Any echo of George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ was wholly
unintended.
VIII
In April 2010, just after I had finished writing the first draft of this essay, I received, in the post, a calendar printed by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, which like the ‘Nehru Imprint’ bulletin, was presumably proof of the tireless activities of the current administration. I was unimpressed, and wrote a letter to Suman Dubey, a close friend of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi who had just been made a member of the NMML
executive council. This is what I said:
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 forwarded the letter to my friend Rukun Advani, who, within five minutes, had sent back this superbly satirical email:
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 passe. 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 Mridula Mukherjee 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
Rukun Advani is a reclusive publisher who works out of the hill station of Ranikhet; although he publishes the works of India’s best historians, he does not actually need the NMML himself. He could afford to be detached and sardonic. However, as someone who owed everything to the place, I continued to be despairing. Days after I received this priceless April–March calendar, the director of the NMML went on three months’ leave. She appointed a recently recruited consultant to act as director in her place. The person in question had previously been an official of the India Tourism Development Corporation, in charge of duty-free shops at airports.
Now, courtesy her contacts and her cronies, this person sat in the chair once occupied by B.R. Nanda and Ravinder Kumar.
And worse was to follow. In May 2010, I was sent a copy of an independent audit of the NMML, which had been recently submitted to the ministry of culture. The forty-three pages of this report were peppered with the words ‘irregular’ and
‘profligate’. The audit report observed that since the new
director took over in 2006, the NMML had recruited as many as sixty-four consultants, with several people being paid for the same job (while thirty-nine sanctioned staff posts remain unfilled). Meanwhile, there had ‘been [an]
abject failure on the part of the NMML so far as research work is concerned’. The financial implications of these irregular appointments were ‘astronomical’; moreover, these favoured consultants often had ‘no experience whatsoever’. As the audit report dryly
observed, this ‘shows the utter contempt with which NMML handles various economy instructions issued by the Ministry of Finance’. The report concluded that the ‘NMML appears to be working with a mind set to provide benefit to individuals rather than to the Institution’.
IX
I suppose I should have been more realistic about, or more resigned to, the deterioration of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I had myself written (in a book published in 1999) about how institutions in India worked well only for short periods of time. I had just been to the Christa Seva Sangh in Puné, a once-thriving centre of thought and action founded by the radical priest J.C. Winslow, which had sought to make Indian Christians more sensitive to the ideas and programme of Mahatma Gandhi. That was in the 1920s; however, I now wrote, ‘to visit the Christa Seva Sangh is to be powerfully reminded of the iron law of Indian institutional decay. The average life of a reasonably well-functioning institution is twenty years; none, it seems, remains in good health after the death or disappearance of the founder.
Gandhi’s own ashrams, Sabarmati and Sevagram, still function in a desultory and decrepit way, but for all the influence they now command they might as well be dead. Why should Winslow’s ashram be different? It requires an effort of the will to think of it as it once was, a centre of active and radical theological work, a bridge between the worlds of Anglican Christianity and an increasingly assertive Indian nationalism.’
Why did I think that the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library would be exempt from this law? Personal engagement was certainly one part of the answer. This institution had meant so much to me, and to my generation of historians and social scientists. Why should it not play the same emancipatory role for later generations of scholars? Moreover, I continued to work there on a regular basis, and felt the pain and anguish of the staff members who had once devotedly served researchers but were now stifled by the atmosphere of cronyism and nepotism that surrounded them.
But there were impersonal reasons why I thought, or hoped, that the NMML could be revived. It had been lucky to have two good directors in succession; with thirty years of solid foundational work, perhaps it could survive a spell of lacklustre leadership—provided the right successor was found. Then again, it was based in the capital, and so exempt (in theory) from the pulls and pressures of caste and regional considerations. This autonomy could—again in theory—be guaranteed by the fact that a scholar, Dr Manmohan Singh, was now prime minister and minister of culture. Nor were funds a problem—the central government had always given it all it wished for in this direction.
Finally, my hopes and desires for the NMML were also encouraged by the fact that I knew a centre of scholarship which had been an exception to the iron law of Indian institutional decay. This was the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. I had worked there in three separate stints (in 1984, 1987–88 and 2004), and done extensive collaborative research with its professors. In 2009 the institute celebrated a century of steady, consistent, high-quality performance. Directors had come and gone. Some had been self-effacing, others egocentric. All, however, had been efficient, non-partisan, and committed to serious research and teaching.
Why could the NMML not be a humanities version of the Indian Institute of Science? In some other culture and country this might have indeed been possible. But not in the India of the twenty-first century.
Here, directors of IITs and science institutes would be chosen by their peers. But the direction of the softer disciplines operated at the w
hims and fancies of the political class. Sycophancy, not scholarship; connections, not credibility, would largely determine who would be chosen to head centres of social science and historical research.
Things were once otherwise, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, when (for example) V.K.R.V. Rao built the Delhi School of Economics into a world-class centre of scholarship. Nehru had an indifferent second-class degree in science from Cambridge; however, this was compensated for by his respect for the autonomy of intellectuals and intellectual practice. Our present prime minister, on the other hand, has a first-class degree from the same university, where he was awarded the prestigious Adam Smith Prize to boot. And he went on to take a PhD in economics at Oxford. This scholar–politician knew of the importance of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Several fine scholars whom he respected had independently drawn his attention to the institution’s decline. His could have been the critical, redemptive intervention—but it would not come.
A cautiously hopeful
postscript: This essay was drafted and completed in the summer of 2010. In December of that year, the Indian National Congress celebrated its 125th anniversary. At a function attended by the prime minister and the party president, an official history of the Congress was released. The finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, was identified as the ‘chief editor’ of the book; but the main work had been done by five academic advisors. These included Mridula Mukherjee, her husband Aditya Mukherjee and her sister Sucheta Mahajan.
Fortunately for these
historians’ reputations, this book is not easily available at bookstores.
I was, however, able to obtain a copy from the party’s office, and was struck by how slight (in both senses of the word) the volume was. Five historians with PhDs had collectively produced a book that, in size and substance, was substantially inferior to the official history of the Congress published in 1935 by the medical doctor, Pattabhi Sitaramayya.
Still, Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation was not written without a motive, or perhaps several. One was to rescue Indira Gandhi, the revered mother-in-law of the Congress president, from the charge of being authoritarian. The excesses of the Emergency of 1975–77 were therefore attributed exclusively to Sanjay Gandhi. A second motive was to cast the current Congress president in the halo of sainthood. Of her decision not to become prime minister in 2004, it was said that ‘not since the days of the freedom struggle was such a complete separation of the objective of personal power and the objective of achieving social ideals seen. People looked upon Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation of power as reminiscent of the Mahatma.’
For the NMML director to help write the official Congress history was in clear violation of conduct rules, which explicitly prohibit ‘any government official from being a member of, or be otherwise associated with, any political party or any organization which takes part in politics; nor shall he [or she] take part in, subscribe in aid of, or assist in any other manner, any political movement or activity.’ In the light of what had passed in the past five years, it may not be too cynical to read the NMML
director’s participation as a gesture of thanks to her political patrons, as well as a coded application for a further extension.
As it happened, the application (if it indeed was one) was not heard—or heeded. In the first week of February 2011, it was announced that the executive council of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library had appointed a search committee to choose a new director. Scholars of distinction were asked to recommend candidates, a selection of whom were then interviewed by the search committee. The committee’s choice finally fell on Professor Mahesh Rangarajan of Delhi University.
Mahesh Rangarajan had made major contributions to environmental history and to the analysis of Indian elections. He was young, energetic, and non-partisan. Moreover, he had been a Fellow at the NMML
during Ravinder Kumar’s tenure; as a regular user of the library since, he knew what the institution was like at its best, and at its worst. Chosen fairly, and with a credible reputation based on serious scholarly work, the new director could command the support and goodwill of other serious scholars, and, perhaps more crucially, of a still capable and qualified staff.
In September 2011, shortly before departing for a year overseas, I visited my favourite library-cum-archive in the world. Professor Rangarajan had been in office barely a month, yet change was in the air, and humming on the ground. The consultants were being disposed of, one by one.
The oral history programme was being revived; the quest for manuscript collections being resumed. The staff were more energized than they had been in years, their enthusiasm renewed by, among other things, the belated revocation of the suspension of the much-admired deputy director, Dr N. Balakrishnan.
Professor Rangarajan and Dr Balakrishnan had reactivated the weekly seminar series; the day I was there, a historian of science from Bangalore was presenting a paper to an audience of historians, sociologists, physicists and economists from all the major universities in Delhi.
The discussion was intense, even electric; it carried on afterwards in the corridor and the café, with new arguments being made and new friendships being forged.
The buzz was in part a tribute to the dynamism of the NMML’s new director; in greater part, a tribute to the heroic hard work of the NMML’s first two directors. The foundations they had laid were so solid that the NMML seemed set to defy the iron law of Indian institutional decay. Those who knew not or cared not for these visionaries could disturb and shake these foundations, but not destroy them altogether. After five years of despair, I left Delhi that September day in a mood of cautious optimism.
Now, with luck, persistence, and the absence of partisan political interference, perhaps the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library might yet be restored to something like its former glory.
Chapter Thirteen
Life with a Duchess: A Personal History of the Oxford University Press
~
I
In the 1990s, I spent many weeks in what must, or at any rate should be, every Indian’s favourite city—Bombay, a city whose depth of history and richly lived (and intensely felt) cosmopolitanism is in such stark contrast to the even-tempered blandness of the town where I live, Bangalore. I would go there twice a year, in February and November, and book myself into a room in the Cricket Club of India. Every morning, I would walk across the oval, dodging joggers and the odd flying cricket ball, and then skirt round the high court to the side entrance to Elphinstone College where, after climbing a staircase stinking with piss, I would arrive at the reading room of the Maharashtra State Archives. Three or four hours of work on the files was a reward in itself, though I often gave myself the further bonus of a Rajasthani thali at Chetna restaurant, before returning for some more digging.
In those days the Maharashtra State Archives were moderately well run (I remember in particular an experienced hand named Lad), and their collections were very rich indeed. Still, my warmest memories of research in Bombay are linked to a private archive that lay down the road, in Apollo Bunder off Colaba Causeway. This was housed in the third (and top) floor of a sturdy stone building owned by the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press, the world’s oldest (and greatest) publisher.
A British historian once said that being published by the Oxford University Press was like being married to a duchess—the honour was greater than the pleasure. My experience was otherwise. Not long before I began working in their archives, the OUP had published my first book. As scholarly books go, it was a work of art. It was set, using hot-metal type, in an elegant Baskerville by the legendary P.K. Ghosh of Eastend Printers, Calcutta. The cover was arresting—a photograph by Sanjeev Saith of a Himalayan oak forest cut up by the designer to represent the ‘unquiet woods’ that the book documented. The prose inside, jargon-ridden and solemnly sociological in its original incarnation, had been rendered moderately serviceable by the intense (and inspired) labours of the book’s editor, a young scholar with
a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge.
To enter the Bombay office of the OUP in 1993 and 1994 was, for me, like entering an ancient club of which I was a privileged new member. The honour was manifest, but so also the pleasure. In the foyer were displayed the works of the best Indian sociologists and historians—André Béteille’s The Idea of Natural Inequality, Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy, Irfan Habib’s An Atlas of the Mughal Empire. Also on display were the works of OUP authors who were not Indian, among them such colossally influential scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart. The gentry and literati of Bombay came to this showroom, and I spent some time there myself. But my main work lay upstairs where, in a locked cupboard, lay the correspondence between a writer whose life I was writing about and a publisher who had once dominated the building where I now sat.
This writer and his publisher were both Englishmen who had gone native. They were expatriates of standing, who knew, or knew of, the most powerful Indians of the day. Their own relationship was personal as well as professional. They were (as in those days writer and publisher sometimes could be) really close friends. In their correspondence they discussed books, but also food, music, politics, and occasionally, sex. Their letters were sometimes businesslike, at other times warm and gossip-laden. Reading them, fifty or sixty years after they were written, was an exhilarating experience.