Today’s politicians are ignorant of our legacy: Ramachandra Guha

Speaking at the launch of Makers of Modern India at the Taj West End on Thursday, historian Ramachandra Guha said that contemporary politicians are completely ignorant of the legacies they claim to represent. Guha is the editor of this anthology of writings of 19 thinker-activists of modern India, published by Penguin Books India.

Stalwarts such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as unjustly forgotten thinkers such as Hamid Dalwai and Tarabai Shinde have been brought together in this anthology.

Guha said that the book resulted from an attempt to find out what contributed to Indian democracy and pluralism in the 19th and 20 centuries. He said that Indian democracy owed a lot to ‘proximate traditions’, rather than emperors such as Ashoka and Akbar.
Guha claimed that Makers of Modern India is the public face of the Indian political tradition. The authors brought together in the anthology are relevant to contemporary realities, he said. To illustrate his point, Guha quoted BR Ambedkar, the maker of the Indian Constitution: “Bhakti in politics will put you on the road to degradation,” he quoted Ambedkar as saying, and added that the Gandhis and the Modis of today would do well to remember Ambedkar's words.

Guha wondered why no politicians today think like Ambedkar. Why, asked Guha, do today's politicians lack intelligence, literary skill and moral courage? Why cannot they tell the truth, like their predecessors? Guha said that readers of Makers of Modern India would raise these questions too. “The book is meant for every thinking Indian, and also for politicians," Guha said.

Girish Karnad, playwright and author, launching the Makers of Modern India, asked why Karnataka, which had been responsive to ideas from across the world, had not produced a thinker-activist that equalled the stature of Guha’s 19. Thinking aloud, Karnad said that the dearth of this kind of writing in the state could be attributed to the fact that Mysore was under the thumb of British rule; what now constitutes the state was divided into four parts, and there was little interaction between these units.

Karnad said Guha had made the intellectual life of India vibrant. He recalled the historian’s confrontations with Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and Gayatri Spivak, a post-colonial theorist. “Guha throws up answers and raises questions. Makers of Modern India, too, does that,” Karnad said.