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Ed. Ramachandra Guha
There cannot be complete agreement on the names he has picked up for this new fat book ‘Makers of Modern India’. Some in the list are obvious like Gokhale, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Ambedkar. Some come on second thought. But some like Tarabai Shinde, surprise you. Guha’s list also features entries of Hamid Dalwai, who died at 44 questioning Muslim dogma for women and the famous anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who lived with Gond tribals and wrote about them. The book pans across the original and indigenous thought-lines that critically highlighted the issues and concerns of a young nation in making. As Gopalkrishna Gandhi points out in one of his pieces, in obsession with life-lines of these people, we Indians usually lose their thought-lines. This book attempts to capture that — the journeys of their ideas in a panoramic way. Guha limits his role to introduce us to the thinkers, and then allows us to deal directly with the body of their work. We can touch, sense, and feel how those words — both written and spoken — have impacted us as society and as a young diverse nation. Many of these personalities pitch their ideas at variance with each other and are sometimes at loggerheads, if you look at how Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak- two Brahmins of the same town shaped their arguments. You can also see Tagore and Gandhi disagreeing on the latter’s Swadeshi Andolan. In fact Gandhi is central to many people’s disagreements, though the Mahatma treats these concerns and people with great dignity and grace. Lohia argued with Nehru as both had a different dream, approach and argument for the set of beliefs they had for the collective manifestation of a nation. Some complemented, others argued. Rich in language and deep in substance, they help us see the process of first — the idea and then — the body of this country. In the process the reader graduates from knowing about them to knowing them. And also, getting to relate to the history of the recent century, we have been witness to and participant of, which still flows through the million mutinies, which define us. The thought-lines are as first-hand and dynamic as journeys of these people. You can see how a Gandhi freshly returned from South Africa evolved further in a span of next 30 years as Mahatma, how a brilliant barrister from Congress returns to form Muslim League and fathers Pakistan. And, how MS Golwalkar’s ideas transform the vast Hindu nation theory this country is still dealing with. You see the importance of educating Muslim youth in those times. Also how an atheist EV Ramaswami ‘Periyar’ pitches for identity of his region and castes in his very prolific ways. You see Tagore having the globe in his hand and mapping India’s imprint on it by its philosophy, spirituality and humanity. The ideas had long arduous journeys behind them and then like strong brainwaves took off on their own; as they come to the reader in the realities India lives in. That is why they are still so relevant even now like questions that confront us. Nowhere else can you find this huge churning of ideas at one place. It is quite a task; first to locate and then go through the papers and figure out the most relevant parts. Guha has included some letters of Nehru written to his chief ministers from 1947 to 1963 on fortnightly basis. The five volumes, from where the letters were taken is an out-of-print publication. These papers would have formed the base of governance of independent India. Or who would dig out Tarabai Shinde’s pamphlet or Dalwai who was translated from Marathi by poet Dilip Chitre. ‘Makers of Modern India’ makes us a little familiar to the India we hardly know about. Reading this book is a kind of pilgrimage to those journeys of brilliant minds. Like ‘India After Gandhi’ by Guha, this is a treasure for every thinking Indian and for the world which is increasingly curious about this country and its people. Guha’s list is a good starting point to see India in its original light, with no sense of finality attached to it.
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