90th BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA
My First Meeting
David Hardiman
Professor, History Department, Warwick University
I met Ranajit and
Mechthild Guha for the first time in October 1971, soon after arriving in India
as a young history student about to start my doctoral research on a history of
the nationalist movement in Gujarat. Although Ranajit taught at Sussex University, where I
had enrolled as a postgraduate, I had not so far met him as he had been away on
research leave. Already, Sussex
had been an eye-opener for me. I
had previously studied as an undergraduate at London University, where I was
exposed to what I came to realise was a strongly colonialist interpretation of
Indian nationalism. Anthony Low –
who was now my doctoral supervisor – Peter Reeves, and others at Sussex soon changed
all that. My eyes were
however to widen yet more on meeting Ranajit in his temporary abode, a flat in
Mall Road in Delhi. Sitting in
front of a shelf of the collected works of Lenin, he told me of a new peasant
radicalism that had the potential to sweep aside the tired and discredited
Congress regime. He urged me
to abandon plans to start my project with months of archival research in the
big cities and get straight on the train to Gujarat, to live there and mingle
with the people in all their joys and sorrows, feeling my way towards a clearer
focus to my research. The advice
fell on highly receptive ears – for since 1967 I had spent many of my
university vacations travelling rough in far-flung regions of Europe, Asia and
Africa, immersing myself in local cultures, though superficially. Now, I had a chance to do it in a more
committed and satisfying way.
Before the end of that month I was ensconced in the Gujarat Vidyapith –
the Gandhian university in Ahmedabad – dressed in khadi, learning Gujarati, and
meeting up with old nationalists.
Ranajit and Mechthild
visited Ahmedabad in December, and likewise stayed at the Vidyapith. Their stay coincided with the start of
the Bangladesh War, with a curfew and blackout at night, and we sat together in
the darkened rooms chatting for long hours. He told me of Gandhi’s strengths and weaknesses, and what he
considered good and bad history and scholarly practice. Not only did I feel inspired, but
he also helped me to begin to feel my way towards a very different approach to
the history of Indian nationalism.
Soon after the couple left,
I took another train-ride, this time on a narrow-gauge steam train that chugged
through the lush countryside of Kheda District in central Gujarat, with its
little fields hedged by cactus and fruit trees, and peasants with rustic carts
drawn by magnificent white Kankrej bullocks. I stayed in the heart of this region – the Charotar –
in a Gandhian ashram, and was taken by old nationalists of the Patidar
community to meet their fellow freedom-fighters. Within less than a week I had determined the subject of my
research – it was to be that of the peasant nationalists of Kheda District. I could never have grasped the spirit
of such a project sitting in an archive.
In this way, I found my
subject. Although the Patidars on whom
I now focussed were – I quickly found – at an opposite pole to any
revolutionary class as envisaged in Maoist theory, they were at least peasants,
and peasant studies were about to burst on the scene as a major academic
topic. Ranajit had facilitated
my being in the vanguard of this new approach, and soon I was to go to go on an
engage with a much more obviously subaltern group, that of the adivasis of the
hills and forests of the Gujarat borderlands. Without his initial intervention and ongoing inspiration,
none of this would have happened in the way it did, and I would have been
greatly the poorer for it.
This I can never forget.
90th BIRTHDAY TRIBUTES TO RANAJIT GUHA
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, Harvard
Dhm
Nobody
walks the thin, sharp line between being an iconoclast and becoming an icon
with greater flair than Ranajit—my cherished mentor and dear friend. To change
the self-understanding of a discipline by radically rethinking its archive of political
agency and its narrative flow of events demands something more than scholarly
courage and political commitment. Such historic acts of the interpretive
imagination unlock frameworks of disciplinary legitimation—the order of things—and
disclose the power of ideas and actions that have been attenuated or
camouflaged or sublimated in their struggle to survive the onslaught of
hegemonic or dominant forces. To retrieve such acts and ideas into the annals
of history demands a rare kind of charisma. And it is this quality of
charismatic authority that drew the most gifted historians of India around
Ranajit. The rest isn’t just history,
it is Subaltern Studies.
I
owe Ranajit much more than any scholarly tribute could convey. Ranajit ushered
me into my academic career. As soon as my appointment at Sussex was announced, Ranajit
invited Jacqueline and me to lunch in the warm and beautiful home Mechthild and
he had made in Brighton. I had only ever seen Ranajit on British television trouncing
Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency. I was quite unprepared for the pastoral pundit
who revealed himself while walking us meticulously through Mechthild’s magical
garden of herbs and vegetables. At lunch I understood why terroir mattered so much to Ranajit—wines were matched with seasonal
dishes of great delicacy and the freshest of flavors.
All
this indulgence and benevolence caused me to relax more than I should have
because I was also quite unprepared for the mischievous irony that Ranajit was about
to unleash on that occasion, and on many other memorable occasions since those
early years. The resonant voice becomes a tad lower and smaller, the face
tilts, and the unusually expressive eyes become ever so slightly hooded: “You
see, unlike you, I am no ‘the-o-rist.’ You use these sophisticated concepts,
make all these complex speculations and references… I belong to another
generation, a much more straightforward, simple intellectual tradition…” Not to accept Ranajit’s playful
provocation is to forego one of the most stimulating and dramatic intellectual
experiences you are likely to have. Never resist the hypodermic jab delivered
by our Ranajit; the flesh may quiver but it immeasurably increases the life of
the mind. Never fail to listen carefully to “the small voice of history” (to
cite one of Ranajit’s signature essays) because when he speaks, the sober surfaces of scholarly sententiousness are
swept aside and a Nietzschean flame singes all that is obvious and otiose.
My
dear Ranajit, I lift a glass to your health as I did in Vienna some years ago, toasting
you with my favorite Muskateller. You
drank graciously but not as fully as I had hoped. The next time we lunched, you
made it plain: “No more Muskateller. Try my drink, Poire Williams, eau de vie.”
So Poire Williams it was, and Poire Williams it will be
when we meet again.
I
wish you and Mechthild many years of companionship. I wish you both many more
unread volumes, and many more books as yet unwritten, and many more pieces of
music as yet unheard. I wish this for you both as I wish it fervently for the
rest of us.
With
love,
Homi
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