Who is the custodian of Indian history?

Editor’s note: One of India’s greatest living historians Ramachandra Guha has written an unusual autobiography—titled ‘The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir’. It unfurls as an epistolary conversation between the author and his lifelong editor—the irascible and brilliant Rukun Advani. In the excerpt below, they argue bitterly over Guha’s attempt to save the Nehru archives from the clutches of the Gandhi family. Published with permission from Juggernaut. 

Between 2008 and 2011, I was involved in a campaign to save my favourite historical archive, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. I had worked in the NMML since the early 1980s, and had spent three memorable years there as a Fellow. All my books had been based to a lesser or greater degree on its manuscript collections and runs of old newspapers.

The NMML had two outstanding scholar-administrators as its first directors: B.R. Nanda and Ravinder Kumar. They were followed by two bureaucrats, who were competent but undistinguished. When the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance came to power in 2004, the director’s post lay vacant. I sent a note to the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, outlining the importance of the NMML, and urging him to constitute a committee of experts to choose the next director through an open and transparent process. He read the note but was powerless to act on it, since the Congress president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, had decided that, as the place was named after Jawaharlal Nehru, she must, as the keeper of the family’s legacy, have the final say about how it would be run.

Unlike Dr Singh, Mrs Gandhi was no scholar. She was prone to promote people on the basis of loyalty, not competence. So, advised by her acolytes, she chose a student of the historian Bipan Chandra, himself a long-standing Congress Party loyalist, as the next director of the NMML. The new director, instead of encouraging historical research, paid back her dues by involving the Congress Party in the NMML’s programmes and events. Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul was even allowed to hold Youth Congress meetings in a place that had hitherto focused on scholarship and been kept free of partisan political influence. Rather than using the funds of the institution to upgrade its research facilities – getting new microfilm readers, for example – they were splurged on such things as parties for schoolchildren on Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary.

I was by then based in Bangalore, but went to Delhi several times a year, working for long spells at the NMML. I found the once motivated staff utterly demoralized. Seeing a place I loved deteriorating so swiftly moved me to action. I poured out some of my anguish in private letters to one of Sonia Gandhi’s close friends, Suman Dubey, who had been taught by the same teachers as I at the Doon School, and who had studied at St. Stephen’s with one of my uncles. I got dozens of scholars to sign a petition asking that the original mandate of the NMML be honoured, and urging that the ruling Congress Party and its acolytes be kept away from the place.

I have written about that campaign in detail elsewhere. Here, let me only reproduce a letter I wrote to Suman Dubey in May 2010, about a particularly egregious example of the misuse of the NMML’s funds. My letter read:

Dear Suman,

 

I was recently sent a copy of the NMML calendar. I was disappointed by the production quality — as a bird lover, you must have noticed too that half the pictures were out of focus. But there is a larger question — should scarce public money be spent on this kind of product? It may be that a printing budget had to be spent — then why was this not spent on finally sending to the press the two volumes of the Rajagopalachari papers that for several years are awaiting printing, and for which very many scholars and ordinary readers are waiting? Or it may have come from a general budget, in which case we may ask, would not the money be better spent on books and journals for the library, or on a new microfilm reader? You may also have noticed that the calendar starts in April, which means that hardly anyone is going to use it anyway.

 

with regards 

Ram

I had bcc’ed, Rukun, who wrote back:

Ram, hi,

 

I too got this wonderful NMML calendar. I don’t know why you are so critical of it. I love it for its appropriateness. Surely even you can see that it is the only calendar in the world which starts with 1 April — such an auspicious day for the dispensation running the NMML. So heartwarmingly self-deprecating of them to alert us to the fact of All Fools. Such a nice thumbnosing of Oxford’s All Souls. 

 

To think of printing a calendar which begins in the middle of the year is breathtakingly imaginative. Only an Indian babu of the highest pedigree could have thought of this. It can set a wonderful precedent for babudom generally and be sent off to all ministries as a reminder that the Christian era is passé. The BJP will love it. Others who have to learn to move with the times will learn that the year isn’t a year unless it is seen as a financial year. Future editions of this work of brilliance can show Jan in red, Feb in orange, and March in green to remind babus they need to rush forward and spend their budget. 

 

I’m in a tizzy thinking of all the many possibilities opened up by this calendar. It is not a waste of money. Nehru would have loved it. He would have given one to Edwina, I’m sure. And [the Director] can give it to all the little children who come to the NMML baal melas. Nehru loved children you see, and now his house is devoted to the cause of All Fools and children. A visionary new direction has been given to the institution. You are wrong to cavil.

 

Love 

Rukun

… Perhaps the most heated of all the political arguments that Rukun and I had was sparked by a piece written by someone else altogether. In April 2012, the young historian Dinyar Patel wrote an essay in the Hindu about the pathetic state of India’s archives, and what could be done to improve them. Rukun sent me a link to the piece, unprompted, with this comment:

Anguish by someone who sounds like one of your acolytes. The only solution is to recall the East India Company. Or hand over the full contents of all our archives and museums to the Japanese government, or the British Museum. Even the Malaysians and Cambodians would do a better job preserving our heritage than this criminal Indian state.

I replied that in this case the state was ‘apathetic rather than criminal’. Dinyar, I told Rukun, was ‘a scholar of much zest and intelligence, and a winning charm . . . He believes that incremental improvements are possible, and so do I . . . There are good and bad elements in the Indian state, as in humanity itself.’

This exchange was taking place soon after I had had a horrific car accident in the Nilgiris, and suffered multiple fractures. So I now reminded Rukun:

[M]y life was saved last week in part by army doctors, our mutual friend [the civil servant] Keshav [Desiraju] has single-handedly changed the law so that disabled people in India can live a more dignified life, and many people in southern Tamil Nadu still remember the Sikh and Bihari SDMs [Sub-Divisional Magistrates} who did heroic rescue work after the tsunami. Your cynicism is unwarranted (also slightly self-serving) – although typing is very painful for me it has provoked me enough to write this!

Rukun replied:

Curious about ‘self-serving’. I would think all outlooks are in some way self-serving, yours included, unless you’re Mahatma Gandhi. And there seems to me no cynicism involved in seeing the Indian state as largely criminal – it is apparent to most that people like Keshav are aberrations, and your valorization of the aberration over the criminal norm could seem a form of cynical defence of your own class and the personal comfort zones from which Fabian meliorism such as yours normally flows.

 

What you consider my cynicism seems to me not cynicism but the fairly normal response of most Indians to what is most loathsome about India in the ordinary experience of most people — the state and all its tentacles. Nor is much of India nationalist in the admirable way you can be. If visa laws permitted free migration, 75% of Indians would opt to get the hell out of here. Our class would not, since we live in well-cushioned zones. So in fact your kind of meliorist nationalism could seem cynical to more ordinary people like me.

 

In the context of a world taken over by multinational corporations, what is wrong with suggesting that some state sectors too should be outsourced instead of being over-protected by myopic nationalism? Our museums and archives would be better run if they were not controlled by Indians who have for 60 years proven their incompetence, but maybe by Japs and Cambodians who have proved they can handle these things. 

 

That’s simply a humanist position from which competence is valued over nationality. Where does cynicism and ‘self- serving’ come into this? I want things to be better in our museums and archives as much as you do, I merely don’t agree with you that the way to make it happen is by depending on wonderful oddities like our friends, who are much of the time prevented from being effective by the normality of the criminal state surrounding them.