First Draft — Witness to the Making of Modern India by B.G. Verghese; Tranquebar Press; Price: Rs.695; 573 pp
.gif)
One of the positive new developments within the country’s books publishing industry dominated by fiction, is the emergence of a series of works of contemporary history. Over several decades for reasons not unconnected with the obsession of the politician-bureaucrat nexus to classify every government document as a state secret under the Official Secrets Act, 1923, all history books and texts culminated with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Presumably the official line of thinking was that with the dawn of independence, utopia was attained ipso facto signaling the end of Indian history. But in retrospect, it’s quite clear that the prime motivation of the post-independence establishment and the neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) nexus in particular to classify all government papers top secret, was to suppress the short-changing and loot of citizens of free India which has often exceeded the worst excesses of the British raj.
Fortunately this embargo on the recitation of independent India’s history has recently been broken by several professional historians, corporate leaders and academics who official discouragement notwithstanding, have written well-researched, interpreted and analysed historical narratives of the past 63 years in which — let’s face the truth squarely — the modest hopes and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of independent India’s citizens have gone up in smoke. Among the most notable and vital new voices of post-independence histories are Ramchandra Guha (India after Gandhi, 2007); Nandan Nilekani (Imagining India, 2008) and Madhusree Mukerjee (Churchill’s Secret War, 2010), all of which have been reviewed and commended on these pages.
Yet while Guha’s valuable contemporary history distinguished by deep insight, analysis and opinion could be classified as a professional historian’s narration and Nilekani’s is written from the business and industry perspective with Mukerjee’s illuminating the causes and effects of the great Bengal famine of 1943, B.G. Verghese’s First Draft — Witness to the Making of Modern India, is a perceptive account written from the critical perspective of a renowned journalist-editor. The author had a ringside seat to momentous political and socio-economic developments of the new republic, when he culminated his blue-chip education (Doon School, St. Stephens and Cambridge) to begin a long innings in the Times of India, Bombay/Delhi (1949-66).
Verghese writes with the maturity and advantage of someone who knew political life from the inside. After the Nehruvian era ended in the rout of the Indian army in the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, he was invited by Indira Gandhi, to whom the Congress party turned after the mysterious death of Nehru’s successor Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent in 1966, to serve as her information (press) advisor.
Three years later, frustrated that the “present system of administration is conservative and tradition-bound and not responsive to new ideas”, Verghese quit government and accepted an offer from K.K.Birla to take charge as editor of the Hindustan Times. That innings in the national capital’s most influential English language daily lasted until shortly after India’s first and only internal Emergency was declared on June 25, 1975, the most familiar date in recent Indian history.
Mrs. Gandhi was less than happy with the editorial line of HT and in September, Verghese was fired by Birla, hardly surprising given that India Inc tacitly welcomed the Emergency during which interregnum (June 25, 1975-March 21, 1977) the lively and free media was muzzled and over 100,000 political leaders and civil rights activists including Jayaprakash Narayan, were incarcerated in prisons across the country.
Indeed of all the 16 chapters of this engaging journalist’s memoir in which he summons memorable incidents, Chapter 8 titled ‘No talking! There’s an Emergency’ is the most absorbing. It’s a vivid recall of the massive violation of democratic rights during this turbulent and routinely under-reported period of independent India’s history. Historical narratives tend to dismiss the Emergency as a minor aberration and false step, but Verghese’s 35-page recitation underscores the horrors of the 21-month Emergency, indicating that it was a near thing that India was miraculously saved from a China-style cultural revolution which took a toll of 30 million lives in that country. Comments Verghese in First Draft: “If India had won independence in 1947, it won freedom in 1977... Henceforth freedom of expression was no more seen as merely freedom of the press, but that of the individual citizen too.”
In 1982 Verghese accepted an offer of the legendary Ramnath Goenka who had courageously stood up to Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency, and for mysterious reasons escaped imprisonment, to take charge as editor of the Indian Express. At the time he took charge, Verghese also inherited the services of the mercurial Arun Shourie, former World Bank executive-turned-polemicist who introduced anti-establishment investigative journalism in India. In their two years together until Shourie was fired by Goenka, the iconoclastic duo transformed the Indian Express into the country’s most respected daily, feared and admired for its hard-hitting and unsparing investigative reportage and editorials.
Four years later in 1986, Verghese put in his papers at the Express ending a distinguished career in Indian journalism and was invited by the Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy Research, where as visiting professor he presumably researched extensively and wrote this luminous history-cum-memoir of post-independence India. Undoubtedly First Draft is a timely and revealing history of our times narrated by an erudite individual who through dint of merit and sustained performance, was invited into positions of power and honour within the media, government and respectable voluntary organisations.
Perhaps the only dissatisfaction this reviewer has with First Draft is its width of coverage at the expense of depth, and its clinical and dispassionate style (warmly lauded by historian Ramchandra Guha as commendable detachment). I believe this more than good book would have become great if the author had focused his attention and erudition upon landmark, tipping point events of independent India’s chequered history, and written about them with greater passion to impact the lessons to be drawn from the failures of the past 63 years of independence.
But one must bear in mind that anything written — including this review — can always be better. That’s the cross every writer has to bear. Nevertheless it is indisputable that First Draft is a scholarly and personalised chronicle of post-Mahatma India which would — and should — honour every respectable personal and institutional library.
Dilip Thakore
Graphic Emergency story
Delhi Calm by Vishwajyoti Ghosh; Harper Collins, India; Price: Rs.499; 246 pp
.gif)
Although the graphic novel — an amalgam of the written word and hand-drawn or picturised characters and situations — is a well-established quarter century-old phenomenon in the industrial West and Japan where Manga comic strip novels and magazines are still a rage, in India it is a more recent debutant.
Delhi Calm is a new genre graphic novel that takes the reader back to the long night of the internal Emergency declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi in June 1975. It graphically depicts the tumult in Delhi, the capital of the world’s most populous democracy where life changed overnight. How and why is narrated by Vibhuti Prasad (26), aka VP who works in a newspaper as a “junior writer and tea-maker”. Marx is VP’s religion and singer Mohammed Rafi his digestive. His friends — all socialists aspiring to translate dreams into reality — are Parvez Alam, an English teacher and struggling poet who visualises himself as Robin Hood of the masses, and Vivek Kumar, ‘Master’, an enterprising physics teacher struggling to teach slum children.
These three comrades also constitute the Naya Savera Band which tours the countryside, conjuring up visions of revolution and change. As is wont in such groups, there are differences of opinion, serious ideological clashes, summary withdrawals of members like Mala and the eventual break-up of the band which also spells the death of several socialist and radical ideas: “Public life sans corruption, fight against misgovernance, a socialist nation with a healthy moral spine, partyless democracy.”
These characters gravitate towards Delhi, the Powerpolis after the political legitimacy of Mother Moon, prime minister of India, has been questioned by the Allahabad high court. Declaring that “my whole attempt is to create a society in which people do not need leaders”, Mother Moon declares an Emergency conferring autocratic powers upon herself and transforming Indian democracy into a totalitarian regime.
The idealistic trio become victims of state repression and surveillance as they chance upon each other in the Powerpolis. The heart of the novel depicts how each of the three musketeers learns to survive by making compromises with the totalitarian state. “Ambition often arrives unannounced on journeys that may have begun with a compromise,” says Parvez.
The careers of each member of the trinity are unfortunately, not tracked in detail, but they deal with the Emergency with caution to emerge out of this dark period to succeed in industry and politics. By the end of the novel, VP has risen to the position of creative vice-president of a major ad agency, Master disappears into the national ‘Missing Persons’ file and Parvez returns to his hometown Jamalpur, signs up with a political party and is elected to Parliament.
Ghosh’s illustrations in black and white and sepia tinted graphics which spring off the pages not only support the text, they become the narrative. The main story (depicted in tones of sepia) resurrects the family history of Mother Moon, who reigns in Delhi with her sons Prince and Pilot. Against the backdrop of the grim realities of the Emergency — forced sterilisation programmes, suspension of constitutional freedoms, authoritarianism — the trials, tribulations and increasingly self-centred opportunism of the trio propel the story forward with ubiquitous masked ‘Smiling Saviours’ of the establishment providing a surrealistic touch to the narrative.
Although the story-line of Delhi Calm is thin, the narrative is enriched by the use of complex visual-verbal signs and markers such as banners and posters proclaiming official propaganda that assumes the form of slogans, and a megaphone which continuously trumpets the pious disclaimers of those in power. The novel derives its title from a newspaper report about the uneasy calm that prevailed in Delhi during the Emergency and ends with its sudden lifting in March 1977. “Prime Minister today pleaded ignorance of any excesses that might have happened during the Emergency,” intones the megaphone.
Jayati Gupta