#
that the various Hindutva organizations had gone
#
and started educating children 10 years, 20 years before
#
that various Hindutva groups had come into Gujarat
#
and were doing different kinds of social work
#
or other kinds of activities among Adivasis
#
and various other kind of marginalized groups in Gujarat.
#
And I sort of at that time said that
#
what we have to think about is that perhaps
#
in the future Hindutva is gonna be made from below.
#
It's not just going to be the Brahmins
#
who are gonna be making Hindutva,
#
but perhaps Hindutva is gonna be made from below.
#
And at that time, I sort of just kind of provocatively
#
said that not realizing where we were going
#
and what was going to be happening.
#
And even today, I think the idea that Hindutva
#
can actually be made from below is kind of discounted.
#
And I still sort of think that that's quite important
#
for scholars to think about and write about
#
rather than sort of dismissing it
#
that they do not know what they are actually doing.
#
And I always ask, I mean, do you think that Narendra Modi
#
does not know what he is doing?
#
Do you think that Uma Bharti
#
does not know what she is saying?
#
Do you think that Savitri Rathumbra
#
doesn't know what she's saying or doing?
#
And so for me, I sort of have disagreed
#
with some of that assessment.
#
And that opened up a whole set of questions that I had
#
in thinking about Savarkar's writings
#
and Savarkar's tactics for creating
#
a kind of unified Hindu identity
#
in which those who are the most marginalized
#
from the nationalist movement,
#
where if you go to any village or town
#
in central Gujarat today, you have statues of Bhakti dars
#
who are still dominating the landscape of the public spaces.
#
That in a certain way, these groups
#
and the act of violence that they have now written
#
themselves into history permanently as well, right?
#
And I think it's important to kind of actually say that
#
and articulate that because I don't agree
#
that they don't know what they're doing.
#
I agree entirely with all of this.
#
Before we go in for a break,
#
just sort of a couple of thoughts that I've kind of explored
#
over many episodes of the show
#
and your book added depth and nuance
#
to those thoughts as well.
#
And one of them is that I agreed at its bottom up
#
And one of those ways is that people often talk
#
of what is happening in India now,
#
as in there are some bad people in a party
#
and they are riling up the people
#
and they are creating all this animus
#
and it's almost like it's a top-down thing
#
like Modi Shah created it or Vajpayee Advani created it.
#
And that is patent rubbish.
#
I had done an episode with Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press
#
and if you look at Indian society over the last 100 years,
#
you realize that this strain in Indian society
#
is incredibly powerful.
#
You look at the sales of books like Ramcharitmanas
#
or the Geeta or even really conservative tracts,
#
which for example denote the ways that a woman should behave
#
and everything coming out of the Geeta Press.
#
And you realize that this has always been Indian society,
#
that the constitution in a sense was a top-down imposition
#
of relatively liberal values on an illiberal population,
#
something Ambedkar himself realized
#
when he spoke of it as a top dressing on the soil,
#
but everything below that is the way that it is.
#
And I think that there was that within that liberal project,
#
if you can call it either liberal or a project,
#
there was a failure in not realizing
#
that if you want to spread liberal ideas in this country,
#
you have to do it in a bottom-up way,
#
that a top-down imposition will never work.
#
And yet I think many elites got complacent
#
that, okay, we've put a constitution
#
and now the job is done and that didn't happen.
#
And I remember an episode in Weed Sanghvi
#
where he was speaking about the 80s
#
and one thing that he's written about in his book as well
#
is the notion that, look, the 1984 vote for the Congress
#
was really the Hindu vote, right?
#
Anti-Sikh and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But in his formulation, it was the Hindu vote.
#
Vajpayee and Gang had in 1980 founded the BJP
#
under the banner of Gandhian socialism, quote unquote.
#
And 84 made them realize that what the hell
#
are the traditional vote bank that we went for
#
seems to have these incredible possibilities.
#
And then the party shifts and then, you know,
#
famously the events of the rest of the decade happens.
#
Rajiv Gandhi is just bumbling around,
#
doesn't realize that he's got this potential.
#
So he lets a Hindu vote go with Shah Bano and all of that.
#
And then at the end of the decade,
#
you have the Babri Masjid movement and et cetera, et cetera,
#
and so on and so forth.
#
You know, Mandal adds to that fire
#
and in a very perverse way, liberalization adds to it
#
in the sense that I regard the 1991 reforms
#
as like an incredible good for humanity,
#
hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty
#
a lot of this new middle class now has a power
#
to assert itself and it believes in those Gita press values.
#
It believes in an assertive Hindutva
#
and that feeds the tiger further.
#
So this is really a bottom-up thing.
#
The question, it's not that Modi has created the movement.
#
The movement has created Modi.
#
It is perhaps a tiger he cannot ride.
#
Like I have out of sheer fascination, you know,
#
gone down right-wing rabbit holes
#
and there are places where Modi will be referred to
#
as Maulana Modi because he's not doing enough
#
for Hindus and so on and so forth.
#
So in that sense, it is a bottom-up political movement
#
that it is just, you know, the BJP supplier
#
responding to demand at this point in time
#
and one should look more closely at the RSS
#
and other such organizations than BJP.
#
You know, the supply can come from anywhere
#
but the demand is deeply rooted.
#
The other aspect where I think many activists get it wrong
#
is when they paint the Hindutva movement
#
as being anti-Dalit and the truth is it is anti-Muslim,
#
yes, in a very virulent, toxic way.
#
That is practically the whole raison d'etre of it
#
but it is not anti-Dalit, you know.
#
As you've pointed out, you know,
#
Savarkar was against caste, wanted to unify everyone
#
under the banner of Hindutva.
#
That's been the RSS project as well.
#
That's been the BJP project.
#
They've been explicit about it,
#
about uniting the Hindu vote
#
and whatever activists on Twitter may say,
#
the bottom line is that they have succeeded
#
because more Dalits voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2019.
#
So whatever narrative you make on Twitter,
#
ultimately, you know, the economic way of thinking is
#
I will look at revealed preferences
#
and the revealed preferences are that BJP
#
is getting the Dalit vote, that people contain multitudes,
#
people don't just see themselves as Dalit and victimize.
#
They also see themselves as Hindus
#
and they also see themselves in a bunch of different ways.
#
And I celebrate the fact that we can all look
#
acknowledge our multitudes.
#
And I lament the fact that it's gone in this direction
#
where Hindutva has become stronger
#
and gotten consolidated because of this.
#
But I think that is also something
#
that's important to acknowledge as you point out
#
in your, you know, beautifully nuanced book
#
that, you know, this aspect of the rhetoric
#
And I wonder, and now I'm thinking aloud
#
whether this aspect of the rhetoric is tribal laziness.
#
Because the set of people who oppose the BJP,
#
for them caste is also a big issue as it should be.
#
And therefore it is very easy for them
#
to kind of superimpose that on their opposition to the BJP.
#
But if anything, I would say that Hindutva
#
doesn't care about caste.
#
Caste is the original sin of Hinduism.
#
And this is perhaps one sense in which you can
#
look at Hinduism and Hindutva and say that
#
Hinduism has a greater problem than Hindutva does.
#
The Hindutva is just a deeply toxic
#
and incoherent political philosophy.
#
And we can, you know, discuss that further.
#
So these are my two brief thoughts that yes,
#
I think it is bottom up, that it is, you know,
#
intellectually lazy to think of it as top down
#
and then blame individuals or blame parties
#
or make easy generalizations.
#
But actually we have to come to terms with the hard reality
#
that this is our society and this is what is happening.
#
And only then when you recognize the enormity
#
of the challenge before us, because it is a far greater
#
challenge to beat something that emerges bottoms up
#
than it is to beat something that is top down.
#
If something is top down, you, you know,
#
you can chop off the head of the top and the job is done.
#
You have to work harder.
#
It's a long-term project.
#
It's a decades long project as, you know,
#
the Hindutva people realized.
#
So this is my brief kind of response,
#
but just to say that in these different aspects,
#
I couldn't agree with you more.
#
You were dead right when you said it's bottoms up.
#
I mean, I guess the one caveat I would add,
#
and we can talk about this more when we talk about the book,
#
is that, I mean, Savarkar himself,
#
there were two strains of his discussions of caste.
#
So one strain was sort of the political activism
#
of sort of wanting to have temple entry,
#
intermarriage and interdining with Dalits and Dalit groups.
#
At the same time that Ambedkar is also vying
#
for creating a certain kind of Dalit identity, right?
#
So the two Maharashtrians
#
vying for the same kind of constituency.
#
But at another level, when we look at Savarkar's writings,
#
the Hindu spirit, the essence of the Hindu,
#
and even after having done all this work,
#
I mean, there is this tension that persists
#
that he has something that he wants to hold onto
#
about sort of the Brahmanic spirit
#
of how he wants to define the Hindu
#
and the Hindutva overall.
#
But yet the practical political realities
#
that Hindutva can only exist with the support of Dalits
#
and with tribals and Adivasis and the marginalized groups,
#
right, and how do we create this kind of unified
#
kind of framework at the same time?
#
So that tension, I think, is also reflected
#
in today's interpretations of,
#
so which Savarkar are we looking at?
#
Are we looking at sort of the Savarkar
#
that wants to kind of hold onto the Brahman
#
as sort of having this kind of spirit
#
of the Hindu who is going to dominate Hindutva?
#
Or is it sort of the Savarkar that says
#
that all blood of Hindus is the same, right?
#
That we're all polluted.
#
And so I think that would be my only kind of caveat
#
that there's this kind of duality and tension
#
that was with him, but it's the duality and tension
#
that exists among the interpreters as well at this time.
#
Yeah, and everybody contains multitudes.
#
I mean, any figure from that time you look at,
#
whether it's Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Savarkar, X, Y, Z,
#
nobody simplistic, and equally he pissed off the Brahmans
#
because as you pointed out in your book,
#
by saying that they should be intermarriage
#
or we should dine together,
#
he fought for temple entry for Dalits into Hindu temples.
#
which would shock many of his supporters today.
#
So, in that sense, all this playing out
#
and yet your book sort of shone such a beautiful light
#
on a lot of that and made me kind of appreciate
#
but we shall for a moment leave the complexities aside
#
and take a quick commercial break
#
and on the other side we'll talk more.
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Welcome back to the Scene on the Unseen.
#
Vinayak Chaturvedi and I are still playing the long game.
#
And now we are going to talk about your brilliant
#
Savarkar book, Hindutva and Violence.
#
Tell me the origin story of the book.
#
Like you mentioned that you were already studying peasants
#
in Gujarat and so on and so forth, and then 2002 happens
#
and you see the sort of simplistic narratives around about,
#
oh, how it's such a sudden shift from Gandhian non-violence
#
to whatever has happened.
#
And you've got some deeper insight into Gujarat by now,
#
but more importantly, there is personal history
#
Vinayak, why are you called Vinayak?
#
Yes, so maybe that is the real answer there.
#
So as a kid on these trips back to India,
#
I remember that, you know, my relatives would tell me,
#
my boas, my, especially my boas would tell me that
#
I was named by my pediatrician,
#
that my parents were out of town and my grandmother took me
#
to this Ayurvedic doctor when I was ill,
#
she got tired of going to a regular pediatrician
#
who was probably my dad's friend and said, okay,
#
I'm gonna take him to a different doctor.
#
And this doctor specialized, as I said,
#
in Ayurvedic pediatrics.
#
So as the story goes that he asked my name
#
when he was writing a prescription.
#
And my grandmother said, we don't have a formal name.
#
We just have a house name.
#
And he said, well, can I name him Vinayak?
#
And so my grandmother was ambivalent about me having any
#
name at this point because I was ill.
#
So, but she said, fine.
#
I guess my health improved and the name stayed, stuck.
#
As I got older on one of these trips to India,
#
I was probably, I think probably 17 or so, 16, 17, 18.
#
One relative revealed another bit of information
#
that I had never had, that had never been given to me,
#
which was that this doctor was the individual
#
who supplied Nathuram Gotse with his nine millimeter
#
Beretta that shot Gandhi and killed Gandhi.
#
And so this doctor Parthre,
#
that doctor Parthre was the individual.
#
So at that point, I was a little overwhelmed.
#
I didn't, as a teenager, I wasn't sure what to do
#
Certainly didn't want to share it with anybody.
#
Fast forward to, I finished my PhD
#
and I was actually in Gwalior visiting one of my Boas.
#
And we were having stories about talking
#
about my grandmother, her mom.
#
And again, of course the story comes up
#
and I sort of thought at this point,
#
okay, I have a certain set of questions
#
that I think I can formulate and ask.
#
But unfortunately, Dr. Parthre had passed away at this point
#
so I couldn't speak to him.
#
But she also said, well, his son is also
#
an Ayurvedic doctor and why don't you go meet him
#
and maybe he can give you some insights about his father.
#
I went and met the junior Parthre
#
and I remember the first time I met him,
#
he asked me at his clinic.
#
I didn't have his number so I just showed up at his clinic.
#
And I said, I'm not here for any medical treatment
#
but I just wanted to share something with you
#
and I was wondering if we could have a conversation
#
So I narrated the story and his first question to me was,
#
And I said, my official name is Vinayak.
#
So he was extremely happy about this
#
and the next thing he said was,
#
well, you're the eighth Vinayak I've met
#
He named hundreds upon hundreds of male children Vinayak
#
and Gwalior when he was a pediatrician.
#
And so he said, but the questions
#
that you're probably interested in,
#
I think it's better we talk in private.
#
So I went and met him the next day at his house
#
and we had a long interview in which I told him
#
I was, you know, my background as a historian
#
and I wanted to write something about his father.
#
And at that point, I just thought I was gonna write an essay
#
about this unusual circumstances
#
by which I was given the name Vinayak after Savarkar.
#
And he then proceeded to, you know,
#
he was kind of concerned
#
what was I gonna do with the information?
#
I said, look, I'm an academic,
#
I'm gonna write it for an academic journal.
#
And so we had this long conversation about his father
#
being a member of the Hindu Mahasabha,
#
being close to the Gotse family,
#
traveling with Nathuram Gotse,
#
looking for a handgun as the plans were being made
#
In Madhya Pradesh, he became known,
#
Dr. Parchure became known as the second Savarkar.
#
He saw himself as sort of a complete devotee of Savarkar
#
and read everything that Savarkar had written
#
and had formed an organization
#
called the Hindu Rashtra Sena in Gwalior,
#
which apparently had membership of around 3,000 individuals.
#
So it was a militia type group
#
that would attack various Muslim neighborhoods when necessary.
#
And Gandhi had written about these attacks in Gwalior
#
by various Hindu organized groups.
#
And so I've sort of put two and two together
#
that this is what Gandhi was writing about.
#
But as the, you know, so the story goes
#
that when Savarkar passes away in 1966,
#
Dr. Parchure, who had been arrested
#
and convicted of supplying the handgun
#
and was eventually released, but when he was released,
#
he agreed that he would no longer participate
#
So after Savarkar's death in 66,
#
he's not participating in public politics,
#
but he decides to, that the way to spread Savarkarism
#
is to start naming as many male children Vinayak
#
A million Vinayaks now.
#
And so that was sort of the beginning of me becoming,
#
starting to read Savarkar.
#
And as I then picked up Essentials of Hindutva
#
and what struck me was the first 80 pages
#
out of the 120 odd pages of the book is,
#
the first 80 pages about the politics of naming.
#
I mean, it begins with Shakespeare's
#
What is a Name, right, from Romeo and Juliet.
#
And I thought the whole thing was very fascinating
#
that here you have Savarkar beginning with Shakespeare
#
and Romeo and Juliet talking about the importance
#
of naming and Dr. Parchure had clearly taken this message.
#
And so if a name is important, a name has meaning
#
that there's a set of politics attached to a name,
#
this is what a way that Hindutva could spread
#
was through this idea of the name sign
#
and having this meaning attached to the name sign.
#
And the name Vinayak in a certain sense
#
also became nationalized.
#
It no longer was Maharashtrian.
#
It was no longer South Indian.
#
Similarly, the Ganpati festival,
#
which was a Maharashtrian festival,
#
also has become nationalized, right?
#
So you have suddenly in this period that struck me
#
was that suddenly Ganesh in the form of Vinayak
#
is now becoming nationalized.
#
And most people assume that I'm named after Ganesh,
#
but in fact, it's named after Savarkar.
#
There we go, a grand confession.
#
And I think people will say character is destiny
#
or geography is destiny.
#
And I'm just thinking names are destiny
#
And there's a Milan Kundera novel,
#
I don't know if you've read it,
#
but I'll link it from the show notes,
#
which is about this doctor,
#
I think he's a fertility doctor or whatever.
#
So whenever patients come to him saying,
#
he finds a way to implant his semen in them.
#
So soon after a few years,
#
a whole town is full of little babies
#
who look just like him.
#
And therefore, and I'm imagining Dr. Parchure,
#
though I would never use Ayurvedic and doctor
#
in the same sentence together,
#
but regardless of that,
#
Mr. Parchure on a similar kind of mission
#
of having many Vinayaks around is so amusing.
#
When you think about going deeper into Savarkar,
#
it is actually not kosher to go deeper into Savarkar.
#
there are these memorable lines of yours
#
from an interview, which I'll link from the show notes,
#
but it really struck me.
#
So I'll just sort of read them out now where you say,
#
in many ways, both the left and the right
#
treat Savarkar as a non-human object.
#
The left wants to simply denounce him
#
and see him as a political enemy,
#
but not actually engage with his ideas.
#
To talk about him or read him is somehow an indication
#
that he is worthy of some kind of engagement.
#
And when it comes to his supporters,
#
it seems they're only interested in hagiographies
#
and elevating him to the status
#
of an almost deity-like figure,
#
but without actually reading what he is saying.
#
And that's kind of the nature of the discourse.
#
And I'm sure back then,
#
it wasn't as madly polarized as it is today,
#
where just to, you take any position
#
that is not an absolutist position,
#
both sides are gonna jump on you and cancel you.
#
So what was it like then?
#
Were you even aware that this is a way
#
that it strike you as surprising?
#
Because you are, at the end of the day,
#
you are an outsider, despite what your name might be.
#
Like in a sense, in the world of history,
#
I mean it in a good way.
#
One should always, in fact, try to be an outsider.
#
And in that sense, you're looking at it from the outside in.
#
And as you point out, you go deeper
#
and you read JP Deshpande and Benedict Anderson and so on,
#
and you kind of realize that it's okay,
#
it must be engaged with.
#
But initially, what's happening there?
#
Like are you bewildered by this?
#
And what makes you decide to go ahead
#
and examine this anyway?
#
So initially, I mean, I guess one way to answer that
#
initially when I started the project,
#
so initially I wanted, one step back,
#
I just wanted to publish an essay.
#
Okay, I'll write this one essay
#
and I can move on to something else.
#
But as I kept reading the stuff coming out of Gujrat,
#
I sort of felt that this ghost of Savarkar was there.
#
And I was also, as you pointed out,
#
at that time I was also reading Perry Anderson's writings
#
I said Benedict, I think, yeah.
#
Yeah, well, I mean, brothers can be very far apart.
#
So I became interested in Perry Anderson
#
because one of the things he argues
#
in his book, Zone of Engagement,
#
and then in this book, Spectrum,
#
is that the left has had a failure
#
of engaging with the right,
#
in part because they didn't need to say,
#
they were the dominant strain of thought in politics
#
for such a long period of time.
#
But as there's been a decline,
#
we have to account for the decline,
#
but we also have to account for the why these arguments
#
that are politically opposite to what we've been arguing,
#
we need to account for that as well.
#
Why did they become popular, right?
#
I mean, how did we cede the territory?
#
But until we actually look at what they're saying,
#
we can't understand why we ceded the territory
#
from the perspective of the left.
#
So he spends a decade or more really evaluating this
#
in his multiple essays and multiple books.
#
And again, he was a UCLA professor
#
and I had taken a class with him
#
and he had a major presence on the UCLA campus as well.
#
So again, it was also location
#
in terms of thinking about some of these ideas
#
and because these were things
#
that he was discussing on campus
#
as he was thinking about writing his work.
#
And this is also once I become interested
#
in thinking about Savarkar more actively,
#
I sort of think, in a sense,
#
this is what's happening in India now too.
#
I mean, with the rise of Hindutva
#
that everyone seems to be writing about now in 2002,
#
how do we account for the same similar
#
kind of parallel processes in India?
#
And so I took that as a form, you know,
#
took that as kind of a message
#
that I needed to do something.
#
I was kind of motivated by that kind of framework
#
of thinking about from the perspective of the left,
#
how do we understand the rise of the right?
#
Because it was becoming more and more clear
#
that we couldn't simply dismiss it, right?
#
But when I started presenting on the Savarkar project
#
early on, I mean, I had multiple senior people
#
in the field, I won't name them,
#
who were very skeptical of the project,
#
were skeptical of treating Savarkar as simply a subject,
#
of serious academic work,
#
of treating Savarkar as an intellectual subject
#
and treating him as an intellectual, right?
#
I mean, I'm making a distinction between the three.
#
And I was kind of taken aback because these were,
#
at that time I was, you know, just an assistant professor
#
and I was kind of curious that the senior,
#
most people in the field who I've been in,
#
who I'm interacting with on these panels
#
are not only critical of just the idea of the project,
#
but are suspicious of me for having,
#
for doing the project, right?
#
And I think that's what I was thinking a while ago.
#
But at the same time as I'm reading the Anderson stuff
#
I came to GP Deshpande much later on,
#
but as I'm reading these figures, I'm sort of thinking,
#
okay, here are people on the left who are saying
#
the left has to take this into account,
#
otherwise we are not going to be able
#
to have any kind of recovery.
#
And then it also struck me that some of the folks
#
who were critical were more than happy to read Heidegger
#
and write about Heidegger and were more than happy
#
to read Carl Schmitt and write about Schmitt.
#
And I thought this was, and we're more than happy
#
to read about various conservative thinkers in the US
#
And, but yet when it came to Savarkar,
#
he was like, as I said earlier on,
#
he's like this Voldemort figure.
#
You can't name him, you can't talk about him.
#
That he can't be taken seriously.
#
And I sort of shrugged my shoulders and I said,
#
well, I think that there's a there there.
#
I think that the rise of Hindutva needs to be taken
#
seriously from below as we were talking about.
#
And I think we have to understand the tactic and strategies
#
of what's going on with the rise of Hindutva overall.
#
I started listening to various speeches
#
by various Hindutva leaders and what was becoming
#
more and more clear was that either they had read
#
Savarkar or that they were aware of his arguments.
#
And I'll explain that distinction if you want
#
in a second why I'm making that distinction.
#
That many of his tactics and ideas were now present.
#
If you started looking individual kind of case studies
#
that people were writing about Hindutva,
#
it was becoming clear that Savarkar had a number of tactics,
#
a number of strategies, a number of ideas,
#
a number of concepts that were now becoming part
#
of political debate culture.
#
But there was a kind of this resistance and reluctance
#
to thinking about the right seriously.
#
But I would also say that it wasn't just about the right.
#
I mean, I mean, you could say that the similar thing
#
about Ambedkar, I mean, that all these people
#
who had written about Indian nationalism
#
and had written about political theory,
#
had written about a whole series of things
#
hadn't taken Ambedkar seriously either, right?
#
So I wouldn't argue it's an anti-Maharashtra thing.
#
You put the thought out there very craftily.
#
I wouldn't think it's an anti-Maharashtra thing,
#
but I do think that it might be because it was an anti-Gandhi,
#
you know, that these figures were anti-Gandhi
#
and at one level too, right?
#
Both of them from different perspectives.
#
And I think, and listening to,
#
I remember listening to Ambedkar's 1955 famous interview
#
at the BBC where he not only describes his private meeting
#
with Gandhi, where he says, you know,
#
when you meet Gandhi in private, he shows you his fangs.
#
He doesn't show you his fangs in public.
#
But the other thing he said that struck me was that,
#
he goes, I don't know why it hasn't occurred to anyone
#
that the reason there is a legacy of Gandhi
#
is because he was assassinated.
#
And at that moment, a sort of a light bulb went off.
#
I thought, huh, if that, let's say he is correct
#
in that assessment, the legacy of Savarkar
#
is also directly connected to Gandhi's assassination, right?
#
So does Savarkar's legacy also directly connected
#
with that as well, right?
#
So I had started having these sets of thoughts
#
related to this triangulation
#
between Gandhi and Ambedkar and Savarkar.
#
And I think that was kind of the beginnings of the project
#
conceptually thinking, coming out of 2002,
#
the rise of use of the term Hindutva.
#
And as I also read Savarkar, it also occurred to me
#
that no one was actually talking about
#
his definition of Hindutva, right?
#
And I thought, this is very bizarre,
#
that why isn't anyone actually looking at Savarkar,
#
how he has defined Hindutva?
#
And with everyone's using the term,
#
everyone is now, it's part of, it becomes ubiquitous,
#
But Savarkar is sometimes mentioned initially,
#
but not completely, and that only happens much later,
#
I think, after the BJP comes to power.
#
But, so those are kind of some of the intellectual
#
and political things I was thinking about
#
as this was happening, and some of the kind of reactions
#
by some of my colleagues regarding Savarkar as well,
#
and also about what I was writing about regarding Hindutva.
#
So I have a question about Savarkar and about Hindutva,
#
about the name and the word,
#
in the sense that my sense is that in modern times,
#
number one, when people talk about Savarkar,
#
they're really talking about a caricature of him,
#
either one side or the other,
#
and the real person is almost irrelevant,
#
it's, there's a mythology there,
#
and either he's an Asura or he's a Deva,
#
and that's kind of where it is.
#
But also Hindutva, now it's a word
#
that is in common usage today,
#
and you've gone into detail about the various ways
#
in which Savarkar wrestled with the word
#
and tried to define it, he didn't, of course, coin it,
#
that was, you know, Chandranath Bose in 1892
#
wrote a book with that, and within the Bengal discourse,
#
it was already being used,
#
and Savarkar struggled to define it
#
in certain different ways.
#
But my sense also is that when most people,
#
number one, when most people in the discourse use it today,
#
they mean it in a very loose, generic sense.
#
There is no theoretical definition of it,
#
which comes from a particular book somewhere
#
that they're really thinking of.
#
It's more a generic sense,
#
and some people will even use it
#
almost synonymous with Hinduism,
#
which is absolutely not how Savarkar himself
#
intended it, of course.
#
The other aspect of it is that
#
if the BJP are children of a movement,
#
they're the children of the RSS,
#
and the RSS is really different from Savarkar
#
in many significant ways, you know,
#
they diverged, they went along different paths.
#
Now, if you just look at, oh, Hindu nationalism,
#
and they'll seem like that, they're brothers,
#
but they're not, they were very different
#
in, you know, many ways.
#
And it seems that everything about the BJP
#
really comes down in terms of genealogy
#
from the RSS philosophy,
#
and perhaps Golbalkar's bunch of thoughts might be,
#
which is also an incoherent, terrible book,
#
but maybe something like that is more relevant.
#
But in a sense, I think no book matters to them,
#
no set of ideas matter to them.
#
It's just this sort of free-floating sense of victimhood
#
and a sense of, you know, hatred of the others.
#
So like Akshay Mukul points out in his book,
#
a lot of the classic Hindutva issues of today,
#
like, you know, like cow slaughter,
#
like love jihad, though the word didn't exist then,
#
but essentially that, you know,
#
were live burning issues of the 1920s,
#
and completely outside of the Savarkar context as well.
#
So I wonder when we think about modern Hindutva,
#
how do we disentangle that?
#
Like, the way that I think the right has latched onto Savarkar
#
is in a similar kind of way
#
that they have tried to co-opt Siddharth Patel,
#
or they have even tried to co-opt Ambedkar
#
at different times, right?
#
Where it doesn't really matter what the person is
#
and whether they are really inspired by that person,
#
but it is just a convenient thing to do,
#
and therefore you kind of take Savarkar.
#
So what is your sense of that?
#
before we talk about Savarkar's definition of Hindutva,
#
if we talk about Hindutva's definition of Hindutva today,
#
if such a thing can be formulated,
#
you know, does that come directly from there?
#
What's your sense of this?
#
Like earlier, you mentioned that many of the people today
#
have read Savarkar or are aware of his argument.
#
So I guess I'm asking the same question in different words.
#
What did you mean by that?
#
Okay, I'll answer that one, and then the larger question.
#
I mean, what I meant by that is that Savarkar
#
was also aware that people probably wouldn't read
#
his text when it was published, right?
#
I mean, it had an initial print run of 2000,
#
and then it had a second print run of 2000,
#
which is still miniscule.
#
But if you look at his Hindu Masaba speeches
#
or reports of all the speeches that he's giving
#
in the 1920s and 30s when he's allowed,
#
he's under house arrest, but he's allowed to give speeches
#
because Hindutva at the time for the British
#
was a cultural activity, not a political activity.
#
And so he's giving these speeches
#
in which he's basically reproducing the arguments
#
of his text over and over again, right?
#
And I think that is an important tactic because he's...
#
And so then what happens is as he gives a speech,
#
a local newspaper will then report on the speech,
#
sometimes will publish excerpts of the speech,
#
which is really just a reiteration of his text.
#
And so now you have these hundreds of reports
#
in the newspapers that are also circulating.
#
You have hundreds of people or thousands of people
#
who are showing up, now they're hearing it.
#
And so they're orally now reproducing it.
#
And that's what I meant, like it created a certain...
#
So in a sense, you didn't have to actually read Savarkar.
#
You just had to, it becomes part of the political culture.
#
And in that sense, I think he was probably
#
quite politically savvy.
#
And if you see Narendra Modi today, I think,
#
I mean, in a certain sense,
#
he's very good at doing something similar.
#
It's the repetition of what is being said.
#
And in the multiple forms that it's being said
#
kind of creates this kind of effect
#
in the changing of political ideas as well.
#
So I think that has something,
#
that's what I meant by linking the two.
#
I think, where I would slightly disagree
#
with the kind of the contemporary versus Savarkar's
#
definition of Hindutva is that Savarkar,
#
because he says, he defines it a Hindutva
#
is not a word, but a history.
#
And I end the book by saying that in a sense,
#
Hindutva is completely dependent
#
individuality of Hindutva in order for Hindutva to survive.
#
And the need for vengeance as part of what is being argued
#
as a certain kind of futurism of Hindutva, right?
#
When the Hindutva leadership says
#
we're now embarking on a thousand year battle,
#
it's really laying out a program
#
by thinking about the future of ridding the present
#
of these legacies of the past.
#
And so in a sense, when Savarkar says Hindutva is history,
#
a history, I think what is happening even today
#
is the repetition of this over and over and over again,
#
whether it's about the Mughals,
#
whether it's about the Delhi Sultanate,
#
whether it's about anything that happened
#
between the 12th and the 19th century, mid 19th century
#
is a period that has to be part of the narrative
#
in order for Hindutva to survive, right?
#
And you've quoted Walter Benjamin in your book saying,
#
quote, even the dead will not be safe from the enemy
#
if he wins, stop quote.
#
Yeah, because they can reclaim, they are reclaiming.
#
They're reclaiming all the dead.
#
And Savarkar is very explicit about reclaiming the dead
#
for his purposes, right?
#
So that's where I think there is this continuity
#
between the two when it comes to thinking about history
#
as being central, right?
#
That to define Hindutva as a history and a history in full,
#
and we can talk about that a little bit later,
#
but as a history is, and so for me,
#
my obsession in the project began,
#
I mean, and I think an obsession is a fair,
#
is trying to really unpack that, right?
#
Why would he define it?
#
One point in the sentence before that,
#
he says it's indefinable.
#
And then he says it is a history,
#
but it is a history in which Hindus are seeking vengeance.
#
It is a history in Hindus are constantly
#
participating in violence.
#
It is a history in which the Hindu needs to abandon
#
any kind of ethical behavior and so on, right?
#
And I think that is part of the story
#
of how Hindutva is even defined today.
#
So I would say that there is that continuity,
#
even though it's now means many things
#
over the course of the last century.
#
Now, regarding the RSS,
#
so what was interesting was that in 19,
#
so in 1925, 24, I'm not remembering the exact year,
#
after Savarkar is released from prison
#
and put under house arrest, he meets,
#
there's a meeting between himself,
#
one of his distant relatives, V.V. Kelkar,
#
who is from Nagpur, and his brothers are there,
#
his father-in-law is there,
#
and there's a small inner circle.
#
And Kelkar is very close to Hegdewaran Goldworker as well.
#
And so there is this kind of close,
#
because Savarkar can't meet everyone,
#
but his books are published in Nagpur, right?
#
So his Essentials of Hindutva is published in Nagpur.
#
A couple of his other early works are published in Nagpur
#
by his distant relative, who is now close to,
#
so there is this kind of closeness in terms of the ideas.
#
And certainly each Hindutva thinker is, of course,
#
going to be interpreting things slightly differently,
#
but where they share the commonalities
#
that we have to enforce a certain kind
#
of understanding of the past,
#
and an assertion of Hindu vengeance
#
as a way of thinking about this term, this concept.
#
So I had an episode with Shruti Kapila,
#
who I think also is a fellow student of Bailey, is she?
#
But yeah, I think she's contributed to a volume
#
he edited on ideas, and she came up with this lovely line
#
where she said, Hindutva is a theory of violence
#
in search of a history, right?
#
And in different ways, you shed so much light on that as well.
#
And I want to talk about both aspects of it,
#
the word Hindutva itself, and then the history aspect of it,
#
how he looked at history and how he defined it.
#
But let's sort of talk about his struggle
#
to define the word itself, the word sort of Hindutva.
#
So give me a sense of how he arrives at it.
#
Like many people today think
#
that Hindutva is a subset of Hinduism.
#
It is the political arm of Hinduism in a sense,
#
in a very loose kind of sense.
#
But actually the way Savarkar is imagining it,
#
Hinduism is a subset of Hindutva.
#
That Hindutva is something all-encompassing
#
and much bigger, so just explain that.
#
Yeah, I mean, Savarkar,
#
now the thing that I've not been able to resolve
#
is how he comes across the term in the first place, right?
#
I mean, one argument that's made is that
#
when he's in the Andamans,
#
there's a few references that he starts
#
to learn to read Bengali.
#
We do know that you had a number
#
of Bengali political prisoners in the Andamans as well.
#
I've talked to a few scholars
#
who've written about some of these folks,
#
and what they point out is that there is this
#
both celebration and antagonism of Savarkar
#
among the Bengali left at that time,
#
where he's seen as a certain kind of authentic figure
#
because he was attached to a number of figures
#
on the left at the India house,
#
or at least interacted with them.
#
There's fellow travelers in certain circles
#
and when he tries to escape in Marseille in France
#
from the ship, his case is heard
#
at the International Court of Arbitration,
#
his is the 11th case that was ever heard there,
#
and becomes sort of an international case,
#
and the arguments are at one level quite comical
#
because the French are saying
#
that they're better imperialists than the British are
#
because they abide by international law, right?
#
But in the meantime, the name and Savarkar
#
starts circulating globally in the press
#
as a result of this case.
#
So you have this authenticity,
#
and so perhaps that interaction is where Savarkar
#
reads Chandranath Basu, right,
#
or becomes familiarized with this term.
#
So that's a way to sort of talk about perhaps
#
where he is exposed to sort of the Bengali debates
#
about Hindutva in the first place.
#
But I think he's also interested in expanding its meaning
#
and connecting it to, you know,
#
he says the closest English translation is Hinduness
#
or Hindupan, but again, he says it's indefinable, right?
#
So he says it's not really definable.
#
He's also very critical of saying it's not Hinduism
#
as you pointed out, right, that it's,
#
that he says Hinduism is a Western construct of Hindu dharm,
#
that Hindus should use Hindu dharm, not Hinduism.
#
Hinduism, he said, isms are dogmas.
#
They're, you know, so he's antagonistic to the idea
#
of calling it an ism in the first place.
#
However, he says if we're gonna use Hinduism as a category,
#
then we have to redefine it, and it's always a subset
#
of this larger category of Hindutva.
#
And what I, as I started looking at the kind of,
#
the structure of how he puts the argument together,
#
he argues that Hindutva is connected to being
#
with a capital B, and I thought this was very peculiar,
#
interesting at the same time,
#
but this is also part of the limitation of Savarkar,
#
but that as a philosopher, he doesn't go into metaphysics
#
and doesn't go into questions of ontology,
#
but he mentions these periodically,
#
and you sort of think, huh,
#
what is he really talking about here?
#
But as I started connecting his discussions
#
of being with his other writings,
#
you begin to see that he has this understanding
#
that Hindutva is sort of this category of,
#
that is this kind of ontological category.
#
And he begins to also think, as a lot of philosophers do,
#
of sort of thinking about the relationship
#
Now, the reason I continue to use the word being,
#
not a Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit kind of equivalent,
#
is because he uses, he writes this in the English.
#
He himself chooses not to use either the vernacular
#
or the Sanskrit to say exactly
#
what he's thinking about here.
#
But when he's, so this category of being,
#
and Hindutva is attached to being,
#
and then he also adds time and sort of says
#
that Hindutva is bounded by time.
#
And suddenly I was very confused,
#
how do I unpack all of this?
#
And my sense was that most people who read the book
#
or have read the book kind of gloss over it
#
and say, it's kind of nonsensical,
#
I don't quite understand, and sort of move on.
#
But I kind of stuck with it and sort of thought,
#
okay, if I try to understand what this means,
#
perhaps we can get closer to understanding
#
what he means by Hindutva.
#
And I think if we look at the title of the book,
#
Essentials of Hindutva, and I started thinking,
#
everyone's focusing on Hindutva,
#
but what about essentials?
#
Like, what does it mean by essentials, right?
#
And so he has these categories of essentials,
#
but as I started reading his other work,
#
the category of essentials he translates in other writings
#
as either tattva, right?
#
And so suddenly I'm like, okay, so the essence of Hindutva.
#
So it's not just the essentials,
#
it's the tattva of Hindutva.
#
And then if we break up Hindutva,
#
Hindutva becomes a compound of Hindu and tattva.
#
So the essence of the Hindu's essence.
#
So now we are now certainly moving
#
into a form of metaphysics and ontology.
#
And at that moment I'm thinking, okay,
#
I kind of want more and he's not unpacking it.
#
And so he then quickly moves on to saying
#
that Hindutva can't be defined,
#
his being can't be defined, right?
#
And the Hindu's essence therefore
#
can only be interpreted, he says, through a history.
#
And so therefore that history part,
#
he quickly moves, he pivots without full explanation,
#
without full unpacking of the concept of tattva
#
or the concept of Hindutva,
#
except saying it's not definable.
#
And so that stuck with me.
#
And then when I was reading his book on 1857,
#
he has a whole thing that what he's interested in doing
#
is trying to understand the principles
#
of these revolutionaries.
#
And these principles of revolutionaries
#
can be only understood by thinking
#
about what is their motive.
#
And motive is then defined as close
#
to thinking about tattva again.
#
So he's constantly working with principles
#
and essence and so Hindutva therefore then becomes,
#
And so the challenge now becomes
#
how to unpack that history, right?
#
And so I spent about a decade trying to think about
#
this history that he begins with 1857,
#
but before 1857 he translates a book by Giuseppe Mazzini.
#
And I started reading Giuseppe Mazzini
#
and you see Giuseppe Mazzini
#
is writing about principles as well.
#
So when he translates Mazzini's writings,
#
he's translating it into tattva constantly, right?
#
So he has this kind of interest in trying to unpack,
#
but I don't think he's a sophisticated enough philosopher
#
to kind of unpack it in a way that becomes clear.
#
But where he does try to unpack this
#
is throughout his historical writings, right?
#
So he begins with 1857 trying to capture the essence of
#
and the motives of these revolutionaries
#
and sort of saying that they possess a spirit.
#
Now what's interesting is one of the definitions
#
of tattva is also spirit.
#
when he's talking about the Hindu spirit,
#
is that also Hindutva, right?
#
It's again the compound between Hindu and tattva,
#
So all these thoughts are going through my head
#
that I'm having all these clues,
#
but I don't have a clear definition,
#
but he's clearly laying out that
#
in order to understand this history,
#
you have to capture these moments in the past
#
in which these Hindus specifically
#
are exhibiting certain kinds of behavior.
#
And then suddenly the Bhagavad Gita emerges
#
and now he wants to link up these histories
#
with certain kind of terminology
#
and characteristics found within the Gita
#
and insert them into the subjects that he's studying.
#
So in a sense, he's not going farther and farther back.
#
It starts with the 19th century.
#
Then he moves on to Hindu Padpadshahi
#
going to the 17th century.
#
Then he's going back to antiquity in his book,
#
Six Glorious Epochs of Sahasranaripane.
#
He's now going farther back and sort of saying,
#
Hindus have been participating in,
#
the Hindu spirit has been traveling across time.
#
What we as historians have to do is now look at this.
#
And this is also Hindutva, right?
#
That the writing of history is as much of Hindutva
#
as the making of history.
#
So suddenly it's, I mean, for a long period of time,
#
this was very confusing
#
and I hope I haven't confused people by,
#
but I think this is partially why
#
individuals hadn't actually written about this
#
because it is kind of, you have to sort of see his work
#
as kind of bringing all of these arguments together.
#
And there's a certain kind of methodological logic
#
that he has internally.
#
He's constantly the omniscient speaker.
#
And I was always interested why,
#
and he's clearly taking this from a literary tradition of,
#
he's saying that this is not fiction.
#
he says that the closest you come to Hindutva
#
in a certain sense is when you write about
#
I'm like, this is also really interesting.
#
Like, what does that mean?
#
So he's saying that these individuals in the past
#
had desires of the Hindu spirit, of Hindutva.
#
And I, as the writer, now writing about them in the past,
#
have, I'm embodying that Hindu spirit.
#
So the idea of not only making history,
#
but also writing history is part of this process
#
of Hindutva itself, right?
#
And, but this cannot be detached from
#
the everyday forms of violence
#
that he wants to capture as well, right?
#
That the Hindu's essence is actually about violence.
#
So people have asked me,
#
why did I call the book Hindutva and Violence?
#
And I said, well, these are the two categories
#
that Savarkar is really unpacking
#
throughout all his writings.
#
And he's actually quite open about the fact
#
that the Hindu becomes the Hindu in the act of violence.
#
And for me, that was really interesting, right?
#
I was, and so all of these things tied together
#
are sort of what makes Hindutva for him indefinable.
#
But at the same time, it gets us closer
#
to what it means to have the essence of the Hindu
#
through studying Hindus in the past who evoke violence
#
and demonstrate a different essence of the Hindu.
#
And if we keep repeating this, right?
#
So the question is, okay,
#
how many times do we need to do this?
#
And his argument is, we need to keep doing this.
#
Every Hindu, if every Hindu would do this,
#
we would come closer to this idea
#
of the essence of Hindutva.
#
So I hope that kind of touches upon both the challenges
#
and difficulty of writing about this,
#
but also the possibilities of understanding
#
why history is so important
#
for the folks who promote Hindutva in the first place.
#
You've actually been incredibly clear in your exposition
#
and the unclearnesses from Savarkar,
#
who I find incredibly unclear now,
#
we'll dive deep into violence in a minute,
#
by which, dear listeners, I don't mean to say
#
we will start beating each other up, not at all.
#
We will talk about violence in a minute.
#
But before that, I want to sort of ask you another question
#
that you've beautifully described about how,
#
for him, the essence of it was you had to get back
#
into history, and for history, you had to get back to
#
the source of all events, which is motive.
#
Innermost desires, and therefore,
#
how do you get to innermost desires?
#
At one level, it involves a certain kind of guesswork.
#
Now, you've described this historical methodologically
#
One of the things that he is doing
#
is using conjecture as method,
#
that he will come up with a conjecture,
#
and for him, that is a valid method,
#
and then that conjecture is held to be true,
#
unless somebody can prove it is untrue.
#
Now, how do you prove a negative, for example?
#
It is an impossible task.
#
You can come up with absolutely any conjecture,
#
and how do you prove that it is untrue?
#
I mean, so many conspiracy theories around us all the time,
#
and the omniscient narrator,
#
which is just bizarre for history,
#
because the only omniscient narrator can be a god,
#
and as we know, god doesn't exist,
#
so how could you possibly have one?
#
And here, what I'm thinking is that I am drawn
#
to the earlier distinction you make about the subject,
#
the intellectual subject, and the intellectual,
#
you know, studying these three,
#
and I find that to be an extremely illuminative phrasing,
#
because an earlier guest of mine had once said
#
that there are three booklets that,
#
I think this was Rahul Ramagundam,
#
who wrote the great George Fernandez biography,
#
and he said he wants to write a book
#
about what he considers three great pamphlets or essays,
#
and two of them, like important, not great,
#
and two of them are Hindutva, Essentials of Hindutva,
#
first published as Hindutva,
#
and, you know, Gandhi's Hinswaraj,
#
and Annihilation of Caste by Ambedkar.
#
Now, I think Annihilation of Caste was a fantastic essay,
#
work of a great intellectual, must be read.
#
Essentials of Hindutva and Hinswaraj
#
are both basically incoherent nonsense
#
by people who weren't very widely read,
#
whose reading was really impressionistic,
#
and in this case, I'll wait for you to correct me,
#
because I have no idea of Savarkar's Marathi reading.
#
You have mentioned in your book
#
so perhaps I'm missing something here.
#
But my earlier impression has been that, you know,
#
and where I see Gandhi as a black swan event also,
#
is that, you know, all the liberals I admire of that age,
#
like, you know, Gokhale, Ranade, Agarkar, and so on,
#
came from a particular tradition of reading,
#
where they've read all the British liberals,
#
they've read their Millen, Bentham,
#
they've also read all the Indian books.
#
There is a coherence to their philosophy.
#
While Gandhi is very impressionistic,
#
he's taking something from Tolstoy,
#
discovers a Bhagavad Gita at some point,
#
but, you know, at one point somebody asks him,
#
why don't you read more?
#
And he says, I don't need to read,
#
I live in the real world, I can look around me.
#
And for me with Savarkar also, you know,
#
the reason that his ideas seem so unclear
#
and his book is so dense, is because they are.
#
Like, I feel there is nothing there,
#
like my, you know, when I was much younger
#
and I would read something I didn't understand
#
in a non-technical subject,
#
my assumption, I would gaslight myself
#
and say there must be something wrong with me.
#
Today, if somebody has written something
#
in dense language that I don't understand,
#
it is, I assume it is that person's fault
#
and it usually is because great writers
#
can convey complex ideas in a clear way.
#
Anyone who's thinking clearly is able to convey it clearly.
#
And so that's sort of my provocative question.
#
Gandhi's greatness of course arises
#
from many of the things that he did.
#
And as Ram Guha told me in an episode
#
about the bizarre ideas he has in Hind Swaraj,
#
doctors are bad, railways are bad, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And Ram made, and my question was that
#
how did he then get non-violence right
#
when he got everything else wrong?
#
And Ram's incredible point there was that
#
that is the one thing he had personal experience of,
#
that in all the years of South Africa
#
he'd done non-violent resistance,
#
he had lived experience of it, so he got it right.
#
He got the theory from the practice.
#
The other stuff he was just, you know,
#
marrowing random funders in the air
#
and kept changing his mind
#
because of course he contained multitudes.
#
So I want to also then go back to that,
#
your beautiful formulation of Savarkar as a subject,
#
Savarkar as an intellectual subject
#
and Savarkar as an intellectual.
#
And my impression before reading your book
#
and I still have a lot to process in it,
#
and of course I've read it all,
#
is that I cannot consider him an intellectual.
#
I can consider him a subject,
#
I can consider him an intellectual subject,
#
but I find it hard to consider him an intellectual.
#
So what would your response be to this?
#
That's a great question.
#
I mean, regarding, I mean, I guess the real part is,
#
I mean, is he an intellectual, right?
#
And that's, and I've argued that he is an intellectual as,
#
and maybe one of the ways to think about the incoherence
#
and the lack of consistency is that he always wrote
#
under censorship or under surveillance.
#
So even Essentials of Hindutva is written in,
#
while he's actually in prison.
#
He's released from the Andamans
#
and where he's not able to write except letters or petitions
#
and the letters are once a year.
#
So we have about a dozen letters that he wrote
#
and we have about a half a dozen petitions that he wrote.
#
So he's just out of prison,
#
I mean, out of the Andamans and he writes this text.
#
So I, in that sense, the prison writings certainly evoke
#
that he doesn't have access to books
#
or he doesn't have access to certain kinds of documents
#
by which he could, you know, which is very different from,
#
I mean, even the 1857 book is, you know,
#
it's written under surveillance.
#
It's a much, much larger book,
#
but it's written under surveillance.
#
So the bulk of his writings are written
#
in this kind of ad hoc way.
#
My smaller point there is, I'm sorry to interrupt,
#
but clarification of what I meant is that
#
Nehru wrote a lot of his stuff from prison as well
#
and didn't have access to books either,
#
like his letters to Indira and Discovery of India,
#
if I remember correctly.
#
But the thing is, he had that, you know,
#
solid foundation of all the reading he had done
#
which had molded his worldview and his knowledge.
#
So is there a sense that Savarkar also had a bedrock
#
of reading which, perhaps, English-speaking elites like me
#
but perhaps he had a deep reading in Marathi,
#
which informed everything he did.
#
Yeah, I mean, so he, I mean, and your,
#
I think your assessment that, you know,
#
he's picking and choosing, certainly.
#
I mean, he's, I mean, he's reading widely.
#
He claims to be reading widely
#
from some of the letters that we have
#
and this prison stuff that he's,
#
he's requesting certain books from his brothers.
#
And so he gets books sent,
#
and we have some of the lists he writes about them,
#
whether it's within the Maharashtrian tradition,
#
whether it's in English as well.
#
He's reading, we know that,
#
the documentation I was able to find
#
is a lot of the Andaman stuff is destroyed,
#
is that we have evidence of when he's checking books out
#
but they don't monitor which books he's checking out
#
and returning in the store.
#
Which would answer some of the questions that, you know.
#
But, you know, we know, like when he's in London,
#
he is reading, he's reading Matsini extensively.
#
the most extensive kind of engagement
#
with any particular thinker is with Matsini
#
because that was a time where he had greater access to books
#
and greater access to, you know,
#
to writing at a specific time.
#
But I would also say that in terms of English,
#
he's not a stylist, I think you're correct.
#
I mean, Nehru is a literary stylist.
#
Savarkar is not a literary stylist in English.
#
Whereas within Marathi,
#
he's considered an exceptional stylist within Marathi
#
writings in his poetry and his dramas and others.
#
So I would agree with you that he's,
#
I mean, people have asked me, how can you read his stuff?
#
It's so, you know, it's so bad.
#
And I agree that as a style of writing,
#
and even as a sort of certain kind of thinker
#
when he's writing these histories,
#
there is a certain kind of ad hoc nature
#
to what he's putting together.
#
And, but at another level, I mean,
#
to thinking about him as, so as a subject of history,
#
that's pretty easy to think of him as a subject of history,
#
to think of him as an intellectual subject.
#
I mean, I think, I hope that's become clear
#
why we can think of him.
#
Whereas I think you're probably onto something when,
#
and this is where I get a lot of the resistance,
#
was he actually an intellectual?
#
I mean, at one level, I mean, if we think of Hindutva,
#
as, I mean, we can't ignore Hindutva today.
#
Should we attribute a lot of it to him?
#
I would probably argue yes,
#
in terms of conceptualizing a lot of the categories
#
And I think he was also someone
#
who understood orality pretty well.
#
I mean, I think that is important as well.
#
And I think the way he is also writing,
#
and I mentioned this in the book,
#
that might explain why I think we should take him
#
seriously perhaps as an intellectual,
#
is that he is also coming out of a Maharashtrian tradition
#
These texts, these fantastical texts that were written
#
about Shivaji and these biographical fantasies
#
And they're replicated over a couple of centuries.
#
And my reading is that Savarkar's writings
#
are closer in genre to that
#
than they are to anything else, right?
#
And I asked the question rhetorically,
#
because I can't answer it with great certainty
#
because he doesn't address it fully,
#
is that, is this a neo-Bukkar tradition
#
that's emerging in the 20th century with Savarkar?
#
Or is this the end of the Bukkar tradition with Savarkar,
#
right, that this is where it kind of ends?
#
And so I think because he has had this impact
#
in terms of shaping Hindutva,
#
I've argued that he is an intellectual in that sense, right?
#
And we can disagree because I mean,
#
there are so many different theoreticians
#
of what constitutes an intellectual.
#
I mean, if we look at the Gramscian context
#
of the intellectual, he's certainly functioning
#
as an intellectual among the Hindu right
#
and occupied that role as a leader,
#
as an organic leader of a certain type.
#
So if we look at the Gramscian formulation of intellectual,
#
he certainly fits that mold, right?
#
Whether he fits the mold of a philosopher,
#
I don't think he's a philosopher.
#
And as I said, I mean, he doesn't fully unpack these,
#
he's onto a lot of interesting things,
#
And whether we should take them seriously or not,
#
But I have tried to take seriously
#
the ways in which he's put this together.
#
And I also use when I say historical methodology
#
with Savarkar with, I would say with quotes around it,
#
whether this is actually historical
#
in the ways in which we think about
#
the discipline of history.
#
I'm not interested in writing an academic history
#
or an analytical history.
#
I'm writing a history that's evoking some kind of emotion.
#
And that's kind of what some of the Bakars were also doing.
#
He says, I'm gonna write biographies
#
and autobiographical writings,
#
which is also part of that tradition.
#
So I sort of see kind of the corpus of his work
#
fitting into sort of this Maharashtrian tradition of writing
#
that sort of is coming to an end,
#
but he has kind of, because he was exposed to that,
#
his understanding of it, the haas comes from that.
#
So that's why I sort of sit at sort of this edge of thinking,
#
you know, that perhaps the most important individual
#
in terms of Hindutva as a concept in the 20th century,
#
not fully clarified, not fully defined.
#
I got in trouble because I said that, you know,
#
there are, of course, other prison writings
#
who write incoherently.
#
And I cited Antonio Gramsci.
#
And again, but I was just saying
#
that you have people who write in prison
#
where it is incoherent as well,
#
who aren't, and Savarkar in English isn't a literary stylist.
#
So I don't know if that's fully addressed.
#
No, no, it makes some important points.
#
Like firstly, you know, Gandhi also, as you point out,
#
felt history was an inadequate term.
#
And, you know, the term iti haas, as you point out,
#
is more all-encompassing.
#
So perhaps it depends a bit on definitions as well.
#
And as far as intellectual is concerned,
#
yeah, maybe I was being too harsh.
#
Like if you define an intellectual as a man of ideas,
#
he certainly was one, and they were consequential ideas,
#
which, you know, had a big impact on Indian society.
#
And I might think from my subjective viewpoint
#
that they're third rate ideas,
#
but that's a different matter.
#
Does he then fit into the, you know,
#
You know, so in that sense, I get where you're coming from.
#
Before we move on to the theory
#
and to talking about the book and to violence,
#
you know, I also want to sort of muse a little bit
#
on the role of contingency in people's lives.
#
Like, you know, his London years, pre-2010,
#
and you've sort of analyzed both his books beautifully
#
on Mazzini and then the first Indian war of independence.
#
And what we find in those books is that in those books,
#
in that work, in nothing of his writing
#
that I could find before 2010, is he actually anti-Muslim?
#
In fact, there are a couple of quotes
#
you give from the 1857 book.
#
In one place, he writes, and these are his words,
#
the feeling of hatred against the Mohammedans
#
was just and necessary in the times of Shivaji.
#
But such a feeling would be unjust and foolish if nurse now
#
simply because it was a dominant feeling of the Hindus then.
#
Instead, Hindus and Muslims need to unify against a foreigner.
#
And later in the book, you quote him as saying,
#
so now the original antagonism between Hindus
#
and Mohammedans might be consigned to the past.
#
Their present relation was one not of rulers
#
and ruled foreigner and native, but simply that of brothers
#
with the one difference between them of religion alone.
#
Four, they were both children on the soil of Hindustan.
#
The names were different,
#
but they were all children of the same mother.
#
India, therefore, being the common mother of these two,
#
they were brothers by blood.
#
Stop quoting, completely contradictory
#
to what he writes in 2003.
#
And from the narrative, as I have got it,
#
it seems to me that contingency plays a big part
#
because 2010, he goes to the Andamans.
#
And oh, by the way, had the British chosen to hang him,
#
I'm sure today, all sides would think of him
#
as we think of Bhagat Singh today as a great revolutionary.
#
But he lives, he continues.
#
And in those years in the Andaman,
#
and I think Vaibhav Purandar's biography
#
and Vikram Sampath's biography have details of this.
#
And I've read the jail diaries of other people
#
who were with him at the time in the Andamans as well.
#
The torture was terrible.
#
And a lot of the torture on him was carried out
#
by these Pathan sort of middlemen
#
between the British jailers and the Hindu prisoners.
#
And you would have this regular torture,
#
which I won't go into now,
#
but you should read those jail diaries
#
and read about those times.
#
And that also makes me kind of look a little more
#
forgivingly on the mercy petitions that he sent.
#
Because man, if you were going through that kind of stuff,
#
you'd do anything to make it stop, I mean.
#
And when he comes out of the Andamans, therefore,
#
he is a devout anti-Muslim, as it were.
#
He has completely turned.
#
And to me, this contingency seems to play sort of a big role.
#
And I know you've argued about it in your book,
#
and that this is not necessarily the case,
#
that there are other indications
#
that he may always have been a Hindutva person in the making.
#
But from his own writings, this is what one seems to get,
#
that what changes so dramatically,
#
like Gandhi meets him in 2009,
#
they discuss violence in the Ramayana at an event,
#
and Gandhi seems to approve of him.
#
This is something I remember from the other biographies
#
I've read of him, not from yours,
#
but there are anecdotes to that effect.
#
But the point is still 2010, he is completely kosher.
#
Looking at him, the only thing that I would disapprove of
#
is the use of violence, because for me,
#
means matter, not just ends.
#
But apart from that, he's actually like all Indians are one,
#
and we must throw out the foreigners.
#
And suddenly this shit happens, and 10 years later,
#
he is like, Muslims are the enemy.
#
And then he weaves that into his theory of Hindutva,
#
into the whole motherland, fatherland, holy land thing,
#
which I'll ask you to elaborate on later.
#
But just thinking about the role of contingency,
#
how does one think about that?
#
Because I think when we look at someone
#
with a political lens, whether it is a lens of the right
#
or the lens of the left,
#
you refuse to acknowledge him as a human being,
#
but he was a human being.
#
Human beings are frail and flawed
#
and creatures of circumstance and so on.
#
And that's what I see when I look at him,
#
that so much is contingent,
#
and you change a few events here or there,
#
and history could be different.
#
Yes, I mean, and for me, that was one of the things
#
that I was very interested in sort of thinking through
#
about this kind of, if you wanna think of it as
#
either a shift or a conversion to Hindutva, right?
#
I mean, that's, and perhaps,
#
I mean, there are some scholars
#
who've been writing about Savarkar who argue
#
that he was always anti-Muslim from the beginning
#
and perhaps prejudiced very early on.
#
And I would be, that would be fully willing
#
to acknowledge that, right?
#
I mean, in his writings, he sort of says
#
that there's this kind of strategic moment
#
where we need to come together
#
and not use the moments of the past,
#
but yet at the same time, he'll describe Muslims as hordes
#
and describe the issue of the invasions
#
and describe all the things that are argued
#
against Muslims even by the Hindutva bodies later on
#
or even by him later on.
#
So, I mean, that is, and then the people
#
who were closest to him argued that he was always like this.
#
I mean, Baha'i Parmanent, who was with him in London
#
before they were both in the Andaman said,
#
he was always like this.
#
And Baha'i Parmanent says that people blamed me
#
for converting him to becoming a communalist,
#
when in fact, he was already a communalist, right?
#
But he would say this, wouldn't he,
#
if he was blamed like that?
#
So, and I think for me, I sort of pivoted in the book
#
to a certain extent by moving on to sort of this idea
#
of thinking about the Hindu spirit, right?
#
And that for him, the revolutionary subject is,
#
the idealized Hindu revolutionary subject
#
is the Mangalpande character overall.
#
And as a Brahmin, and that spirit is the only spirit
#
that matters as well, right?
#
So, it's only the Hindu spirit.
#
So, by the negation of the Muslim spirit there,
#
we have something else.
#
So, the absence of an argument
#
or the absence of a formulation,
#
also it could be examined as sort of the prioritizing
#
of the Hindu, the idea of, you know,
#
so I think this shift is something
#
that is not fully unpacked.
#
And I think one could read it,
#
that there are these moments of prejudice
#
that appear throughout the text as well.
#
But at another level, the opposite argument
#
could also be made because he's saying, you know,
#
he's talking about Hindus and Muslims
#
using our religion as a, you know,
#
and I'm like, what does that mean
#
when he says our religion?
#
Is this, I mean, at what point,
#
is he sort of re-embracing the Muslim as a former Hindu?
#
Is that what he means or, you know,
#
but he's happy to use Jihad and Shaheed as a category.
#
So, what I've done is I've looked at some of these categories
#
across his writings and, you know,
#
so here he's willing to use Shaheed,
#
but later on he says, I don't like using Arabic terms
#
and I want to rid language of Arabic terms as well.
#
So, you have all of that happening.
#
And then, now what is happening in prison?
#
And he writes, you know, it is about some of the violence,
#
it is about some of the privileges,
#
but where I think high permanent becomes important again
#
is this is the moment where Savarkar's
#
turn towards the Arya Samaj becomes much more evident
#
and the whole issue of reconversion.
#
And so, some of the arguments about Savarkar's shift
#
probably have to be contextualized
#
within that context as well,
#
that he himself says that there was a multi-level problem
#
that he was thinking through
#
and not simply the fact it was these Patan warders
#
who were physically beating him, right?
#
So, I don't, I mean, and some of this is still, you know,
#
I mean, up for conversation and debate
#
in terms of was there a transition in Savarkar
#
or does it get more amplified as time moves on?
#
Let's talk about violence now.
#
And, you know, the most bizarre thing about Savarkar's theory
#
is not that, like, a lot of the rhetoric today
#
when they talk of violence and there are all these,
#
you know, like one of the core tenets of populism
#
is that the majority will claim victimhood,
#
like an aggrieved minority,
#
which is what seems to be happening in India today.
#
And one of the narratives there is violence
#
has been inflicted upon us, but no more.
#
And interestingly, the way Savarkar sees violence
#
is not that violence has been inflicted upon us.
#
It is that, you know, we are originally violent.
#
We are the original colonizers of this land
#
that violence is good, violence is what makes you a Hindu.
#
And there is, you know, there's an effeminate Hindu
#
who must be condemned, who is not adequately violent.
#
And I found all of this, like, really fascinating,
#
this toxic macho sort of attraction towards violence
#
and, you know, almost making it a first principle,
#
as it were, of his philosophy.
#
So tell me more about this.
#
Yeah, I mean, I think you've kind of summarized it really well for me.
#
I mean, for me, what was really fascinating
#
was this whole issue of the Hindu colonizing Hindustan, right?
#
And, but he, you know, he very quickly goes from the Aryan
#
to the Hindu as without a further explanation.
#
But I think the explanation is actually in the act of colonization, right?
#
So he says you have this movement into the Gangetic Plain,
#
which was a wasteland, which gets colonized.
#
And it's culturally transformed.
#
But in the act of colonization, you have the Hindu confronting,
#
the Aryan confronting the non-Hindu, right?
#
And the Aryan, when confronts the non-Hindu,
#
it's through the act of violence, the non-Hindu becomes the Hindu,
#
and the Aryan becomes the Hindu.
#
So it's that moment, that originary moment,
#
that the Hindu is born in the act of violence,
#
and the Hindu is born not in the act of violence as the perpetrator,
#
the Hindu is born in the act of violence as the victim.
#
And for me, that was really fascinating.
#
I just sort of thought this is kind of really trippy stuff that I...
#
And then I kept thinking, you know, am I reading too much into this because...
#
But then what else does it mean, right?
#
And it's sort of that...
#
And the ending of this process, interestingly enough, right?
#
He says in Essentials of Indutva,
#
the ending of this process is Ramchandra's conquest and slaying of Ravan, right?
#
And I thought this is really interesting.
#
So you have the ending of the process through this act of violence as well.
#
And then, as I was sort of writing,
#
and as I sort of, you know, was talking to the publisher about the title,
#
and I was actually debating whether I should use violence or not,
#
and whether the title would be more appropriate as Hindutva and Vengeance.
#
Because what I find really interesting is listening to some of the channels
#
the Hindutva folks are talking will say that we are not violent.
#
And what I find is really most interesting is we are not violent in the act of killing.
#
And I found that to be really interesting that we are not violent in the act of killing
#
because vengeance is a unique and special category in and of itself.
#
That Hindus have been subjected to violence,
#
but the Hindu is not violent, but the Hindu is vengeful, right?
#
And it's at that moment of vengeance that we can move beyond into the next realm, right?
#
And so I think for me that's the Hiranyakaship story with Prahlad is really important
#
because Savarkar writes about this at the end of his career where he says,
#
Prahlad continues to worship Vishnu, but his father inflicts all sorts of
#
horrible things on Prahlad, and Prahlad doesn't respond.
#
But Prahlad in the end is only saved when Vishnu comes down in the form of Narsim
#
and kills the father, but doesn't just kill the father.
#
He brutally kills the father. He rips his guts out.
#
And it's that moment of vengeance, right?
#
And Savarkar will say that this is how you have to treat the effeminate Hindu.
#
The effeminate Hindu should not just be killed, but brutally killed.
#
And for him, the ultimate effeminate Hindus are those preaching Ahimsa.
#
Which is really, again, really fascinating, right?
#
So the Buddha is a big problem for him for that reason.
#
And the Buddhists, they are part of this tradition, right?
#
However, he says that because of the Buddha and the monks go around the world telling
#
the world that we have these great intellectual riches, great financial riches,
#
but we also don't have a theory of warfare anymore because we have now declared Ahimsa.
#
And he says this is the root of the problem
#
leading to the number of invasions, foreign invasions that happen.
#
But he's also metaphorically also talking about Gandhi here, right?
#
That Gandhi is also partially opening up a space where we're going to be
#
dominated yet again for the next X number of years, right?
#
But that's where I think the meeting that you said that Gandhi and Savarkar had in 1909
#
is important because they are discussing...
#
So Gandhi says, I will not participate in this meeting as the guest of honor
#
if Savarkar talks about politics.
#
So Savarkar says, fine, I won't talk about politics.
#
Instead, what he does, he talks about the Ramayan.
#
And when you look at that conversation he has in 1909 with Gandhi about the Ramayan
#
and thinking about violence and the slaying of Ravan as an important act,
#
and fast forward to Essentials of Hindutva where he's talking about the slaying of Ravan
#
as the completion of Hindustan.
#
And almost as if Ramchandra becomes the father of the nation at that moment
#
because that's when the Hindu nation is completed in that act of slaying Ravan.
#
In a sense, there's this kind of ongoing conversation between Savarkar and Gandhi.
#
And just as an aside, I think Hind Swaraj is interesting
#
because it's written in a dialogue format immediately after this 1909 meeting
#
when Gandhi is returning back to South Africa.
#
Wasn't it written when he's going from South Africa to India?
#
That's what I thought it was.
#
I thought it was on that voyage in circa 1912 when it was written.
#
I... no, it was because it was published in Gujarati in 1909
#
and then the English comes out in 1910.
#
So I must be getting it wrong.
#
But my impression was it was written on the return voyage.
#
Yeah, I mean, obviously.
#
So it's on the return voyage from London to South Africa.
#
And Gandhi writes furiously, he says, for 10 days to put this on paper.
#
But... and so I think that's also the interesting thing
#
is that he's having this dialogue in part with a revolutionary figure who doesn't name.
#
And in part, there are moments where it's as if he's having
#
a conversation with Savarkar himself, right?
#
So they have this interesting kind of...
#
both have this dialogue with each other independently in multiple moments.
#
That's the only public place where they have this kind of engagement.
#
Living rent-free in each other's heads.
#
So tell me now about, you know, motherland, fatherland, holy land.
#
Like I find that really fascinating the way Savarkar decides
#
who is part of Hindutva and who is not.
#
Who is the outsider who must be fought and who is not?
#
Why the, you know, the Jains are fine, for example, but the Muslims are not.
#
So, you know, take me into that aspect of his thinking.
#
Yeah, I mean, I think in a certain way,
#
the essentials of Hindutva's argument about holy land negates
#
the argument of the 1857 book, right?
#
So the 1857 book is about motherland and about fatherland,
#
where the Hindu and the Muslim, the quote that you just read, share the same...
#
Yes, and they share the same motherland.
#
So if they share the same motherland,
#
and they share the same fatherland,
#
what differentiates the Hindu and the Muslim then?
#
And I think that's where the idea of the holy land comes into play.
#
And the holy land comes into play for a couple of reasons, I think.
#
Or, I mean, he actually will say it, you know,
#
he's very interested in the Zionist creation of Israel.
#
He's also very interested in the...
#
This is also happening during the Caliphate movement.
#
So he's also very interested in sort of the looking towards the...
#
Yes, that there is a holy land that people are looking towards.
#
They're not looking at this territory as their home or their holy land.
#
And so for him, that becomes important that
#
that this territory of Hindustan should be seen as a holy land as well.
#
So the Muslim can have the same blood, right?
#
Because they're of the same blood as the Hindus.
#
They share this kind of fatherland celebration as well.
#
But by saying holy land is what distinguishes this territory,
#
becomes really important for that bifurcating argument that he lays out in 1857.
#
Now in Essentials of Hindutva, it's no longer just the first two.
#
Now it's about the holy land.
#
Just like each of them becomes a necessary but not sufficient condition on its own.
#
Now you need all three and it's a convenient third category, which keeps Muslims out.
#
Right, but it's also interesting that, you know,
#
he's taken by the Zionist argument, right?
#
I mean, he says the Hindus couldn't be happier if Palestine becomes,
#
you know, the holy land in the form of a Zionist state, right?
#
So he's already anticipating kind of the relationship that exists between India and Israel today.
#
So, I mean, does that fully kind of, I mean,
#
did you want me to unpack a little bit more on the motherland, fatherland stuff?
#
No, no, no, that's absolutely that explains it beautifully.
#
The sort of the adding the holy land to his earlier argument,
#
and, you know, making it exclusionary.
#
And therefore by saying anybody who's off this land
#
and who doesn't pray out to something outside this land
#
is, you know, part of the overall Hindutva family.
#
But otherwise, you're not so dead.
#
At another level, you know, he sort of thinks that, you know, for example,
#
there's certain Muslim groups that are redeemable.
#
The especially the the the Boras and the Kodjas.
#
There are Christians who he says they're too smart,
#
you know, too small in number, they can be absorbed.
#
The Zoroastrians, similarly, the Indian Jews, no problem.
#
You know, these aren't they're not going to be a problem.
#
But it is larger, you know, issue is primarily a way to kind of segment the Muslim away from
#
this territory as their own.
#
So he's come up with this great vision of a history.
#
You know, what is his vision for the future?
#
Like, you know, where does he conceptualize Hindutva going?
#
What is the purpose of all this?
#
At one point, you've referred to, you know, that whole repeating loop
#
that we got to, you know, keep this going until we arrive at,
#
you know, whatever the end state it is.
#
But what is the end state?
#
Like when I did an episode with the first of my episodes with Akar Patel,
#
he brought up the same interesting point that if I look at an Islamic state,
#
I know what it stands for.
#
When I look at the Hindu state, the so-called Hindu state,
#
all I know is what it stands against.
#
Basically, Muslims and you can go down to details and say it's against love jihad
#
and against this and blah, blah, blah.
#
But what does it stand for?
#
What is that positive vision that we will be this, you know?
#
So what in Savarkar's term, what was the utopia with Savarkar wanted to construct?
#
So that's, I mean, that's really interesting because Savarkar lays out in his,
#
in Hindu Padpatsahi, in a strange sort of way, there's no there there.
#
And which is often when I first thought about that and what I'll explain what I mean.
#
He says, when the Peshwas came into power,
#
it was final reversal of what he deemed 700 years of victimization of Hindus, right?
#
And even though the Peshwas weren't in power very long, it didn't matter, right?
#
What mattered to him was the process.
#
The process was that for 700 years, we lived under an Islamic
#
set of Islamic states, rulers, and the Hindu spirit wasn't crushed, right?
#
Which is another way for him to say that Hindutva wasn't crushed, right?
#
That the Hindu spirit wasn't crushed, which means that there were enough Hindus
#
who were resistant to this, that we got to the point of the Peshwas.
#
And it doesn't matter that the Peshwas didn't stay there.
#
And he has this line in the book where he says,
#
even if the Hindu Rashtra exists for a day, that's great.
#
Because that means that the Hindu spirit is still around.
#
And if Hindus become, if Hindus are victimized after that one day,
#
the cycle will repeat, right?
#
So it's this very strange formulation of temporality of the future that it's kind of both,
#
it's perpetually aspirational, and it's perpetually aspirational,
#
which allows them to be in what I call a permanent state of war.
#
And he calls it a perpetual war, right?
#
So if there is a single Muslim living in this territory,
#
the war is not over, right?
#
So this war, so if you listen to today's leadership,
#
they will tell you they're in a thousand year war, right?
#
And I've always, you know, so this idea of a Hindutva futurism,
#
I mean, if you go to the Savarkar Smark here in Mumbai,
#
and if you look at the mosaic of Bharat Mata, the map of Akhand Bharat,
#
or the abbreviated map of Akhand Bharat and Savarkar statue,
#
what's interesting about that is I think that's the only image of Mother India that I've seen
#
in which she is sort of has shackles, first of all, and she's broken the shackles.
#
And you have a map of India in which there's no Pakistan, no Bangladesh, right?
#
And in a certain sense, this is Hindutva future, right?
#
It's kind of this aspiration of reclaiming the partition of Mother India, right?
#
So it's sort of that this will end when we get rid of the territorial boundaries
#
between the two, but also implicit in that when they talk about our slavery, right?
#
Like if you listen to any of the speeches, when they talk about slavery,
#
it's the Hindu has been enslaved by the Muslim.
#
Mother India has finally, her shackles have been broken.
#
It's been the reunification of Hindustan.
#
And so you have this weird kind of Hindutva futurism that they're laying out as a kind of
#
this perpetual state of warfare that's going to happen.
#
I mean, what I didn't write in the book was these series of telegrams that Savarkar wrote
#
to Chhanka Shek in 1942, which are really interesting because it kind of addresses this problem.
#
So Savarkar says that Chhanka Shek was coming to India to visit Nehru
#
and Jinnah and Gandhi and others.
#
And Savarkar is not on the list of individuals who he's supposed to meet.
#
So he writes this telegram to Chhanka Shek saying, you know, I want to welcome you to India.
#
We are co-religionist brothers.
#
And he wants to meet him.
#
Chhanka Shek never responds.
#
But what's interesting is that the Hindu Masaba goes on a letter writing campaign to the Chinese
#
delegation that please, you have to listen to what Savarkar is saying because as we're
#
in a period of decolonization, we have to now reimagine a future of Asia, of India and China
#
and East Asia as pan-Islamism is rising, right?
#
And you're going to have your own Pakistan in China if you don't figure out a way.
#
So there's this vision of creating a future of an alliance that's going to recreate some
#
kind of Hindu-Buddhist bond.
#
It's not the same thing as the Bandung Conference of 1955, but Savarkar is trying to create this
#
vision of a future in which you have this perpetual war, you want to rethink territory,
#
rethink space, temporalities, you know, it doesn't have to happen now.
#
It's not going to happen in our lifetime.
#
We have to be patient and so on, right?
#
He sort of at one moment, he describes Hindutva as a banyan tree, which I thought was really
#
And if you look at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad symbol is the banyan tree.
#
And I always think the banyan tree is really interesting because, you know, he says the seed
#
of the banyan tree is smaller than a mustard seed.
#
So he's kind of playing on the parable of the mustard seed from the Bible.
#
And so the seed of the banyan tree is smaller than the mustard seed, but has potential for great,
#
he says, luxuriant expanse that the banyan tree grows both underground, of course, and above
#
And even if you cut off a limb, the tree doesn't die.
#
But what's not discussed, there's a, I forget, there's a scholar who works on Indonesia.
#
There's an Indonesian political party that also uses the banyan tree.
#
And he says that what's the irony about that metaphor, using the banyan tree as a symbol
#
for any political party is that there's nothing that can live under the banyan tree.
#
The banyan tree will destroy all life under the banyan tree.
#
So it's a strange metaphor.
#
So Hindutva, or maybe it's the correct metaphor.
#
Unknowingly, he chose a perfect metaphor, perhaps.
#
Right, that it grows above, it grows below.
#
You can cut it off at one limb, it's not going to stop.
#
And he says that if I prove to be true, people are going to think of me as the prophet.
#
And if I prove to be wrong, people will think I'm a fool.
#
So again, the use of the word prophet is also really interesting in this context.
#
Yeah, and because he's stretching out forever into history,
#
he can always say I'm going to be right someday.
#
You can't call me a fool today.
#
An interesting thing that I have to remind myself whenever I read the history of this period
#
is that you and I can take a certain stability in the world for granted,
#
not just in terms of fewer wars, less violence, but also the lines on the map,
#
There's been a certain stability in our lifetimes.
#
For example, in India, the nation-state is basically broadly more or less what it is.
#
It's broadly, for most of this time, democracy functions in the same way,
#
dysfunctional in the same predictable way.
#
But you look at the lifetimes of Savarkar and Gandhi,
#
and the sands are constantly shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting.
#
That you begin against the British Empire, you're jailed by the British,
#
and then independent India happens at one point,
#
and there are still those narrative battles playing out over there.
#
Of course, my contention always is that Indian independence was inevitable,
#
even if there were no freedom fighters.
#
The British were bankrupt after World War II.
#
It was just something that eventually they could not maintain their colonies anymore.
#
This would have happened at some point or the other.
#
It's just that after it happens, you have a certain mythology built,
#
certain people are alienized, others are sort of condemned into history, etc, etc.
#
So these are madly shifting times,
#
and I want you to help me sort of understand Savarkar's personal journey during this time,
#
from whatever you can make out of it, and kind of understand what does a man want?
#
How are his wants shifting?
#
I love this phrasing that I learned from Luke Burgess,
#
but it comes from Rene Girard, of thick and thin desires.
#
Thin desires can be very intense,
#
but its mimetic desire is based on what other people want,
#
like I might want a Mercedes because my neighbor has it and that's a thin desire.
#
But a thick desire is something deep within that it really matters to me.
#
And I'm wondering what is this thick desire?
#
Is it a thick desire truly for Hindutva,
#
or is that a manifestation of whatever his deeper thick desires were,
#
in conjunction with the directions in which circumstances took him?
#
What is the game that he's playing?
#
At one point you talk about how in the 1960s he wrote an essay called
#
How Hindu organizers should read and write their national history.
#
And at this point I'm thinking, okay, he's still got a long game in mind.
#
He's still playing the game.
#
He's never going to come to power.
#
That game is over by the 60s, obviously everybody knows it,
#
but he's still playing some kind of game or the other.
#
So I'm trying to kind of get a grip on that.
#
What's his interior life?
#
What does he daydream about?
#
What does he really want?
#
What does he daydream about?
#
Tell me if you have a clue.
#
That's a really good question because I mean,
#
he's in that way very different from Ambedkar or even,
#
I mean, especially from Gandhi.
#
I mean, Gandhi's all about happy to talk about interiority
#
and from bowel movements to everything else above that.
#
Whereas for Savarkar's writings sort of lack that interiority.
#
Even in his memoirs, they lack the interiority.
#
I mean, it's as if even in his autobiographical writings,
#
it's as if he has this kind of insecurity that he will be forgotten.
#
Ram Guha told me this memorable line that every memoir
#
is a preemptive strike against future biographies.
#
Yeah, and so he writes, I mean, strangely enough,
#
multiple autobiographies, right?
#
And for me, that was kind of both interesting and struck me as,
#
here's an individual who is trying to ensure
#
that there is a narrative that he has laid out for his life story.
#
That will forever be documented, right, and reproduced.
#
And what struck me as really interesting is that
#
the biographies from the 1920s all the way to 1966
#
were all either authorized or sanctioned by him, right?
#
Even Dhananjay Kher's, he does the earlier edition in 1950s,
#
but the second one comes out in the 60s.
#
Savarkar has been consulted.
#
Savarkar has been interviewed.
#
Savarkar facts checks it.
#
Savarkar's writings are incorporated into it.
#
So you have this kind of reproduction of Savarkar's life story
#
as he wanted it to be told, right?
#
Then if you pick up like Amarchit or Katha
#
or any of the popular Savarkar narratives,
#
they still reproduce the same sets of narratives
#
about his life story and as if we can no longer move away from them.
#
And that's kind of what I liked about G.P. Deshpande also.
#
He's like, you know, I'm not interested in the man anymore.
#
The man is not interesting anymore.
#
What's interesting are his ideas because why are they persisting, right?
#
The man has been, you know, as you were talking earlier,
#
the idea of the human and the non-human, right?
#
That either he's a god or a monster.
#
And here in Maharashtra, some politicians declared him a god, right?
#
So suddenly he has a different status,
#
having been formally declared a god.
#
So I think that becomes kind of important as well in this context
#
for thinking about Savarkar as a subject
#
that he himself ensures is there for posterity.
#
In the context of the current times,
#
you write at one point in the book that, you know,
#
we think of Gandhi as a father of the nation,
#
maybe Savarkar as a true father of the nation,
#
the host father of the nation, which is such a beautiful phrase that you use.
#
And I want to ask you there then about what your take is on,
#
you know, the great man in history theory, right?
#
That one way of looking at history would be that
#
there are these individuals and they change it.
#
And if these individuals weren't there, the world would be different.
#
Another way of looking at history is that the currents are what they are.
#
And the individuals don't matter so much.
#
History would proceed along those lines.
#
And just now, for example, you asked a hypothetical question that,
#
you know, when Deshpande was saying that the man isn't important,
#
why do his ideas persist?
#
And one answer to that is his ideas persist
#
because they're not just his ideas.
#
They are the sentiment and ideas of a whole bunch of people.
#
And he happens to be the person who articulated them
#
and gave them some kind of framework, Shetty as it is.
#
But despite the shitty framework and the bad articulation,
#
those ideas, it becomes huge because the ideas themselves
#
are in the DNA of the society and there's nothing you can do.
#
So where's your take on this?
#
Like, if there wasn't a Savarkar,
#
would India be in pretty much exactly the same place as it is?
#
Or, you know, would it be different?
#
And if so, how and why?
#
I mean, that's a great question.
#
I mean, I think in the process of writing the book,
#
I sort of realized that his ideas were part of
#
a larger set of arguments that were already present.
#
So I think you're absolutely right on that point, right?
#
And I hope that in the process of writing the book,
#
my purpose was not to sort of elevate him
#
to the status of the great man,
#
even though he is the sort of the center point of this.
#
But he is a product of a certain kind of environment.
#
I mean, he is also a certain kind of political figure
#
who wants to have this kind of status and limelight.
#
And part of it is circumstantial, as you point out as well,
#
because, I mean, there are certain moments in his history
#
that elevate him to this kind of international stature,
#
which then is then celebrated over and over.
#
So for example, all the stuff on geography,
#
all the stuff on Mother India,
#
I mean, all of these are part of debates that are happening
#
at the time he's writing them.
#
He's not the only one situated in these sets of conversations.
#
But where I think he's able to connect
#
to a whole series of innovations regarding,
#
as we were talking about the definition of Hindutva itself
#
and connecting it to history and articulating history
#
as something that's non-linear,
#
that's not necessarily chronological,
#
that is reading against the grain.
#
I mean, all of these things are sort of celebrated today
#
by historians themselves.
#
And I think he himself is part of some of these earlier conversations.
#
But when I've talked to Sanskritists, for example,
#
and I've asked them about the debates on language and meaning,
#
those were happening in the 19th century.
#
So in that sense, he's able to build on a whole range of things.
#
I mean, what struck me as really interesting was
#
his formulation that Hindutva is 40 centuries old.
#
And as I sort of started thinking about why
#
that's a weird temporal kind of category of 40 centuries,
#
he's basically participating in these debates on the Bible
#
and the aging of the pyramids in Egypt,
#
that 40 centuries becomes this kind of standardized time period
#
for great civilizations.
#
The birth of Christ to creation, to birth of Christ, 40 centuries.
#
Aging of the pyramids, 40 centuries.
#
And so he's not original in that sense.
#
I don't know how old it is,
#
but let's say it's as old as the pyramids
#
and the temporalities in Judaism and Christianity.
#
So there is a certain lack of originality in that way,
#
but I do think he's kind of bringing in all these things together
#
which had resonance at a specific historical moment,
#
which made them powerful for some level.
#
I mean, the Hindu Masaba itself
#
was already articulating a lot of these things.
#
If you look at the Masaba speeches,
#
if you look at the Masaba newspapers
#
or even the Hindu Outlook that buy permanent edits,
#
a lot of this stuff is already being discussed
#
in different sorts of ways.
#
So historians usually don't like asking the what if question,
#
but I think that a lot of these ideas
#
were already percolating whether they would have had
#
a different form, certainly.
#
But I think he was a good, he understood social media
#
in that sense too and propaganda, certainly.
#
And by what we were talking about earlier,
#
the newspapers, the oral, the repetition,
#
you can imagine that if he was around today
#
that he would be a great Twitterati.
#
And so I think he's able to hone in on a lot of these things.
#
I mean, even the number of biographies, autobiographies,
#
these kind of dominating a certain kind of news cycle,
#
if you want to think of it that way, right?
#
News cycle being for years,
#
but dominating a news cycle about himself
#
and therefore becoming a prominent figure.
#
Whereas others like Ambedkar or other contemporaries,
#
even in Maharashtra were more prolific.
#
And Savarkar certainly, as I was saying,
#
was competing with Ambedkar
#
for a certain kind of constituency as well, right?
#
So I think he's working at multiple levels,
#
but the fact that he was under house arrest
#
And it's as if he can't move because he's imprisoned,
#
but he wants his ideas to move out, right?
#
So what did the process of writing this book
#
Wow, you've stumped me there.
#
In the sense, what did you know when you ended,
#
which you may not have known so well
#
or just had an instinct about when you started,
#
or did you change your mind
#
in some significant way about something?
#
I mean, I certainly think,
#
I certainly thought that the significance of
#
some of the early historical writings
#
and the debates, and not among Savarkar,
#
but just the early Maratha stuff,
#
was certainly eye-opening.
#
It's kind of richness and it's the sheer commitment
#
of some of these early scholars,
#
whether it was B.K. Rajvare or Jadhunath Sarkar
#
or G.S. Deshpande, I mean, sorry, Sardesai.
#
So I think that's the significance of this book.
#
I mean, sorry, Sardesai,
#
that there is this kind of very extreme commitment
#
to what we call history
#
and these earlier kind of traditions of writing as well, right?
#
So there is this kind of long-standing sets
#
of intellectual traditions in the vernacular
#
that often don't get unpacked.
#
And I think that's really important.
#
I found myself wishing I had spent more time
#
early in my career thinking about those kinds of things.
#
And as I became more and more interested
#
in intellectual history,
#
realizing that I wish I was a Sanskritist myself.
#
I mean, I think that there are many powerful kind of debates
#
that become difficult to access as a consequence.
#
I think in terms of politically,
#
I mean, I sort of felt that I had to read
#
more than I imagined to write this book.
#
I felt like I had to read both Ambedkar and Gandhi.
#
And what that made me also realize was,
#
coming back to what we started with,
#
was this idea of the fluid intellectual economy.
#
And Gandhi and Ambedkar both was so incredibly prolific,
#
100 volumes of Gandhi, something similar of Ambedkar,
#
changing their mind throughout, thinking aloud,
#
which is a joy and a privilege to be able to read those.
#
But then how do you grog those?
#
How do you read so much?
#
How do you make sense of that?
#
What I was trying to get at is that
#
all these thinkers were not autonomous beings.
#
That there was this very rich landscape
#
that were kind of only scratching the surface.
#
I jokingly one time said,
#
I finally feel like I can now start writing about Savarkar.
#
That I've gotten through the foundational stuff
#
because there's so much,
#
and I don't want to use the word misinformation,
#
but there's so much stuff out there
#
that distracts from actually having a conversation.
#
And I sort of feel like now I could,
#
many people have told me they will no longer talk to me
#
My friends, I mean, they're like, you have to move on.
#
You can't continue working on Savarkar.
#
And I say this jokingly,
#
but I'm not saying it seriously.
#
But I think realizing how rich this intellectual world,
#
both at one level of the Maharashtrian tradition,
#
but also just nationally and also internationally,
#
that they're so going back and forth.
#
And as you said, some of it is just taking things,
#
and others is actually serious engagement.
#
And I think that's what makes some of this stuff
#
on intellectual history kind of exciting as well.
#
Let's move on from the book now.
#
I'll just urge all my listeners
#
that if you have to read a book on Savarkar,
#
And even if you've read the others, please read this one
#
because where I found that this was really excellent
#
was in the extra layers that it added
#
to my understanding of Savarkar.
#
So it's not just sort of documenting somebody's life,
#
but it's also layers of understanding
#
and contextualization and a visceral sense
#
of that fluidity which we spoke about.
#
And everyone listening to this should go out right now
#
or not right now after this episode is over
#
My next question to you is about the project of history.
#
Like I did this wonderful episode with Swapna Little.
#
And Swapna made a beautiful point there
#
where she said that history, actually,
#
if you think about it, the word means two things.
#
It means things that happened in the past
#
and it means a study of those things, right?
#
And history in that first sense, the past,
#
is being weaponized today in politics.
#
It's always been weaponized,
#
but has, I think, been weaponized today
#
with more force than ever before
#
because of the amplifying effect of technology
#
And the question that then arises is
#
what do practitioners of history in its second sense,
#
you know, the studies of the past,
#
how do they approach the subject?
#
Because one way of approaching the subject
#
is to just ignore the world outside as it is
#
and just focus on the work that you've got to do
#
and just get it out there.
#
But equally, some might view it as a political project,
#
you know, and not, I don't mean in a bad sense
#
that you have an agenda, but a political project
#
that because the world is full of mistruths
#
and falsehoods in various directions,
#
you have to go out there and set the record straight
#
and put in the nuance and put in the detail.
#
Or sometimes, because a narrative is shifted
#
perhaps be simplistic in a certain way,
#
but a way that you feel is useful in the current moment.
#
So I think a lot of questions of inner motivation
#
can come up here, where if I was a historian,
#
I'm sure I would sit down sometimes and think that
#
in this day and age, why the fuck am I writing?
#
Like WhatsApp history is dominant.
#
No one gives a shit about nuances I bring in
#
and what letters I reproduce, right?
#
That could be one disheartening way of thinking about it.
#
Or it could be imbued with further meaning
#
that there is, you know, it's really a war
#
And I am going to play my little part in it.
#
It's my dharma to do so.
#
So how do you look at, you know,
#
the project of history and your role in it?
#
Yeah, I wouldn't describe it as dharma,
#
because I mean, in a sense,
#
Savarkar describes it as holy work.
#
Savarkar describes the historian's work as holy work, right?
#
So there is this kind of dharmic element
#
to his articulation of, you know,
#
being a maker of history and a writer of history, right?
#
I mean, he uses that binary in his work,
#
which I kind of unpacked a little bit in my book.
#
I mean, yes, I mean, I think,
#
and I think the way to answer your question
#
is also that history, the presence and dominance
#
of history within public debate here
#
is different than in the United States,
#
is different than what's happening
#
in different parts of Europe as well.
#
So there are these kind of national
#
and regional dimensions to it.
#
And even within India, I think there are regional dimensions.
#
I mean, it's not just a national thing.
#
I think the ways in which we were talking earlier
#
about sort of the way archives function,
#
I mean, the way archives function in Maharashtra
#
is different than the way archives function
#
We have the best archives.
#
And part of that is because I think there is this kind of
#
commitment to a certain kind of understanding of the past
#
that has been, and that's what I was trying to address earlier,
#
that there is this kind of rich intellectual tradition
#
that is part of this world.
#
And I think that's what Savarkar was also aware of,
#
that even if you don't get the history
#
through your textbooks or scholarly books,
#
you can get them through poetry,
#
you can get them through drama,
#
you can get them through other means.
#
And so for him, in that sense,
#
he diversified his portfolio in writing in multiple genres
#
and writing both in English and in Marathi
#
for that specific purpose that, you know,
#
I'm going to be able to get out on multiple platforms
#
using today's terminology.
#
And so I think that's what he was effective doing.
#
But at the same time, what I think different today
#
is that he could read academic works
#
and be critical of them.
#
He could read Jadunath Sarkar
#
and be critical of Jadunath Sarkar.
#
He could read G.S. Sardisai and celebrate G.S. Sardisai
#
or Rajwari for the kind of rigorous work
#
in collecting documents that Rajwari was doing,
#
which I think is kind of lost
#
in today's public debates about history.
#
It's so embedded within that the academic historian
#
And in some of the things I've been working on
#
regarding academic freedom,
#
that what's happening, at least in the United States,
#
and I would suspect it's happening here,
#
but in a different form,
#
is that you have various Hindutva organizations in the U.S.
#
that now have started filing complaints
#
with academic institutions, with politicians,
#
that the ways in which Indian history
#
is being taught at the university is anti-Hindu.
#
And it's anti-Hindu because academics will write about
#
caste discrimination, issues of velith rights,
#
women's oppression, poverty.
#
So all of this is actually anti-Hindu,
#
which means, and I've said this to my colleagues,
#
I said the reason why everyone should be concerned about this
#
is they're actually not interested
#
in academics writing this kind of work.
#
They're not interested in academics writing analytical work
#
that's evidentiary-based.
#
As we said, conjecture is good enough, right?
#
And it was good enough for Savarkar,
#
it's good enough for these folks.
#
And university administrators often don't know
#
what to do with this because they're well organized
#
and it's directly connected to a certain kind of
#
political power of some of these organizations
#
with various kind of organizations in India,
#
with different organizations outside of India.
#
So you have the debates on history that vary,
#
I think, from place to place.
#
I think the role of the academic historian,
#
I think, that differs from this is that we are,
#
I mean, we're disciplinarily trained
#
within certain kinds of conventions and norms
#
and those are extremely diverse.
#
There's no standardization,
#
especially in the discipline of history,
#
which makes it both exciting and loose in terms of,
#
if you do cultural history or social history
#
or intellectual history or gender history,
#
environmental history or whatever,
#
but there are certain frameworks and certain questions
#
that academic historians are asking
#
and seeking with evidence, right?
#
Whereas the WhatsApp university is not about evidence.
#
It doesn't have to be about evidence.
#
So I would sort of say that while all of that is interesting,
#
I'm not convinced that academic historians shouldn't stop
#
and I would say that this is a time
#
where we should actually buckle down
#
and train students even with more rigor
#
and because if we don't do it,
#
no one else is really going to be doing it, right?
#
Because we know what the other side is interested in doing
#
from issues of plagiarism
#
to just kind of making up stuff from conjecture
#
to arguing that the epics are historical texts
#
to everything else in between.
#
and coming back to the main point,
#
I think the reason history has a specific place today
#
in India is directly connected to this idea
#
of that Hindutva is intertwined with history
#
as its kind of foundation, right?
#
So if you want to critique Hindutva,
#
one of the ways you could critique Hindutva
#
is actually by going after their definitions of history
#
So I think that it's a complicated situation
#
but I think at one level, everyone's talking about history.
#
I mean, when I'm in India,
#
I'm talking more to the average person about history
#
than anywhere else I am.
#
So that's something that's really interesting.
#
But there's also, or maybe a misunderstanding,
#
or maybe it is the way that the Hindutva machine works
#
that they want to insert a certain kind of
#
new hegemonic understanding of what history is
#
by which they can perpetuate these narratives
#
of Hindu victimization.
#
And in a certain way, they do understand hegemony well.
#
Like through WhatsApp, through social media,
#
it's like this repetition that's endless every day
#
that this is being repeated to the point where
#
the average auntie and uncle are repeating,
#
And so in that sense, it's been effective
#
in saying that you should have historical consciousness
#
in order to be a good Hindutva-vadi.
#
I actually feel that interest of history
#
is not just a shallow interest for WhatsApp narrative sakes,
#
but even within my podcast,
#
I found there is a deep interest in history.
#
My episodes with people like Srinath Raghavan
#
and Manu Pillay have been really popular,
#
all the six Ram Guha episodes.
#
Of course, even back in the day,
#
episodes I did with Iram Akhoti, Parvati Sharma,
#
So I find that there is sort of a deep interest
#
There is also sometimes a mild befuddlement
#
at the different kind of narratives
#
But by and large, I would say that
#
while vocal minorities make a lot of noise online,
#
both from the left and the right,
#
there's a silent majority,
#
which is not beholden to those tribes,
#
which is genuinely interested
#
and wants to kind of find out more.
#
And that sort of gives me hope.
#
But all of those people, Vinayak,
#
the silent majority on the left,
#
the silent majority in the middle,
#
the vocal minority on the left,
#
the vocal minority on the right,
#
and anyone else I have inadvertently left out,
#
all of them will read your next book
#
So kindly tell me about what you're working on now.
#
And you know, I was so excited
#
when I heard about the project.
#
So I have two projects.
#
I mean, one I sort of call my retirement project
#
and one I've started more recently.
#
So the one we were talking about earlier
#
is this project on the history of Imperial tennis.
#
I've been collecting material for about 20 years now,
#
thinking about the place of tennis,
#
or using tennis as a metaphor
#
to trying to understand specific moments
#
there's a few kind of moments
#
that I've tried to capture
#
in thinking about the project.
#
And one is the individual who patents the game.
#
I mean, so there was a British military officer,
#
Walter Clopton Wingfield,
#
who arrives in India in 1858.
#
And he's already very interested
#
in thinking about sports and tennis.
#
And he experiments in Bangalore
#
and in Madras and then goes back to Britain
#
And with his Imperial connections,
#
lawn tennis is born and spreads globally.
#
And then you have Wimbledon less than 10 years later
#
as sort of the cathedral of tennis.
#
But part of the story is that a lot of things,
#
and as I've been sort of reading
#
more and more English history,
#
I'm sort of convinced that everything
#
that's quintessentially English
#
is actually Imperial and Indian.
#
Including the game of lawn tennis.
#
But you had British officers
#
who would train their servants to play.
#
And you had these servants who,
#
there was a servant in Allahabad who became,
#
there was an essay written about him
#
by this British officer saying
#
that he's by far the best tennis player in all of India.
#
And all these European players
#
would travel to Allahabad to play with him.
#
But he was not allowed to compete, right?
#
This was the interesting thing
#
because he was a tennis servant.
#
He was a tennis marker.
#
And so you have these kind of interesting narratives
#
of a number of places where tennis was played.
#
But it's also a story of technology
#
about the tennis ball, the vulcanization of rubber
#
to the lawnmower, you know,
#
sort of these minor technologies
#
that helped to shape the ways in which tennis was played.
#
But I also was very interested
#
because two important thinkers
#
were very involved in tennis.
#
Edward Said, for example, was a daily tennis player
#
and he wrote this fantastic essay
#
in the London Review of Books in I think 1999.
#
I think it's called John McEnroe plus anyone else.
#
And it's a story about the demise of tennis
#
and the decline of tennis
#
and the alienation of tennis that has developed
#
as tennis has become much more impacted by capitalism.
#
So it's this interesting kind of story Said lays out
#
about what he calls the decline of tennis
#
just as you have the rise of Rafa and Roger
#
and everyone else, right?
#
So he sees this as a moment of transformation
#
and he has a great sort of sadness about it.
#
But it's also tennis played a major part
#
which I thought was really interesting,
#
in which he sort of talks about various moments of racism,
#
of various moments of colonialism, imperialism,
#
through the optic of tennis that he's interpreting.
#
And so for me, that was kind of interesting as well
#
that Said at one level and then Pierre Bourdieu
#
in his important book, Habitus, talks about in his book,
#
I'm sorry, on distinctions where he talks about
#
that the idea of a habitus is directly connected to the game
#
and the game he's talking about is tennis.
#
And I thought this is really interesting
#
because he's writing about Algeria
#
and Said is writing about colonial Palestine and Egypt.
#
And here you have two major thinkers of the 20th century
#
who are viewing the writings of post-colonialism
#
to social theory through the optic of tennis.
#
So that struck me as really interesting to think about as well.
#
So it's a project that's still kind of unfolding
#
through different moments of the late 19th and 20th century.
#
So that's kind of what the tennis project
#
is what I've been thinking about.
#
Okay, that was a quick answer.
#
I mean, Roger, I think represents the end of classic tennis.
#
Roger was able to merge the classic tennis with modern tennis,
#
for those who know about the distinctions within the game of tennis.
#
Whereas Rafa, I think, represents the sort of the epitome of modern tennis in a certain way.
#
So, I mean, this was something that Said was concerned about,
#
that, you know, sort of the decline of the elegance of the game,
#
the decline of sort of the gentlemanliness of tennis.
#
And in a certain sense, that's what Roger represents,
#
whether you look at his advertising or, you know,
#
the kind of the aesthetic that he has on the tennis court or had on the tennis court,
#
but yet at the same time, transforming his game over the course of his career
#
to become a master of the modern game as well.
#
I totally get what you're saying.
#
Also, I sometimes wonder about how we sort of perceive beauty in sport, right?
#
Like, of course, when one thinks of Roger,
#
one thinks of the easy elegance and the languid grace and all of those things.
#
And you think of Rafa and it's all this mechanical brute force
#
and the persistence and all of those things.
#
But why do we find a particular kind of shot beautiful and not the other shot?
#
And to me, that's just a quirk of the brain,
#
that when, you know, David Gaard plays this beautiful cover drive,
#
we're all like, ah, it's a work of art.
#
And if someone with a more brutal style plays a similar cover drive,
#
we say, ah, you know, what power, what force.
#
But actually, those are sort of arbitrary constructions of the brain
#
in the sense that we view them.
#
All of them require impeccable technique.
#
In fact, both Roger and Rafa, and I'm just such a huge fan of both of those people,
#
are absolute gentlemen.
#
They play the game with such a wonderful spirit.
#
They're both incredible role models.
#
So I completely get where you're coming from.
#
But I also think that there might be a false distinction there
#
because of, you know, the quirks of the brain.
#
Why do we find one thing beautiful and not the other?
#
And, you know, both of them have involved thousands of hours of practice.
#
Both are incredibly, like, in terms of,
#
if you compare a shot of Roger with a shot of Rafa in a particular moment,
#
both have, you know, gotten, have honed that particular shot
#
in thousands of hours of practice.
#
Both are optimally effective, which is why they come to play it.
#
It's just that one man may, you know, that the brain interprets,
#
one shot is beautiful and the other is powerful,
#
where they could almost be exactly the same.
#
Yes. Well, I guess maybe one qualification would be
#
in terms of technique, right?
#
So the way you teach tennis, like, you couldn't,
#
I mean, in a strange sort of way,
#
you couldn't teach either Roger or Rafa's game to anyone, right?
#
Djokovic, I think there is, Djokovic is the master of
#
the textbook technique of neutral tennis.
#
And I know fans of Djokovic are going to find that description, you know.
#
It's actually a great compliment.
#
If you take every basic skill to its ultimate level of expression,
#
that's Novak right there, and it's a great compliment.
#
And, and I didn't appreciate Rafa earlier on.
#
I think I appreciated Rafa when I saw him up close, you know,
#
So, and that is a great treat because you sort of,
#
there is a different kind, as you said, of fluidity, right?
#
There's a different kind of just sheer dominance in terms of the way
#
and he's hitting the ball.
#
Roger is just sort of a master craftsman of a different type.
#
I mean, you know, it's not that both aren't craftsmen and master craftsmen,
#
but Roger's a different, of a different type.
#
And, and I think Roger's longevity in part was due to the fact that
#
it wasn't that it looked effortless.
#
There was less effort required because of the technique.
#
Whereas Rafa, because he was a constant, you know, he never gave up
#
and he was a grinder to a certain extent.
#
He ground his opponents down when he was younger.
#
I think that made a big difference in terms of the number of injuries
#
that he's had and Roger had longevity in that sense,
#
because he also was very selective and-
#
Economical movements and so on.
#
And I mean, the other, I mean, now what's interesting is you have players
#
like Medvedev who I find aesthetically unpleasant to watch,
#
but they're clearly masters of the game.
#
But as a tennis fan, you know, I mean, whether it's him or whether it's Iga Shwajtek,
#
there's a couple of other players where the technique is not, you know,
#
it looks as if there's an issue with the technique,
#
but they're certainly masters of the game, right?
#
And so, so I think in a sense, both with the technology, with the conditioning,
#
and they're able to, and clearly they're hitting the ball really well, I mean, as well.
#
I mean, Medvedev prides himself with the fact he said recently in an interview that
#
there's only a handful of players who don't find him frustrating,
#
and that's part of why he likes, that's part of a consequence of his technique,
#
is that the ball does not come on the racket in the same way that
#
a Djokovic ball would come or a Roger ball would come.
#
Oh, okay, I haven't watched much of these new guys.
#
Controversial question, do you think sport always evolves in such a way
#
that the current sportsman is always going to be a step up on previous sportspeople?
#
Like in chess, that is certainly the case, but part of the reason that is the case is
#
that your theory is growing all the time,
#
your pedagogical tools like the computers you use are growing all the time.
#
So I would in fact go as far as to say that, you know,
#
60 of the best 100 chess players of all time are active chess players today.
#
If you just look at their games and ignore everything else,
#
and you look at their playing strength, perhaps even more than that.
#
Would that also be the case in other sports, that sports tend to evolve a lot,
#
and if you were to just transplant, say, McEnroe, you know,
#
when the big three were at their peak, he would be completely outlast,
#
though obviously it is true that McEnroe was actually, you know, born 20 years later,
#
he would also be a great player because he would train differently and evolve differently.
#
But is it the case that in absolute terms, do you think sport tends to grow like that,
#
or are you more of a romantic and you say, no, I still remember Rod Laver's service.
#
No, I would say, I mean, the game that's played today, I mean,
#
I've just I've been watching recently, these group of 17 year olds who are coming up,
#
they played the first couple of tournaments professionally,
#
and they're quite stunning. They're quite, it's pretty incredible as a 17 year old what
#
they're doing, 18 year olds, but again, Rafa was also one of the French at 17, Roger won at 19.
#
I think technology is a big thing as well. I think the rackets are allowing the players to
#
hit the ball bigger, better, faster. The change in technology of balls also has made a big
#
difference. And maybe the most important thing is the change in technology of strings.
#
And I think all of those things combined, and then I think fitness and conditioning,
#
and then big data entering the sports is. And so if you look at the players, I mean, the amount
#
that they're covering court space, I mean, it's almost as if the court that's with that is fenced
#
in is too small, which is also a sign that they're moving a lot more laterally than they were
#
in past. They're also moving a lot more up and down. I mean, Medvedev will stand 15,
#
18 feet behind the baseline to receive, which is just completely unheard of as well. So I think
#
I'm not a romantic in that sense, but you know, my favorite players are of the 80s, but that's a
#
different thing. Who are they? Connors, Lendl? I guess you would not have liked Lendl, I know.
#
No, Lendl I did like. You did like him. Connors, I couldn't stand. And McEnroe I didn't like until
#
much later, but beyond Borg, I was very fond of Borg. I think everyone was fond of Borg in a
#
certain way. Lendl, I mean, in this essay by Said, I mean, he blames Lendl for being the first kind
#
of robot on the tennis court, but there's a great two-part interview with Lendl, Becker, McEnroe,
#
and Vlander. I don't know if you've seen these. I haven't seen these interviews. It's worth it's
#
on YouTube. It's worth watching this. And basically what they're doing is they are talking about the
#
transformation of the game from when they played to today. And the thing that's really interesting
#
is that the intellectual among the four is certainly Yvonne Lendl. I mean, the way he was
#
analyzing the game and he's humorless, but otherwise he's by far the most, in a certain way,
#
the most insightful of the four in that conversation. But it's a worth it. They talked
#
for about two hours, I think. And so it was really eye-opening in terms of how they interpret the
#
changes in the game and the transformations in the game. And of course, from their perspective,
#
if they had today's technology, they would certainly dominate.
#
Mind-blowing. So, you know, I can't wait for that book and I'm going to make a promise to
#
come and do another five hours with me when that book is out. But in the meantime, my final question
#
for the day, you know, for me and my listeners, recommend to me books, films, music, which mean
#
a lot to you and you'd love to share with the world.
#
Music. So I've recently discovered and recently in the last couple of years,
#
and I listen to it a lot now, is a certain type of electronica and house music. And there are
#
these young DJs out of Scandinavia and Germany. My favorite right now is a guy named Ben Bowmer
#
and another one, Resident. He goes by Resident. They're both German. There's another
#
two guys who are called Sultan and Shepherd. They're very good.
#
They're humans and not dogs. They sound like dog names.
#
There's this woman who goes by Nora and Pure. I like her stuff as well. But in terms of music,
#
I think I recently saw U2. U2 in many ways is probably my favorite band. U2 and New Order.
#
But U2, I've seen probably about a dozen times, but it was a complete mind-blowing experience.
#
They've been performing at this new venue in Las Vegas called The Sphere.
#
And I think that has completely transformed live music.
#
And for me, that was kind of amazing because it's a visual experience, right? So thinking about music
#
as a visual experience, for those of us who grew up in the 80s, MTV was that visual experience of
#
watching music videos. But this was The Sphere. It's this monstrous construction and you're
#
watching the band, but you're also watching what's going on on the screen behind the band.
#
And each song has this different kind of visual attached to it. And they're all very different.
#
And so I thought that was kind of changed the way I was thinking about live music, right? So,
#
I mean, most of the time I'm listening to music in the car or when I'm at home.
#
But for me, that was something in terms of technological change in music and the ways you
#
experience live music. That was for me something that was kind of mind-blowing. In terms of film,
#
I think the film that recently has kind of, I thought, left a lasting impression is
#
Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest. By far, one of the most powerful and disturbing movies
#
that I've seen. And it resonated with me also, I think in many ways, related to the Savarkar
#
Project, I think, just about the banality of evil using Hannah Arendt's formulation.
#
But it wasn't just that. I mean, it was sort of this that it's not simply that when we see
#
people doing horrific things to other human beings, we somehow want to treat them as
#
not human in a certain way, right? But in fact, what Jonathan Glazer in multiple interviews has
#
said that it's what I wanted to show is how close we are to the perpetrators. And I think that's,
#
in thinking about what's going on, as he said, in the world today, but also what's going on
#
in India today, that sort of the ease with which people talk about vengeance and eradication,
#
eradication of populations and individuals, just kind of reminded there was all these interesting
#
kind of links that as I was watching the movie, but visually, I think it's, it was really stunning.
#
And it's kind of stayed with me for a long time. But overall, I think the cinema that I've
#
discovered most recently, which I wish I discovered much earlier, that and I wish
#
Hindi cinema was more would excite me as much, you know, so every time I watch a Hindi movie,
#
I want it to be really good. And there's this kind of perpetual cycle of disappointment.
#
But on the other hand, recently, I've been watching a lot of Korean cinema. And every
#
time I watch it, it doesn't matter which film director I've watched thus far, I've found
#
something deeply profound, both very serious, but also with humor as well. And I think that's part
#
of what's kind of also attracted me to Korean cinema. So films like Old Boy, Burning, Memories
#
of Murder or Parasite. I mean, these are things that I've really enjoyed. But there's also a new
#
group of Korean diasporic directors that have come up that I like a lot. There's a movie that
#
was called Return to Soul. I mean, it was made by a Cambodian director. And most recently,
#
Past Lives. I like that one as well. And then there's this Japanese filmmaker who I like,
#
Hirokazu Korita. And his film Monster that just came out was quite fantastic.
#
It's a masterpiece. I wrote about it in a recent newsletter post and I was just so moved by it.
#
Yes. And have you seen his others? Shoplifters?
#
I've seen Shoplifters and Monster, nothing else, nothing before this. So I will go and check it out.
#
Broker was excellent. Nobody Knows was the first film I saw of his,
#
which was probably closer to Monster. So these are the kind of films that I've been watching
#
recently. And in terms of novel, I think the writer who has kind of left an impact in terms of
#
not what he's saying, but the way he's writing is Carl Ova Nausgaard, my struggle. I mean, I think
#
in many ways it has this kind of resonance with the zone of interest that there's a certain kind of
#
aesthetic to his writings that I found really compelling. I found really refreshing.
#
And again, there's no dare there, but it's an aesthetic exercise.
#
I find him almost to be like a modern day prost.
#
The same kind of meditativeness and he takes you inside yourself and that same sort of rhythm.
#
Yeah. And so his writings, I would say, I find it difficult to pick up his book because I know
#
this is a different kind of journey. There's no beginning, middle and end. But I do think even
#
his sort of essays, he wrote this essay for the New York Times commissioned him to write an essay
#
to travel across parts of the US to see Scandinavian communities and write about
#
what he thinks of them. So he said he didn't want a word limit.
#
So I think they wanted a short piece. He wrote a 10,000 word piece and he demanded that they
#
publish it. And so I mean, I do appreciate his writings as well.
#
Wonderful Vinayak and I think me and all my listeners after they buy your book,
#
which they will have to do right now within the next 15 minutes,
#
appreciate your writing as well. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I've
#
learned a lot from your book and from this conversation. So thank you so much.
#
No, thank you for having me. Thank you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please recommend it to anyone who you think might be
#
interested. Check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes. It will go to your nearest bookstore online
#
offline and pick up Hindutva and Violence, Viri Savarkar and the Politics of History
#
by Vinayak Chaturvedi. If you have to buy one book on Savarkar, please buy this. It's absolutely
#
worth it. I couldn't find Vinayak on social media, which is perhaps why he's such a fine thinker,
#
but you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes
#
of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and on any podcast app of your choice.
#
Thank you so much for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of this show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any
#
amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
