India In Retrospect

Ramachandra Guha’s riveting narrative celebrates a nation kept alive by constant political improvisation.

INDIA AFTER GANDHI: THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST DEMOCRACY By Ramachandra Guha Picador Price: Rs 695, Pages: 900

PICTURE SPEAK

LARGER THAN LIFE: The story of India is hinged on unforgettable characters

In a strange way, despite the exuberance of the writing, the narrative is driven by a sense of anxiety. It used to be famously said that it does not occur to anyone to doubt the idea of India until people start defining it. There was both a calm reassurance in this statement and a riposte. The reassurance was that there is a complicated web of interdependencies that links India’s various constituents together, but the minute one tries to name it and benchmark the meaning of the term ‘Indian’, the idea itself is put into question. Part of India’s success is that it has refused the politics of benchmarking, and the main thrust of Guha’s message is not so much unity in diversity, but that we are diverse in our unities. What is refreshing about his story is that it places politics front and centre. Much of holding India together is a consequence of political improvisation, an acute sense of judgement about when to yield and when to assert. But Guha is much more torn about the failures of the nation at its margins, Kashmir, the north-east. There is more than a hint in Guha’s account that no political options are palatable ones; these regions define the limits of India’s political creativity. India is a nation constituted through politics, in the best sense of the word. But a national identity contingent upon the good sense of its political leaders can both be reassuring and can induce a vertigo. It is reassuring in that it makes India possible; it is disquieting in that it makes it extremely contingent. But that is perhaps the lesson of Guha’s story.

Guha writes with an enviable fluency and assurance; his judgements are often astute and border on the lapidary. The book strikes a fine balance between different regions of India and manages to go through the catalogue of major episodes: Partition, Constitution-making, states reorganisation, the Hindu Reform Bill, an unusually detailed discussion of Kashmir, wars, the Emergency, rise of the Hindu Right, etc. These episodes are narrated reliably. The assurance of the writing comes from methodology: it is almost as if Guha had a ringside seat as these episodes were unfolding. There is immediacy to the narrative that comes in part from Guha’s great interest in individuals. It is often said that Indian fiction in English is almost totally devoid of characters; it is too over-determined by history and a sense of circumstance. It is ironic that in a work of non-fiction, almost the reverse is true. Guha can create a thumbnail sketch or a portrait of a character in a sentence or two; this is a history dominated by a host of interesting people.

And yet sometimes this interest in people occludes larger structural questions. Why, for instance, has no society achieved nationhood without violence? What explains the functioning of the institutions of Indian democracy and their limitations? And there is a curious lack of interrogation of the link between democracy and development: political economy is a marginal side show in this story. And like with nationalism, Guha’s account of why democracy survives is also ambivalent. Is it a product of contingent conflicts or deep-seated beliefs? Perhaps the test of this claim may lie in this. The last chapter of this book is called ‘Why India Survives’. If the next edition of the book has a chapter ‘Why India flourishes’, we might have a true measure of the possibilities of Indian democracy.

Index