Rukun doesn’t like people. It explains everything about him. This is why he lives in the hills. This is why he loved [his dog] Biscoot without reservation: he wasn’t human. He loves Beethoven because he’s dead and his genius can be electronically reproduced without the agency of other people. It’s why he deals in books: books are forms of disembodied intelligence, they hold out the promise of profundity or pleasure without people attached.
This is Mukul Kesavan on Rukun Advani, quoted by Ramachandra Guha in the last chapter (‘The Editor at Home’) of The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir. One could say, the whole memoir is an exercise in qualifying the last bit of the character assessment – of Advani dealing in books because of “the promise of profundity or pleasure without people attached”. In Guha’s case, at least, the person seemed to have mattered.
‘The Cooking of Books,’ Ramachandra Guha, Juggernaut, 2024.
The book is based on four decades of correspondence – letters and emails – between Guha and Advani, spanning the publication of several seminal books written by Guha and edited by Advani, first at OUP and then at Permanent Black (Advani’s own publishing venture at Ranikhet after exiting OUP). It is, as Guha says in his Preface, “an author’s tribute to the remarkable (and remarkably self-effacing) editor who made his books possible, and occasionally, popular and even profitable”. It is Advani, Guha avers, who made him “a historian, a biographer, a cricket writer, and an essayist”.
The tribute is also a paean to epistolary friendship, which actually went beyond the ‘Author and Editor’ relationship of a particular publishing house to later include one between a ‘Writer and Critic’ (where Advani played a part in Guha’s writing as an essayist and columnist), and also one between a ‘Patriot and Sceptic’ (where they argued about Indian democracy).
The three categories mentioned are the titles of three (of the seven) chapters of the book. It is, however, the first two – ‘Sportsman and Scholar’ and ‘Finding One Another’ – that are the most delightful.
Elite campus life and accidentally converging careers
‘Sportsman and Scholar’ is an unforgettably humorous account of campus life at St. Stephens, Delhi. Of how an “anti-intellectual” cricketer (Guha) was held in contempt by a snooty, literary-minded, Western Classical music loving senior (Advani), in whose elect group only a very few could qualify (Amitav Ghosh and Mukul Kesavan being the two prominent ones). It is full of delicious Stephanian gossip – something that continues, to varying degrees (though never without relevance), till the end of the book.
In the course of tracing the arc of his relationship with Advani, Guha gives delightful backstories of their families and schools (La Martinière, Lucknow and Doon School, Dehradun). Advani’s father’s bookshop in Lucknow and the role it played in the academic and cultural life of that city, post-Partition, is perhaps the most memorable part of that informal sociological history.
The most fascinating account in the book is, however, Guha’s tortuously uncertain path from cricket to Environmental history via Economics, and the way he reconnected with Advani (Chapter two, ‘Finding One Another’).
After his graduation from St. Stephen’s, Guha did a Masters in Economics from Delhi School of Economics. He did a summer research fellowship at a Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) factory in the Koraput district of Odisha – where he accidentally came to know about the life and work of anthropologist Verrier Elwin. Reading Elwin was an “epiphanic experience”; “he,” Guha recalls, “opened my eyes, and my mind, to other ways of studying the world than graphs, charts, equations, and numbers”.
Guha had failed to make it to the Delhi University cricket team for five consecutive years. He also did not do well in his Masters, he took a gap year and applied for a PhD in Sociology at IIM Kolkata. Introduced to the work of the Subaltern Studies Group by his advisor and hearing Ranajit Guha speak at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences – on “how to write the history of peasant protest” – had a salutary effect on him. It was while working on this dissertation that he accidentally met Rukun Advani at a mutual friend’s wedding in Delhi.
In sharp contrast to him, Advani’s had been a straight upward graph. He had been offered a position as lecturer in the English Department of St. Stephens immediately after his Masters, where he taught for a year. He then left, with an Inlaks scholarship, to do a PhD from Oxford University on the non-fiction writings of E.M. Forster. The St. Stephens offer was still open for him when he finished his dissertation, but he applied to work at OUP, was interviewed in London, and chosen among three contenders. He would go on to devote himself and substantially contribute to the growth of OUP India for the next two decades.
One of the first things that he was given responsibility for by Ravi Dayal when he joined OUP in 1982 was to see through the publication of the Subaltern Studies volumes, the first of which had been published just months before. A convergence of intellectual interest between Guha and Advani was thus brought about, the most fruitful outcome of which would be Advani prodding Guha to turn his thesis into a book. From then on, their friendship would be sealed.
The making of books
The bulk of Guha’s literary memoir is about how books are made, or rather “cooked”, to use Guha’s metaphor, with the ingredients gathered together in the right proportions, cooked on slow fire, garnished, and then offered on a beautiful plate. In real terms, this translates into a blow by blow account of the making of several of Guha’s books; the way Advani, the editor, guided his writer-friend every step of the way – from brainstorming ideas of a book and polishing up the proposal, to not only commissioning but also copy-editing the manuscript himself, and then exchanging notes and deciding on the cover design.
The lengthiest account of the process is with two of Guha’s earliest books – The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989) and Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India (1999), the manuscript of which he had to revise four times over to finally earn Advani’s nod. But the reader is also treated to some of the epistolary discussions the two had relating to his later books like A Corner of a Foreign Field: An Indian history of a British sport (2004), where Advani helped him decide the title, as well as his feedback on some essays and lectures while Guha prepared for them. The most intellectually rigorous among the latter are the exchanges the two had on an essay entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual’ and Guha’s Preface to a new edition of Tagore’s Nationalism.
Of the innumerable essays by Guha, Advani’s favourite was An Anthropologist among the Marxists (which would go on to become the title essay of an anthology published by Orient Blackswan in 2000). What he says about it speaks as much of his own mind as Guha’s:
[It is] more to my taste than almost anything else you’ve written. I revel in pieces of perverse, spoofy logic which carry through their patently absurd and comically iconoclastic hypotheses to the bitter end, with a mask of seriousness. Such things are calculated to subvert by ‘riling’ – in my Anglo school, where I was at the receiving end, it was the best weapon of the weak.
Complexity of bond and inequality of need
Friendships are often construed to be less complex than romantic relationships and easier to maintain. They are not. The best thing about The Cooking of Books is that it demonstrates that fact with candor. Guha’s relationship with Advani had never been easy, though it transformed dramatically once the editor-writer relationship was established between them. Even then, Guha admits that their relationship survived because it was principally conducted through correspondence.
Guha unhesitatingly gives us the various shades of this bond: on the one hand, there is an Advani politely cutting him down to size when he pitched the idea of an anthology of essays all too soon, or faxing him in officialese about curtailing royalties, or categorically stating in a row over a Series that the decision of continuing it rested with the publisher and not the Series Editor (which Guha was at the time).
On the other hand, there is the very concerned friend writing to Guha’s wife (Sujatha Kesavan) to try and dissuade him from visiting Kabul during politically incendiary times, or cheering him up when he is depressed that he is thought less of as an academic writer because he also wrote on cricket.
Guha also does not shy away from sharing the bitterest argument they had over what he calls “the redemptive potential of Indian democracy”. Sparked off by a piece written by a young historian about the deplorable state of Indian archives, the two friends sparred over whether one should have any faith at all in the workings of the Indian State and the idealism of its citizens. In the course of it, Guha once called his friend “self-serving”, which engendered a fresh set of arguments… till Advani called it quits. And Guha was moved to apologise.
The emotional high point of their relationship is perhaps when, even after not being granted the Indian rights of A Corner of a Cricket Field by Picador, Advani reassures Guha:
I’d like to read whatever you write in any case and please feel wholly unpressurized on publishing decision making. My interest in your editing will remain as strong as ever and has nothing to do with your need to earn the best living you can out of what you write.
It was an “uncommonly generous” gesture, which Guha tells us he “rushed to take advantage of”! And yet, at a personal level, there always seems to have been a basic inequality of need between the two friends, which came into sharp focus when Advani went out of circulation for a time without notice. That Guha had come to terms with this inequality finds its most poignant expression in the final paragraph of the book. Speaking of his last day on a short visit to Advani in Ranikhet, in 2019, he says:
What Anu, Rivka, Rukun, and I chatted about at lunch I now forget. However, I do remember that when my friend drove me to the market where my taxi waited, he said, ‘I wish you had stayed longer.’ I nodded in assent, but on resuming the drive to Kausani realized it was wise that I had not. I had seen him long enough to sense that he was happy in his reclusiveness. To mail him sometimes, to think of him often, made me happy too. But to demand to speak to him more – on the phone or in the flesh – would be […] an intrusion. Things were best left as they were – for now.
The reader only hopes that the epistolary friendship between the two remains intact for their entire lifetime.
