On Republic Day, I attended the concluding day of a four-day literature festival in Kolkata. I had flown to the city from Jaipur after participating in a similar, annual gathering devoted to the same theme. At both places, writers, critics and publishers had gathered in large numbers to exchange ideas, share gossip and, in general, have a good time.
I have always looked forward to these literary carnivals in the New Year when the weather tends to be agreeable. This year, I had a chance to interact with some very interesting historians. There was Tristram Hunt, a historian-turned-politician who represents the Staffordshire constituency of Stoke-on-Trent, known for its iconic chinaware. A former labour Party spokesman on education, Hunt was purged from his party’s front-bench after Jeremy Corbyn took over the party.
As a historian, Hunt has written extensively on urban history and particularly the contributions of the Victorians in the creation of imperial cities. His Ten Cities that made an Empire is a riveting tour of the Anglophone world, as seen from the perspective of cities ranging from Boston and Bridgetown across the Atlantic, Cape Town in Africa, to Calcutta, Bombay and Hong Kong in the East. And there is also Melbourne in Australia and liverpool, from where many voyages of the British Empire began.
At a session in Jaipur we discussed the links that forged the British Empire and the contemporary agonies of dealing with a past that no one is anxious to fully embrace. It was a conversation that was free of rancour and minus the underpinnings of hostility that characterise academic seminars.
In a subsequent session I had an engaging conversation with Margaret MacMillan, the Warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, and now famous for her two books on inter-War Europe. A Canadian, MacMillan had started her academic career writing on the British community in India and her first book (written in 1996) was on the women of the Raj. She admitted to me that the limited job opportunities in imperial history propelled her into shifting her focus to international history —which, in the context of the early-20th century, meant America and Europe.
Yet, MacMillan hadn’t lost her early interest in India — aroused first by a grandfather who was a doctor in the Indian Medical Service. We quickly dispensed with any illusion that the discussion on her first book would be an exercise in post-modern ‘gender studies’ and launched into a discussion on the memsahibs that made the Raj. A radical historian observing the discussion would probably have been infuriated. Neither MacMillan nor me even attempted to be judgmental about these pillars of imperial rule. The job of a historian, as she saw it, was to get under the skin of the actors and try to see things from that perspective.
What I found particularly heartening in the discussion with MacMillan and a subsequent session with Ferdinand Mount — author of Tears of the Rajas — and William Dalrymple was the lack of audience outrage. I tried to imagine what would have been the reaction had the same session been replayed in, say, a university campus. Needless to say, we would have been pilloried and denounced spiritedly by post-colonialists angry at the effrontery of an imperial family history that hadn’t frontally denounced colonial rule.
Some of that outrage was visible in patches in the hugely-attended session on Empire that involved Shashi Tharoor, Hunt and myself. However, even if Tharoor’s polemical denunciation of Empire — and a parallel deification of Jawaharlal Nehru — did draw more enthusiastic appreciation than my feeble attempt to suggest that the imperial encounter wasn’t all black and white, I was more than satisfied that we had a civilised conversation and had successfully elevated our love of history to something beyond slogans.
The reason I find these festivals devoted to books and ideas quite enthralling is because an intellectual contest (and sometimes it is just a convivial conversation) is received in the right spirit. In Kolkata, for the concluding session of the festival, Javed Akhtar, Ruskin Bond, Nandana Deb Sen and I were in a (televised) discussion with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt. As happens with most TV debates, there is always an attempt to set off fireworks because, according to conventional media wisdom, angry and loud interventions secure audiences. Mercifully, there are times when the occasion prompts a departure from the predictable. In Kolkata, there were sharp differences but there were also significant areas of agreement. But neither distracted from the fact that four individuals saw the world through different prisms.
Is there a larger message that emerges from my experiences over the past few daysIJ First, it is obvious that the belief that India has suddenly turned intolerant is a grotesque over-simplification. Yes, there are areas of disagreement on issues of politics and public policy. Most democracies experience similar schisms. However, Indians, particularly when exposed to an environment where the emphasis is on listening and imbibing ideas, tend to conduct themselves decorously. Put the same Indian in a very different environment — and the TV studio is not the only arena of prickliness and friction — and you are likely to see an exemplary demonstration of restraint and even intellectual humility.
Once upon a time, the centres of education promoted debate. Today, alas, and thanks to the encroachment of political correctness, alternative voices are getting drowned out of the campuses. The media, another traditional centre of intellectual churning, too is succumbing to serf-serving sensationalism. Yet, that doesn’t mean India is in danger of losing its democratic ethos. Despite all the adverse commentary of the past six months, the literature festivals have maintained their strong global appeal. Maybe we need more such occasions in many more cities.
