Democrats and Dissenters by Ramachandra Guha Penguin Random House; Price: Rs.699; Pages: 302 Although he wrote over half a dozen books in the 1990s and early noughties, warning the nation about the ecological and environmental disasters which have since enveloped the country, Ramachandra Guha burst upon the national scene as a popular historian with the publication of his widely admired history of post-independence India, titled India After Gandhi (2007). Since then, this prolific multi-disciplinary (sociology, anthropology and history) writer has authored several deeply researched and elegantly written histories including Patriots and Partisans (2012) and Gandhi Before India (2013) which have beamed a powerful and overdue spotlight on the dozens of extraordinary leaders of India’s freedom movement who were ignored or obfuscated in history textbooks, written by British Empire propagandists/apologists. And by insufficiently learned post-independence native historians unequal to the imperative of challenging the dominant Western historical perspective of the Indian subcontinent. In his latest oeuvre Democrats and Dissenters, an eclectic collection of essays some previously published but updated and divided into two parts ‘Politics and Society’ and ‘Ideologies and Intellectuals,’ Guha lives up to his reputation. Part I comprises eight engaging essays written in felicitous prose which enables easy but thought-provoking reading. In the first essay in this section, the author narrates the sad history of the Congress party, now reduced to a pathetic dynastic fiefdom that is unlikely to “ever become the dominant pole of Indian politics again”. In the second essay in Part I, Guha warns against “eight threats” to the freedom of expression in contemporary India. Other engrossing chapters in Part I include a debate between independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and formidable socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan; two insightful travelogues of China and Pakistan which expose the majoritarian Han domination of China and the slavish ownership of Pakistan’s academic and intellectual community of the subcontinent’s Islamic heritage, including its worst excesses. And the last essay in this section speculates about which are India’s worst years since independence during which the country’s democracy and national unity were severely endangered. Part II of this informative and intellectually stimulating compendium contains a second batch of eight mainly biographical essays. Among the brilliantly original scholars and thinkers profiled in this section are the maverick British Left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012); China-born Irish scholar Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) who deeply studied Indonesian history, politics and society; Indian Sanskrit and Pali scholar Dharmananda Kosambi “a world authority on the language and culture of early Buddhism”; Andre Beteille, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics for over four decades and described as the “wisest man in India”; economic historian Dharma Kumar, perhaps the country’s first feminist scholar, and U.R. Ananthamurthy (1932-2014), the celebrated Kannada writer and literary giant who in Guha’s opinion “redefined the terrain of Indian literature”. The author’s celebration of the lives and work of these hugely under-appreciated scholars and true intellectuals is inspiring and reassuring to people despairing the neglect of research and deep scholarship in the country’s floundering…
