My Reading of Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi..Prologue

The title of the prologue 'Unnatural Nation' disturbs me as I suppose it was meant to. Exasperating, yes we all agree, but to concur that it is unnatural is not easy. Guha says: 'Because they are so many, and so various, the people of India are also divided. It appears to have been always so'. Would one term the Amazonian rain forest as unnatural, because of its variety, I assume not. But, then he quotes Mirza Ghalib 'Why has not the dooms day come? ... Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe'. (Chirag-i-Dair. 1827).

I learn that after the 1857 mutiny the British took a firmer control through the famed Indian Civil Service and improved infrastructure. He also refers to, most of us would have heard mentioned, the various pronouncements made to oppose the call of Independence. 'There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be on in the future'. 'The Indians could not govern themselves'. 'to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence'. 'India will fall back into the barbarism and privations of the Middle ages'. (These quotes are all with a cross reference in the book.) He also mentions that many Indians also shared this view and a few still want to break away from India.

The doomsayers continued even after 1947. 'That India could sustain democratic institution seems, on the face of it, highly improbable'. Luckily there is at least one sympathetic quotation (1969). ' Yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.

He thus deduces, 'The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn't. The place was too complicated, too confusing - a nation, one might say, that was unnatural'.

He also speaks of the Rajpath in Delhi, used as a street for protests by people from all over India with issues, hoping to get the attention of the Indian government and seeking solutions! And about this book, 'However, like the book that I once intended to write- based on a year spent walking up and down Rajpath - this too is a story, above all, of social conflicts, of how these arise, how they are expressed, and how their resolution is sought'.

(I really liked his idea of a story of Rajpath. I had thought of writing about walking in different cities in different countries and had made some notes as well!)

As a historian, he looks at conflict as running along many axes, caste, language, religion and class as the four pre-eminent ones and a fifth, that of gender. He avers that: 'At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and in literature, or addressed with such directness by the political system or the media.

He then analyses the history of independent India by creating what he terms as 'conflict maps' and infers that much more than 50 per cent of India was comfortably at peace with itself even at its 'dangerous decades'. He states that more than stories of India's economic success, the real success lies not in the domain of economics but in that of politics.

A statistical analysis 'the odds against democracy were extremely high' prompts him to say: 'The forces that divide India are many.This book pays due attention to them. But there are also forces that have kept India together, they have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that- so far, at least- have nullified those many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic'.

He has dwelt on the available literature or lack of it, which interests a contemporary historian. Also on the challenges of a contemporary historian. 'The reader is also a citizen, a critical citizen, with individual political and ideological preferences'. Another challenge is 'the historian also is a citizen' and also 'the closer one gets to the present, the more judgemental one tends to become'.

(The frame work of his book is very clear and is very thought-provoking for a concerned citizen and a layman like me. As I continue to read his book, I hope that we will come to grasp the 'Mantra' that he has detected, which seems to be holding us together! He calls them 'moderating influences'.

I remember trying to coax my father to write about his times. He was 39 when India became independent and saw 48 years as a citizen of India. While he was not in the forefront he did meet many of the notable participants. I wish he had written!)