A brilliant young academic debunks cosy histories of Indian secularism, among other things
Sanjay Subrahmanyam peers through his glasses, hair and beard united in Marxian abundance. "There is some amount of fear here," he declares, with all the intensity of that hairy German. "There are concealment games, there are witch-hunts. People are hunting different witches."
Subrahmanyam, relatively unknown outside rarified academic circles, is an economic historian, and arguably the brightest young one on the block. He is also the bete noire of the Indian history establishment. In a recent book, Unravelling the Nation, edited jointly with economist Kaushik Basu, Subrahmanyam puts forward a bold new thesis: "official secularism," he says, "is a cul-de-sac".
At 35, he's written six books and edited a number of others. He speaks, reads and writes half-a-dozen contemporary languages including Portuguese, French, Spanish, as well as classical Sanskrit and Tamil. Says eminent economist Dharma Kumar: "Subrahmanyam is one of India's top scholars". Rukun Advani of Oxford University Press agrees: "His range of languages, the rare insights he is able to offer, his productivity at a very young age, his expertise in economic and social history, set him apart. He is absolutely top-notch." However, besides the praise, Subrahmanyam generates much controversy too, since much of his work radically overturns conventional notions of the pre-colonial era.
At the stroke of the midnight hour, India awoke to life, freedom and the NCERT (National Council for Educational Research and Training)—the latter entrusted with the task of providing textbooks for newly sovereign youth. In a process that reached its apogee in the Indira Gandhi years, the NCERT, inspired by the Congress leadership and manned by erstwhile nationalists, provided the secular nation-state with an 'appropriate' history.
After all, successive generations of independent Indians needed to know what to believe as fact and what to disregard as bad fiction. They needed to know who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, when the Golden Ages and Dark Ages began and waned, when Hindus and Muslims lived in happy harmony and when they began to squabble as a result of imperialist doctrines like Divide and Rule. This was history as nation-building, Nehru-friendly history, history designed to create the progressive and secular soldiers of modern India.
Subrahmanyam is scornful of such boring stuff. "Nationalism is a banal trap," he says. Born in the '60s, he is a post-Independence creature, far too irreverent to bother with the needs of the nation. His own tryst with destiny lies in a systematic opposition to accepted truths about the past. Was Akbar 'great'? Did 'sectarian conflict' begin only after the coming of Islam? Were the Bhakti preachers all passive 'saints' of peace? Did Hindus and Muslims begin to clash only after the advent of the British? "No," says Subrahmanyam emphatically.
"Why is it that so many of our historians are obsessed with colonial India?" he demands, looking like a bewildered Einstein. "It's almost as if the wheels of Indian society started to turn with colonialism." He specialises in the 18th century which, conventional history tells us, is all about darkness and decline. The Mughals had collapsed and British rule had not yet begun.
Yet, in this twilight zone of knowledge, Subrahmanyam is creating cutting-edge history, scrutinising documents in Portuguese and Spanish. India in the 18th century, according to him, was a vibrant (and violent) place, with monarchs raising money for war through promissory notes—the beginnings of portfolio capitalism perhaps—merchantmen establishing monopolies over pearl fisheries, coastal kingdoms with a sophisticated knowledge of the market, and flowering regional centres of culture after the decline of the Badshahi at Delhi. And, perhaps most importantly, Hindus and Muslims clashing violently and often. A vision of India which by his own admission is a little different from the Government's directorate of audio-visual publicity.
"This notion of all this brotherhood being spilt all over the place, the ICCR version of Bhakti and Sufi movements," Subrahmanyam waves his hand in disgust. Some Bhakti saints, according to him, were even bandits. In fact, the weaknesses of official Indian secularism have in his opinion ceded valuable ground to the advocates of the Hindu right-wing. "Naturally, someone like Arun Shourie can easily falsify this 'official secular' position. To be a defender of official Indian secularism means that one has to be a part of a sort of mish-mash of Stalinism, Indira Gandhi camp follower, a diffuse category which is everything other than Hindu."
In Unravelling the Nation, Subrahmanyam writes that the destruction of Hindu and Muslim religious sites was a continuing fact of the 18th century. Referring to the historical dispute over the Ayodhya temple, he writes: "Rather than analyse the medieval Indian record of sectarian violence in order to transcend it, there has been strategic selectivity, misuse and obfuscation." There was never a golden age of tolerance to which we can return at will, he believes. "But as far as pre-colonial India is concerned, there is an official line on certain things," he says.
Subrahmanyam refutes notions of the secular golden age (he also completely rejects the notion of a so-called Hindutva golden age of the saffron school) of Akbar portrayed as a sort of 16th century Nehru—"actually Nehru is quite anti-Islamic in Discovery of India ". His idea that Hindus and Muslims often destroyed each other's holy sites are concepts that are so unorthodox that he is an isolated figure among his community. "For a long time what I wrote was banned at the Aligarh Muslim University. Even today, it's impossible to argue these about things, people are so ready to brand you as anti-secular. You could say that there is a crisis in medieval Indian history because people are afraid to go against the official canon."
He's never been afraid, though. The youngest son of defence analyst K. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay says he was left to roam free, doing what he liked, while his elder siblings got on with the business of joining the IAS, IFS or the IES. Subrahmanyam is determinedly anti-state, the errant youngest child, rebellious about received wisdom, impatient with the limitations of language and nationality.
He learnt so many languages because "one thing led to another". He has taught at Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania and Delhi University. One of the greatest influences in his life was Ashim Dasgupta of Calcutta University. "There's such a lot of bad writing in Indian history, but Ashim is almost Victorian in the elegance of his expression," he says. Subrahmanyam's vast mass of hair flaps in the breeze. He's reportedly crazy about cricket and when in college even played in a rock band.
In his book Symbols of Substance, Subrahmanyam studies unconventional source materials, folklore, erotic poetry, the relationship between king and courtesan. "Medieval India is far too conservative a field," he believes. Yet there is nothing overtly trendy about him, no avant-garde post-modernism for this carelessly dressed, old fashioned story-teller of a neglected past. He is a sort of 'young fogey', old beyond his years, who looks nothing like the stormy petrel of History that he is. Last year, Subrahmanyam left for Paris where he now lives and teaches economic history at the Centre for Study of India and South Asia with his French wife, and is not hopeful of an immediate return to India. "One gets into so many stupid fights here, I find it almost impossible to get on with a number of people in my field," he sighs.
"Part of Sanjay's problem," says a colleague, "is his personality. He can be abrasive, arrogant, rude, a real Tamil Brahmin sometimes. He attacks people in print. He abuses people at seminars, yet his brilliance is evident and people get jealous." That a Delhi boy—Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and St Stephen's—has single-handedly rewritten an entire period of Indian history is a hard lesson for some. "People say, 'oh, he can't even read Persian.' So now I'm learning Persian." Subrahmanyam grins—a flash of teeth through the unkempt beard. His knowledge of Portuguese, on the other hand, is so deep that he was even asked to write an autobiography of Vasco de Gama due for release next year.
"Area studies," he says, "are a defence mechanism, not an ideal situation." Sanjay Subrahmanyam has shattered yet another preconceived notion. Just because one is an Indian, should one always study India? Why should one not live outside India, try and learn close to 10 European languages, cruise the high seas with the Portuguese and the Spanish, live in a wider world of which India is a part? And meanwhile, at home, generations of Indians memorise their history lessons, quite unaware that alone among hitherto untouched records sits a politically incorrect exile, quietly demolishing their Officially Sanctioned text-books.