Brought to life

The Last Liberal and Other Essays By Ramachandra Guha, Permanent Black, Rs 495

The closest I can get to describing Ram Guha is that he is an intellectual entrepreneur. He might well have become an economist, joined the Bank and showered advice on the poor of the world. But he became a Marxist and went to Calcutta to empower the poor. The Marxist research institute he joined there was very good; it cured him of Marxism — though not of Marx, whom he here calls “the forerunner and inspirer of the greatest social theorist of them all, Max Weber”. Bereft of a life’s vocation, he became an itinerant scholar for a while. It was during this vagabond stage of his life that I came across him in the sylvan surroundings of Grunewald in Berlin. It was a watering — and feeding — hole for the world’s best scholars, and Ram was having a whale of a time. He told me that he was writing a book on cricket. I thought he was saying it just to upstage those stick-in-the-muds who were working on the concept of kingship in Islam or the role of diplomacy in the affairs of Queen Rosamonde of Thumbria. But then he did come up with the book three years ago; it was about cricket, but he treated cricket as an arena for ethnic politics in India. It is not a book for someone who wants to worship heroes and feel good about their sixes and hat-tricks; it is thought provoking, and requires some application.

Having applied myself to it, I approached this one with some trepidation, wondering whether he was going to make me think too hard. But this one is an easier read. It consists mostly of essays about people; so one does not have to worry about missing the big picture. And unlike the average Indian, Ram is not a sourpuss; he is generally cheerful and witty. This is a good book to read in bed; it improves one’s mood before one drops off to sleep.

The longest piece is about tigers in the Alps — Sri Lankan Tamils Ram ran into in Switzerland. Everyone knows about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, those terrorists who brought the Sri Lankan government to its knees after twenty years of fighting. How did they survive so long? Whence did they get their sustenance, when the economy of their home base, Jaffna, was shattered? How did they fight both the Indian and the Sri Lankan armies to a standstill without any ordnance capacity of their own? What happened was that many of them, especially the educated ones, escaped to Europe and Canada; often they were helped by governments and international organizations that saw them as political refugees. They financed an underground organization that fed and armed the rebellion. Ram writes about some of them he met in Switzerland. Not many would have his experiences — for none of us would go looking for them

The most intimate essay is about Dharma Kumar, Ram’s cousin and his teacher of economic history in the Delhi School of Economics — the last liberal of the title. Dharma was one of the most lively, entertaining, engaging characters I have known. She had a far more eventful life than Ram might know; and he has given only a glimpse of her sharp and often wicked wit. She would have supported a rollicking biography if only a scribe had been by her side. But in his absence, it is good to have Ram’s warm tribute.

I also found the essay on Ram’s visit to Sevagram — Segaon as it was called before Gandhi moved there — fascinating. Ram has heroes, like Gandhi and Rajagopalachari, but is irreverent enough to joke about them. And his quest takes him into the most obscure corners. In the last essay of the book, for instance, he gives us the marks Gandhi got in school.

Ram is that rare breed, a cosmopolitan Indian, and it shows both in his distaste for the little Hindu’s parochialism and in his choice of subjects. Thus, in this book, we find B.P. Koirala, the politician of Nepal whom we know as ex-prime minister but little else. Few know or would remember that he was a graduate of Benares Hindu University, and that he led a rebellion which unseated the Ranas and restored the throne to king Tribhuvan. And we find C.L.R. James, a black nationalist and cricketer from Trinidad. Naipaul painted an unflattering portrait of him in his novel, A Way in the World. More interesting was what James said about Naipaul when he was writing the disdainful tracts which eventually went into A Wounded Civilization: “Effective as we are in stripping the wrappings from the underdeveloped countries, we would be more effective if…we are ready to strip or have already stripped the wrappings from the western civilization itself.” Even more apt is the comment of his countryman, Derek Walcott, on Naipaul: “the peevish sixth-grader still contained in an almost great writer”.

Not all Ram’s subjects are distant or exotic; there is also a warm portrait of Sujit Mukerjee, the rare Bengali who spoke fluent Hindi and could laugh at Bengalis. I was intrigued by his inclusion in this book, for I had the impression that Ram’s sojourn in Calcutta had put him off Bengalis a bit (I have kept my love of Bengalis intact, but then I have never lived amongst them — and I have lived amongst a sufficient variety of people to have found that none are perfect). I should have known — Sujit Mukerjee was a cricket enthusiast, and thus the highest breed of men in Ram’s book. Ram laments the fact that good biographers are so rare amongst south Asians.

In an essay on his favourite biographers — and there are so many! — he says, “South Asians are generally too genteel and fastidious to attempt burgling the souls of their subjects.” That is too polite a way of putting it: we spiritual Indians do not really believe people have souls, so we do not know what there is to burgle. We have learnt so many things from the British, and mastered a few like cricket. But the British art of observing people, reflecting on what goes on inside them, unveiling the character, has somehow eluded us. Ram does recognize a genre, though not a tradition, of Indian autobiographies, led by those of Gandhi, Nehru and Nirad Chaudhuri; maybe we are not entirely oblivious of the soul within ourselves. The other three he includes here are those of Jim Corbett, Salim Ali and Verrier Elwin; Elwin also found a biographer in Ram. Here at last we have, in Ram Guha, an Indian who is fascinated by the art of biography, who has taken the first steps to master it, and who, on the small scale he has attempted it, has done it very well. Here we are seeing an Indian who is about to sail off on a voyage strange to us, whose trawl till now shows him to be a master treasure hunter. Let us wait for the 1,000-page biography he will eventually write, and in the meanwhile, savour Ram’s casual offerings.