Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 8

Three Things Karl Marx Got Mostly Right, Hindustan Times

In the course of doing two degrees in economics I was taught to regard Karl Marx as, in the words of the Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. His labour theory of value was rejected by my teachers; and his predictions about the immiserization of the proletariat and the imminent death of capitalism appeared to have been falsified. However, I then went on to to study sociology and history, where I was obliged to take Marx seriously. For, in these domains, his ideas and insig...

Between Rectitude And Responsibility, The Telegraph

One of my closest male friends is a senior IAS officer, now retired. He belongs to a family of scholars and public servants, and has degrees from two of the world’s great universities. He has some special areas of expertise, such as education and health, and speaks four Indian languages fluently. With these skills, and without pulling any strings or ingratiating himself with any politician, he ended his career as Secretary to the Government of India in New Delhi.

While in service my friend wo...

Choosing The Ten Greatest Indians, Hindustan Times

When, in August 2017, India marked the seventieth year of its freedom from British colonial rule, the Hindustan Times did a series of long stories on seventy of this and seventy of that: the seventy best books written since Independence, the seventy greatest sportspersons since Independence, the seventy finest films since Independence, the seventy most influential politicians since Indepdendence. Such lists have become ever more popular in the India we now live in. In recent years, I have mys...

A Forgotten Precursor To The Rushdie Affair, The Telegraph

In the winter of 1988-9, there occurred what became known as the ‘Rushdie Affair’. Salman Rushdie had just published his novel The Satanic Verses, which orthodox Muslims denounced as having defamed the image of Prophet Muhammad. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on the writer’s life. In the country of Rushdie’s birth, India, the book was banned by the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. In the country of Rushdie’s domicile, the United Kingdom, the book was bu...

When JRD Tata Called For a Strong Opposition, Hindustan Times

On 15th May 1961, the politician C. Rajagopalachari wrote to the industrialist J. R. D. Tata, asking him to support the newly formed Swatantra Party. A patriot of impeccable pedigree, ‘Rajaji’ had started Swatantra to provide effective opposition to the ruling Congress party, which he saw as insensitive to economic and political realities, and dominated by a single individual (Jawaharlal Nehru). Rajaji knew the House of Tatas had long funded the Congress, but, as he now told J. R. D. Tata, ‘e...

Anti-Intellectualism In American And Indian Life, The Telegraph

Books set in other countries and published at other times can sometimes be strikingly relevant to India today. This is certainly the case with Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963. I first read this book as a doctoral student thirty years ago, and re-read it recently.

As a professor at one of America’s most prestigious universities, Columbia in New York, Hofstadter watched, with fascinated horror, the persecution of scholars and writers by Senator Joe...

The Struggles Of A Muslim Modernizer, The Telegraph

In different but complementary ways, the debate on triple talaq, and the debate on cow slaughter, both demonstrate the medievalist mindset of modern India.

Why, when even the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has abolished the pernicious practice of triple talaq, has India not done so? Largely because the leadership of Indian Muslims is in the hands of bigots and reactionaries, not progressives and modernizers.

To to be sure, there have been exceptions, of brave individuals who sought to promote r...

Why This Revival Of Hindu Chauvinism?, Hindustan Times

Some years ago, I was at a literary meeting in Bhubaneshwar. Odia had just been declared the sixth classical language in India, after Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. My scholarly hosts were naturally delighted; one taking particular pleasure in imagining how President Pranab Mukherjee felt when he signed the relevant file, since his mother tongue, Bengali, would never remotely be considered a ‘classical’ language.

That conversation came back to me when, last week, the senior C...

The Rise And Fall Of The Term ‘Harijan’, The Telegraph

In his 1984 book The Untouchable as Himself, the anthropologist R. S. Khare speaks of the derision with which Dalits viewed the term ‘Harijan’, popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. Khare quotes a Chamar reformer in Lucknow as telling him: ‘Harijan means what we can never be allowed to become by the caste Hindu, and what we may not want to be anyway. It was a superficial way for Gandhi to resolve his guilt’.

It is well known that Gandhi himself never used the term ‘Dalit’. It is less well known that...

What Champaran Meant To Gandhi, The Telegraph

A hundred years ago this week, Mohandas K. Gandhi arrived in the district of Champaran in north Bihar. He spent several months in the district, studying the problems of the peasantry, who had been forced by European planters to cultivate indigo against their will. Farmers who refused to meet this obligation had their land confiscated.

Through his interventions with the colonial state, Gandhi was able to get substantial concessions for the peasantry. Rents were radically reduced, and the compu...