Three publishing houses fought tooth and nail two years back to acquire the rights to publish author Ramchandra Guha's series of seven books. Penguin snagged the rights over a whopping one crore deal. With the first book in the series out, Guha spoke to us about including only nineteen luminaries out of the long list he had in mind, about excluding Marxists and why Rahul Gandhi needs to read his great grandfather's letters
Three publishing houses fought tooth and nail two years back to acquire the rights to publish author Ramchandra Guha's series of seven books. Penguin snagged the rights over a whopping one crore deal. With the first book in the series out, Guha spoke to us about including only nineteen luminaries out of the long list he had in mind, about excluding Marxists and why Rahul Gandhi needs to read his great grandfather's lettersIt was a mere coincidence when cricket buffs were enlisting the evergreen cricket stars excluded in the dream team chosen by cricinfo.com, last week, the literati was busy counting statesmen not included in Ramachandra Guha's just launched Makers of Modern India, a book introducing the leaders who made India's history were also writers. Guha, a historian and a columnist is also a cricket writer. But it is another striking coincidence.
In fact, amidst all the hoopla around Guha's latest work is that within a week of the books launch, it has already kicked up debates on exclusion and inclusion of visionaries in the top-ten-ranking like list, while readers took out time to refresh their memory to recall the otherwise forgotten national heroes.
Theoretically dividing the country into regions, the vocal chords were strained getting into advocating Bengal verses Maharashtra, North India verses South India and so on. Guha reiterates this by saying, "I didn't start out by debunking Bengalis, but the Maharashtrian social reformers played a fundamental role in shaping modern India."
Guha admits on omitting the inclusion of eminent luminaries, the most conspicuous being the entire band of Indian Marxists, besides Swami Vivekananda, Sardar Patel, and Subhas Chandra Bose, and reasons, "the space was limited to 537 pages. It would be good if someone takes it forward and comes up with subsequent volumes to speak about the left outs."
If that was so, how did the Hindu supremacist MS Golwalkar get space in the list of nineteen luminaries, we wonder? Guha is quick to share, "I feel particularly sorry not to have found space for Dadabhai Naoroji. But, one can be sure the list would not end with Naoroji. The omission of Indian Marxist was deliberate as he thinks "their work has been mostly derivative." He quotes Anthony Parel saying 'Marxists were and are bent on changing India on Marx's terms; they simply refuse to change Marxism on India's terms.'
Guha adds that Patel and Bose were left out because of the paucity of original ideas contained in their published works. He argues that the influence of Aurobindo Ghose and Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan never really extended beyond middle class; nor did it last much beyond their death, while the magnetism of Vivekanada and Dayananda Saraswati had passed.
The question remains on the book being only a compilation of the works of the leaders of yester years, while Guha's reasoning is not convincing enough. At a point of time, before he started working on Makers, he had thought of writing the book on his own, but restrained himself after imagining the voluminous size that the work would have assumed after including his writing and letters of the original heroes. Guha justifies, "I had written elaborate introductions to each part of the book and it covered one third of the volume. But, it definitely does not fulfil my appetite as a writer and it might leave the reader unsatisfied."
Though Guha might have given pride of place to the nineteen prominent leaders of the past, coming to the present times, he does not mince his words either when he speaks about today's politicians. His first and foremost advice is to cub politician Rahul Gandhi where he says, "Historical illiteracy will prove detrimental for our politicians and that is why I would want Rahul to read the letters of Nehru."u00a0
Significant leaders of our times like PV Narasimha Rao, AB Vajpayee and V P Singh, will perhaps never find place in books on makers and shapers of India because theyu00a0 could not contribute their original thoughts in shaping the country as a modern India according to Guha. However, Guha does consider Barack Obama as a political thinker because he is a scholar who has written about himself. India for him is a fifty-fifty democracy right now and has a long way to go before reaching a near perfect set up.
