How Ramachandra Guha Became an Essayist

Scholars write books to impress their professional colleagues, and they write newspaper articles to reach out to the aam admi. Beyond the short, pungent, often polemical article of a thousand words or less and the long, solemn, sometimes boring book of four hundred pages or more is a third literary genre less often practised by scholars. This is the personal essay. 

I published my first newspaper article in 1982, and my first book in 1989. I came to the essay rather later, and altogether by accident. In the summer of 1994, I was sitting in my office in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, of which I was then a Fellow. I had come to escape the heat – the NMML, being in Lutyens’ New Delhi, was air-conditioned, whereas our home was not – and to study in solitude. The book I wanted to read, quietly and with intensity, was a collection of academic essays by a distinguished American scholar of India named Bernard Cohn.

I admired Cohn a great deal, because of the originality of his work, and because of the ease with which he transcended disciplinary boundaries. He was trained as an anthropologist, and had done fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh in the 1950s, exploring the complexities of caste on the ground. As he grew older, he had taken increasingly to archival research, studying the social and institutional impact of British colonialism on India. 

The book of Bernard Cohn’s that I wanted to get away from home to read ran to some seven hundred pages in print. Published by the Oxford University Press – then the world’s leading scholarly imprint – it brought together some two dozen research papers written over a period of thirty years, and first published in academic journals and books. The titles of some of the chapters give a sense of their seriousness and sobriety – they include ‘Networks and Centres in the Integration of Indian Civilization’, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, ‘The Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India’, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’. 

As these titles suggest, each paper drew on deep research followed by careful reflection. Each paper was heavily footnoted; each was addressed to an academic audience alone. However, Professor Cohn had chosen to begin the volume with an introductory essay written in a (slightly) less solemn vein. This drew not on his archival or field research but on his own professional experiences as what he called ‘an anthropologist among the historians’. Based on his years studying and teaching in universities in the United States, Great Britain and India, Professor Cohn had outlined in this essay what he had learnt of the different research methods, different work styles, different modes of presentation and different temperaments of historians and anthropologists respectively. This framing introduction also gave the book its title, which was published as An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays.

The NMML is set amidst a gorgeous landscape of trees and flowering plants. I looked up from reading Professor Cohn’s book, and saw a grey hornbill flying from one tree to another. This scene got me thinking about my own early days as a scholar. These began in June 1980, when I moved to Calcutta to begin a doctoral degree in sociology. It took me four years to complete my degree; after which I got my first academic job, in the same city.

Altogether, I spent almost six years in Calcutta, years that were formative for me personally as well as professionally. Now, sitting at my desk at the NMML, and looking back to my time in that city, I remembered how the intellectual company I kept in those years was almost exclusively composed of Marxists. This was not by choice, but compulsion. For the political and scholarly discourse of Calcutta had been (to use one of their own favourite words) hegemonised by the Left. To be sure, there were different kinds of Marxists within the Bengali academic world. Some were members of the Communist Party of India, others were activists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), yet others were fellow-travellers of the Naxalites. Some admired Lenin more than Mao, others thought Mao the more dynamic revolutionary. A tiny fraction claimed that Trotsky was a more original thinker than either. But, these differences notwithstanding, more or less all Bengali academics thought of themselves as Marxists, that is to say, as ideological and political descendants of Karl Marx. 

Because my teachers were all Marxists, within six months of moving to Calcutta I had become a Marxist myself. However, my readings then persuaded me that while Karl Marx was undoubtedly an original thinker, his younger compatriot Max Weber provided equally penetrating insights into modern society; while my experiences in the field convinced me that Gandhi and Ambedkar were more relevant to Indian conditions than either Lenin or Mao. By the time I left Calcutta in December 1985, I had moved quite far away from Marxism. 

Now, reading Bernard Cohn several years after I had left Calcutta, I thought it might be fun to adapt his title to a rather less scholarly exercise – a personal, anecdotal, recollection of my time in that city. So I recast myself as an anthropologist, doing fieldwork among a soon-to-be-extinct tribe, studying its rituals and customs, its beliefs and prejudices, its rivalries and schisms. Taking this conceit further, I spoke of having done anthropological research in three ‘field-sites’; the Indian Institute of Management (where I had taken my doctorate, in sociology), the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (where I had worked), and the radical journal Frontier (for which I sometimes wrote). I narrated how, in each of these field-sites, I had studied the ways and mores of the different clans and sub-clans of the ‘tribe’ of Marxists. Apart from places, the essay also profiled some individuals; such as the legendary editor of Frontier, Samar Sen, and a Bengali historian I knew named Hitesranjan Sanyal, who was heretical enough not just to disavow Marxism, but to declare himself a Gandhian. Both Sen and Sanyal had since died; so I identified them by name, while disguising via pseudonyms the dogmatic Marxist and Maoist teachers of my youth. 

In those days I wrote in long-hand, with a Reynolds ball-point pen (white body, blue cap), on loose sheets of A3 paper, and it was with these tools that I wrote a draft of the essay, in my air-conditioned study at the NMML. The library had a vast array of typists paid from the Consolidated Fund of India, to convert the handwritten work of pampered Fellows such as myself into legible typescripts. However, no one but me could read what I wrote (an illegible handwriting being about the only trait I share with the subject of my later research, Mohandas Gandhi). So I took the bunch of scrawled-upon-pages to my wife Sujata Keshavan’s design office, in Kailash Colony, where I typed its contents out on an Apple Macintosh of a vintage that must surely exist now only in museums. The following morning I returned to the NMML, where I worked on the printed sheets with a red pen, making changes and corrections as I went. Then I returned to Sujata’s office, for cleaning up the draft and preparing a better one.

Even the earliest Apple Macs could automatically calculate the number of words in a document, so I knew that my article was some four thousand words long. Where could I publish it? At that stage, the two main outlets for my writing were the Indian Express, to which I sent my polemical, political, articles; and the Economic and Political Weekly, to which I sent my scholarly, heavily footnoted, research papers. But this particular essay was too long for a newspaper to consider; and too whimsical for a journal like EPW. So I sent it off to a magazine in England. I never heard back; that, I thought, was it. My first stab at a personal essay would die unsung, unhonoured, unmourned.

It turned out otherwise. For two Indians who were to me both friends and mentors were, just then, launching a new literary journal called Civil Lines. These were Professor Dharma Kumar, who had taught me Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics (and was also by way of being a cousin of mine), and Dr Rukun Advani, who had edited my books at the Oxford University Press (and before that had been a college contemporary). Partly (but I hope only partly) out of friendship and nepotism, they published, in the first issue of Civil Lines, an essay to which I, nodding to Bernard Cohn, had given the title ‘An Anthropologist among the Marxists’. 

Also Watch | Ramachandra Guha On the Man Who Made Him an Author, Rukun Advani

II

My first personal essay appeared in print courtesy two friends. Later ventures in this direction have been shepherded into print through more professional channels. In 1995 Sujata and I moved with our children from Delhi to Bangalore, always a home town for her but a place I myself knew only through summer visits to my grandparents. Growing up in Dehradun, I read The Statesman; studying in Calcutta, I read The Telegraph; working in New Delhi, I read the Indian Express. Now, living in South India, my newspaper of choice became The Hindu, a newspaper that was not – at the time – printed or distributed in the cities I had previously lived and worked in.

Almost from its inception in 1878, The Hindu had been known for being solid as well as stolid. It was reliable, and it was also boring. When I began reading it in the 1990s, it retained this reputation, at least so far as the main paper went. However, The Hindu Sunday Magazine was slowly developing an identity of its own. Its prose was livelier, more sparky, than that of the main paper; and it allowed longer pieces too. This transformation was led by the Sunday Magazine’s editor, Nirmala Lakshman, a student and lover of literature whose tastes and interests were refreshingly different from those who ran the main paper.

I cannot now remember who first introduced Nirmala Lakshman to me, or me to her. It may have been Rukun Advani, who knew her slightly. It may have been T. G. Vaidyanathan, the Bangalore-based film critic and fellow cricket tragic who wrote often for the Sunday Magazine. At any rate, by the late 1990s The Hindu had become the preferred outlet for my non-scholarly output. In 1997 I acquired a fortnightly column in the newspaper, which ran for eleven years. This was restricted to a thousand words, but Nirmala Lakshman encouraged me to submit longer pieces which she showcased as the Magazine’s cover story.

Many of the essays in the present book were originally published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine in the 1990s and 2000s. Some were a historian’s reflections on the origins or consequences of important political events: as in the essay on Indira Gandhi and the Indian Emergency, which appeared in June 2000, the 25th anniversary of the Emergency; others were personal meditations on people who had just died, such as the essay on Dharma Kumar, or on figures from the past who deserved to be better known to an English-speaking audience, such as Dharmanand Kosambi and Shivarama Karanth; still others were a traveller’s account of places he had recently been to, such as the essay on Sevagram. 

People, politics, places – these are the three themes of my essays, sometimes blending into one another, as in the essay on Gandhi and Banaras, first published in Outlook magazine, and which one can characterize as being about the politics of a person in a place (or, more precisely, about the particular politics of a particular person in a particular place). Other essays in this book were first published in the Economic and Political Weekly and in Caravan. A couple appeared not in magazines but in edited books. These all drew on the prior practice in the essay form that The Hindu Sunday Magazine and its indulgent editor had previously provided me. 

III

The column, the essay, and the book represent three distinct forms of literary expression. They differ in tone, sensibility, and intent, these differences dictated largely by how they vary in word length and purported impact. A column is short, and written for the moment; a book is long, and in theory written for the ages. Back in the days before the internet was invented, a column lasted precisely for twenty-four hours; till that day’s newspaper was added to the pile of other newspapers in the garbage bin. On the other hand, books have a sturdy physical presence, which ensures that they can be passed on from friend to friend, teacher to student, parent to child. A book published one hundred years ago can still be found in a library; or even in a second-hand bookstore. 

Now the Net keeps alive even the newspaper column; but as pieces of writing they remain ephemeral, for the moment alone. It is only books that endure. That is why the Hungarian-British writer Arthur Koestler once remarked that he would gladly exchange one hundred readers today for ten readers in ten years time and for one reader in a hundred years time.

Where does the essay figure in this typology of literary genres? The essay is not as opinionated as a column, but nor is it as scholarly or nuanced as a book. Unlike in a column, in an essay one has the space and leisure to develop a theme or an argument over several thousand words; unlike in a book, one need not pretend to be rigorous or comprehensive. Newspaper columns, which are supposed to make their arguments crisply and directly, sometimes bear an excessive imprint of the authorial voice. On the other hand, works of scholarship, in their search for respectability and objectivity, can seek to suppress the author’s voice altogether. In the essay one can be personal without being casual. This is a genre that has a special character and a distinctive appeal. 

The essay as an art form was developed in early modern Europe. Among its first great practitioners were the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne and the Englishman William Hazlitt, both of whom favoured a meditative and reflective style. So did a great modern practitioner of  the form, Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, other essayists have tended to be more political and polemical, for example George Orwell, or, more recently, Christopher Hitchens. 

I came to the essay, however, not as a litterateur or journalist but as a paid-up academic, for whom the attractiveness of the genre was that it allowed one an occasional escape from the solemnity of scholarship into the more voyeuristic domain of personal reflection. So, while I have read a bit of Montaigne and Hazlitt and more of Woolf and Orwell, I would count as my more immediate mentors the historian E. P. Thompson and the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, whose books shaped my own approach to scholarly research, and whose ventures into essay writing have inspired me as well. 

As a lover of our shastriya sangeet, I would say that the book is akin to a khayal, its theme developed in a slow and elaborate manner, an introductory alap followed by a meditative vilambit, and concluding with a more energetic drut bandish. The newspaper column is like a film song, delivered at a consistent pace throughout. The essay is like a thumri, subtle without being serious, playful without being flippant. 

Serious connoisseurs of classical music, who spend their time listening to khayals that each last an hour, have little interest in (and sometimes absolute scorn for) film songs that end in three minutes flat. However, they might still sometime be moved and enchanted by a thumri that is longer than a mere song yet sweeter than a sombre khayal.  Meanwhile, devoted fans of film music, who do not have the patience or the training to listen to khayals, don’t mind listening to the occasional thumri either. The thumri can thus bring the aesthete temptingly downwards, while it can elevate the philistine enrichingly upwards. 

The reflective personal essay perhaps plays an analogous role in literature. It is aimed both at scholars who can tolerate stuff slightly less serious than their normal fare, as well as at lay readers willing to engage with stuff slightly less trivial. That said, like the thumri, the essay has a character all its own. It is not a mere dumbing-down of the academic monograph, nor is it a simple extension of the newspaper column. It has it own techniques, rhythms, and resonances.

I am a consumer, not a practitioner, of music. However, in extending the analogy to the literary sphere, I speak as a practitioner too. The books I write are prompted by an intellectual challenge; the columns I publish are provoked by current events. The first originate in, as it were, my obligations as a scholar; the second in my anxieties as a citizen. The essay is driven rather by sentiment and emotion. It may draw on original research; it may seek to present a particular point of view. But its principal aim is neither to educate nor to instruct, but to evoke: a particular person, place, mood or event. It is in this respect far more personal than the book or the column, far more revelatory—for good and for ill—of the character of the writer.

Let me make so bold as to offer one final comparison. The classical vocalist knows that a perfect rendition of a khayal represents the summit of her art and the pinnacle of her own achievement; that is why her concerts always begin with that art form. But after singing khayals in one or two ragas, it is with pleasure and relief that she turns to a thumri with which to end her recital. The essay performs the same sort of function for the scholar; it provides a joyful release of emotions suppressed through the long years spent in researching and writing those earnestly argued and massively footnoted books. 

It remains for me to thank all those who made this particular collection possible: my first patrons in essay writing, Rukun Advani, the late Dharma Kumar, and Nirmala Lakshman; the prime mover and translator of the present exercise, Ashutosh Bhardwaj. And I remember with especial gratefulness the book by Bernard Cohn and the grey hornbill in New Delhi that, in that steaming hot summer a quarter-of-a-century ago, first encouraged me to experiment with the form of writing known as the personal essay.

This essay appears, in Hindi translation, as an introduction to Shatabdi ke Jharokhe Se, a collection of my work translated and curated by Ashutosh Bhardwaj, and published by Penguin Swadesh.