Political India initially was a creation of British colonialism. They brought the 500-odd wrangling princely states into a loosely knit political unit for administrative convenience aimed to ensure effective exploitation of India’s resources to their optimum advantage.
When compelled to leave India following the onslaught of Mahatma Gandhi’s mighty but non-violent struggle, the British were sure and some even honestly said that the land would soon drift into chaos and anarchy and eventually perish.
There was not much of an India left to administer when Nehru, independent India’s first administrator, was preparing to take over from the British. The colonial power argued that what they took over from the 500-odd princes now will be returned to them and not to the Nehru government!
Provinces they directly controlled after giving up East and West Pakistan was hardly half of geographical India. As the day for the British to leave India was getting closer, anarchy and chaos were sprouting like dirty mushrooms all over India. Western press, political and cultural establishments were near unanimous in predicting the fall of the infant republic before it could even be born. Winston Churchill, who was opposed to Britain leaving India, said that in the absence of colonial power “India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.”
On Aug. 15, 1947 the British left India, the Union Jack was pulled down and replaced with India’s tricolor. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru took the oath of office as independent India’s first prime minister. Ramachandra Guha poignantly notes in his magnificent book about those crucial days “the heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn’t. The place was too complicated, too confusing – a nation, one might say, that was unnatural.”
After six eventful decades of high drama of soaring hopes and profound disappointments India remains, more united than ever, the world’s largest democratic nation, a unique model of a working democracy, and the experiment goes on. Guha magnificently tells that riveting story of the most plural democracy in his monumental works, India After Gandhi and Makers of Modern India.
Textbooks concluded Indian history with the advent of Aug. 15, 1947. A few chapters with cosmetic data on the chaos of partition were the icing. Over half a century’s turbulent making of modern India remained unwritten. Whatever little was written was parochial and seldom exhibited an all India perspective. Guha, a teacher by profession who taught at Yale, Stanford, Oslo and Indian Institute of Science, must have felt the need for chronicling the young republic’s 50 years of history intensely.
Otherwise he would not have attempted this formidable task. The end result is two magisterial works on the pains, struggles, humiliations, high drama and the glories of a young nation. Condemned to doom at birth, toiled in blood and sweat of the most brutal partition in human history, a multitude of people described as political illiterate and cultural uncouth by the Western connoisseurs of democracy stood the test of time to turn into the world’s largest democracy is a story of epic dimensions and Guha has narrated mankind’s greatest political challenge elegantly with a noble insight only a true historian could command. The Chronicler of Rome Edward Gibson himself would have nodded in appreciation of the magnificently told history of this giant among democracies.
When the violent tremor of partition subsided many thought that the worst was over but it was not to be so. The republic was and is prone to political conflicts of every kind. Guha in the initial chapters identified four major conflicts, how they arise, how they are expressed and how their resolution is sought.
First, there is caste, a principal identity for many Indians, defining whom they might marry, associate with and fight against.
Then there is language. The constitution of India recognizes 22 languages as official, among which Hindi is spoken by 400 million. National unity and linguistic diversity continues to be noncompatible to each other.
The third axis of conflict is religion. A vast majority of billion-plus Indians are Hindus and at the same time India has the second largest population of Muslims in the world — about 140 million. And there are substantial communities of Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains. Due to a lack of education coupled with financial backwardness, the politics of religion always finds people to fight often violently on communal lines even for mundane reasons.
The fourth major axis of conflict is class. India is the land of massive social disparities and feelings of dispossession have fueled opposition movements including armed struggles like that of the ultra left Maoists. Guha interestingly notes the developing conflict lines provoked by gender inequality too. He writes, “as an axis of discrimination gender is even more pervasive than the others, although it has not so often expressed itself in open and collective protest.”
No historian worth his salt can be impartial because only a vulgar historian can afford to be so. Every visionary writer discerns, weighs and arranges his material in an order mandated by his understanding of human progress and destiny. Guha is unashamedly Nehruvian in his approach in weighing conflicts, its causes and aftermaths but never ignores the real players, be it the Quixotic Sangh Parivar or the unimaginative Left. This is explicitly evident in the ‘Makers of Modern India’, a sequel written as if to fill the gaps in the first narrative and to make his logic of historiography clearer.
The depth and diversity of India is a point to wonder and ponder over. So is the array of its political leaders who were thinkers and activists at the same time.
Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar are the magnificent three of Indian political history. They inspired and led massive sociopolitical movements, made rhetoric their companion and wrote volumes after volumes eloquently.
There are not many parallels to match this mammoth format of leadership even in the world scene. Decades after their departure from the political arena, the trio is still discussed, debated, loved or hated for their role in India’s history.
Guha in his sequel profiles 19 individuals from Rammohan Roy to C. Rajagopalachari whose ideas had a defining impact on the formation and evolution of contemporary India. Differing with conventional historians, Guha chooses to include rare and compelling excerpts from their writings and speeches to validate his argument on their eminence.
Guha records that these makers of modern India never spoke in one voice. Their perspectives were sometimes complementary, at other times contradictory, yet through their confrontations India faced modernity and gathered fuel to move ahead. It was “the most contentious times in the most interesting country.”
No review could aptly convey the significance of Guha’s authoritative works in the backdrop of human history. He so brilliantly records how one fifth of the world population with so many factors working against its very existence as a nation could come together and with blood and sweat form a matrix to live and progress together as world’s largest democracy.
