|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R.C. Dutt "When I read Mr Dutt’s Economic History of India, I wept, and as I think of it again my heart sickens ... .", Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Hind Swaraj. THE story of India’s exploitation had been told and retold by many like Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice Ranade and G.V.Joshi. But R.C.Dutt truly came into his own as a master critic of the British when he backed up with research the open secret that India had been the richest nation in the world till the British came in. His Economic History of India is even today considered one of the most important books, which documents the systematic looting of India by the British.
Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), like most of us, lived in a period of transition. That is the simplest way for us to reconcile the many contradictions in his life and views. For example, why did someone like him, born into one of the most anglicised families of his time and who later ran away to England to appear for the ICS, go ahead and write a book like that raising the heckles of the very authorities he was supposed to please? Why did he communicate with his children in English, marry his daughters outside caste and linguistic boundaries and then glorify ‘sati’ and ‘jauhar’ in his historical novels? And the most important reason that his critics claim made him lose his pride of place in the annals of history— why, when he was armed with a dynamite-load of data and support from the nationalists, did he go around petitioning for political reform in England? Meenakshi Mukherjee has answers to all that and more—without being even remotely hagiographic. While she liberally quotes instances that furnish proof of his exceptional administrative abilities, she similarly leaves the reader to draw her own conclusions about his literary skills (or the lack of them). For someone who was elected the president of the Indian National Congress in 1899 and spent his later years carrying out administrative reforms in the princely state of Baroda as its Dewan, the man certainly deserves more than a passing mention in textbooks. Hope the efforts of Mukherjee, an accomplished literary critic herself, do just that. Especially since she recently passed away when boarding a flight to Delhi to inaugurate this book. A fitting tribute to Romesh Chunder Dutt in the centennial year of his death.
|
||
|
|
||
He
experienced the first flush of his creative genius when he joined the
ICS (being the second Indian to do so). Armed with the government’s
own records and statistics, he gave the lie to the theory that the
British were so carefully trying to popularise—that the ‘natives’
were nothing but a bunch of ‘crooked lotus-eaters’. Having
considerable access to government data was certainly an immense help.
This elaborately detailed and well-researched biography brings out the
various facets of the man who successfully straddled the contradictory
worlds of bureaucracy and nationalism—and excelled in both.