Sunday, December 15, 2002		Books

Encounters with history
Rumina Sethi

Power, Politics and the People: Studies in British Imperialism
and Indian Nationalism
by Partha Sarathi Gupta. Introduction by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Permanent Black, New Delhi. Pages 528. Rs 775.

THE essays selected in this volume were all written between 1966 and 1998. They are the research papers of historian Partha Sarathi Gupta collected for the first time by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya who introduces the reader very sensitively to each of these pieces. Thematically organised rather than by chronology, the papers explore broad areas such as imperialism, nationalism, labour movement, the Empire and the systematic Indianisation of the Indian Army and the Raj in general.

The first set of essays on imperialism and nationalism consists of the most recent piece by Gupta, an address at the 59th session of the Indian History Congress, a little before his death in 1999. He takes as his spectrum the changing trends of research work in the above areas. Starting from studies on nationalism from Anthony Smith to Benedict Anderson, Gupta offers a commentary on the self-destructive nature of the armaments race of the last century and the emergence of new nation-states out of old ones through carving-up processes. Similar processes were witnessed when the British Empire was fashioned with the explosion of national energies while consolidating imperialism abroad. The protection of British overseas economic interests and trade were behind the formal empire building.

The second portion is about the processes of decolonisation, the "end-game of empire." These take into account the federalisation schemes the British introduced in India and the rapidly changing economic relationship between India and Britain. The third academic cluster of essays includes the history of the Indian Army to which very little research is usually devoted. As Gupta writes: "The use of India as a cheap reservoir of military manpower at the cost of Indian revenues was only an extreme form of imperial exploitation." Although three Governor-Generals—Lord Dufferin, Lord Elgin and Lord Curzon—objected, their protests were couched in their interest to protect their own financial interests. Interestingly, Gupta writes of the policies of the British to prevent Indian officers to go to Sandhurst and Woolwich for training, which refuted all principles of racial equality.

Then comes a section on the British and Indian labour history, which is related to Gupta’s time in Oxford and his own D. Phil. research on the railway workers’ trade unionism. Influenced deeply by E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Eric Hobsbawm’s Labouring Men, Gupta writes on the Indian working class in industrialised cities of the country and the interaction between the home and the imperial centre in terms of labour movements.

The last part is by far the most interesting for me because it takes Gupta’s concerns away from the dry, sterile world of labour and capital to the culture industry. Typically, Gupta can only have Bengali songsters in his gaze. Yet he speaks about the role of music in political rallies and the attempts that were made to forge a unity between different classes of people on the basis of say, the old songs of Nazrul or the duets of Abbas-ud-din and Mrinal Kanti Ghosh. One of the last essays, "Radio and the Raj," which was delivered at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, in 1993, as part of the S. G. Deuskar Lectures on Indian History and Culture, discusses the role of radio in strengthening ideology. The All-India Radio, which was supposed to be analogous to the BBC, had neither an extraordinary founder personality such as John Reith nor the finances to find licensees: "Four years of hard labour had produced 14 transmitters and a competent staff and in four years the 400 million people of India had bought exactly 85, 000 wireless sets. It was the biggest flop of all time." Following the BBC’s policy of political neutrality, the AIR failed to give the Raj a platform for broadcasting its own genius either, which may be seen as a positive factor in an otherwise glum landscape.

The essay on "The Quality of Life and Indian Scholarship," which is the last in the volume but first in chronology, gives us an understanding of the man that Partha Sarathi Gupta was and aspired to be. Veering away from the oft-quoted view that Indian universities developed hand-in-glove with the desire to produce clerks and minor bureaucrats, he draws attention to the fact that the earliest courses taught in India were mathematics and logic, political thought and poetry, philosophy and physics rather than précis-writing or accounting which would be more suited to the secretarial crop the British were trying to create. The "filtration" theory or the top-down model of British education may be related to the conditions prevailing in Indian universities today which have sacrificed quality to "quantitative inflation and non-academic pressures" and, of course, grandiose schemes. As he writes: "By now a generation is about to enter the university portals, none who were born before 1947. Will these hungry sheep be properly fed? Most likely their diet will be barely nutritious and their degree a debased currency.... As long as genuinely strong centres of learning are not developed by fighting whatever vested interests stand in the way, Indian intellectuals will include a few brilliant scholars, a large number of dilettantes, and far too many charlatans." A view that perhaps did not make him very popular, it is certainly a telling remark on the political coterie who decide the fate of academics today.