Emotions delicate as petals
Review by Priyanka Punia
The Flower Boy by Karen Roberts. Viking Penguin India, New Delhi. Pages 341. Rs 395.

Anti Muslim roots of nationalism
Review by Bhupinder Singh
Indian Nationalism: A Study in Evolution by Sitanshu Das. Har- Anand Publications, New Delhi. Pages 291. Rs 325.

The team which made BAe fly again
Review by Chander Mohan
Vertical Take-Off: The Inside Story of British Aerospace’s Comeback from Crisis to World Class by Richard Evans and Colin Price. Nicholas Brealey, London. Pages 214. £ 10.95.

Dawn of life’s truth up in the hills

The Book of Shadows,by Namita Gokhale Viking, New Delhi. Pages 332. Rs 295.

by Rumina Sethi

Rachita Tewari, a 34-year-old college lecturer, is running away from the memory of her fiance and the calamity she has suffered at the hands of his sister who has mutilated her face by throwing acid on it. Interwoven with insights into her life and the cause of her present misery, this story of claustrophobia and terror is propelled with dark as well as bright shadows of pathetic, sinister, and perverse figures who are associated with the central persona of the house in Kumaon hills. In her world no one individual can touch another’s existence; all seem to be intangible spectres and living ghosts like her servant or the dog.

Rachita is the protagonist of Namita Gokhale’s "The Book of Shadows" a chronicle of displacement, strangeness and exile, of forbidden passions and family histories told in a sensual, descriptive style which lends energy to her tense psychological drama with all its intimacy and haunting elusiveness. It is an original and ambitious piece of work and wide-ranging with a laudable cosmopolitan edge.

Written in quietly confident prose which fits in well with the peculiar atmosphere of the novel, and taking for her theme the fashionable subject concerning ghosts, there is an increasing feeling of distance from humanity, though at places it unfortunately gets a little insufferable. The voice of calm urbanity is given a note of something altogether bleak.

Though Gokhale never overcomplicates her story, her accumulation of detail and changes of perception result in a complex picture of the flawed nature of men and women and their inability to come to terms with the reality.

And though living in a climate of fear, dreams and truth, the protagonist would never respect herself if she were to run away from the experience of isolation she has sought. Though pain remains unvanquished and constant, she knows that a "firm hold on anything, even reality, hurts less than a timid half-way encounter. Pain is a precondition to life, a prelude to joy." One cannot be deterred by fear at some moments in life, and it is this irreducible moment in Rachita’s life when she has to make the existential choice of confronting the shadows that make up her life. She is part of a complex web of relationships with others, through whose eyes events are filtered. Such mannerisms at places stick in the throat, making the densely packed novel increasingly hard to swallow.

At the core of the novel is the house into which she retreats, feeling that it "belongs to me, as I belong to this house. I live here alone in the hills, watching the day turn to dusk, awaiting the dawn." The house and she become "one spirit"; it has taken her in again, soothes her hatred and "hushes" her sorrow. This old house built by a missionary a hundred years ago, is the repository of her youth and "the custodian" of her dreams.

The pace of the novel may flag at times in its larger concern with the house, but there are plenty of interesting moments in the evocation of a period that takes in mentalities as well as the Himalayan landscape, and deftly connects the two.

Anand, her fiance, has committed suicide which is the provocation for the acid attack on her. She had supposedly given in to the "subtle persuasions of her best friend’s husband, a betrayal too grievous to be accepted by Anand. She is now in the hills to heal, to hide, to forget, and maybe to forgive. She needs "solitude and soliloquy" to come to terms with what had happened, to forget Anand’s indulgent act of suicide, "ignore his stupidity" and restore to her life some sanity. Here far away from Delhi, she remembers her past and all that the house once was — the narcissus growing on the hillside, the smells, the dogs: "These were not strangers around me, they were familiar cohabitants of the same space. It was as though we had escaped the confines of our life-scripts, stumbled upon some interstice of experience, some simultaneity of narrative."

Rachita longs to escape from her present state of mind into her childhood when their garrulous servant Lohaniju used to tell them interminable stories. She wants to forget the alien language and seek refuge in the servant’s soft and consonated Pahari. Like the house, he too has taken her in to become a solace to her sorrows. She spends her days in the mountains reading poetry, drowning herself in the childhood pleasures of comics but takes care to paint her nails so as to not fall into "physical and emotional disrepair".

She dreads dreams and reality and remains wakeful, overtaken by shadows and voices from her past, tenaciously gripping her and almost tyrannising her. Anand’s anger, the familiar sight of his tongue hanging out from the corner of his mouth, and her pain are trapped in her mind. Only a Bhotiya dog named Lady keeps her company, the last link with the living world that keeps her from falling apart.

The novel thus sets the tone for the ghost stories to follow, along with a number of love stories involving a missionary, William Cockerll and his frail wife Fanny. A first person narration by a ghost with panthers, eroticism, and violence thrown in, along with perceptive remarks on poetry, creative writing, literature and philosophy make up the numerous sub-plots of the novel.

The journal written by William Cockerll throws light on the role of the missionaries and their rather orientalist views on the nature of the natives who are taken to be lethargic and immoral. He imagines the natives as shadows hovering around him and wonders if they were really human or only shadows belonging to some other "unchastened un-Christian world".

Rachita reads his journal which, in fact, not only documents the history of the house, but also the progressive breakdown of a man facing an alien culture and climate.

In the face of such reading she tries to keep a close watch over her sanity and comes to the conclusion that "most of what is real within us is not conscious, and most of what is conscious is not real". Trapped within herself she feels the shadows closing in on her, the shadows of Captain Wolcott and his mistress Dona Rosa, the other residents of the house.

Their story is told through the eyes of the ghost, the disembodied narrator and the oldest tenant of the house, who is so charged by the passion between the two lovers that he cannot help entering the body of Wolcott, though the experience of it is inadequate in enabling him "to reach and penetrate the essence of his beloved Dona Rosa".

The other narration about the perversions of the two disciples of Crowley, Marcus and Munro, and their excursions into black magic, forbidden sex and the final sacrifice of a child, which unleashes the spirits of the mountains in the shape of panthers resulting in their physical mutilation and horrifying death, is in itself a juxtaposition of Kumaoni folklore, superstitions and the inherent evil in human nature.

And in the midst of these shadows, Rachita finally realises that "to be ourselves we must remain in control of our scripts. We must make and remake ourselves, possess and repossess our world, cast and recast our lot in every precious moment. Above all, we must know what to hold on to, what to discard, in this radical flux which is life". She now knows that she had travelled to the edge of this universe and has now returned, and "that the world was good".

Her world which had turned into anarchy and chaos had finally "reintegrated into something more that the sum of its parts". The act of going away to another place will symbolically transform people like Rachita Tewari from the sufferers of an indifferent fate into the protagonists of their own lives in charge of their destinies and responsible for their survival.

Although the novel is conventional in its content, it is Namita Gokhale’s most technically ambitious and successful fiction. There is fluidity in the various perceptions which make up the narrative, enabling her plot and subplots to engage and convey with conviction. But she resists any easy solutions and neat endings — her character’s fate remains open to the unexpected aspects of her new environment and she does not know if she will return to the outside world again, which is full of change where one does not know if memories will endure.

Strange disturbing memories, pleasant and horrifying, will not allow a final tie up into a greater whole. This is a compelling story, leaving deeper layers of consciousness disturbed by analysis and remaining forever entangled with the shadows from the past.

Emotions delicate as petals

The Flower Boy by Karen Roberts. Viking Penguin India, New Delhi. Pages 341. Rs 395.

by Priyanka Punia

KAREN Robert’s "The Flower Boy" reads like a charming bedtime story, especially the first 200 odd pages.

Set in the 1930s Ceylon, then under British rule, its locale is a small, quiet, sparsely populated tea estate. It is at a vantage point, surrounded by the resplendent beauty of untouched nature. Nestled close to it is Glencairn, an imposing bungalow occupied by a British tea planter, John Buckwater, his snobbish wife, his three children and a battery of Sinhalese servants.

The story begins with a four-year-old flower boy, Chandi, playing in the rain with gay abandon and vowing to be the best friend the soon-to-be born daughter of Buckwater (respectfully called the Sudu Mahattya). With a degree of innocence natural to a child, he even decides that he would call the little girl Rose, after the flower he most likes. When he sees her six months later, it is like a "father meeting his baby for the first time".

The novel mostly concentrates on the bond that slowly develops between Chandi and Rose-Lizzie "who had four years of separate experiences to catch up on and they set about it with great enthusiasm".

Chandi’s views, his thinking, is central to the book. Most of the developments are seen from his perspective. How he feels when his father, Disneris, moves on leaving them behind; his relationship with his mother Premawathi who manages Buckwater’s kitchen; his turmoil and confusion when he discovers quite by accident his mother’s affair with the Sudu Mahattya whose bored, embittered wife leaves for England never to return; his sorrow when his young sister Rangi jumps off the chiff; his relationship with the kind teacher whom he grows to respect and admire very much, are the focus of the novel.

The story begins when he is four and ends when he is 18. When he is a child he already knows life is hard. He wonders why people cannot be just "medium — neither happy nor unhappy". He is the sort who "chose to believe nicer things than actually happened".

It does not come as a surprise when he begins to imagine that the Sudu Mahattya would take him and his mother to England when the British finally left Sri Lanka. This is the dream he most cherished. But when it is left to him to make a final decision, he knows he cannot go. "How would he live without the sounds and smells and sights he had seen everyday for as long as he could remember."

He is forced to think if there is really happiness. He thinks of it as a "myth put there by tired gods to keep people hoping".

Towards the end, the once happy Gleincarn disintegrates into a shadow of what it was. One by one all its inhabitants leave, some on their own and the others because of events they cannot control.

Disneris, a round, passive character, who loves his wife and kids only because they were easy to love and as it required "no effort", leaves because he cannot adjust to the informal way of life at Gleincarn. His point of view is reflective of that of society which believes that everything (including people)had a place, a natural order. The rich had theirs and so did the poor. Any uncalled for fraternity between them would upset that order.

Leela, Chandi’s elder sister, leaves after she gets married. Sensitive, loveable Rangi commits suicide after she happens to listen to a conversation between her mother and the Sudu Mahattya. She can empathise with her mother’s "heartache" and sees the "shattered dreams ahead". Sensing the "impossibility of it all", she is driven to end her life.

Ayah, Rose-Lizzie’s keeper, leaves with her lover, the firewood man. Appuchamy, the oldest servant at Gleincarn, dies in his sleep. And finally, the Buckwaters join the exodus of the British. Everyone reconciles himself or herself to his or of her destiny.

The book is about people connecting. Some characters come together to make a new beginning. Some simply drift apart, while some others are forced to act differently by circumstances.

It is also about internalising of emotions. Rangi is prone to it, so is Premawathi who wonders how good it would be to be able to "succumb to a love rather than deny it, to be able to revel in it without doubting it".

Another parallel theme is the racial bias and the stratification of society which limit human interaction. But there is hope when John Buckwater says,"No one is better or lesser because they have more money or less, or because they are black or white. What makes us better or lesser is what’s in here (the heart) and here, the mind."

Born and brought up in Colombo, Karen Robert’s sensitive portrayal of human relationship and treatment of moral and emotional complexities is remarkable. The narrative has the smoothness of freshly whipped cream.

"The Flower Boy" makes you laugh a lot here and cry a little there. Like most fiction, it moves you but does not provoke you to think. Nevertheless, it is an endearing novel, suitable for leisure reading.

Once upon a time in Kurali

My Reminiscences by Gur Rattan Pal Singh. Published by the author. Pages vi+250. Rs 450.

Secret of India’s greatness by Jagadguru Shankaracharya Shri Bharati Krishna Tirtha. Jagriti Prakashan, Noida. Pages xvii+135. Rs 200.

Insight written and published by S.K. Shah. Pages xiv+222. Price not mentioned.

by Randeep Wadehra

THE late English author Margaret Fairless Barber once remarked, "To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward." This book looks back in a manner that is at once emotional and analytical — a rejuvenating amalgam of the heart and the mind.

An advocate by profession and a poet by nature, Gur Rattan Pal Singh’s endeavour could not have been otherwise. Tracing back his ancestry, he talks of Lala Harnam Dass and Lala Bhagwan Dass — his forebears on the mother’s side, who received a gold watch each as a token of appreciation from the British government for building a palatial sarai in 1901. At present the Chief Khalsa Diwan, Amritsar, is managing it. The sarai has proved to be an enduring gift to society.

The author was born at Kurali. Not many Punjabis and hardly any other Indian might know much about Kurali, but Hitler had developed a desire to visit the place! This was after he came to know that many Indian prisoners of war were recruited at the Kurali Recruiting Centre. This prompted the dictator to show interest in the place.

The author talks with compassion of the 60,000 Muslims who took refuge in his family’s mango garden in 1947. Victims of the communal violence — an ugly feature of partition — these Muslim families had seen death and destruction as had their Hindu and Sikh counterparts elsewhere. When they left, the mango trees had become mere stumps because the refugees ate the leaves as food and burnt the branches for fuel. Not that the author’s family grudged them this infraction.

When leprosy was considered incurable there was a hakim named Badan Singh at Kurali who could cure the affliction. There was a lighter side to this noble profession. Hakim Atma Ram, another medical luminary of Kurali, was an expert in uroscopy — he could diagnose a patient’s ailment by a mere glance at his urine brought in a glass bottle. Once a potter mixed his wife’s urine with that of a she-donkey and brought it for the hakimji’s inspection. The latter retorted, "Have you come to test my knowledge? Go home... both your wife and the animal are pregnant."

The author talks of saints and soldiers. However, his recollections of the area’s prostitutes too are quite vivid. The author appears to be slightly apologetic about including this subject in his book, but nostalgia is neither unidimensional nor gray in colour. It is a canvas wherein all hues, shades, shapes and images, must have their due place in order to be an authentic account of the times. Where was the need to embellish his case with Khushwant Singh’s opinion on love and John Donne’s observation on the fate of "every affair"?

I found Gur Rattan Pal Singh’s narration of Kanso’s love life quite interesting. One could virtually smell the air of those times in the narrative. Probably the author should consider writing more on the sensual incontinence of the period. Carnal desires and mindless violence can be successfully shaped into best sellers. The author has given but a fleeting glimpse of this aspect of the socio-cultural life in Punjab.

Banur is actually the author’s paternal hometown. It was earlier known as Pushp Nagri because it was a famous trading centre for flowers and scents. It so happened that Mian Tansen, Akbar’s favourite court singer, came here and met Banno, a woman belonging to the Chimba (tailor) caste. Tansen was suffering from the aftermath of singing Deepak raag. Banno sang raag Malhar and thus rescued him from his fiery ordeal. A grateful Tansen’s took Banno to Akbar’s court where her wish to name Pushp Nagri after her name was granted by the emperor.

The author talks fondly of his childhood days spent in almost idyllic surroundings. He recollects how Gandhi’s assassination prompted him and his brother to stop attending the RSS shakha. His recounting of his college days at Ropar tells us how the student culture has changed over the period. After graduation he went to Aligarh for his MA, LL.B. course in 1956. Despite partition violence and hatred he found the Muslim students friendly and cordial towards Hindu and Sikh students. Later on, while doing a course in proficiency in land laws at Delhi University, he established contacts with politicians.

In the 1960 Akali Morcha led by Master Tara Singh, Gur Rattan Pal Singh and his father Gur Iqbal Singh were arrested. Thus was his political baptism by fire.

He was lodged in six different jails. This had an adverse effect on the family’s business. The author avers that despite his family’s contribution to the Akali cause, not much recognition came its way because the party was dominated by Jat Sikhs. Disillusioned with politics, the author concentrated on his legal practice.

Talking of his profession he says, "This is a profession monopolised by rich people, including close relatives of Ministers, Judges and bureaucrats... one’s caste, favourable time, influential connections, hard work, command over language... are some of the factors for a lawyer’s success. Through dinner diplomacy and publicity, some persons manage to rise from limbo of oblivion to limelight."

Contradictory though the author’s observations may appear, one tends to agree with his assertion that connection does count. I wish the author had dwelt a bit more on how justice is dispensed in our courts. As a cynic once remarked, "If you want justice, don’t go to the court; rely on your own resources — fair or foul."

George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad." The train of nostalgia takes the author through variegated vistas. Personal triumphs and disappointments, joys and sorrows, friends and foes. However, at the end of it all, I must register my personal admiration for the man. Apart from those mentioned by him in detail, he has a list of one hundred and six persons towards whom he feels indebted! In these days of "use and discard" he cares to remember so many friends.

We live in an age when "contacts" have replaced friends; when the smile is a currency in the commercial market; when courtesy degenerates into curtness as soon as one’s purpose is served; when only fools care to allow gratitude to sway them from the mercenary path... Indeed, it is only a good soul who would write an entire book merely to repay his debt to a large number of people.

Apart from providing historical information of the little known facets of the region, this book is a testimony to the wholesome life that was a salient feature of a bygone era. A book for all reasons and seasons.

***

If you remember Iqbal’s poem "Sare jahan se achha.." you can’t possibly forget the lines, "Unan-o-Misr-Roman sab mitt gaye jahan se, magar hai baki ab tak namonishan hamara... Kuchh baat hai key hast mitati nahin hamari, go sadiyon raha hai dushman daur-e-zaman hamara." How true! There is really hardly some imperceptible force that has sustained our civilisation over the ages even when the more aggressive ones have long disappeared from the face of the earth.

His Holiness the late Jagadguru Shankaracharya Bharati Krishna Tirtha was a unique personality. He participated in the freedom movement and was arrested twice. He went abroad to propagate Sanatana Dharma. R. Heber Richarde, President of Central Connecticut State College, observed, "During all his appearances... the saintly speaker held his audience spell-bound... We are pleased that at least we can preserve, in printed form, what many consider one of the greatest messages ever brought to our campus."

A series of lectures given by him at Chennai in 1933 form the basis of this book. The swamiji wanted to inculcate self-respect in society, which had passively accepted the derogatory Arab term "Hindu" (literally "thief" in Arabic) as its mark of identity. These were the times when, in Radhakrishnan’s words, "The attitude to Indian thought was one of hazy emotional reverence and not that a historical analysis and critical evaluation: the living faith of the dead has become the dead faith of the living."

Pointing to the dynamism inherent in the Sanatana Dharma, the swamiji points out that unlike other religions, ours is not dogmatic or intolerant. It doesn’t discard an idea just because it has become old, nor does it ignore the winds of change. The Sanatana Vaidika Dharma in fact keeps all points of view open to scrutiny.

He avers, "The Sanatana Vaidika Dharma alone... possesses the unique peculiarity of not merely enjoining on others the duty of truth-speaking but lays even its own teachings, too, open to enquiry and determination on the basis thereof, as to the truth or otherwise of its own doctrine in respect of karma (action), bhakti (devotion) and janana (knowledge)."

An excellent book for the students of Indian philosophy and thought.

***

Letter writing, especially as an expression of one’s views on the contents of assorted publications, is an art that is yet to be recognised in our country. For some it merely a means for passing time while others do it as an ego-boosting exercise. You can identify these from the language and style adopted by a letter writer.

Shah appears to be one of those rare types who take letter writing seriously enough to keep their copies and record the names and other details of publications in which they had appeared. Thoughtful, sarcastic, philosophical, angry and amusing...his letters portray the varied reactions of a common man to what is happening in our country. I quote the one I liked best, "...India is a land where a hen’s daily diet is a quintal of cattle feed, where 15 tonnes of fodder is loaded on a two-wheeler scooter and Rs 133 crore is siphoned off to another country against imports of urea which never touched Indian coasts..."

Though not all his letters are in a similar vein, they do reflect a reader’s perception as moulded by the media. The above letter had appeared in The Hindustan Times in 1997. The rest you can read in the book that has been approved of by no less a person than Tavleen Singh herself. Plenty of fodder..oops! food for thought there.

The team which made BAe fly again

Vertical Take-Off: The Inside Story of British Aerospace’s Comeback from Crisis to World Class by Richard Evans and Colin Price. Nicholas Brealey, London. Pages 214. £ 10.95.

by Chander Mohan

BRITISH Aerospace, BAe for short, was an unwieldy multi-billion pound sterling enterprise engaged in civil and military aerospace. It included some of the greatest names in aviation history: British Aircraft Corporation, De Haviland, Hawker Siddeley and Vickers. Their pioneering work had included aircraft like Viscount, the first turbo-prop; Comet, the first commercial jet; Harrier, the very short take-off and landing jet fighter. BAe was also a partner in Concorde, the only commercial supersonic plane in service, and in the Airbus challenge to American dominance.

With its proud heritage and national aura, it hobbled along in the eighties, middling in performance after its privatisation by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. To face the post-cold war defence cut-backs across the world, it had went into a run of acquisitions to broaden its base in diverse the portfolio of civilian and non-cyclical businesses — car maker Rover, munitions supplier Royal Ordnance, property developer Arlington Securities, etc. To fund these acquisitions, it raised $ 430 million in rights at a respectable £ 3.80 a share in 1992.

The hurricane blew in all of a sudden and within a year of Richard Evans taking over as CEO, property market crashed. Rover sales nose-dived by a fifth. The UK’s defence spending also came in for a major review. Cut-throat competition in a shrinking defence market had even forced American goliaths into mergers. BAe was forced to cut 60,000 jobs out of its strength of 127,000. To add to all this, BAe had to go in for a £ 1 billion asset write-off, the largest in UK history. Its share price had fallen below par.

Such was the grim challenge which faced Evans in 1994, not long after he took-over. Morale was at rock bottom. He also realised that the companies unified under the BAe umbrella had never shed their individual identities. There was no meeting ground or sharing. Ten different salesmen of different products could be handling a single customer, even competing against each other. This is the BAe which he resolved to resurrect from the pits. No outside consultants, but an advisor for himself in Colin Price of Price Waterhouse who also co-authors the book.

A drastic change was called for, and fast. But he was also clear that without the active participation of his top management team, this exercise would be a dead duck. He thus began it with an off-site retreat of 30 top managers from across the group which was soon enlarged to 130. This was the think tank to thresh out a vision for BAe and develop the strategy.

On the face of it, the vision carved out by them looks a common homily: "At British Aerospace we are dedicated to working together, and with our partners, to become the benchmark for our industry, setting the standard for customer satisfaction, technology, financial performance and quality in all we do."

This was then translated down to five fundamental values, including customer, internal and external; people, realisation of the full potential of the combined BAe team; partnership with customers and suppliers; innovation and technology or hunger for long-term competitive advantage; and performance which has to be a continuous challenge to be the best.

BAe benchmarks were then set for each of these values. The group was made responsible for transfer to their respective domains, with free access to teams of topic specialists drawn from the entire organisation. This approach itself became a beginning for dismantling inter-company barriers and forging a unified BAe spirit.

As is apparent, in people lay the core of all values. Success hinged on harnessing individual and team talents and creativity and enhancing their ability. Peer evaluation was used as a very effective tool for monitoring individual commitment, understanding and application. To drive home its priority, achievements and peer evaluation were gradually made the basis of bonuses and promotions.

The sinking drag of deep-rooted culture and the imperative necessity of his personal commitment and total involvement in change was driven into Evans all the way through.More than a third of his time was devoted to this task. Some senior managers who refused to change had to go. Personal contact and demonstrated commitment could also not be established by sitting in the London office.

The end result has been most rewarding. The change process picked up momentum with time. In four years, BAe had turned the corner with a 1998 profit of £ 700 million on a £ 9 billion turn-over. The sale of Rover, a non-core business, to BMW, followed by acquisition of companies in advanced avionics to become a total systems supplier added to its strength.

It is a step-by-step tale, Evans’s difficult journey, despairs and joys included. Alongside are chapters by Colin Price to give the outsider account. The one thing stressed repeatedly is that such journeys only succeed with the total involvement of the CEO, demonstrated every day in every action and deed. Cultural resistance is most difficult to shake.

It holds many a lesson for Indian CEOs who have made a bee-line for various quality certifications in the past decade, but to little intrinsic benefit in actual working.

Anti Muslim roots of nationalism

Indian Nationalism: A Study in Evolution by Sitanshu Das. Har- Anand Publications, New Delhi. Pages 291. Rs 325.

by Bhupinder Singh

HISTORIAN Bipan Chandra has shown nearly three decades ago that an economic critique of imperialism by Dadabhai Naoroji, M.N. Ranade and others formed the bedrock of Indian nationalism. An essentially anti-imperialist movement led to the formation of a nation-state, though not really a nation in the West European sense.

The author of the book under review, however, has a different opinion and views nationalism from a religio-cultural angle. According to Sitanshu Das, the defining element of Indian nationalism was essentially anti-Muslim. His study on nationalism is confined to the late 19th century Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab. In all three states he thinks that nationalism had a unifying anti-Muslim thread.

According to him, the Bengal Renaissance was a myth and there were other contending streams of nationalism which Bengal produced as a response to British rule. These were expressed in religious terms and were essentially anti-Muslim. The Hindus of Bengal had initially welcomed British rule as it gave them some freedom which had been "stifled" under Muslim rule.

He holds the basis of nationalism in Maharashtra to be the "nationalism" of Shivaji. Before the coming of Ranade and Tilak, the Chitpavan Brahmins, as inheritors of the Peshwa dynasty (despite its degenerate rule), saw themselves as the natural nationalist leaders. Their nationalism was also essentially anti-Muslim.

The author’s understanding of nationalism in Punjab is equally religion-centred. In Punjab, he feels, the question was essentially between the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Hindus and Sikhs, on the other. The Sikhs were the defenders of the Hindu faith. Guru Gobind Singh practically represented Hindu nationalism. Till the 19th century, the Hindus sought the protection of the Sikhs.

The British colonial rulers created a separate Sikh identity and the latter sided with the British government after the Anglo-Sikh wars. Modern nationalism, therefore, came to be represented by the emergence of the Arya Samaj under Lala Lajpat Rai.

Das opines that Nehru and Netaji Bose were wrong to read a syncretic tradition in the medieval age and instead it was Vivekananda who represented the enduring stream of Indian nationalism. Hindu resistance to Muslim rule was present throughout the medieval period. Vivekananda revived this "tradition" in a package of militant nationalism. (The discerning reader may be reminded here of what Hobsbawm once termed as the "invention of tradition".)

The author’s basis for understanding 19th century Indian history in general and nationalism in particular is flawed on a number of counts.

Das views Indian history in terms of religious identity and confines himself only to the "high tradition". His work belongs to what has been termed by Sumit Sarkar as the "older kind of work on nationalism focused on politics inspired or manipulated from the top" and one that is a rather unreliable guide to what the rank and file of the common people actually thought and felt.

The writer assumes an a priori notion of nationalism as an ever-present phenomenon, while today there is more or less a consensus that nationalism emerged only in the early 19th century Europe (see Raymond Williams’s excellent summary in his compendium "Keywords").

Das also fails to locate Indian nationalism in the context of the current debates on nationalism, significantly the works of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. The author also ignores the excellent work done by Sudipto Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee in this decade and the Marxist and subaltern schools previously. Sumit Sarkar’s extremely relevant essay on Ram Mohan Roy is not even mentioned. The least one could have expected in a work on Indian nationalism is a discussion, if not a critique on some of the issues raised by these historians.

Sumit Sarkar has recently observed, rather self-critically, that even in the context of modern Indian history written as late as the early 1980s (including his own work "Modern India"): "The common sense or textbook understanding of late colonial Indian history, for instance, is still in large part grounded on the assumption that the entire meaningful world of political action and discourse can be comprehended through categories of imperialism, nationalism and communalism… Such an assumption involves an uncritical acceptance of holistic ideological claims of ‘Indian nationalism’ and ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim communalism’." (See his "Identity and Difference: Caste in the Formation of Ideologies of Nationalism and Hindutva" in "Writing Social History").

Das continues to sell his wares in an even older and long defunct paradigm that comes close to articulating the unifactory projects of Hindutva and Indian nationalism. Incidentally, if not intentionally, this suits the Sangh Parivar’s current saffronisataion of history offensive.

The author’s attempt at writing the history of Indian nationalism can be described as belonging to a school of historiography that is at best outdated and at worst discredited.

Hobsbawm notes in his "Nations and Nationalism since 1780" (1990) that nationalism is a complex business. He quotes the French historian Renan as saying: "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation."

Whether India is or was ever a nation, will it ever be a nation or whether it is a nation in the making or in the unmaking, whether it is a cultural unity or a civilisational unity or whether India has to be discovered or invented — these are questions that are at the centre of the debate and contest today not only in academics but also significantly at the political level.

As far as the work under review is concerned, it does not attempt to raise or answer any of these and trace their evolution. It does, however, qualify the first part of Renan’s observation — it magnificently manages to get its history wrong.