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BOOKS
Hey Ram!
Thank
heaven for the non-Delhi intellectual
By
Ashok Malik
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AN ANTHRO-POLOGIST
AMONG THE MARXISTS
By Ramachandra Guha
Permanent Black
Price: Rs 450
Pages: 267 |
One
of the attributes of a good book is its ability to introduce to the reader
a character he or she would actually like to meet. Jane Austen gave me
Elizabeth Bennet. Ramachandra Guha does two better. In An Anthropologist
Among the Marxists and Other Essays he writes with feeling and often personal
experience, about C.S. Venkatachar, J.C. Kumarappa and Philip Spratt.
The first
was an outstanding public servant in the best traditions of the Indian
Civil Service, unafraid in his later years to call the Quit India movement
a "maladroit move" and refusing to see "Jinnah as a tragic
figure nor geographical partition as a tragedy". The second was a
Gandhian blessed, like his master, with robust common sense, a man whose
Report on Rural Development Work in Madurai District (1956) has Guha terming
him the "prophet and pioneer of the contemporary environmental movement".
Indeed, the essay on Kumarappa is a revelation on how Gandhi's village
renewal ideas can work.
The third,
Spratt, was a British communist whom India converted into a Gandhian,
a Royist (M.N., it may be clarified) and finally, a capitalist. He helped
edit "the weekly Mysindia, described by one who then read it as the
'Blitz of the Right, only more intelligent'" and recommended in 1951
that India "give up the valley and keep Jammu and Ladakh" for
"the army would otherwise be in Kashmir forever".
The three
were different men, with varying sensibilities. What united them was a
certain cerebral honesty, an open mind and a willingness to agree to disagree.
That truly is where the merit of Guha's book lies. A celebration of annals,
anecdotes and angularities. It is also, perhaps consciously, a tribute
to the non-Delhi intellectual, the sort of person whose sense of proportion
has not evaporated in a hothouse atmosphere.
It's a mix
of the qualities of his heroes that makes Guha such a fine essayist and
exponent of an art India is forgetting: writing the obituary. There's
one strongly-felt objection though. On page 261, with six to go before
close of play, Guha reaffirms Michael Manley's selection of Jack Hobbs
and Sunil Gavaskar as openers for the Earth All-Time XI. Hey Ram, what
about Victor Trumper?
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