On Modern Indian Sensibilities

Culture, Politics, History

Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Sarvani Gooptu

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351190497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book consists of incisive and imaginative readings of culture, politics, and history – and their intersections – in eastern India from the 16th to the 20th century. Focusing especially on Assam, Odisha, Bengal, and their margins, the volume explores Indo-Islamic cultures of rule as located on the cusp of Mughal-cosmopolitan and regional–local formations.

Tracking sensibilities of time and history, senses of events and persons, and productions of the past and the present, the volume unravels intimate expressions of aesthetics and scandals, heroism and martyrdom, and voice and gender. It examines key questions of the interchanges between literary cultures and contending nationalisms, culture and cosmopolitanism, temporality and mythology, literature and literacy, history and modernity, and print culture and popular media.

The book offers grounded and connected accounts of a large, important region, usually studied in isolation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of history, literature, politics, sociology, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

Part I

History and historians

1
Gautam, ever my friend

Dipesh Chakrabarty

There comes a time in human life – if blessed you have been with a longish tenure on this fragile and suffering planet of ours – when the mantle of old age falls on you. Long before you see it, others begin to see it in you that strange something we call ‘age’, until one day you begin to find yourself in the company of Yeats’ ‘old men’, their ‘hands like claws, … their knees twisted like the old thorn-trees by the water,’ admiring themselves ‘in the water’, and muttering: ‘Everything alters, and one by one we drop away,’ and regretting that ‘all that is beautiful drifts away like the water.’ Some, facing finitude, proudly prepare to ‘spit in the face of Time’ that has transfigured them, for ‘the beauties’ they have loved are still fresh in their memory while some others turn to their friends as time’s ‘bitter flood’ rises, for it is only in their friends’ eyes that their own beauty remains embalmed. But all this, ultimately, is to no avail; whatever the means the old may seek in dealing with age, they have but one path left open in the end. Yeats describes that journey cruelly and yet so beautifully: ‘to wither into the truth’.

For a lucky few, however, the slide into ‘the truth’ is neither so inexorable nor so fast. There are other possible moments that can arrest the slide, and books such as this one represent one of them. Here, the erudition, research, and writings of a venerable scholar, in addition to his role as a teacher inspiring generations of historical researchers – in a word, his scholarly life – are being celebrated by his younger friends, former students, and colleagues. This is not a meeting of old men looking at themselves in the waters that end up taking everything away! I have been invited to say a few introductory words that only older friends of the scholar can offer. I feel honoured and privileged that I was so invited to these celebrations, where even the young who fell in an untimely manner to the ravages of time also take their place.

Let me begin, then, by speaking of my memories of my friend. The year was 1965 and the place, Presidency College, Calcutta, now a university. A fresh group of first-year students had arrived, their faces reflecting the excitement of their arrival in what was still considered a truly serious educational institution with hallowed and ancient memories stretching back to the beginnings of British rule in Calcutta. But this was also a year that eventually marked a departure from the traditions of the College. Rumblings of postcolonial discontent breached the seclusion in which this scholarly institution preferred to find itself. The state of West Bengal was in the grip of an acute food crisis. A series of mass strikes and demonstrations had been unleashed against the existing government by the newly established Communist Party of India (Left) that was born in 1964. India’s 1962 war with China had laid bare the hollowness of the official nationalism that was peddled by the state-owned media. The Chinese Communist Party had split with that of the Soviet Union. China was now on the verge of the later infamous but then-romanticised Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that was to be inaugurated in 1966. In a few months, in February 1967, the Congress Party would be defeated in the polls for the first time ever in the history of the state since independence. Some of us, barely 16 or 17, arrived in the College with the drum-beat of ‘revolution’ in our ears even though we had no idea of what a revolution in reality might look lie. It did not matter whether one studied science or humanities. The spirit of rebellion was everywhere and often disliked for that reason. The College portico was, as now, a favourite gathering spot for students who, in those years, would speak in the same breath of both the palpable political unrest in the state that called some of them to action and of the brilliant young students who had joined the College as ‘freshmen’ (the Calcutta word was ‘freshers’), especially those who were also interested in revolution.

Gautam was one such talked-about person. I was not directly in his class. I was a student of science while Gautam studied the humanities, specialising in history. The first thing I remember being told about Gautam – I don’t remember who told me though I would like to believe it was our friend and senior, Amal Sanyal – that there was this brilliant new student in history who, in spite of a congenital stutter, could recite fluently and passionately long poems by Tagore. Gautam’s phenomenal memory was becoming proverbial. And soon there were other stories circulating about Gautam. One I remember concerned how terrified our young teachers of history were of this new prodigy. Many lecturers would teach history from the books they had read and not base their teaching on any original research. Gautam, apparently, would sneak away between classes to the West Bengal State Archives on Bhabani Datta Lane, a narrow and foul-smelling street bordering the College on its north, and consult ‘original’ documents bearing on the beginnings of British colonial rule in Bengal. He would then catch his young lecturers out in class by showing how the teacher’s interpretation of events could be challenged with the help of ‘original’, archival documents! (Gautam would later develop a particular way of saying this English word that we would tease him about – he said it with very Bengali vowels and hard consonants as dokument, his ‘d’, and ‘k’ and ‘t’ un-aspirated). As is well known, ‘original’ documents have a certain cache in the world of history, and often the poor lecturers, caught up in the busy schedule of classes and other obligations, got little time to consult them. I was told that some lecturers would appeal to Gautam at the beginning of their class for him to go and sit at the last bench as they felt terrorised to see him sitting right under their noses, never hesitating to flaunt his superior knowledge of the archives! I am sure these were apocryphal stories. The real Gautam would surely have been much kinder to and appreciative of his teachers (for Gautam is very capable of true and generous appreciation). But the stories speak of the formidable reputation that Gautam had acquired as an undergraduate student. We were all somewhat in awe of his knowledge.

Gautam and I were members of the same political organisation of students – the Presidency College branch of the Bengal Provincial Students’ Federation, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). We were both involved in organising a strike at the College that went on for a few months in the winter of 1966–1967, the event that radicalised us all. We became believers of the Maoist-Chinese line in international communist movement and were sceptical of both Soviet socialism and of the two main Communist parties of the country – the CPI and CPI(M). We saw them all as ‘revisionists’. This scepticism – and some historic peasant-tribal insurgencies in northern Bengal – would later result in the formation in 1969 of a third CPI, this time qualified as ‘(M-L)’ or Marxist-Leninist or, really, Maoist in orientation. I had in the meanwhile dropped out of the movement once the College strike was over, not because I was any wiser than my comrades, but out of the sheer fear of losing all the comforts of my middle-class life. My fellow-students decided to leave the city for the countryside to organise a peasant-revolution on the basis of the thoughts of Mao. I failed to follow them but remained a sympathiser. Gautam was kind to me. When he became the editor of the College magazine – quite a prestigious position to occupy – he published a poem I wrote expressing some of my feelings on failing to heed the call of the revolution that I still believed in.

My failure at becoming a Maoist revolutionary did mean that I lost touch with Gautam somewhat, though I kept hearing stories about him. He had become a Maoist or, as the Indian term went, a Naxalite. I used to hear about how Gautam still remained a brilliant student – unlike many whose academic careers were destroyed by their involvement in revolutionary politics – and how, when asked at his admissions interview at the Nehru University as to whom he considered the greatest historian of the 20th century, Gautam had apparently answered, without blinking an eyelid, ‘Why? Of course, Mao Zedong!’ We also heard stories about Gautam being arrested from Howrah Station just as he was about to catch a train to Delhi to join his M. Phil class at JNU. The climax was the story was, of course, how the Police Commissioner in Calcutta soon got a call from one of the best economists of the country threatening that if the Commissioner did not release Gautam immediately, the Prime Minister of the country would call requesting such a release!

All those stories only enhanced Gautam’s image in our eyes. Revolutionary, Maoist, and outstanding student of history whom all academics fervently admired, regardless of their political opinions – what could be more awe-striking than a single person combining in himself so many impressive traits? So when, around 1972, I entered the portals of the social sciences – through a complicated history that does not have to detain us here – I found myself drawn to a group of friends among whom Gautam was one of the central figures (others included Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Ajit Chaudhuri, and Shubhendu Dasgupta). The School of Social Sciences at the JNU had already developed an aura. Gautam had studied at JNU and was now in the process of completing his M. Phil thesis (given its size and depth of research, it could have been a Ph.D thesis as well). Old Naxalite friends, such as the young economists mentioned earlier, who had now – their revolution ‘crushed’ by the early 1970s – come back to the fold of academics, started an unusually stimulating magazine in Bengali, Anya Artha (meaning, ‘other meanings’ or ‘other economics’, or both), dedicated to the discussion of the social sciences. Gautam was a key member of this group. He had already published a book on Charlie Chaplin, as part of a film club movement these ex-Naxalites friends had set up aiming to introduce radical/revolutionary films to the city. Gautam began to write in Bengali a series of articles in Anya Artha on the nature of agricultural economics in Mughal India. I was among the many avid readers of these essays that Gautam later put together into a major Bengali-language book on the Mughal period. The book, as far as I know, still enjoys great popularity with students.

It was from around these years, 1973–1974, that I began to get to know Gautam more intimately. We both got temporary fellowships in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta in 1974 and joined the Centre on the same day. We shared the same office for the next couple or so years. The Centre was a very young institution, having been initiated a year or two before. I would see Gautam every day, back from a quick trip to the archives or the National library, or on his way out to them, or rifling through his notes on the history of Murshidabad (the subject of his M. Phil thesis) and muttering frustrations with historian’s methods: ‘I know how much ferrymen charged to take people across the Bhagirathi, I remember taking notes on a piece of paper, but now I can’t find the damned paper on which I wrote!’ I would later come to realise that this was an everyday problem of the researcher in history. Watching every such little moment of Gautam’s life – his elation at having stumbled upon some new sources, his frustration at having lost some piece of paper on which he had taken notes, his strongly expressed disagreements or agreements with fellow-scholars – I learnt a great deal about the habitus of the archives-centred historian. Gautam – and all my accomplished friends in the social sciences in these years, many of them working at the Centre itself – became informal teachers to me. I doubt that without their everyday help I would have ever learnt about the deep pleasures of research in the archives.

Gautam, sadly, lost both his parents soon after we joined the Centre. Mashima [aunt; lit. mother’s sister], as we called Gautam’s mother, was a very affectionate person, friends with all of Gautam’s friends, and also proud, legitimately, of her son’s achievements in spite of having some obvious congenital disabilities. I did not know Gautam’s father as well as I did his mother. Mashima died of cancer, and her death deeply affected Gautam and his two very admirable brothers, Shibaji and Sujata. Gautam’s father died soon after in circumstances that had something of the absurd about it – but that incident, not without some elements of dark humour in it, will need a separate telling. I should mention, however, something that impressed me deeply about Gautam and his brothers at this time. It so happened that Gautam’s father married again within about six months’ of Mashima’s death, but then died suddenly within a few hours of getting married. The marriage had not been consummated. As far as I knew, the new wife, from a strictly legal point of view, had no rights on Gautam’s father’s estate under these unfortunate conditions. Yet, I know personally that Gautam, Shibaji, and Sujata sold their parental house and willingly gave their stepmother all that she would deserve under the law if the marriage had developed a social life. I could not but laud the brothers’ sense of justice and their humanity. I don’t know how many of my acquaintances would have done the same under similar circumstances. Not many, I suspect.

Gautam’s life picked up momentum at this stage. He began to teach at the University of Calcutta where he met his future wife, Narayani. I feel extremely honoured even today by the fact that when they decided to get married, they chose me to be one of their legal witnesses. A simple civil ceremony saw Gautam and Narayani announced man and woman. They now lived their unpretentious but scholarly lives in a house that Gautam rented in a slum on B. L. Saha Road. The house, which belonged to a trade union leader, became a place of pilgrimage for many young and old historians, students of history, editors of magazines, and members of Calcutta literati generally. I was by them a doctoral student in Australia. On every trip, I would spend as much as time as possible seeing Gautam. Later, when the opportunity presented itself, I asked Gautam and Narayani – and Manji came soon after they got married – if they would like live downstairs from my parents, a proposal they, to my great happiness, accepted. This was in 1993. From then on, until the time they bought their present house in the Golf Green area of Tollygunge (2002), I would see Gautam every morning whenever I would be back visiting my parents. I have very precious memories of these years, especially of our early-morning conversations over cups of tea. We ranged easily from one topic to another: from contemporary theory to subaltern studies, from Mughal to modern history of India, from historiography to un-trodden areas of South Asian history. By this time, Gautam and I were both members of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a project that began under the inspiring leadership of Ranajit Guha in 1982. Gautam and I worked on different topics, but our thoughts intersected deeply, and Gautam was still my teacher in many areas where my knowledge was scanty.

Gautam’s work in the four decades that we have been friends moved from an active interest in 18th century and before to the 19th and 20th centuries. I think the world would have gained even more from Gautam if he had pursued his interests in Farsi language and Farsi-language-based sources. But there remained certain constants in his theoretical interests. Peasants, subaltern classes, and their rebellions have remained a lifelong interest of his as have been Islam and Mughal and Muslim history. His collection of essays, Iman o nishan, remains a pioneering study in this latter area. Or think of his interest in Kantanama, an 18th-century text in praise of a zamindar that he analysed in the pages of Subaltern Studies in order to explore the psychology of subordination. In the 1990s and later, he also expanded his interests to include analyses of printed texts (such as almanacs), bat-tala publications, the history of advertisement, of tea-drinking in Bengal, and many other aspects of popular and print culture. And there are many more studies to come, on Gopal Bhanr, for instance, or another topic in which his interest has been well known for decades: the art and the dying practice of kathakata. Gautam’s work now combines, method-wise, both archival-library and field research, and his leading status in this area was recognised by the award to him of the highly prestigious Ananda-puraskar (Ananda-prize) in 2011. This is, of course, not a review of all of Gautam’s many, many publications. My intention was to suggest by some means the tremendous vortex of energy that he has been in the world of research, and that too without taking into account the numerous researchers he has helped and supervised. For many of us, Gautam has been a walking encyclopaedia of information – on books, sources, latest research, in short, a living search-engine or a bibliography!

But Gautam is also a character! I would like to conclude these observations on his life – if I may – by sharing with the reader some of the funny stories that go around about Gautam. These have been around from the very first time I met him. Gautam, one could say, is a much-storied man. Besides, anecdotes play a very important role in cultures of memory in the Indian sub-continent. Sometimes these are stories about Gautam’s heroic efforts in life – and the applause is fully deserved – and sometimes these are funny stories about the man, a subject of friendly banter and un-malicious humour that only loving friends can offer. Let me share some of the more humorous ones.

Firstly, there are those that are about Gautam the historian, his undying trust in ‘original’ or ‘archival’ documents – a historian would not believe anything or any claim unless it was supported by documents. Once, I am told, that in our 20s, Gautam, our friend Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, and some others were walking the narrow street where my parents’ house was located when they came upon – and this bit itself belongs to the murky and suppressed history of sexuality and hygiene in Calcutta – some blood-stained home-made sanitary napkins lying among the rubbish usually heaped on Calcutta roads. Struck by the sight of blood in these twisted pieces of rags, Gautam asked others what these were, at which point Raghab proceeded to explain to him the whole phenomenon of menstruation. Gautam was stunned by these facts about the female body. Could all this be true? Convinced that Raghab was having him on, telling him a cock and bull story simply to embarrass him with some sexual references, he finally declared with aplomb: ‘I don’t believe it!’ It is Raghab’s retort that has remained with us. ‘Yes, why would you believe it?’ Raghab is said to have shot back. ‘You did not find this in a dokument in the archive, did you?’ The story may have been apocryphal like many of the other stories I recount here. But we loved telling this one at parties, and Gautam would laugh benignly at his friends’ attempt to portray his historian-self as quite a character (a Jadunath Sarkar would have been proud of Gautam)!

Or there was also the story Gautam’s boarding a plane for Agartala when he intended to fly to Imphal to take up a job at the north-east centre of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Apparently, he realised his mistake when the pilot announced the destination and his commotion led the pilot to abort the take-off and let Gautam jump off of the plane – so Gautam himself tells me, reassuring me that it was a small aircraft – while it was still on the runway!

But my next story is not apocryphal, for I witnessed this event first-hand. A whole group of us friends went to Agra in 1974. Gautam was the Mughal specialist among us. We had asked him to show us around the Mughal monuments. And he had brought along published, specialist works on Fatehpur Sikri and the fort. I remember in particular books published by the Archaeological Survey and one authored by S.A.A. Rizvi, if I am not mistaken. On the eve of our trip to Fatehpur Sikri, Gautam read up with care and made notes on what he might tell us about these monuments. When we went there, however, we were obliged to take on a local Hindi-speaking guide (as he simply would not stop pestering us otherwise). Every time we entered a room of the building or looked at an aspect of it, the guide would tell us a little history of the place, unaware that there was a specialist historian amongst us. And every time the guide finished his little lecture in Hindi, Gautam would begin by shaking his head and remarking in Bangla, ‘bhul, shob bhul. Wrong, it’s all wrong.’ The guide did not understand Bangla, but he soon caught on to what was going on. I still remember the expression on Gautam’s face and our collective laughter when, on entering a new room, our guide turned to Gautam before saying a word and said in Hindi, ‘pehle aap bataiye. You go first!’

Then there are stories about Gautam’s English. For some strange reason worthy of research – or maybe there are already studies of this phenomenon – Gautam’s spoken English has been, as they say in a good-humour spirit in Urdu, masha’Allah. His use of written English and of theoretical concepts was completely precise and highly sophistic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: histories and sensibilities
• Part I History and historians
• Part II Objects, metaphors, temporalities
• Part III Memory, politics, culture
• Part IV Literature, nation, modern
• Index