Ashutosh Bhardwaj 
It is believed that Karl Marx stood G.F.W. Hegel on his head, but both the influential thinkers shared a crucial perspective towards the two biggest Asian nations. Hegel thought that “China and India as it were lie outside the course of world history”, whereas Marx proposed that the British rule was “the unconscious tool of history” in bringing about “a social revolution in Hindustan”.
In stark contrast, their contemporary, Goethe, arguably the greatest European poet of his age, proposed that Kalidasa’s Shakuntala contained all the wisdom the universe had to offer, and was also enamoured by a Chinese novel at a time when the genre was believed to be an essentially European venture.
Hegel and Marx are among the determining influences on the course world history has taken in the last two centuries. And yet, the nations they sneered upon deeply inspired their illustrious compatriot for their contribution to human civilisation.
**
Shatabdi Ke Jharokhe Se, Ramachandra Guha, Penguin Swadesh, 2025.
There is a history written by political thinkers; and there is one written by artists and story-tellers. The essays in the following collection, Shatabdi Ke Jharokhe Se, are written by a scholar with a novelist’s gaze and craft. To paraphrase his favourite title, ‘A Novelist Among Historians’. A sharply moving narrative with incisive character sketches, penetrating insights about human follies, a deeply felt prose laden with evocative imagery. Ramachandra Guha delivers history from the lectern of a Kathavachak. Be it a subtle revelation about the scholar of Indic religions Padmanabh Jaini in Dharmanand Kausambi’s life story, or a quietly placed reference to Indra Kumar Gujral in an essay on Dharma Kumar, Guha is aware that moonlight can be best depicted not by writing about the sky or its white ring, but by the reflection of falling silver rays on the broken shards of a green bottle. And thus, all he needs is a slight stroke of pen to enliven Dharampal with his commitments and contradictions.
His essay on Khushwant Singh’s support to Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency begins with a delightful episode about the Sikh scholar’s residency at the Bellagio Centre in Italy. A seemingly unconnected episode with the argumentative essay, it doesn’t add any aspect to the subject’s personality because Singh appears as a shadow character. The episode is about a marvelous memory Italians constructed of the Indian visitor. And yet, the jump cut arrives with a joyful appreciation of the essayist’s art as the reader moves from the episode to the next section.
What separates Guha, a scholar firmly stationed in archives, from other historians is not the astonishing range of his subjects. Long before he wrote a definitive biography of Mahatma Gandhi, he had charted the world of Verrier Elwin, and before researching the social history of Indian cricket, he had co-authored a book on the environment. It’s the layered and intimate bond he forms with his subjects, the empathetic dialogue he holds with events and personalities that distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
**
Umberto Eco once said that his friend Roland Barthes lived with remorse because he couldn’t write a novel, whereas the Italian believed that the Frenchman’s essays carried more narrative beauty than many famed novels.
Can the essays in the following volume be read like the episodes of a novel?
Guha himself answered the query by underlining that Under Three Flags is his favourite book from Benedict Anderson, a work that studies two major figures, the novelist José Rival and the folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes. Guha went on to quote Anderson that ‘the best way to write up the research material was to employ the methods, if not the gifts, of nineteenth century novelists: rapid shifts of scene, conspiracies, coincidences, letters’.
The historian has given us a cue to decode him.
**
On several occasions Guha has expressed his penchant for stylistic prose. I have my own anecdote. When I first met him in February 2017, a book had been simmering in me that could be loosely termed as a biography of the Indian novel (which later became an account of the novel’s solitary woman). He instead suggested that I attempt a biography of my favourite novelists and then suddenly sprung a question that had absolutely no connection with our conversation, but whose import I could instantly gather. “Who writes the edits?” he asked, referring to the unsigned editorials of the Indian Express, the newspaper I then worked with.
Perhaps, he had the question lingering in him for long – who are the unnamed prose masters of the Express newsroom’s formidable edit team? If the question reveals the man, the inference was unambiguous.
**
In his introduction to the volume, Guha has compared books, essays and newspaper columns with dhrupad, thumri and film songs. Let me offer my analogy. Great books are born out of crippling introspections and paralysing questions that do not take leave of a writer; newspaper columns by immediate provocations; and personal essays are conversations with the subject on a terrace, often on a brooding evening when the stars have just begun to emerge.
One can, thus, trace Guha’s life unfolding in the essays which can together be read like his intellectual autobiography. One learns about his childhood in Dehradun, his college and university days in Delhi, his teacher and cousin Dharma Kumar, his PhD in Kolkata, visits to his grandparents in Bangalore, which was also the hometown of the girl who was to become his wife and with whom he’d frequent Premier Book Store, his archival work at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and the Mumbai office of Oxford University Press, besides the many influences that shaped his writing, scholarship and his life.
Watch | ‘Few, If Any, Could Have Done A Better Job Than Nehru But He Stayed On For Too Long’
Let me also register the expectations of a reader: moments of self-doubts, dilemmas and the consequent inner development, an introspective transparency that launches George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant to a different orbit.
Reviewing Guha’s biography of Gandhi, I once wrote: “A biography, especially of this scale, is impossible without a significant investment of one’s self in the subject, and the consequent loss or gain of one’s self. Given that Guha has spent decades attempting to ‘settle his accounts with Gandhi’, one can only guess how the subject transformed the biographer. But that is a book for the future.”
**
In the end, let me share my experience as a translator. I am not a professional translator. I took it up on the suggestion of my friend and editor Piyush Daiya, who had rejected my earliest fiction piece saying that I should first attempt translations to learn the “music of words”. In my early twenties then, I spent a year translating Franz Kafka, essays by modern artists and musicologists, even an extract from Ramchandra Gandhi’s Svaraj, a book-length meditation on Tyeb Mehta’s painting Santiniketan Triptych.
I wrote my Bastar book, The Death Script and Mrityu Katha, in two languages to overhear the intimate conversation that takes place between their alphabets, to learn the mytho-cultural ecosystem words represent, a phenomenon that had escaped me when I worked only in one language.
I came to translating Guha by a long and circuitous route, and returned enriched. Guha has chosen contemporary India as his scholarly arena, an epoch embroiled in a heady political history most Indians are eyewitness to. A perennial question that a novelist confronts is about the creative modes to address contemporary politics. A fiction writer often requires a spatial and temporal remove to write about events that are unfolding before them.
Does it apply to a historian as well? How to approach contemporary history in an era that finds a plethora of archival details online? Several recent books on post-Independence Indian politics read like a rehash of media reports, or the chronicle of a story previously told. Guha stands out among his peers because of the novelistic gaze he lends to his subject which, to me, is among his greatest contribution to history writing in India. The art is not limited to the execution of the research material; it begins with the gathering of the archives itself. If you cannot read the essay on the cricketer Baloo Palwankar without a surge of emotions and eyes turning moist, then know that only a deeply lived scholarship can beget an achingly felt prose.
Professor Harish Trivedi once alerted me to the several words in modern Indian languages for translation: anuvad, rupantar, tarjuma and molipeyarttall. Each of these words carry a different connotation, unlike in English where the word “translation” seems to have no synonym.
The most common Hindi word for translation is anuvad, a word of Sanskrit origin, implying something that follows. Long ago I learnt a Malayalam word for translation, vivartanam, again derived from Sanskrit. A foundational concept of the Advaita lexicon, vivarta operates at two levels. It denotes a thin veil that both conceals the ultimate truth and projects a different image that constitutes the reality until the veil is removed. I instantly marvelled at our Malayalam ancestors who took a word from a profound philosophical context and used it for literature, a word that brilliantly illuminates the art and philosophy of translation. (I need linguists to examine my proposition that vivarta entered the Malayalam dictionary due to Kerala being the birthplace of the great Advaita saint Shankaracharya.)
Contrast this with the Italian saying, Traduttore, traditore (The translator is the traitor). The distrust Europe had for translations brought wrath upon translators. The scholar-linguist William Tyndale was executed for “heresy” he had committed by translating the New Testament into English, so was the French translator Etienne Dolet for what they believed was a wrong translation of Plato.
Do the essays that follow amount to betrayal, anuvad or vivartanam? I leave it to the reader.
This essay appears, in Hindi, as an introduction to Shatabdi ke Jharokhe Se, a collection of Ramchandra Guha’s work translated and curated by Ashutosh Bharadwaj, and published by Penguin Swadesh.