[Reader-list] Sanjay Kak on Ram Guha's Book

[Asit asitreds]

 justasmall rajoinder if everyone is born equal with equal capacities
how many dalits, landless labourers and poor kasmiris have madr
significant contribution like kashmiripandits why doesnt every
kashmiri gets a barrister degree like jawahar lal nehru the reason is
simple his father moti lal had the money to send him abroad  why is it
so that only kasmiripandits excel what is the science behind this
possibly its a super human race my understaing of socities teach me
only the elites execel because they have the resources to achiving
exelllence unless we believe in they are super natural i think this
has to do about the class postion of kashmiri pandits now the last
query
who has the copy right to speak about kashmir
asit

On 3/9/08, TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com> wrote:
> I hope you are not comparing the struggle in Kashmir with that of students'
> revolt in France.
> In Kashmir, there is one more oppressor which has been given a clean chit by
> the movie in question. The independent voice has been severely oppressed by
> certain Islamic fundamentalist groups. The women have been attacked for not
> adhereing to so-called Islamic code almost foreign to Kashmiri culture. The
> al-qaeda kind zellots have thrown acid on the faces of women for not
> covering their face in public. Not only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and
> moderate Muslims have been murdered in the past and very often by non-state
> agents.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Asit asitreds" <asitredsalute at gmail.com>
> To: "Wali Arifi" <waliarifi3 at gmail.com>
> Cc: "reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2008 2:40 AM
> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Sanjay Kak on Ram Guha's Book
>
>
> > though ihavent read ram guhas book but sanjay kaks critiqe is brilliant
> > the problem with  liberal historiography is the author doesnt take a
> > stand lets not forget the famous dictum of parisian students in 1968
> > its important from which position you are speaking from the side of
> > oppressed or the opressor
> > in this sense sanjay kak has beutifully deconstructed ram guhas
> > irresponsible nuetrality
> > asit
> >
> > On 3/5/08, Wali Arifi <waliarifi3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> In continuation of the recent posting of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's review of
> >> India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
> >> by Ramachandra Guha · Macmillan, 900 pp, £25.00
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> A Chronicle for India Shining
> >>
> >> by Sanjay Kak
> >> *
> >> Biblio* July-August 2007
> >>
> >> Ramachandra Guha is among Indias' most visible intellectuals, and his
> >> newspaper columns and television appearances mark him off from the more
> >> reticent world of academic historians. At 900 pages his new book India
> >> after
> >> Gandhi is not shy of claiming its own space on the bookshelf: from it's
> >> title page, where it announces itself as "The History of the World's
> >> Largest
> >> Democracy" (not A History, mind you, but The History); to it's end
> >> papers,
> >> which tells us that the author's entire career seems in retrospect to
> >> have
> >> been preparation for the writing of this book.
> >>
> >> So first the happy tidings from the back of the book: things in India
> >> (after
> >> Gandhi, that is) are overall okay. They could be better, he agrees, but
> >> for
> >> now we must be satisfied with what the Hindi cinema comic actor Johny
> >> Walker
> >> kept us amused with: phiphty-phiphty. For those hungry for a modern
> >> historical understanding – or even an argued opinion – on 60 years of the
> >> Indian Republic, this piece of dissimulation is an early sign of things
> >> to
> >> come.
> >>
> >> There are some notable features of the paths by which The Historian
> >> arrives
> >> at this facile and frivolous conclusion of fifty-fifty. The first is that
> >> all that is troubling and challenging in the short history of this
> >> republic
> >> is co-opted into the nationalistic narratives of 'success' and 'victory',
> >> turning our very wounds into badges of honour. "At no other time or place
> >> in
> >> human history" he says, "have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so
> >> vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature, or
> >> addressed with such directness by the political system and the media".
> >>
> >> I can think of at least five issues that have bedeviled India all the way
> >> from 1947 which simply fail this assertion: Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland,
> >> Naxalism, and of course, Dalit rights. These are at the head of a very
> >> long
> >> list which seriously challenge Guhas' assertion that the Indian nation
> >> has
> >> been successful at even addressing conflicts, leave alone dealing or
> >> managing them. I use the word 'successful' here because justice has not
> >> even
> >> appeared on the horizon on most of these fronts.
> >>
> >> Right at the outset of the book he lets us know that the real success
> >> story
> >> of modern India lies "not in the domain of economics, but in that of
> >> politics". So it's not the software boom that he offers for approval, but
> >> Indias' political success as a democracy. Politics for him is, in the
> >> main,
> >> narrowly defined, and remains the domain of parliamentary politics. From
> >> Prologue to Epilogue, Guha vicariously digs out every negative prediction
> >> ever made for India's future as a democracy, and then since India has had
> >> elections for 50 years, turns it into a vindication of it's democracy.
> >>
> >> No surprise then, that it's the romance of the Indian elections for which
> >> he
> >> reserves his unqualified enthusiasm. Every General Election since 1951 is
> >> celebrated in tourist-brochure speak, so by 1967, elections no longer are
> >> a
> >> "top-dressing on inhospitable soil", they are "part of Indian life, a
> >> festival with it's own set of rituals, enacted every five years". As
> >> evidence we are offered statistics of large turnouts, and accounts of
> >> colourful posters and slogans. By the 1971 polls, the logistics are
> >> offered
> >> in giddy detail: "342,944 polling stations, each station with forty-three
> >> different items, from ballot papers and boxes to indelible ink and
> >> sealing
> >> wax; 282 million ballot papers printed, 7 million more than were
> >> needed…".
> >>
> >> To so easily substitute 'election' for 'democracy', to be preoccupied
> >> with
> >> the procedural – rather than the substantive¬ – aspects of democracy, and
> >> indeed of politics, is conceptually problematic, and not a mistake any
> >> serious scholar of politics would make. The obsession with parliamentary
> >> democracy, with its first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all bias, also
> >> means
> >> that descriptions of India's recent political history remain here focused
> >> on
> >> those in Parliamentary Power, and at best, those in Parliamentary
> >> Opposition. But when he has to deal with the more fundamental questions
> >> raised about Indian democracy from outside of this, by the Naxalites in
> >> the
> >> 1960s, or by Jaya Prakash Narayan and Sampoorn Kranti in the 1970s, or
> >> indeed the Narmada Bachao Andolan in the 1990s, Guha seems to lose his
> >> way,
> >> and his enthusiasm for 'politics' is more subdued.
> >>
> >> A second clue as to how he reaches here seems to lie in methodology, and
> >> Guha explicitly states his: to privilege primary sources over
> >> retrospective
> >> readings, and "thus to interpret an event of, say, 1957, in terms of what
> >> is
> >> known in 1957, rather than 2007". One of the reasons he cites for this is
> >> the paucity in India of a good history of India after Gandhi: by training
> >> and temperament, he says of Indian historians, they have "restricted
> >> themselves to the period before Independence". So combine this ascribed
> >> lack
> >> of historical interest with Guhas' own stated preference for 'primary'
> >> sources: together they lay out before him a vast – and clearly
> >> unchallenged
> >> – canvas.
> >>
> >> This is a curious methodological assertion. With the exception of some
> >> primary sources (and some first-time sources, like the PN Haksar papers)
> >> the
> >> bulk of the book seems to draw upon the excellent work of at least two
> >> generations of historians and social scientists. The copious Notes at the
> >> back of the book happily acknowledge at least some of this to be so. With
> >> the work before us of Sumit Sarkar, Partho Chatterjee, Rajni Kothari,
> >> Tanika
> >> Sarkar, Yogendra Yadav, Zoya Hassan, Christopher Jafferlot (amongst
> >> others),
> >> why does Guha pronounce this area to be a tabula rasa, one that this book
> >> alone bravely sets out to fill?
> >>
> >> Ramchandra Guha's earlier book on Verrier Elwin was proof of his
> >> dexterous
> >> use of archival material, and over the years his newspaper columns have
> >> been
> >> rich with his joyful – even eccentric¬ – use of the archive. Here too he
> >> locates some nuggets, which its sources may now well want returned to the
> >> darkness of the archive. In 1944, the Bombay Plan, mooted by a group of
> >> leading industrialists, making a case for 'an enlargement of the positive
> >> functions of the State', going so far as to say that 'the distinction
> >> between capitalism and socialism has lost much of it's significance from
> >> a
> >> practical standpoint'. In 1966, as groups of Mizo National Front rebels
> >> appear ready to storm at least two towns in Mizoram, the strafing of
> >> Lungleh
> >> by the air force, the first time that air power had been used by the
> >> Indian
> >> State against it's own citizens. Or in 1977 India's favourite
> >> businessman,
> >> JRD Tata, speaking to a foreign journalist during the dark days of the
> >> Emergency, finding that things had gone too far, adding that 'The
> >> parliamentary system is not suited to our needs'.
> >>
> >> But this history by bricolage inevitably ends up with embarrassingly
> >> ahistoric conclusions. For example, to bolster his own naïve view that
> >> "Rural India was pervaded by an air of timelessness" at the time of
> >> Independence, he quotes a British official writing in an official
> >> publication in 1944: 'there is the same plainness of life, the same
> >> wrestling with uncertainties of climate… the same love of simple games,
> >> sport and songs, the same neighbourly helpfulness…" I don't doubt that
> >> this
> >> qualifies as 'contemporary narrative', but surely even within the
> >> impoverished state of Indian social science that Guha seems to encounter,
> >> he
> >> has heard of enough respectable scholarship, that contests – and even
> >> confounds – this static image of the "Indian" countryside? The peasant
> >> rebellions, the tribal movements, the caste conflicts?
> >>
> >> What this often results in is a naïve – even absurd – acceptance of what
> >> is
> >> described to us by the privileged 'contemporary narrative'. "Living away
> >> from home helped expand the mind, as in the case of a farm labourer from
> >> UP
> >> who became a factory worker in Bombay and learnt to love the city's
> >> museums,
> >> its collections of Gandhara art especially". This is no doubt true for
> >> this
> >> exceptional individual, but does this aid our understanding of the
> >> processes
> >> of rural deprivation and urbanization that translate into the journey
> >> from
> >> village in Uttar Pradesh to textile factory in Mumbai? (And where did
> >> that
> >> worker go, refined sensibilities and all, once the textile mills began to
> >> shut down in the 1980s?)
> >>
> >> And when Nehru formally inaugurates the Bhakra dam in 1954, "for 150
> >> miles
> >> the boisterous celebration spread like a chain reaction along the great
> >> canal…" Because Guha is committed to understanding 1954 in its own terms,
> >> we're often left just there, in 1954, without the illuminating oxygen of
> >> contemporary scholarship on the Bhakra dam and its consequences, for both
> >> the people displaced by the dam (still without re-settlement 50 years on)
> >> or
> >> for the land and waters of Punjab (now feeling the ill effects of the
> >> massive hydraulic meddling and its handmaiden, the 'Green Revolution'.)
> >> At
> >> such moments we must be forgiven for feeling that we are rifling through
> >> the
> >> brittle pages of an official, sarkari history of India.
> >>
> >> Where official archives and histories don't exist, the excessive – and
> >> selective –reliance on newspapers and journals seems even less
> >> convincing.
> >> Who amongst us has not read the newspaper of the day about an issue or
> >> event
> >> that we know about and understand, and not despaired at the errors and
> >> biases inherent? Who amongst us has not shuddered at the thought of some
> >> future historian trawling the pages of the Times of India and the Indian
> >> Express and forming a narrative of what is happening in India in 2007?
> >>
> >> Through the book, Guha's writing on Kashmir, for example, is peppered
> >> with
> >> insights from a journal called Thought, apparently published out of
> >> Delhi.
> >> Forgive me, but what was Thought? Insights extracted from such narratives
> >> can be useful to the historian, but also highly problematic, unless we
> >> can
> >> contextualize them, compare them with other assessments, and understand
> >> the
> >> nature of the biases we are dealing with. Otherwise we are simply left
> >> with
> >> arbitrary assessments of shaky provenance: in1965, of Lal Bahadur
> >> Shastri,
> >> second Prime Minister of India, who gets a positive appraisal by the
> >> Guardian newspapers' Delhi correspondent, as well as a condescending
> >> exchange of letters between two ex-ICS men: "I can't imagine Shastri has
> >> the
> >> stature to hold things together... What revolting times we live in!"
> >>
> >> Guhas' selective dependence on 'contemporary' narratives, and his
> >> distaste
> >> of politics that is not 'parliamentary' comes through most clearly in his
> >> treatment of Jaya Prakash Narayan. He musters the following: RK Patil, a
> >> former ICS officer who asks of JP: "What is the scope of Satyagraha and
> >> direct action in a formal democracy like ours…? By demanding the
> >> dismissal
> >> of a duly elected assembly, argued Patil, the Bihar agitation is both
> >> unconstitutional and undemocratic". To this Guha adds the opinions of the
> >> "eminent Quaker" Joe Elder, who hectors JP on launching a mass movement
> >> "without a cadre of disciplined non-violent volunteers". And finally,
> >> Indira
> >> Gandhi herself, who dismisses JP as a "political naif… who would have
> >> been
> >> better off sticking to social work." With such a slanted set of
> >> 'contemporary' narratives, it's no surprise who Guha is able to pin the
> >> blame on for the tumult of those years, asserting that the honours for
> >> imposing the Emergency should henceforth be equally shared between Indira
> >> Gandhi and Jaya Prakash Narayan!
> >>
> >> For the first 600 pages of his chronicle, Guha piles up the bricks and
> >> artifacts of this structure sort of chronologically, 1947 through to
> >> 1987.
> >> Then quite arbitrarily he announces a change in tack, moving from
> >> 'history'
> >> to 'historically informed journalism'. He approvingly cites the
> >> thirty-year
> >> rule of archives, adding grandly, that as a historian "one also needs a
> >> generation's distance. That much time must elapse before one can place
> >> those
> >> events in a pattern, to see them away and apart, away from the din and
> >> clamour of the present".
> >> The claim of 'history' and 'historically informed journalism' is at once
> >> too
> >> strong for either section of the book. Because if indeed the section from
> >> 1987 onwards is 'historically informed' then shouldn't history actually
> >> inform our understanding? Should this method not prepare us for some
> >> things:
> >> the emergence of the non-Congress governments; of Kanshi Ram-Mayawati and
> >> the BSP; for Liberalisation and India's relationship with the
> >> International
> >> Financial Institutions? Why then does each of these appear on the horizon
> >> of
> >> this book fully formed, with no lead-ins or alerts?
> >>
> >> The relentless, even plodding attempt at being comprehensive, and the
> >> dizzying collation of disparate facts, seems to tire Guha out too, and
> >> then
> >> his usually elegant prose begins to flag, and the ideas it carries become
> >> tedious, eventually grinding down to a sort-of Year Book listing of
> >> significant facts and figures, people and events. In a chapter called
> >> 'Rights' (and which in news-magazine style is followed by sections called
> >> 'Riots', 'Rulers' and 'Riches'), a brief 28 pages races us through Caste,
> >> the Mandal Commission and Dalit assertion; and an update on the conflicts
> >> in
> >> Assam, Punjab, Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland! But wait, there is also
> >> demography and gender – in a single paragraph that begins with "there was
> >> also a vigorous feminist movement" and then deals with the women's
> >> movement
> >> in 15 lines. Tribal rights fares a little better than Women's rights (or
> >> perhaps worse, I'd say fifty-fifty): it just crosses a page, much of it
> >> about the Narmada Bachao Andolan, where the 18 year old history of the
> >> Andolan is reduced to it's leader, "a woman named Medha Patkar", who we
> >> are
> >> told, "organized the tribals in a series of colourful marches… to demand
> >> justice from the mighty government of India". And then, "The leader
> >> herself
> >> engaged in several long fasts to draw attention to the sufferings of her
> >> flock".
> >>
> >> This is India's most well-known non-violent resistance movement, engaged
> >> in
> >> articulating the largest internal displacement in our recent history, and
> >> in
> >> case you had missed anything, it's her flock. Without prejudice to either
> >> Vogue or Cosmopolitan, this condescension could probably never even make
> >> it
> >> to their pages, and defies belief in a work of history written in the
> >> 21st
> >> century. Apart from the fact that the NBA is only one of the hundreds of
> >> people's resistance movements in India, many of whom are in the front
> >> ranks
> >> of the struggle against neo-imperialism.
> >>
> >> Quite early in the book, in assessing the historian KN Pannikar's
> >> opinions
> >> of Mao Zedong, Guha reminds us that "Intellectuals have always had a
> >> curious
> >> fascination for the man of power". He then puts on display his own
> >> unseemly
> >> fascination with Power, with History from Above. (With a few exceptions,
> >> even the small selection of haphazardly organized pictures in the first
> >> edition of the book seems fixated by the man – or woman – of power, from
> >> Lord Mountbatten to Amitabh Bachhan.) This I suppose is symptomatic, this
> >> disinterest, even condescension, towards the fragile and powerless, and
> >> this
> >> is what finally prevents his version of history from illuminating our
> >> times.
> >> Because the powerless may not always be so, and 'historically informed
> >> journalism' would need to tell us what brought Laloo Prasad Yadav, and
> >> Mayawati to us. Even what preceded Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao
> >> Andolan. (What forms of Adivasi and other organization made their
> >> movement
> >> possible? And what in its turn did the NBA make possible, not in the
> >> struggle against large dams alone, but in creating a climate in which the
> >> resistance to SEZs can be contemplated today?)
> >>
> >> For in the privileging of the 'primary', the question is, what are your
> >> 'primary' sources? Will they be restricted to the libraries of the India
> >> Office, London and the Nehru Memorial, New Delhi, or are they going to go
> >> beyond? Will we, for example, look at Urdu papers in Srinagar (and
> >> Muzafarabad) to understand what was happening in Kashmir from 1947 to
> >> 1987?
> >> Will we look at Dalit Hindi language little magazines to understand the
> >> phenomenon of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati? Because if we don't do that, The
> >> History of the World's Largest Democracy – like the Indian State – will
> >> continually be surprised by the events and consequences of the day to day
> >> history of the little in this country.
> >>
> >> In the past, however arguable his ideas, Guhas' prose has been highly
> >> readable. But here, hobbled by some Herculean compulsions to be
> >> comprehensive, to reduce everything down to the manageable scale of one
> >> grand narrative, ambition eventually does damage to his book. Impatient
> >> with
> >> the increasingly workmanlike narrative, but determined to see it to it's
> >> end, I found myself drifting into marginalia: for example Guha's peculiar
> >> obsession with certain kinds of academic pedigree. Jawaharlal Nehru was
> >> of
> >> course a "student at Cambridge", and so was the "Cambridge educated
> >> physicist" Homi Bhabha. Krishna Menon and P N Haksar are identically
> >> "educated at the London School of Economics". P C Mahalanobis is "a
> >> Cambridge-trained physicist and statistician, Saif Tyabji too is "an
> >> engineer educated at Cambridge", and of course, Manmohan Singh has
> >> "written
> >> a Oxford D Phil thesis". I'm then curious as to the reasons why the same
> >> insight is not provided to us for Acharya Kriplani, Ram Manohar Lohia,
> >> Shiekh Abdullah, Zakir Hussain; or for Indira Gandhi, Kanshi Ram,
> >> Mayawati,
> >> or even Medha Patkar? Of course, BR Ambedkar makes it, because he has
> >> "doctorates from Columbia and London University". Jagjiwan Ram scrapes
> >> through because he is the first Harijan from his village to go to High
> >> School, and then onto Benares Hindu University. (Equal Opportunity in the
> >> New Republic!) Kamaraj doesn't, but he does get a fuller description: "K
> >> Kamaraj… born in a low-caste family in the Tamil country… was a thick-set
> >> man with a white mustache… he looked like a cross between Sonny Liston
> >> and
> >> the Walrus". I looked in vain for an equally entertaining description of
> >> former President APJ Abdul Kalam.
> >>
> >> If these obsessions with pedigree were the only things impeding my
> >> reading
> >> of the book, there would be little to worry about. But armed with the
> >> dangerous licence of 'historically informed journalism' for the crucial
> >> last
> >> two decades of his book, he seems at liberty to comment without even the
> >> minimum disciplines of 'history'. To take one example, he draws together
> >> what he thinks of as "the two critical events that… defined the epoch of
> >> competitive fundamentalisms: the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the
> >> exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits" (from Kashmir). He then goes on to make
> >> the
> >> astonishing comment: "Would one trust a state that could not honour its
> >> commitment to protect an ancient place of worship? Would one trust a
> >> community that so brutally expelled those of a different faith?" Neither
> >> needs to be established, both are stated as a priori facts.
> >>
> >> He sees a striking similarity between the two pogroms he acknowledges in
> >> independent India: that directed at the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and at the
> >> Muslims of south Gujarat in 2002. "Both began as a response to a single,
> >> stray act of violence committed by members of the minority community.
> >> Both
> >> proceeded to take a generalized revenge on the minorities as a whole".
> >> Guha
> >> is careful to quickly wipe his sleeve, and draw attention to the
> >> innocence
> >> of the victims, but I do wish he had shared with us what was the "single,
> >> stray act of violence" committed by minority Muslims in Gujarat? After
> >> all,
> >> the jury on the terrible burning of the train in Godhra is still out, is
> >> it
> >> not?
> >> At another point he describes the protests against the acquisition of
> >> land
> >> by the Tatas in Kalinganagar, Orissa, where in the first week of 2006, "a
> >> group of tribals demolished the boundary wall provoking the police to
> >> open
> >> fire. The tribals placed the bodies of these martyrs on the highway and
> >> held
> >> up traffic for a week ". How does he establish who was provoking whom,
> >> and
> >> how?
> >>
> >> Or what can explain his saying, about the aftermath of Sant Harchand
> >> Singh
> >> Longowals' killing, in Punjab in 1988: "The sant's assassination was a
> >> harbinger of things to come with a new generation of terrorists taking up
> >> the struggle for Khalistan". I carefully looked over at least a dozen
> >> references to the troubles in the Punjab in his book, there are never
> >> Militants, always "Terrorists".
> >> The point of bringing together these instances is simply to underline the
> >> inherently establishment nature of the positions taken by Ramachandra
> >> Guha's
> >> History. This sometimes leads him to places the intelligent reporter –
> >> leave
> >> alone the historian – would not want to be stuck in. About the early
> >> 1990s
> >> in Kashmir he says: "As the valley came to resemble a zone of occupation,
> >> popular sentiment rallied to the jihadi cause. Terrorists mingled easily
> >> with the locals, and were given refuge beforeor after their actions".
> >> Once
> >> again: hugely contested words like 'Jehadi' and 'Terrorist', which
> >> scholars
> >> the world over are cracking their brains over, slip off like the slipshod
> >> words of television anchors.
> >>
> >> And finally, on the difficulties of nurturing secularism in India in the
> >> aftermath of Partition, Guha says: "The creation of an Islamic state on
> >> India's borders was a provocation to those Hindus who themselves wished
> >> to
> >> merge faith with state". Does one need to repeat here that the RSS, with
> >> its
> >> fascist ideology borrowed directly from Mussolini, and it's ideal of a
> >> Hindu-rashtra, was set up in 1925, and long preceded the idea of the
> >> Islamic
> >> State of Pakistan. But Guha dives in head first: "My own view – speaking
> >> as
> >> a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists
> >> there
> >> will be Hindu fundamentalists in India". Can such a completely ahistoric
> >> assertion make its place into a history? And then remain unchallenged by
> >> historians, commentators and reviewers in the India of 2007?
> >>
> >> Incredibly, in the last few pages of the book, Guha does admit that only
> >> in
> >> three-quarters of the "total land mass claimed by the Indian nation" does
> >> the elected government enjoy a legitimacy of power and authority, and
> >> only
> >> here do they feel themselves to be part of a single nation. How then does
> >> this admission that in a quarter of the World's Largest Democracy people
> >> are
> >> substantially alienated from the Nation sit with his insistence on
> >> phiphty-phiphty? At what point will our historians ring the alarm bells?
> >> When Half the nation is holding the Other Half by force? When it really
> >> reaches fifty-fifty?
> >>
> >> From the books' well-publicised entry into the world we learn that the
> >> author has spent the last eight years working on it. I too seem to have
> >> coincidentally spent the same years ruminating on the World's Largest
> >> Democracy, not as a historian, but as a film-maker, and not with the
> >> grand
> >> purpose of this book for certain, but just fishing in it's troubled
> >> margins:
> >> first in the Narmada valley, and then in Kashmir. Like many others who
> >> are
> >> somewhat bewildered at events around us, and have failed to join in the
> >> celebration of democracy this August, the book is an important marker. It
> >> demands to be read seriously, and it's flaws and omissions ask to be
> >> taken
> >> seriously by us. Because, in our tumultuous times, when change is fast
> >> forcing all of us to choose sides, fifty-fifty has to be seen as too
> >> cautious an answer, so safe as to translate into an almost mathematically
> >> calibrated cowardice.
> >>
> >> What then does the book represent? It's timed for the celebrations of the
> >> 60th year of Indian Independence, and arrives amidst the giddy hosannas
> >> to
> >> India's success as a democracy, and our newly unfolding status as an
> >> emerging economic power. The recent enthusiasm to burnish our 'shining'
> >> democracy is, as we all know, tightly tied in with the desire to set
> >> India
> >> up as a next destination of global capital. (Essentially, India 1, China
> >> 0).
> >> So the grinding poverty, the dispossession, the cruelty and oppression
> >> are
> >> made charming, and discord and chaos is turned into a tribute to our
> >> democratic credentials. For all the book's sophistry then, Ramachandra
> >> Guha
> >> emerges as the chronicler of India Shining. In this season where we
> >> celebrate Indian democracy, surely a reassuring book to pass on to CEOs
> >> and
> >> investors at the next Davos.
> >>
> >> (*Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary film-maker, whose recent film
> >> Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom) is about the idea of freedom in
> >> Kashmir, and the degrees of freedom in India*.)
> >> _________________________________________
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