Turn Of The Pen

It isn’t easy to toss one up to Ramachandra Guha. Try something on the prosof a mega-hydel dam, try something with a looping trajectory about Chipko being alocalised protest revolving on timber politics, a sharp turner on Gandhi’s hypocrisy,he’ll play it all with panache. Endless polemic, restless discoursing, constantlybouncing off book and column ideas, animatedly talking of a rejoinder to a newspaperarticle that has to be written, in Guha one can see a perennial uncoiling of ideas.

OK, his ganglia are wired up that way. Maybe that explains why Guha, 41,environmentalist, historian, social anthropologist, cricket freak, columnist, visitingprofessor and writer of eight books, should be so childishly fascinated with everything hedabbles in. He’ll tell you the names of four other Christians who played cricket forPakistan before Yousuf Youhana and then perhaps go on to elucidate the role of minoritiesin shaping subcontinental cricket. Guha is now passing through mid-life euphoria. He is onthe verge of releasing his eighth book, Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin, hisTribals and India ( Oxford), a wrenching and grand biography in the classical mould,which sounds the gong for the coming of age of the modern Indian biography. In thelargeness of the theme, in the writer’s tireless effort to get into the mind and soulof his subject, in the way he contextualises a forgotten British intellectual who lovedIndia and its tribals more than his religion, in the ease with which he straddlesdisciplines to grasp a prolific, difficult persona, in the finesse of language andexecution, this book is beyond all other Indian attempts at life-sketching.

Verrier Elwin represents the flowering of a prose cultivated, re fined andvalue-added over two decades of endless writing. "Its chiselled prose blends highlevels of intellection and language," says his publisher, editor and guide of twodecades, Rukun Advani, who compares it with S. Gopal’s Radhakrishnan biography. Guhapicks an ignored, oft-condemned Britisher who lived in the backyards of Madhya Pradesh andOrissa, penned tomes on the Gonds, Baigas, the Murias, and gives him a space and a heart.Like in all such great stories of men that have come to us, here too a sort of telepathiconeness—a merging of persona— between author and subject lifts the book toethereal levels.

When Guha first heard of Elwin from a friend in Orissa  in ’78, he recalls aninstant spark of affinity. Elwin—an Oxford scholar with a yen for Gandhi and a thingor two against colonial forestry—was a charmer, a restless, compulsive writer (somuch so, his first tribal wife Kosi said she’d married a typewriter) and ananthropologist with a deep love for India. One more likeness: both Elwin and Guha werescholars who remained aloof from the accoutrements of academia. "I’ve no patronin the academic community," Guha says with the pride of an outsider. Elwin rebelledagainst two of his religions: Christianity and Gandhi. Guha walked out on Marxism, towhich he owes much intellectually—and, for a while, rejected cricket too.

Elwin’s voluminous oeuvre, including an autobiography, helped Guha prise open hispsyche. After two decades of searching, reaching out, struggling, Guha—shortened fromthe Tamil Guhan—can confidently link his hands with the few other arrivistes ofIndian English writing. "I want to be a writer, a historian," he says, as if hehasn’t yet reached there. "Ram is always clear and lucid. He doesn’t try toimpress through mystification. You know what he’s saying," says good friend andSt Stephen’s contemporary Mukul Kesavan.

Guha doesn’t hop fashionable topics like academics are wont to, but pursues hisgame only if he develops a writer’s crush on his subject. "It’s mostlycentred around people. He’s impatient of intolerance, of any attempt to deny peoplespace," says Kesavan. Guha was researching the Pentangular cricket tournaments (whichbegan in ’37) when he came across the story Palwankar Baloo in a clipping anddetoured to research the life of the Dalit cricketer, the first public figure from amongthe untouchables to emerge in western India, according to Guha. As in Elwin’s case,it was love at first word .

The subject of Guha’s doctoral thesis, the history of the Chipko movement,published as Unquiet Woods, (Oxford, now in its sixth edition) was the offshoot ofan ’83 EPW article. "A crude Marxist history of forestry in colonial India, itwas the first time anybody had talked of these things," Guha remembers now. In DehraDoon Forest Institute, where his father worked, he met Madhav Gadgil with whom he was toform a memorable intellectual partnership and co-author The Fissured Land: AnEcological History of India.

While ruminating on the injustices of the forest policy, his fascination for anotherkind of timber, the willow, was gnawing at him. He played cricket for St Stephen’s,his family had a passion for the game, an uncle still runs a cricket club in Bangalore.When Ashish Nandy’s Tao of Cricket was out, it provoked Guha to write thesociology of Indian cricket. It also set him off on a tangential writing career which isnow three books rich. "Rukun nudged me towards it," says Guha, gratefully.

In Wickets of the East, Guha mused on things beyond the pitch—thepredominantly Iyengar composition of crowds at Chepauk, the Madras locality Triplicanebang next to it. His second book, Spin and Other Turns, was pure escapism, writtenin a state of trauma after the Ayodhya demolition. "I’m not an activist, but Iwas devastated. I just kept staring at the walls." Then, in a blinding fit he wrote Spinand Other Turns in two weeks. For him it was therapy, for fans—with its blend ofa grandstand spectator’s spontaneous glee and a sense of tradition—it waselixir.

Guha swears by C.L.R. James, whose Beyond the Boundary he has read 30times—once as he came home with his first born, trying to grapple with fatherhood."I’m steeped in James. He made modern cricket. I can never dream of beinginspired by him. He’s unique."

Hearing Guha speak animatedly for two hours on the lawns of Delhi’s StStephen’s—pacing to his left, stomping to his right—on the history ofenvironmental protests in India, on anything and everything, one sees a logic behind hisinquietude. "There’s a complete unity in what I’m doing," he says. Histhree cricket books do have a pattern, the first on local cricket, the second on greatIndian cricketers and another on great foreign cricketers who played here .

It’s been a hectic day but Guha won’t rest early. Pulling together the lapelsof his blazer against the winter chill, he sets off on a walk. He’ll bounce ideas offthe wind and return with another theory in his grasp. Maybe the nucleus of another book.