In Their Own Words

Before Independence, Gandhi exhorted his disciples to go to the villages; he himself constantly did so out of faith and compulsion, soliciting support for the Congress and the freedom movement. His imaginative way out of India's multiple oppression was to be poor by choice, to consciously opt out from material indulgence, to discipline his own taste and habits, and try and convert others. After Independence, the ruling elite and their commissars visited the villages to manufacture consent for their rule.

Now, it's the gene collector, patent discoverer and the (international and indigenous) development activist—missionaries of the 'new world order'—who visit villages. So do, ad infinitum, hordes of academicians and interdisciplinary scholars looking for rare gems, for theoretical exotica, coming back with books, fashionable methodologies, trendy stylistics—somewhere or the other always ghost-writing old colonial chronicles, concealing therein their own ignorance, prejudices and other 'knowledge' they share with the rest of the literate. It is in this context that Siddharth Dube's book stands out for its boldness and narrative accuracy.

The book is really the memoirs of Ramdass and Prayaga Devi, their sons and immediate relatives. It is the world of the untouchables, their internal and external landscapes, the rich and vivid remembrance of Independence, zamindari before and after 1947, primary education, industrialisation, bogus land reforms and affirmative action programmes, the Emergency and forced sterilisations. In short, the memoirs of the multiple operations of tradition and the state—Thakurs, police, local and state bureaucracy, the foul places and naked exploitation, the corruption, the depressed Bombay, Allahabad, Dehradun, Faridabad and Delhi, tea plantations and construction sites, textile mills and primary schools, in the backdrop of a constant fight for land and water, dignity and respect.

Dube's book testifies once again that the real subjects of history are not lacking in historical knowledge, that they remember everything, from the peasant struggles and armed uprisings of the colonial times, Gandhi, Congress and its corruption and complicity with landlords and money-lenders, Ambedkar and his tragedy, Nehru and his retreats to the mansions, Indira Gandhi and 'Garibi Hatao', Rajiv Gandhi and his festivals, massacre and tyranny, the consolidation of fanatics. It testifies that they live in history, that they breathe it. It is the professional historian who lacks it, condemns it to the archives. In that way, Dube's journey to the village and back is very instructive and should be appreciated without reserve.

As compiler and narrator of these oral testimonies, Dube limits his own descriptive and situational comments to a minimum and takes sensitive care of his protagonists by not snuffing their lives with the burden of history. He treats them with love, respect and a sense of gratitude rare among his tribe. An odd voice in these times and, strangely, more Nehruvian than Nehru and also rehearsed within the acoustical museum of the mainstream Left-liberal humanist scholarship, a hybrid voice true to its genealogical legacy, the current face of which is Ama-rtya Sen and the like, votaries of the coexistence of a welfare state and globalisation. Odd, since the most confusing and volatile topics in contemporary India are tradition and liberalisation, and the most ignorant in these two are our own intellectuals.

In a way this book is attempting a reality, no doubt to grant the analysis of poverty priority and absolute independence with regard to any discipline, research and rig-our. Dube does not point to it from afar, he neither observes it nor analyses it for the sake of experiencing it at a distance in the hope of a solution, some day or the other.... On the contrary, his text domesticates the malady of a poor family, he fuses with it, is on the same level with it, without either distance or perspective.