Granta has the following interview with Sanjay Subhramanyam- the brother of India's Foreign Minister. Strangely, at one time, Sanju was considered the brainier of the two. That was because nobody actually read his books.
Editor:
What modern Indian literature made an impression in your youth?
None. People like me and Sanju read Enid Blyton.
Did someone like R.K. Narayan matter to you? Did you develop any relationship to the Tamil intellectual world?
Sanju would have been about six or seven years old when the anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu led to Congress being replaced by the anti-Brahmin DMK. Tambrams began thinking of settling in the North or even emigrating.
RK Narayan was ahead of the curve in that he wrote for the paper associated with the anti-Brahmin Justice Party.
... The fear that haunts many people is of a genuine linguistic impoverishment, when groups in search of social and economic mobility will let go of their grasp of their mother tongues, fail to properly enter the Anglosphere, and remain in a kind of linguistic limbo or no man’s land.
In some states there is resentment that even second or third generation immigrants aren't learning the State language. What if our own urban youth follow this fashion?
I hope this proves an exaggerated fear, though it is a legitimate one. These were issues that the post-independence modernizers failed to grapple with adequately.
Different States had different approaches and different success rates in spreading literacy. The Central Government did enter the educational field but its impact was limited.
Editor:
Were they too concerned about further cracks and break-aways from the nation under construction
linguistic reorganization of the States went through.
or was it more the inertia of a largely English-speaking bureaucracy that they were inheriting?
Bureaucrats played second fiddle to politicians. In any case, all civil servants learn the language of the State in which they serve.
Did they have other options?
No. A Democracy can't impose a single language on a vast population.
Subrahmanyam:
There were certainly no easy options, and still are none, but the matter required sustained political and intellectual engagement.
It required resources which Socialist India lacked.
Certainly not the iron fist used in the Soviet Union to impose Russification and Cyrillization. In the first two decades after Independence, the southern states were probably not given enough of a voice in these discussions, as many of the dominant politicians on the national stage came from the ‘Hindi belt’.
Sadly Tamil politicians like Kamraj & Bhaktavatsalam were pro-Hindi. But Rajaji too had tried to make Hindi compulsory in schools when he formed a Ministry in Madras in 1937. This gave great impetus to what would become the DMK which took power in Tamil Nadu towards the end of the Sixties. Indira Gandhi had been careful to conciliate them and they supported her after she split from Congress. Kamraj's political career was finished.
After Nehru’s death, there were the violent anti-Hindi agitations and the invention in 1968 of what came to be called the ‘three-language formula’ – a national educational policy that mandated students learn English, Hindi, and one regional language – which was in turn perceived as asymmetric in the burdens it placed. In sum, the question remains a sort of open sore, albeit not the only one.
It didn't greatly matter. The problem facing most students was that the English teacher didn't know English. After the failure of Gandhi's 'Wardha Scheme' (Nai Talim), the Central Government became wary of the education issue. That's why the useless Maulana Azad was put in charge of it in the Fifties.
Editor:
You were too young for the first major dosage of Maoism injected into Indian intellectuals, peasants, and tribals in the 1960s.
Would Mao & Ayub Khan arm and train the Naxals in the Siliguri gap? If the Chinese invaded and conquered Bengal they would reward their sycophants. The other question was whether the CPML could replace the CPM. The answer was no. If you shell out a little money, people will come forward to slit the throats of the Naxals.
Nevertheless, at an intellectual level, especially in your field of history, the prominent presence of Marxists is unmistakable.
Indira Gandhi supported the Leftist historians and they ruled the roost from the Seventies onward.
What was the source of the appeal of Marxism to Indian intellectual elites in the 1950s and 1960s and later?
Most people believed that Stalin had turned Russia into an industrial and scientific giant in the space of a generation. Could India achieve the same thing? Probably not. Still, why not pretend otherwise?
Subrahmanyam:
India was not that different in this respect from many other parts of the non-Western world, where Marxism was very appealing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, whether in Turkey, Japan, or Latin America. Further, after 1947, there was no sustained repression against Marxist intellectuals, as happened elsewhere.
The more militant ones were punished. Stalin himself advised the Indian Communists to ally with 'progressive forces' to achieve land reform. Since Communists had been doing quite well in elections in the Thirties, in some States, it made sense to follow the 'Browder thesis' and seek to take power through the ballot box. In 1957, the Left came to power in Kerala- this was hailed as the first time Communism had prevailed by democratic means.
They were even able to assert themselves and become a kind of lobby, supporting and promoting each other, until a major factional struggle broke out, which it did in the 1960s.
Because of the Sino-Soviet split.
The appeal of Marxism was of course its claim to unsentimental rigor, its concern for real social change, where the Congress by the 1950s had begun to lose credibility, even among its erstwhile supporters.
Congress had shown that it could do a worse job of running the country than the Brits. The Commies should be given a chance to show that they are even shittier than Congress.
Eventually, the establishment Marxists allied to the Soviet Union’s line were outflanked on the left by the Maoists with their more radical agenda, but they still remained important.
The CPM prevailed over the 'Maoist' Naxals.
There were also disparate groups of intellectuals who claimed to be ‘liberals’, but as the analyses by Ram Guha and Chris Bayly have shown, this is a term that is very difficult to make clear sense of in the Indian context.
It is easy enough. Either you are for free-markets or you aren't. Rajaji's Swatantra party stands out as being for the free-market. But it was seen as reactionary and out of touch. A currency crisis forced Indira Gandhi to devalue & bend the knee to IMF 'structural adjustment'. This was deeply unpopular and was one reason the country moved to the Left. It must be said, the Vietnam war was another factor. The US seemed to be propping up all sorts of corrupt Dictators while the Left was on the side of the toiling masses in those countries.
Some liberals were in favor of a free market and for less state intervention, while others were just ecumenical in their intellectual tastes,
they were culturally liberal & opposed to some orthodox practices.
so that ‘liberal’ came to mean someone who was in her/his own view not doctrinaire.
There was little enthusiasm for the thing. After all, the British Liberal party had declined greatly.
The difficulty that the Marxists faced was that along with some remarkably creative minds like the great ancient historian D.D. Kosambi,
he was a mathematician
or Ranajit Guha,
too stupid to get a PhD
or Susobhan and Sumit Sarkar,
sound enough scholars connected to the Communist party.
they also attracted many people who were extremely rigid, repetitive, and doctrinaire, and this became even more evident when they were the ones to call the shots in the institutional landscape.
Only the very stupid studied history. The even stupider taught it.
Editor:
But there must be something more exceptional about the Indian situation.
It was a Democracy. Communist parties could come to power by winning elections. Also, the Soviet Union was a strong friend of India.
Marxism made more headway in India than it did in many other former British colonies. The conditions seem to have been more propitious for its reception than, say, Pakistan with its larger, more formidable land-owning class.
Islam has good reason to hate Communism. Still, the State was happy to use some Communist intellectuals for its own purposes.
Is part of the reason that the Congress, with its acquiescence toward landlords,
Mao himself had to be nice to landlords and 'kulaks'. They alone had the food surplus to feed his men. It is easy to say 'get rid of landlords. Get rid of caste.' but the result would be a power vacuum in the districts. Sooner or later, gangs of various types will fight each other for control.
left itself vulnerable to criticism about persistent caste inequalities and the like?
Different castes could form their own parties and seek to build alliances so as to win elections and take power.
Subrahmanyam:
From a certain point of view, the resentments created by Pakistan’s class structure should have helped the Marxists, except that by the late 1950s there was already a US-backed Army rule.
The crackdown on the Commies had occurred earlier. To be fair, most Leftists were sound enough patriots.
In India, while there was periodic repression, it was more limited, and the communist parties found a place in the system but at the price of a great deal of compromise.
They had to stop pretending they could win an armed struggle.
They may have had a social and economic agenda, but their leadership was very much drawn from the upper castes. And in the case of West Bengal, over several decades of rule, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) became a machine for the distribution of patronage and thoroughly entrenched in a corrupt rural politics.
The CPM did do a certain amount of land-reform. About 2.3 million acres were redistributed. Hilariously, about 13 'surplus' acres were taken from the widow of Charu Mazumdar (leader of the Naxals).
Leaving aside the Maoists, who are not concerned with governing, the two other main parties have gradually been ‘normalized’. Concerns about caste-based inequality are now carried mainly by other parties.
Those 'concerns' are a license to loot the state.
Editor:
You have recently written with reserved respect of the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha,
at one time people thought he was close to the big-shots in Moscow. He had attended a Communist Youth Conference in Paris after the war which was organised by the man who would become head of the KGB.
a shadowy yet central figure in the writing of Indian history. But how do you judge the collective over time and as a whole?
People from 'backward' and Scheduled tribes and castes were becoming Chief Ministers at precisely the time when these cretins were pretending that the 'subaltern' can't speak.
Why do Guha’s incisive raids on historiography — lucid, cutting, brimming with insight no matter how one judges them ultimately — appear so much stronger than later contributions of Subaltern Studies?
Guha was writing nonsense. He thought that the 'European Enlightenment' had a single theory of property. It didn't. It was aware that there were many different types of property regime. Sometimes they coexisted in the same District.
What happened along the way?
Everybody emigrated. Their students were stupid and mad. Having to read dissertations written by imbeciles is no fun even if you are an imbecile yourself.
Editor:
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now been in power for more than a decade. Do you think there is anything like a right-wing intellectual milieu in the country?
Smart people aren't intellectual. Intellectuals aren't smart.
Subrahmanyam:
There are relatively few historians, sociologists or anthropologists of quality in India today
or elsewhere.
who both have genuine scholarly stature, and openly sympathize with the BJP. To be sure, there are now such people like Sanjeev Sanyal
an economist and former Banker
who have penetrated the market for popular history and biography with some degree of success. But this is easy enough with the backing of trade presses and their marketing machinery, even if one writes slapdash and derivative books.
rather than stupid nonsense.
Editor:
Writing about Indian liberalism has become an academic cottage industry. Some, like Christopher Bayly, have argued that it exercised ‘hegemony’ over Indian thought from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.
Indian liberals were liberal. Indian conservatives were conservative. The Viceroyalty of Ripon was the high water mark of liberalism. But Ripon's attempt to 'devolve' more power to local authorities failed. District Collectors simply filled the Council with yes-men.
Liberalism could not take root at the grassroots level. Religion, on the other hand, did enable 'mass contact'. Caste and language too were important. Nobody really cared if one or two barrister joined the Viceroy's Council.
But weren’t other ways of thinking in the country more important than this relatively small kernel?
Yes. Religion was way more important. Sanju won't admit this obvious fact.
Subrahmanyam:
Intellectual history in India, and the history of political thought more particularly, is still a fledgling field.
Nope. We know all about it. There really isn't very much to it.
Bayly and Ram Guha were amongst those who gave it a real push,
Bayly, maybe. Guha- no. He had a 'great man' theory of history. Edward Shils, the American Sociologist, did some quite extensive field-work but few Indians read his work. On the other hand, many relied on Marcus Franda's book on the Naxals. I may mention, the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levi came to India and then Bangladesh because he was enthused by the story of a heroic Maoist movement in rural Bengal. He was chucked out of Bangladesh after published an interview with a Maoist who derided Sheikh Mujib as the tool of Moscow. Pakistan's Yayha Khan was close to Beijing and thus should have been allowed to massacre Bengalis.
and now there have been other contributions, by historians as well as philosophers and literary scholars. But the difficulty remains the focus on a narrow band of Indian thinkers who mostly wrote in English. And even these are often treated superficially. I wa s quite surprised to see how badly Bayly misunderstood someone like K.M. Panikkar, a
brilliant historian and writer who rose high in the politics of the Princely states before becoming a diplomat
gadfly and mercenary who became a strange sort of Nehruvian ideologue.
No. He wrote well and was interesting to read but he wasn't an ideologue. Some in the Indian security establishment- perhaps Sanju's own daddy- thought he had been soft on China.
What is obviously needed is a set of studies of different regional traditions on the one hand, and a debate on the adequacy of categories like ‘reformers’, ‘conservatives’, ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ on the other.
There is no need to waste more time on this. There are negative returns to this sort of mindless 'research'.
Editor:
For the past few decades India has been remarkably stable compared to its neighbors, where there have been either dramatic regime changes and collapses or ongoing instability.
India has always been stable- even during 'Quit India' the Government prevailed though the enemy was at the gate.
What kind of effect do you think this stability has had on Indian intellectual and literary culture?
There wasn't very much of it and what there was was boring shite.
Subrahmanyam:
There has not been any drastic regime change in India comparable to Pakistan or Bangladesh, or a civil war as has happened in Sri Lanka with the Tamil separatist movement. There is no doubt that such changes and upheavals have had a major effect on cultural life in those countries. Meanwhile in India, even though national elections have been regularly held every five years since 1999, the political changes have been more subtle and their effects on intellectual and literary culture have been harder to discern. One turning point was
Rahul's refusing to take over as PM and lead his party to victory in 2014. The result was that 'Hindutva' nationalism has taken over from Nehruvian 'Secular Socialism'.
the emergence of the BJP as the dominant national party in 2014, a position it continues to hold.
Thanks to Modi. The big surprise is that the BJP has won a big majority in West Bengal. The intellectual climate has changed even in Calcutta.
This has led to the withdrawal of state patronage to many groups and individuals on the intellectual and cultural scene who had been important in earlier periods of Congress dominance, though some have cleverly navigated the transition.
They hadn't been important. They had been sleeping peacefully while cosseted by the government.
This has gone hand in hand with the dismantling of some key educational institutions, including universities.
They couldn't be made any shittier.
Paradoxically, one effect of this has been to reduce the importance of Delhi as a pole, in relation to many of the regional centres.
Delhi is much more affluent now and has acquired a distinct identity. The rise of the AAP party showed that the 'common man' now had much higher aspirations.
At the same time, the obvious growth in religious and communitarian tensions
they are much less than they were in 1947. Why pretend otherwise?
has meant an expansion of subjects considered to be taboo, which are not addressed because of self-censorship.
Do you want some jihadis to turn up and chop your hand off? No? Then shut the fuck up.
The media, both in print and electronic, has particularly been affected by this, though there are some refreshing new trends like the rise of political stand-up comedy.
The CM of Punjab is a comedian.
Some participants and observers now hope that new sources of cultural and intellectual patronage will emerge, for example from the newly rich in the corporate world. But nothing guarantees either the good taste or the sound ethical orientation of such actors. If anything, my experience with them tells me to be very skeptical.
The newly rich want to get richer. That means investing in STEM subjects and skills training not wasting money on stupid historians.
Editor:
Historically, a great deal of what became Indian literary culture flowed from Bengal.
Then Bengalis took over from the Brits and wrecked the place.
When one turns to contemporary India and power, it’s unmistakable how much flows out of Gujarat.
The Arya Samaj was founded by a Gujarati. Parsis are Gujarati. Both Jinnah & Nehru's daughter married Parsis. Jinnah's descendants are Parsis not Muslims.
Not only the leader of the country but also two of its wealthiest businessmen.
There are plenty of very wealthy Parsi businessmen- e.g. Jinnah's descendants.
It seems like no accident that Gujaratis occupy a unique place in the Indian state and business. How do you account for this recent resurgence or prominence of Gujaratis in modern Indian society or has it just always been there, starting with Gandhi himself?
Starting with Dayanand Saraswati.
Subrahmanyam:
Not only Gandhi but Jinnah was from Gujarat, and Gujaratis played a key role in the emergence of Bombay (Mumbai) as India’s leading metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier, between about 1400 and 1800, Gujarat was in many ways a key hub of Indian Ocean commerce, with Gujaratis playing a trading role from the Red Sea and East Africa, to Java and south-eastern China.
Gandhi himself says that his own 'banyan' class helped finance the expansion of the East India Company.
The Gujarati intellectual and religious tradition was also quite unique, combining orthodox and heterodox forms of Islam, with Hinduism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism.
They all shared a strong work-ethic. Moreover, they believed that character was the true source of wealth. This promoted 'high trust' business networks.
During the period of the British Empire, the Gujarati diaspora spread further, and in the second half of the twentieth century, they came to settle in increasing numbers in the UK and US. Perhaps because of their reputation as astute business people, the intellectual and cultural role of Gujaratis has been neglected,
but not their religious role. The Swaminarayan movement is Gujarati. Some of the best temples around the world are run by them.
leaving aside the Parsis (or Zoroastrians). In recent decades, the region’s reputation has also been marred by important incidents of religious violence such as the pogrom carried out against Muslims in 2002.
After Muslims massacred Hindu pilgrims.
In any event, we know Bengal’s intellectual prominence after 1860 was not based on any corresponding economic prosperity.
Calcutta continued to flourish. The University of Calcutta, set up in 1857, aimed for excellence and did in fact create a large class of graduates with broad intellectual and aesthetic tastes. It must be said, the Bengali 'bhadralok' retain this to this day- though they may be living far away from Bengal.
It remains to be seen if Gujarat’s economic surge will have an intellectual counterpart.
i.e. will Gujarat produce a class of over-credentialized cretins who demand that the country destroy its economy and surrender to Pakistan? The answer is- no. Don't be silly.
Editor:
How would you characterize or describe Indian capitalism today?
There is too little of it in some of the most densely populated parts of the country.
Someone like Amartya Sen lobs praise at earlier generations of capitalists, such as the Tata family, who – like the Carnegies – build scientific institutes and ‘gave back’ to Indian society. The new capitalists like Gautam Adani
are Hindu. Hindus are very evil.
seem different, but also perfectly compatible with the Hindutva program of the BJP. Has a break of any kind transpired?
Subrahmanyam:
I have an abiding interest in the long history of capitalism in India, in its many manifestations and from early modern times onwards. The Tatas were very good at managing their public image and papering over some of the more unsavory aspects of their history, with regard to the opium trade or financing British colonial expeditions.
The Parsis rose thanks to the British. What is remarkable is that some Parsis took the lead in Nationalist politics. One reason for this may have been police indifference to Muslim violence targeting Parsi neighbourhoods. Often, the cause of the attack was some article published by a Parsi intellectual.
But they did provide a certain model of philanthropy and personal frugality, which was then adopted by members of groups like Infosys, as distinct from the ostentatious vulgarity of the Ambanis, for example.
Even worse is the rise of the middle class more particularly if they are Hindu. Also, why has Modi not surrendered to Pakistan and converted to Islam? Is it because Gujarat has failed to produce a class of intellectuals?
The real problem of the last three or four decades has been the explosion of the dollar billionaire class (of whom there are now nearly three hundred), who often practice versions of pretty open crony capitalism.
This was the case in Nehru's India- or Jyoti Basu's Bengal.
Of course, this happened elsewhere too, as David Cannadine’s study of Andrew Mellon in the US shows
Which Indian businessman was appointed Finance Minister? TTK. But that was under Nehru.
The real question is whether it will be possible to produce a capitalism with a real emphasis on smaller entrepreneurs, and markets that are competitive rather than manipulated and monopolized by Indian ‘robber barons’.
In other words, Sanju wants a capitalism in which the capitalist has no fucking capital and thus can't gain economies of scope and scale.
The issue also remains whether this is a process in which participation will go beyond the usual suspects, which is to say the mercantile castes and Brahmins.
Patels are agriculturists. So are Jat Sikhs. They seem to do very well in business.
Some significant counterexamples do exist of course. I note that some analysts are still optimistic about this ‘trickle-down’, as works on India’s ‘new capitalists’ suggest. However, the jury is still out.
The jury ran away when they discovered that nobody would pay them.
Editor:
When one listens to the BJP home minister Amit Shah talk about the greatest threats facing India, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether he and the rest of the BJP think it’s Naxalites, Khalistan supporters, farmers, human rights activists and western NGOs, or Pakistan.
It is Pakistan. Them guys have nukes.
Then there is the matter of trying to maneuver between the US and China.
The US has told India to fuck off. It has to find a modus vivendi with China.
What do you think the greatest strategic dangers to India actually are?
Pakistan. They are bound to try some stupid shit.
Subrahmanyam:
As Tzvetan Todorov wrote in his book The Fear of Barbarians (2008), many forms of nationalism generate paranoia, and see enemies everywhere, both within and without.
Communist paranoia is worse. Todorov was Bulgarian.
To me, one can translate this into a different language. There is obviously concern on the part of the Indian state that with a form of accelerated economic growth that is accompanied by widening inequalities, various sizeable groups of disenfranchised people – whether the urban poor, or marginal peasants and footloose rural labor, or tribals whose lands have been expropriated – will want better political representation and living conditions.
Such people aren't 'disenfranchised'. They have the vote and know how to use it to get 'last mile delivery' of essential items.
These struggles could turn violent in India, as elsewhere.
What would be the point? Killing the golden goose means no more golden eggs which can be sold to finance the welfare system.
That is undoubtedly a long-term threat to the viability of the political system as it stands, and it needs more than band-aids as a response.
What it doesn't need is advise from a cretin.
On the external front, the focus has been on threats from Pakistan and China for decades now. But it has turned out that in the short to medium term, the real ‘rogue’ polity is the US, which cannot be counted on as an ally either by India, or even by Europe, or Japan.
India had hoped that something would come of the 'Quad'- i.e. a naval alliance against China.
The emergent new world order of which my father – the defense strategist K. Subrahmanyam – wrote, in the years before his passing in 2011, seems hopelessly optimistic now. India will have to brace itself for a rough ride, but so will the rest of the world.
Indeed. India will have to defund non-STEM subjects and focus on imparting work-skills. It will need to create more and more Marshallian industrial districts capable of doing their own R&D. Raise general purpose productivity and supply becomes more elastic. But you also have to fix the Justice system so total factor productivity can rise. This is stuff Sanjeev Sanyal understands. Sanju, sadly, has wasted his life. If you can't understand the present, you can't understand the past.
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