Editor’s Choice

WHEN RUKUN ADVANI acquired the rights to my first book, I ran into M.N. Srinivas, India’s most famous sociologist, who had taught at Oxford and Chicago and other such places, and was a Fellow of the British Academy besides. I knew him slightly: he lived in the same locality as my grandparents in Bangalore. Srinivas had heard that Oxford University Press was publishing my book, and now asked: ‘So who is writing the foreword?’ The grandee, I later learnt, had been unsuccessful in having books by his own protégés published by the OUP. How, he now wondered, had someone who had studied sociology in, of all places, a management institute, got his book published by the most prestigious academic imprint in the world? Who, in other words, was this Guha fellow’s patron? Which influential Indian academic had helped him achieve this astonishingly unlikely feat? Hence his query. M.N. Srinivas did not want to know what the book was about, what its arguments or sources were — merely who was writing the foreword.

I had no patron within the academy — but I had Rukun Advani. When we met at our mutual friend Shivy’s wedding that fateful evening in 1982, I had hoped that from my doctoral dissertation I could extract two, perhaps three, essays for scholarly journals. I never thought the dis­sertation had the makings of a book. It was Rukun who saw that it did. I would not have known what to cut and what to add to convert an unpub­lishable thesis into a published book. It was Rukun (who had once done the same thing to his own Cambridge PhD) who showed me how to.

Shortly before The Unquiet Woods was published, I moved from Bangalore to Delhi. I spent six years in the city, in the course of which my friendship with Rukun deepened with every meeting. In those days he was slightly more gregarious than before or afterwards; happy to meet and chat with people he liked, and to listen to all kinds of oddball schemes and proposals that they (or at least I) threw at him. At our lunches at Kwality’s and our walks in Lodi Gardens, Rukun and I talked about history, sociology, and politics; music and sport; academic rivalries and personal enmities.

Rukun and I got along so well not merely because we worked together on the books that I wrote and he edited. We each held strong views on literary style, and fortunately they coincided. Both of us had a distaste for jargon and a partiality for mischief. Puns and alliterations came naturally to us — perhaps, too naturally. Further, we each had strong views on politics — these too coincided. The years that Rukun and I were in Delhi at the same time were the years that the open-minded, tolerant Nehruvian vision of India was rapidly giving way to a hardline and humourless Hindutva, a transformation that both of us viewed with disgust and horror.

Had I not met Rukun Advani I would probably not have become a published author. Had he not befriended and guided me as I sought to shift fields and genres, my move from social history to biography would surely have been far more tortured and infinitely less satisfying. Had I not had Rukun to instruct and encourage me, I may never have thought of writing books on cricket

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We shared enough to get along, and we differed enough to get along even better. Rukun was editing works of history from a background in literature; I was writing works of history from a background in sociol­ogy. I learnt from his more aesthetic approach to history writing; he was keen to engage with my more analytic approach to history writing. My sense of humour veered towards self-deprecation; his towards savage satire. His view of the world, and of India in particular, was infinitely darker than mine. I thought that Hindutva would pass and liberalism would once more come to prevail; he was sure that the country was coming under the jackboots of fascists, forever.

Those years in Delhi were, in retrospect, crucial to our relationship, giving it an emotional and empathetic layer underneath its professional core. Our conversations were at once jokey and intense, affectionate and argumentative. And so they continued to be after I returned to Bangalore in 1995, when correspondence by mail replaced personal meetings. Even when I went on to work with other editors at other presses, Rukun continued to be the person I most relied upon for liter­ary advice, whether structural or stylistic.

HAD I NOT MET Rukun Advani at Shivy’s wedding I would prob­ably not have become a published author. Had he not befriended and guided me as I sought to shift fields and genres, my move from social history to biography would surely have been far more tortured and infi­nitely less satisfying. Had I not had Rukun to instruct and encourage me, I may never have thought of writing books on cricket.

I had long credited Rukun with all these things. But my memory told me that he had nothing to do with my becoming a historian of the Republic. I believed that the origins of what became India after Gandhi lay in a conversation I had with Peter Straus, then with Picador, in the lobby of New Delhi’s Imperial Hotel in September 1997. I stated this as fact in print when the book came out in 2007; and again, and at greater length, when a tenth anniversary edition appeared in 2017.

As a historian, I knew that memories were fallible. I had often argued that if there was a contemporary document at hand to record an event, it tended to be more reliable than recollections offered years later. It turned out that in recording my professional history I had disregarded my own caution. Many years after India after Gandhi was published, I found among my papers a document I had sent Rukun in January 1996. It was a proposal for a book to be called ‘Nehru’s Children: When India Was Young’. Conceived as a history of the first, formative years of the Indian Republic, it was to have nine substantive chapters, these covering politics, economics, foreign affairs, religion, society, the environment, civic activism, sport, and popular culture.

In my proposal I had provided brief outlines of each chapter, the characters and controversies they would cover, the sorts of sources they would use. Revisiting it now, some two and a half decades after it was written, I notice an embarrassingly elegiac tone, as in talk ‘of a time when Hindus did not butcher Muslims, when politicians died penniless, when we won Olympic gold medals, and when ours was a recognized, and recognizable, moral voice in world affairs’.

With this proposal in my papers was a letter to Rukun. I had a trip planned to Delhi in February, when, I said, ‘One of the things I want to discuss with you is the enclosed book proposal, which I worked up sitting in an airport lounge in Hawaii. I have to finish my [Verrier] Elwin book and research and write a book on environmental thought, but I have been in search of a properly challenging historical subject, something that would have the excitement of my work on Garhwal and Kumaun. I think I may have found it in this, but need, from you, more than just the title.’

Rukun and I got along so well not merely because we worked together on the books that I wrote and he edited. We each held strong views on literary style, and fortunately they coincided. Both of us had a distaste for jargon and a partiality for mischief. Puns and alliterations came naturally to us—perhaps, too naturally

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I should explain that ‘Nehru’s Children’ was one of the chapters of Rukun’s recently published novel, Beethoven among the Cows. My title was inspired by him; and I now needed as­sistance with regard to the contents.

Rukun wrote back suggesting a date for our meeting in Delhi, and then, in his graceful cursive hand, sent these reflec­tions on my book proposal:

‘Your informal history of India between 1947 and 1967 (INDIA BEFORE INDIRA (?)) looks nice as a proposal on paper, and I think if it’s motivated by the same slightly wild (therefore attractive) & offbeat mixture of learning, erudition and strong opinion which makes Wickets in the East jell so well, then it’ll be both readable and successful, apart from being perhaps a slight thorn in the side of mainline academia, which doesn’t shoot in quite so many directions within the same book. Did you get any inspiration for this from your reading of Shiv Visvanathan’s script? He has a somewhat similar view of that ‘age of innocence’, though I’m a bit sceptical of glamorizations of that period. After all we don’t have famines now, & the poverty situation now is marginally less abysmal. And were politicians, on the whole, less venal then, or was it that the focus on grand nationalists like Nehru, Patel and Shastri obscured the corruption — some of which they themselves sheltered? And didn’t we win hockey gold medals mainly because the Australians & Europeans didn’t really play hockey then? As regards being a ‘portrait of a time when Hindus did not butcher Muslims’, as your epigraph says, perhaps the rhetoric of secularism had greater weight and force then, whereas now it’s a farce, but in the real world did either community ever stop butchering the other?

If you begin with the proclamation, in your book, that you’re going to focus exclusively on the idealism and rhetoric of those days, as well as on upper-middle class memories of happy days, you may need to take care that people don’t see it like Dom Moraes’ eternal state of nostalgia — he makes his living off that these days. The truth is it was never all hunky-dory. So long as that is recognized, there’s much to be said for a selective, opinionated & informal history.

I hope I’m not jumping the gun in re­sponding with this mix of reservations, caution & enthusiasm, & I hope I haven’t got it all wrong — your intentions, I mean. With you writing it, the book will come out good — provided the proposal isn’t just a bit of airport enthusiasm & you do let it take off. Keep it to 200PP else it’ll take many years?’

I have no memories of what we spoke of when we met next in Delhi, but clearly the idea of writing a political and social history of India after 1947 was already implanted in my head before I met Peter Straus. The book that Straus commis­sioned was eventually called India after Gandhi. It took ‘many years’ to write, covered six decades of history rather than (as was originally intended) merely one, and was far longer than Rukun himself had suggested it should be. I eschewed nostalgia (mostly), and grounded myself in primary sources, writing unsentimentally about corruption, Hindu–Muslim conflict, the Kashmir dispute, and the like. And of course had I not written those more slender and more narrowly focused books under Rukun Advani’s guidance, I could never have ever sought to attempt a one-volume history of our maddeningly complex country.

(This is an edited excerpt from The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir by Ramachandra Guha)

About The Author

Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha is a historian, environmentalist and public intellectual

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