Makers of Modern India Read online

  Edited and Introduced by

  Ramachandra Guha

  MAKERS OF

  MODERN INDIA

  Contents

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also By Ramachandra Guha

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Prologue: Thinking Through India

  Part I: The Opening of the Indian Mind

  Introduction to Part I

  1. The First Liberal: Rammohan Roy

  Relations between Men and Women

  The Freedom of the Press

  The Need for Modern Education

  Part II: Reformers and Radicals

  Introduction to Part II

  2. The Muslim Modernist: Syed Ahmad Khan

  Educating the Muslims

  A Modern Curriculum

  The Two Eyes of India

  Politics and Discord

  3. The Agrarian Radical: Jotirao Phule

  Educating the Masses

  The Condition of the Peasantry

  4. The Liberal Reformer: Gopal Krishna Gokhale

  Elevating the Depressed Classes

  On Hindu—Muslim Cooperation

  A Call to Service

  5. The Militant Nationalist: Bal Gangadhar Tilak

  The Need for a National Hero

  The Necessity for a Militant Nationalism

  6. The Subaltern Feminist: Tarabai Shinde

  A Comparison of Men and Women

  Part III: Nurturing A Nation

  Introduction to Part III

  7. The Multiple Agendas of M.K. Gandhi

  The Power of Non-Violence

  Non-Cooperation with the Raj

  The Abolition of Untouchability

  Hindu—Muslim Unity and Inter-Faith Dialogue

  The Position of Women

  8. The Rooted Cosmopolitan: Rabindranath Tagore

  India and the West

  The Excesses of Nationalism

  The Problem with Non-Cooperation

  9. The Annihilator of Caste: B.R. Ambedkar

  The Revolution against Caste

  How to Annihilate Caste

  Why the Untouchables Distrust Gandhi

  10. The Muslim Separatist: Muhammad Ali Jinnah

  The Steps towards a Muslim Nation

  11. The Radical Reformer: E.V. Ramaswami

  The Fraud of Religion

  On the Rights of Widows

  The Case for Contraception

  The Constraints of Marriage

  12. The Socialist Feminist: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

  The Women’s Movement in Perspective

  A Socialist View of the Communal Question

  13. The Renewed Agendas of M.K. Gandhi

  Revisiting Nationalism

  Revisiting Caste

  Revisiting Hindu—Muslim Cooperation

  Village Renewal and Political Decentralization

  Part IV: Debating Democracy

  Introduction to Part IV

  14. The Wise Democrat: B.R. Ambedkar

  The Indian Constitution Defended and Interpreted

  15. The Multiple Agendas of Jawaharlal Nehru

  The Treatment of Minorities

  On Planning and Economic Policy

  Asia Redux

  India in the World

  The Conflict with China

  The Rights of Women

  16. The Hindu Supremacist: M.S. Golwalkar

  The Hindu Nation and Its Enemies

  The Muslim Threat

  Not Socialism but Hindu Rashtra

  17. The Indigenous Socialist: Rammanohar Lohia

  Caste and Class

  Banish English

  18. The Grass-Roots Socialist: Jayaprakash Narayan

  A Plea for Political Decentralization

  The Tragedy of Tibet

  A Fair Deal for Kashmir

  The Question of Nagaland

  19. The Gandhian Liberal: C. Rajagopalachari

  Our Democracy

  Wanted: Independent Thinking

  The Case for the Swatantra Party

  Reforming the System of Elections in India

  Freeing the Economy

  Assisting the Backward

  Why We Need English

  The India We Want

  20. The Defender of the Tribals: Verrier Elwin

  Freedom for the Tribals

  Neither Isolation nor Assimilation

  Part V: A Tradition Reaffirmed

  Introduction to Part V

  21. The Last Modernist: Hamid Dalwai

  The Burden of History

  The Challenge of Secularism

  For a United Front of Liberals

  Epilogue: India in the World

  Footnotes

  Prologue: Thinking Through India

  1. The First Liberal: Rammohan Roy

  2. The Muslim Modernist: Syed Ahmad Khan

  3. The Agrarian Radical: Jotirao Phule

  4. The Liberal Reformer: Gopal Krishna Gokhale

  5. The Militant Nationalist: Bal Gangadhar Tilak

  6. The Subaltern Feminist: Tarabai Shinde

  7. The Multiple Agendas of M.K. Gandhi

  8. The Rooted Cosmopolitan: Rabindranath Tagore

  9. The Annihilator of Caste: B.R. Ambedkar

  10. The Muslim Separatist: Muhammad Ali Jinnah

  11. The Radical Reformer: E.V. Ramaswami

  12. The Socialist Feminist: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

  13. The Renewed Agendas of M.K. Gandhi

  14. The Wise Democrat: B.R. Ambedkar

  15. The Multiple Agendas of Jawaharlal Nehru

  16. The Hindu Supremacist: M.S. Golwalkar

  17. The Indigenous Socialist: Rammanohar Lohia

  18. The Grass-Roots Socialist: Jayaprakash Narayan

  19. The Gandhian Liberal: C. Rajagopalachari

  20. The Defender of the Tribals: Verrier Elwin

  21. The Last Modernist: Hamid Dalwai

  Epilogue: India in the World

  Guide to Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  To the selfless tribe of librarians and archivists—and in particular to

  Dr N. Balakrishnan of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MAKERS OF MODERN INDIA

  Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist based in Bangalore. He has taught at the London School of Economics, Yale, Stanford and the Indian Institute of Science. His new book, Patriots and Partisans, a collection of essays published by Penguin in 2012, will be followed by new, updated editions of his earlier books Environmentalism: A Global History; Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India; and A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport.

  He is also the author of the internationally acclaimed India After Gandhi, chosen as a book of the year by The Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Outlook; and as a book of the decade by the Times of India and Hindustan Times. He is currently working on a biography of Gandhi, to be published by Penguin in 2013.

  In 2008, Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines nominated Guha as one of the world’s hundred most influential intellectuals. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009.

  Also By Ramachandra Guha

  The Unquiet Woods:

  Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya

  Savaging the Civilized:

  Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India

  Environmentalism:

  A Global History

  The Use and Abuse of Nature (with Madhav Gadgil) An Anthropologist among the Marxists and Other Essays

  The Last Liberal and Ot
her Essays

  A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport

  India After Gandhi:

  The History of the World’s Largest Democracy

  Patriots and Partisans

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  This book presents the work and the words of the men and women who argued the Republic of India into existence.

  I had first thought I would write a history of political thought in India, a single-authored work where mine would be the structuring hand and synthesizing voice. I soon realized that this would do injustice to the quality of the thought of Rammohan Roy, Jotiba Phule, Mohandas Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, et al. And so this became an anthology where Indian thinker-activists who fought social inequality, who promoted religious pluralism and freedom of expression, and who outlined a forward-looking path for the nation, spoke directly and extensively in their own voice, their words placed alongside the words of other thinker-activists who had powerfully resisted these trends.

  Makers of Modern India thus provides a representative selection of the writings of this country’s most remarkable social reformers and political activists. In the prologue that follows, I explain the principles of inclusion and exclusion. These ‘makers’ had all to be active in public life, and they had also to have written original works of social or political criticism. The former criteria excluded pure intellectuals, those who wrote and spoke but did not, in a meaningful social sense, act; the latter criteria excluded pure activists, those who reshaped society but did not leave behind an impressive enough body of writings and speeches.

  While making my choices, I knew they would not be uncontroversial. As I write in the prologue: ‘About the reception of this book I am certain only about one thing; that each region and language will have its own special grouse about people I have left out.’ An early reader of Makers of Modern India, who had just returned from a bout of public service in Bengal, joked that the next time I visited Kolkata I would need to protect myself with a crash helmet. He had in mind the exclusion from this book of such famous Bengalis as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Subhas Chandra Bose. I had explained these (and other) omissions in my introduction, but my friend felt that the Bengalis would not be satisfied.

  In fact, before I got to Kolkata I heard other parochial complaints. I had included as many as six Maharashtrians, but when I spoke about this book in Puné my hosts complained that I should have had at least two more (Savarkar and Agarkar were the names offered). In Chennai, my reading of excerpts from the writings of E.V. Ramaswami and C. Rajagopalachari prompted the question—why had I left out Kamaraj and Annadurai? A left-wing friend in Delhi University was enraged that I had not included any Marxist, and had compounded the sin by enshrining the right-wing reactionary M.S. Golwalkar as a ‘maker of modern India’. Arya Samajis charged me with dishonouring the memory of Dayananda Saraswati. A venerable old civil servant who had previously praised my books in print said he was withdrawing the praise because I had omitted Vallabhbhai Patel. Muslim intellectuals angrily asked why I had not included Maulana Azad; this sin compounded, in their view, by my featuring an (to them) obscure Maharashtrian named Hamid Dalwai.

  I read and heard these criticisms, and remained unrepentant. As Hindu social reformers, Dayananda, Vivekananda and Aurobindo had all been superseded by Gandhi. Bose and Patel were men of action who were not profound thinkers. Likewise Kamaraj and Annadurai. There had been no genuinely original Marxist thinker-politician in India (if Bhagat Singh had lived another ten or twenty years he might have become the first). To have Savarkar and Agarkar when Golwalkar and Gokhale were already represented seemed superfluous. Azad’s views on Hindu–Muslim harmony were more eloquently conveyed in my book by Gandhi and Nehru. Urdu-speaking intellectuals in north India treated Hamid Dalwai with condescension because he wrote in that plebeian tongue, Marathi. But that was their problem, not mine. I had included Dalwai because he was a brilliant and brave thinker, a Muslim radical who spoke directly to the post 9/11 world.

  I would yield no ground on these names, but still, the criticisms got me thinking. Were I to do this book again, whom else might I include? I think the one person I would add to the nineteen individuals profiled in Makers of Modern India is the engineer-administrator Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. Builder of dams and steel mills, diwan of Mysore, he was emphatically a man of action; and he also wrote many books and pamphlets outlining his vision for a free India. This rested critically on the application of science and technology to augment living standards. As a technological modernizer, Visvesvaraya inaugurated a line of thinking whose later exemplars include such influential figures as Meghnad Saha, P.C. Mahalanobis, Homi Bhabha and Sam Pitroda, who have likewise believed that a scientific world view alone would make India strong, modern and developed.

  Fortunately, a younger historian is planning a separate anthology on the scientists and technologists who helped make modern India. Meanwhile, two Mumbai writers are working on a book on the much underrated Hamid Dalwai. I have been enormously gratified by the popular reception of Makers of Modern India (it was reprinted several times in hardback, and several Indian language editions are under way). However, that this book shall provoke the publication of other books is perhaps more gratifying still.

  Prologue

  Thinking Through India

  I

  The striking thing about modern India is that the men and women who made its history also wrote most authoritatively about it. The country’s leading politicians were its leading political thinkers. This is especially true of the trinity of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar. The first was the father of Indian nationalism who, between the 1920s and 1940s, forged a popular, countrywide movement against British colonial rule. The second was the architect of the modern Indian nation-state, serving as prime minister from the nation’s birth in August 1947 until his death in May 1964. The third was the great leader of the country’s oppressed castes who also oversaw, as the country’s first law minister, the drafting of the Indian Constitution, which came into effect on 26 January 1950. But even as they fought and struggled, led and governed, Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar wrote at great length about the world they saw and shaped.

  Gandhi’s Collected Works, published by the Government of India between 1958 and 1994, run to more than ninety volumes. More than fifty volumes of Nehru’s Selected Works have so far been published by a trust created in his name. In the 1980s the government of Ambedkar’s home state, Maharashtra, published sixteen volumes of his writings, each volume sometimes exceeding a thousand pages. Although many of the entries in these collected or selected works are routine letters or speeches, others represent extended essays on subjects such as national identity, democracy, religious culture and social justice. Indians in general (and Indian writers in particular) tend to be prolix and verbose, but in these instances at least quantity has not necessarily been at odds with quality.

  This combination of political activism and theoretical reflection was not peculiar to these three men. Other Indian politicians and reformers were also serious writers, articulating, in their own more restricted spheres, ideas that had a powerful resonance in their own day and continue to do so in ours.

  Modern India is unusual in having had so many politicians who were also original political thinkers. However, it is not unique. In the making of some other nations, activists and campaigners have likewise doubled up as authors and polemicists. The first generation of American nationalists—Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin—were certainly men of action and of thought. This was also true of José Marti of Cuba, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who participated in movements to free their country from foreign rule while writing important works of propaganda and/or scholarship.

  Nations tend to produce thinker-activists at their birth and in moments of crisis. When, in the middle decades of the last century, England and France found their national s
overeignty threatened by Nazi Germany, the patriots who led the resistance also wrote most evocatively about it. The books written by Winston Churchill before and after the Second World War were to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Likewise, Charles de Gaulle produced a series of stirring works in the 1940s and 1950s, which defined anew the meanings of France and of being French.

  A third conjuncture that produces the politician-as-writer is a revolutionary change in the system of government. Paradigmatic here are Lenin and Mao, the acknowledged leaders of the Russian and Chinese revolutions respectively. Pre-eminently men of action, both also wrote influential works of political and economic analysis. Their essays and books were required reading in their own homeland, while also attracting attention in other countries.

  This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action.

  Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present.