In 1931, the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress was held in the port city of Karachi. Vallabhbhai Patel was elected President. Early in his address, Patel remarked: ‘You have called a simple farmer to the highest office to which any Indian can aspire. I am conscious that your choice of me as first servant [...]
Perhaps because my own life has largely been devoted to the pursuit of personal success, I have always felt a guilty veneration for those who live for others. The public servant I most admired died on Sunday the 5th of September, aged sixty-six. In these times this may seem too early to go (particularly as he [...]
The city outside India I know best is London, and the place in London I know best is the British Library, where, for thirty years and counting, I have scoured the capacious collections pertaining to the history of colonial India. I must have worked there for at least a thousand days all told, always following the [...]
Like all other Indians, I grew up thinking of 15th August as the day when, back in 1947, the first Government of independent India was sworn into office. However, in recent years the day has acquired for me another meaning, not unrelated to the first. In my consciousness, 15th August 1947 has been joined by 15th [...]
I have recently been revisiting Walter Crocker’s 1966 book, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate. This book remains the best single-volume study of the life and legacy of India’s first prime minister, and it says many interesting things about Nehru’s country too. Consider these remarks about the part of India I myself live in: “South India has counted [...]
Shortly before T. S. Shanbhag shuttered his Premier Bookshop in 2009, Asha Ghosh and Kathleen Dargis made a short film about him (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLxYuoWKhA0). The film was dedicated to the photographer Raghav Shreyas, who died tragically young, and was a habitué of the store. It features, among other things, a lovely cameo of the owner of Premier [...]
“What am I? Asiatic, European, or American? I feel a curious medley of personalities in me.” — Swami Vivekananda In 1873, the social reformer, Jyotirao Phule, published a searing critique of the caste system. Entitled Gulamgiri, the book was written in Marathi, yet it carried a dedication in English. This expressed the author’s admiration for “the [...]
I have been reading the memoirs of Dora Russell, a pioneering British feminist and educationist. These were published in three volumes, of which I have just finished the first. This covers her upbringing in Edwardian England, her education at Cambridge, the development of her views on gender equality, an experimental school she established, and the years [...]
Why would the Indian state arrest a twenty-one-year-old woman activist who seeks a cleaner and safer planet? Should not the country want young people to look beyond their narrow personal interests to the interests of society at large? Why did our Government lock up a young citizen seeking to build a better future for herself and [...]
The American writer Louis Fischer is best known for his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which Richard Attenborough drew upon while making his award-winning film of 1982. Fischer’s book was published in 1949, a year after Gandhi’s assassination. Seven years previously, he had written a much slimmer (and now far less well known) volume entitled [...]