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| Blackbeard, Sanjay S. Whitebeard, Simon Digby |
IS SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM FOR
REAL?
He's won the Infosys Prize for History for 2012, so he probably is.
Academics write mainly two kinds of
books: monographs addressed to their peers, and textbooks for students. The
scholar who can entirely switch modes and provide entertaining English for the
serious lay reader is a rarity everywhere. In India, Ramachandra Guha, Nayanjot
Lahiri, Sunil Khilnani, and Mukul Kesavan are some of the better-known
exceptions—teachers and scholars who’re well regarded for their journalism and
magazine essays.
You would not think of Sanjay
Subrahmanyam in connection with this bunch. A formidable economist who grew
into a formidable historian and linguist—estimates of the languages in which he’s
fluent remain inexact and it would take a supercomputer to tot up his
publications—he’s usually associated with social science intellection at
rarefied levels, including trade and maritime history, the social and economic
aspects of early modern times, wanderers and savants who’ve traversed cultures
and oceans, world history and the working of empires—in short, the sorts of
elevated subjects that have non-specialist readers running for cover.
But, in fact, Subrahmanyam’s
trajectory since the early 1990s shows what in the world of Hindi movies used
to be called a ‘double role’: the ability to switch identities, become another
character. Subrahmanyam’s transformation from academic prose writer to
essayist-for-the-masses is as amazing as, and in keeping with, his language
skills. He has been writing reviews and long essays that are not only wholly
accessible to the general public, they’re also extremely entertaining, being
leavened with a dry humour that can be excoriating.
Part of the reason Subrahmanyam
has remained a hidden treasure on this count in India is that these
prose pieces have been locally unavailable: they appeared in prestigious
overseas places such as the London Review
of Books. In part it is because visibility and stardom in the world outside
the university campus now depend a lot on either winning prizes or writing
fiction or both. Subrahmanyam must have won more than a prize or two but, as he
charmingly puts it, ‘Unlike a large number of my contemporaries in Delhi
University, I have never been tempted to write a novel or even publish a short
story. Still, I do love literature, but am certain that—as in the best
Hindi films, like Muqaddar ka Sikandar—this
is unrequited love.’
Permanent Black will, early next year, publish a
collection which showcases this unsuspected aspect of Subrahmanyam.
The book will take its title
from its first essay, Is ‘Indian
Civilization’ a Myth?, in which Subrahmanyam tears into ‘golden age
hallucinations’ among those in his profession, specially those with links to
the Hindu Right. Later, in an essay
titled ‘Secularism and the Happy Indian Village’, he more or less eats up Ashis
Nandy and those who argue that ‘secularism’ is a European idea alien to India.
Subrahmanyam provides examples from Spanish and other European histories (among
Indian academics he is almost uniquely equipped to do this) to show that in
fact ‘secularism’ is a rather indigenously Indian term with very little
purchase in the West.
The book comprises twenty long essays over which Subrahmanyam tells us ordinary
folk, with much intellectual exuberance and caustic elan, many of the things
that he’s already expounded to the learned. It’s a book that normal human
beings will want to look out for because it is so breathtakingly and
unexpectedly wonderful to read.
Why? Largely because its mix of wit and scholarship makes Subrahmanyam’s
English prose in this book quite exceptional. Here is one example from an essay
titled ‘What, Exactly, is an Empire?’ which includes a discussion of the work
of a historian of empire, John Darwin:
Empire has been at the heart of his
research and publishing career, as indeed of his teaching ... The work under
review here departs markedly, however, from the earlier ones in three ways: in
terms of its conception as a popular work, in its far larger (even global)
geographical scope, and in its embrace of both the early modern and the modern
periods. In his preface Darwin suggests that there are sound English, even
Oxbridge, precedents for his work: he notes that his ‘first introduction to the
fascination of viewing world history as a connected whole came as a pupil of
the late Jack Gallagher, whose historical imagination was boundless.’ Elsewhere
in the same prefatory text he relates his work to earlier literature on the
rise of the West and European expansion, while acknowledging his debt to ‘the
huge volume of new writing in the last twenty years (…) on global history.’ He
adds thereafter that ‘it is not only recently that historians have insisted on
a global view of the past: that tradition, after all, goes back to Herodotus.’
Did Herodotus ever speak or even reflect on a ‘global view of the past’ when he
was presumably not aware of the earth as a globe? I rather doubt it. This may
be a little generous, but probably not as generous as the reference to
Gallagher, whose vision remained entirely confined so far as anyone can see to
the later British empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its
vicissitudes. This version of boundless imagination is possibly, like that of
the placid dreams of the Empress of Blandings, based on the exuberant semiosis
of a few enigmatic grunts.
The deployment of Wodehouse and his
pig to give us the lowdown on the sometimes limited vision of Cambridge
historians is sublimely more than one can expect from any academic.
Sanjay
Subrahmanyam may, however, disagree with this notion of there being an absolute
distinction between his academic and popular prose. And if he does, there may
be some truth to his opinion; it is, at least, a matter worth debating. One way
of finding out is to read the essays he has co-authored with Muzaffar Alam in Writing the Mughal World, for those
essays occasionally include the sorts of satirical gems that will be found in
greater abundance once Is 'Indian
Civilization' a Myth? is published. Here's a hilarious example on cannibal
practices from a chapter titled 'The Mughals Look Beyond the Winds', in the
Alam and Subrahmanyam book:
The cannibals' villages were
scattered, but despite this it turned out that they were all related to one
another. If one of them fell ill, they let time pass; and when the illness had
advanced they killed the person and distributed the body parts amongst
different families, with the chief (kalāntar) getting the head. These parts were
then hung in houses, so that every major house had a few heads hanging in it as
a sign of status. The more heads you had hanging in your house, the greater the
signification of your power and importance. But matters did not stop with the
traffic in body parts. When these cannibals gambled, they offered their own
hands and feet as wagers in the game, and if they lost, their hands and feet
were cut off and miscellaneous other pieces of flesh taken away in proportion
to the loss. The other cannibals ate this flesh without hesitation; nor did the
people whose task it was to carve up their fellows hesitate for a moment, or
even think to discuss the matter afterwards. (A small parenthesis adds that
they also ate pān leaves, or betel, in the area, as if to suggest that the
cannibals were not entirely beyond the pale in the things they consumed.)
Returning to the main thread of his discussion, Tahir continues: if you
promised a part of your body in a game and then refused to give it up when you
lost, it was considered a sign of great humiliation not just for the poor
loser, but for his whole group (qabīla). Besides all this, there was also an
annual day when the ruler of the cannibals and his people got together and ate
human flesh (gosht-i ādam). On this particular occasion, a chosen man was
rendered unconscious by placing a hand over his mouth. Occasionally, if he
pleaded, they let him go and caught another, it being inauspicious to consume
one who had expressed such a marked distaste at the prospect of being eaten.
Then, the selected person’s body parts were cooked alongside other dishes, and
if any in the group felt a lack of appetite facing such a choice repast, they
lost status and were made to feel insufficiently cannibal.
IN SUM, Subrahmanyam is one of our
most accomplished writers of English prose, and this should not remain only a
suspicion. Writing the Mughal World
and Is ‘Indian Civilization’ a Myth?
are both, in a sense, weighty books that you can also read simply for the
pleasure of reading elegant English prose.
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