India in the eyes of Isaiah Berlin
Dileep Padgaonkar
One of the most stimulating interviews this columnist conducted for the Times of India was with Sir Isaiah Berlin, a historian of ideas, at All Souls in Oxford in 1989. He was then at the zenith of his fame
No. He was a 'New Deal' or 'Butskillite' who believed in a mixed economy. Thatcher & Reagan believed in free markets, Privatization & small government.
as a pre-eminent member of the Anglo-American establishment.
He had been a British diplomat during the Second World War. It was obvious that the State had to greatly expand its role so as to defeat Hitler. Berlin says that he only lost his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union after meeting Anna Akhamatova and understanding the human cost of Stalin's supposed achievements. He was being disingenuous. His family had fled the Red Terror in Petrograd. They knew very well that the 'human cost' of Stalin had been horrendous. Still, in 'Butskillite' England, Berlin had to appear to support the 'mixed economy'. But so did Sir John Hicks. It was only after Mrs Thatcher won re-election that he could express his true beliefs- of a classical liberal kind.
During the Cold War years he had promoted its causes with considerable brio.
No. He was cautious. He referred to classical liberal values as 'negative freedoms' and accepted the prevailing view that 'positive freedom' (most notably the right to a job which, it was believed, the Soviets provided) were more important. This meant Keynesian style aggregate demand management or even Nationalization so as prevent the closure of loss making industries which would lead to localized structural unemployment. Thatcher & Reagan were prepared to let unemployment to rise to Great Depression levels so as to squeeze out 'cost push' inflation.
That provoked his critics, mainly communists and their fellow-travellers, to deride him as a half-baked scholar, a phoney liberal, a social butterfly and a megaphone of western imperialism.
He was seen as a bourgeois idealist more concerned with aesthetics than the plight of the proletariat. People quoted Tom Paine on Burke- 'he mourns the plumage but forgets the dying bird'.
Sir Isaiah rarely crossed swords with his tormentors in public.
He was a patrician figure safely ensconced amongst the Oxbridge 'great and the good'.
But he hit them hard in his vast correspondence.
He was, after all, a foreigner- albeit one with a Public School education. Foreigners go in for back stairs intrigue. Englishman play cricket with a straight bat.
Henry Hardy, one of his Literary Trustees, has edited it with uncommon flair. Three hefty volumes have been published so far. Once completed after the publication of the fourth one, this magisterial enterprise can, according to one leading expert, “match Boswell, even Gibbons”.
Boswell, maybe. Not Gibbons.
During the interview, Sir Isaiah was in full bloom as he answered every question with a benumbing volley of quotations from the best known to the most obscure thinkers of the western world – more to impress, methinks, the ever ebullient Sagarika Ghose, who was present, than me.
Foreigners have read books. Also, they are lecherous. An English don would mumble a few words, look askance at the beautiful lady, and offer his guests dry sherry and even drier arrowroot biscuits.
However, other than referring me to a lecture on Tagore he gave in 1961 – where he praised the poet for “choosing the difficult middle path, drifting neither to the Scylla of radical modernism, nor to the Charybdis of proud and gloomy traditionalism”
Tagore condemned not just the Revolutionaries but even the moderate Nationalists. Why? Hindus would lose lives and property in East Bengal if the Brits did a bunk.
– he had nothing more to say on India. (“I’m shamefully ignorant of Indian civilisation.”)
i.e. hadn't studied Sanskrit & Persian.
It was during his visit to India in 1961 that he met Jawaharlal Nehru. In a lengthy letter to Charles Taylor, he described the Indian prime minister as “extraordinary”, “tremendously vain”, “touchy” and “self-conscious”.
Nehru was overworked. He had wanted to retire after turning 70. His party wanted him to stay because he was their biggest vote-catcher.
Nehru liked meeting writers and intellectuals- after all, he was himself a best selling author. Writers do tend to be narcissistic.
He was, Sir Isaiah added, someone whose whole political outlook was England-derived
he called himself the 'last Englishman to rule India'.
(“the occasional unscrupulousness,
Edwardian gentlemen had a great sense of entitlement
the empiricism,
he genuinely believed that Socialism was less wasteful than Capitalism
the disdainful reference to Marxism…”)
it seemed rather vulgar- like laissez-faire Utilitarianism.
and who “like everyone else in the world wants recognition”.
He had it in spades.
He speaks of Nehru’s “double morality”
Nehru's biggest challengers were to the Left. He knew he had to tilt towards Moscow and away from Washington.
– about which “he is least ashamed of” – and says that the prime minister regards the United Nations as nothing more than “an instrument registering the shifts in the balance of power, and not as an entity possessing some kind of a deliberative or executive character of its own”.
Nehru understood that referring the Kashmir issue to the UN had been a mistake.
But he also points out that Nehru is “infinitely sensitive to public opinion – in the first place that of India itself…while that of the West hardly at all”.
By contrast, Macmillan didn't give a shit about folks in Manchester thought of him. He was wholly focussed on public opinion in Mombasa.
Yet, he insists, the prime minister “greatly enjoys his encounters with the West –
and the East and the North and the South. He had charisma.
he likes them individually, he is intrigued by them, adores flirting with handsome western ladies like a Samson who practises brinkmanship with a number of formidable Delilahs…”
Kennedy wasn't practicing brinksmanship with Marilyn Monroe. Lucky dog.
However, in a letter written to another friend a few weeks later, he confided that he found that the criticism of Nehru in British and American newspapers “miss the nature of his problems and the kind of solutions he brings to them”.
People liked Nehru and couldn't understand why he had to do what was in India's, not their own, interest.
He also noted that Nehru perfectly realised that his “cosy, semi-capitalist regime” means “stagnation and ultimately collapse and defeat”.
It was the Socialist aspect of it which was ruinous. If you are poor, only budgets matter. Plans don't.
If there is a prescient ring to these observations, what follows is even more striking. “Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust”
That may have been the case fifty years previously when India could point to Tagore. But Tagore had no successors.
he tells a correspondent, whereas, in fact, they are “half-baked and exhausting”: there is “no intellectual bite, no firmness, no toughness at all”.
JBS Haldane had renounced British citizenship in 1961. He too became annoyed by Indian vagueness or vacuity. He went on a hunger strike after some visiting Canadian refused to come to dinner with him.
And he concludes on this note: “If real social justice and rationalisation ever come to India it will be through some spellbinder whom people won’t bother to resist and under whose spell they will enjoy falling.”
This was written in 2013.
Shades of a prophecy?
Modi is very evil. If he becomes PM, the backward castes will take over. The reign of Macaulay's bastards will come to an end.
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