In his last years as GM, Hawkins was joined by two gifted young Indians who had both studied at Oxford. Girish Karnad was a mathematician by training and a playwright by temperament. Ravi Dayal was a history scholar who had read widely in the social sciences. After seven years with OUP India, Karnad left to make a career in films. Dayal stayed on, and in 1971 moved to Delhi to start a branch of the OUP there. Meanwhile, Hawkins was succeeded as GM by Charles Lewis, a gentle and understated Englishman with an effervescent and politically active Indian wife, Primila. In 1975, the Emergency was promulgated, and Primila Lewis was jailed by Indira Gandhi’s police. The OUP now thought it best to move her husband back to Oxford.

  Shortly before Ravi Dayal was appointed GM in place of Lewis, OUP India had shifted its head office to Delhi. The city was coming to replace Bombay as the intellectual capital of India. Scholars in Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) thought they were among the best in the world. Some certainly were – such as the sociologists M.N. Srinivas and André Béteille, the historians Sarvepalli Gopal and Romila Thapar, the economists Sukhamoy Chakravarty and A.L. Nagar, and the unclassifiable social scientist and social critic Ashis Nandy.

  The early works of these scholars had often been published overseas – by Cambridge, Chicago, Blackwell, and other presses. Ravi Dayal persuaded them to offer their next books to the OUP, so that they would be edited and printed in the country where they themselves lived and about which they wrote. Most agreed, because they recognized that there were now more Indian than foreign readers of their books – and because it was impossible to refuse Ravi Dayal.

  A small dapper man usually dressed in a churidar-kurta, Ravi Dayal was a Kayasth, from a community that produced many of northern India’s best scholars and scribes, but also its finest cooks. The Kayasths were keen patrons of Hindustani classical music.[fn1] Dayal himself could talk food like an Indian and talk Dickens and Gibbon like an Englishman. He was both vernacular and cosmopolitan, a mixture that characterized the intellectuals whose books he was seeking. Scholars such as the half-Bengali, half-French sociologist André Béteille, and the Oxford-educated historian of medieval India, Irfan Habib, were likewise desi and videsi in equal measure. They were naturally drawn to a publisher who bridged their worlds.

  By the end of the 1970s, Ravi Dayal and the OUP had shifted the locus of scholarly publishing on South Asia out of the West. Theirs was the stamp that scholars working on the subcontinent most craved. Historians and social scientists, whether living in India or overseas, of whatever nationality or ideological affiliation, were, so to say, lining up outside the OUP’s offices in New Delhi. Their manuscripts were subject to rigorous vetting: scrutiny by the concerned editor, and by at least two external referees, in a process that saw perhaps four out of five proposals turned away to other, lesser, publishers.

  To the scholars he wooed, Dayal was a publisher who understood scholarship. To his staff, he was a boss with little regard for hierarchy. Rukun Advani, who worked with him closely in his own first years at the OUP, recalled:

  [Dayal] refused an air-conditioner in his room because it would have made the organization inegalitarian in a way he considered unacceptable. This was the sort of Gandhian trait that earned him huge respect, and which made his organization congenial and unhierarchical. It created a sort of ‘Dayal Bagh’ in which everyone grumbled about low salaries but where everyone stuck it out because the bidi-smoking boss at least looked like he was in the same boat as the bidi-smoking chaprasis. No one cultivated unglamorous socialist fellow feeling with as much perverseness as Dayal. Most people who worked with him secretly hoped he would one day see the light of capitalist hedonism. But he never did.

  In the summer of 1979, Ravi Dayal, now the most respected English-language publisher in India, received a proposal from a middle-aged Bengali academic based in England. His name was Ranajit Guha. At that stage Guha had published just one book, a study of agrarian policy in eighteenth-century Bengal. As a student leader in Calcutta, Ranajit Guha was admired for his oratory, and as an academic he continued to work for the most part in the oral tradition. So, although he had himself published little, he had gathered around him a group of bright young devotees who promised to publish a great deal.

  Ranajit Guha’s proposal to Ravi Dayal was that he and his acolytes would publish a series of collected essays under the running title ‘Subaltern Studies’. Where other editors might have been deterred by Guha’s lack of distinction, and turned off by the confusing series title,[fn2] Dayal saw here an exciting move away from the elite-centred narratives of Indian historiography. For Guha and his disciples were genuine interdisciplinarians: historians who reached out to anthropology and political theory to make meaningful sense of the past. They had also moved beyond the colonial archive to seriously explore sources such as vernacular tracts and oral testimonies. Almost for the first time in Indian historiography, the voices of peasants, tribals, workers – hitherto excluded from the standard narratives – were brought centre stage.

  A first volume of Subaltern Studies was commissioned, and duly appeared in April 1982. Three months later, when Rukun Advani joined the OUP’s Delhi office, Ravi Dayal told him that – among other things – seeing the subsequent volumes of the series through the press would be his responsibility.

  III

  In the summer of 1978, Rukun Advani had his life transformed by the award of an Inlaks scholarship to Cambridge, turning him away from a life teaching bored undergraduates in St. Stephen’s towards what was to become a very interesting and (on the whole) enjoyable career in publishing. In that same summer I had my life reshaped too – albeit in the remote highlands of Odisha rather than the rarefied portals of Oxbridge. The previous year, I had begun an MA degree at the Delhi School of Economics (popularly known as D School), seeking to redeem myself by spending more time in the library than the cricket field, hoping thereby to obtain the first class that had eluded me in my BA. When the academic year ended I put in an application for a summer research fellowship, the topic chosen for me by an uncle who worked in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). I would, I told my D School professors, study the productivity of workers in a HAL factory manufacturing fighter jets that was located in the tribal-dominated district of Koraput.

  The factory had been sited in upland Odisha for two reasons: that it might help develop a ‘backward’ district; and because it was deemed too far away from the range of Chinese or Pakistani bombers. My own study would test the validity of the first claim, by studying how many tribal workers the factory employed and how they were faring. The topic was intriguing enough for my teachers to grant me the fellowship, notwithstanding my indifferent grades.

  I spent the months of June and July 1978 in that factory township in the hills of Odisha, gathering data on employment, productivity, etc., then running regressions that proved the tribal workers were comfortably as efficient as non-tribal workers. In the event, the elaborate econometric exercise proved irrelevant to my future; what was of more consequence was a chance meeting with a veterinarian, Dr Das, who asked whether I had heard of a man named Verrier Elwin who had come to these highlands and written about life in them long before the aircraft factory had been conceived.

  I had not, so Dr Das told me just enough about Verrier Elwin to keep the name alive in my mind: that he had studied at Oxford and joined the priesthood, that he had later abandoned the church for Gandhi and theology for anthropology, becoming a leading ethnographer of the tribes and a self-appointed spokesman for their rights. I made sure to issue some books of Elwin from the college library after I returned to Delhi.

  Reading Verrier Elwin was an epiphanic experience. I was enchanted by the quality of the prose and the compassionate humanity of his descriptions of the tribals of central India. The first book of his that I read was his autobiography, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, which described, with passion and wit, the twists and turns in his own career. The second was Leaves from the Jungle, a diary of his life in the Gond country. This spoke of the intimate bond between the Gond and nature, of how ‘he is the child of the open-air, of mountains and streams, of the lonely forest-path, and of the wild rushing winds’. One Gond, asked his idea of heaven, answered: ‘Miles and miles of forests without any forest guards.’

  The works of this self-trained anthropologist had opened my eyes, and my mind, to other ways of studying the world than graphs, charts, equations, and numbers. That I was patently not cut out for a career in economics was already known to me, and was made known to the world the following year, when I graduated with a low second class in my MA.

  In the summer of 1979, while Rukun Advani was consulting the papers of E.M. Forster at the King’s College library preparatory to writing his thesis, my own future was utterly uncertain. In five years of playing cricket for St. Stephen’s, selection for the Delhi University team had consistently eluded me. My mediocre record in sport was perfectly matched by my mediocre record in academics. What sort of career could I hope or aim for? Were the doors of scholarship to be forever closed to me?

  Fortunately, I had an undemanding father to aid me out of my confusions. Where other security-conscious parents of similar background would have had me leverage my English-language skills and upper-caste cultural capital for a job in the corporate sector (following legions of Stephanians in this regard), when I asked for a year to, as it were, clear my mind at his expense, my father agreed at once.

  I spent that year in my grandmother’s home in Bangalore, a town that had better libraries than my native Dehradun but also fewer distractions than Delhi. Reading the works of Verrier Elwin had stoked an interest in humanistic studies, and the thought that, having failed to make headway in economics, I might yet make a good fist of doing research in a subject like sociology appealed to me. It began to appeal further when, at Bangalore’s wonderful Premier Bookshop, I bought the works of the leading Indian sociologists M.N. Srinivas and André Béteille, and found them to be more analytical but no less elegantly written than those of Elwin himself.

  Halfway through my ‘gap’ year I told my father I would like to do a research degree in sociology. His support was, as before, unwavering. He was an indulgent parent; besides, scholarship was in the family tradition. My father had a PhD in chemistry himself; he also had a father-in-law with a doctorate in wood science, as well as one niece with a PhD in economics and another with a PhD in nutrition. Having some first-hand knowledge of the joys of research, and close familial acquaintance with others who possessed that knowledge, my father was not about to deprive his previously wayward son of the opportunity of joining the club.

  However, it turned out that, because of my grades, the only place that would give me admission for a doctoral degree was the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Calcutta. Although IIMs were not exactly in the vanguard of social science research, I took the chance and joined. There I was fortunate to be mentored by a brilliant, astonishingly well-read, and deeply caring teacher named Anjan Ghosh. Just a few years older than me, a product of the Jadavpur and Jawaharlal Nehru universities, Anjan patiently guided me through the works of the great trinity of nineteenth-century sociologists – Durkheim, Weber, and Marx – while introducing me to the influential twentieth-century British tradition of social history and to classic ethnographies by American anthropologists as well.

  I joined the IIM in July 1980; so, for the next two years, Rukun and I were both pursuing doctoral degrees, in Cambridge and Calcutta respectively, far away from one another, in places distinctly different in aesthetic beauty and academic prestige. Our research interests were rather different too; he was writing his thesis on the prose of a high-minded British liberal, whereas I was writing mine on the struggles of the peasants of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, my choice of subject dictated by the fact that I had grown up in the region and was conversant with Hindi, allowing me both to interview villagers and (albeit with more difficulty) read old newspapers in that language as well. While Rukun’s doctoral research was an example of ‘literature from above’, mine was an illustration of ‘history from below’. (This retrospective comparison is, of course, mine alone; in those years I probably did not think of Rukun, and he certainly did not think of me.)

  In April 1982, just as Rukun Advani was preparing to move back to India, the first volume of Subaltern Studies was published by Ravi Dayal at the OUP. My teacher, Anjan Ghosh, wrote an early review of the book in the radical Calcutta weekly, Frontier. The review was very positive; as I recall, it ended with a sentence expressing the hope that Subaltern Studies would stir (and stir up) the ‘still waters of Indian historiography’.

  Anjan Ghosh’s enthusiasm for this new project stemmed from multiple sources. He was a heterodox Marxist interested in culture, and a sociologist interested in history – a rare commodity. He had taken his first degree in English literature, and had a taste for good prose. These multiple interests were all satisfied to varying degrees by the appearance of Subaltern Studies. My teacher could not but contrast this invigorating approach to the history of Indian nationalism with what he had witnessed as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies was dominated by a group of mechanical Marxists who had no interest in sociology and anthropology, who used a narrow range of sources, and who wrote a kind of wooden, babu English that took the life out of even the most exciting historical processes.

  This new series intrigued me too. Among the periodicals I was reading in the IIM library was Past and Present, ostensibly a journal of history writing, but with a strong sociological slant. I had the conceit of hoping, in the Indian context, to blend sociology and history myself, and Anjan Ghosh nudged me further in that direction by lending me his heavily marked-up copy of Subaltern Studies I. Shortly afterwards, the editor of that volume, Ranajit Guha, came to Calcutta, and my teacher took me across town, from the IIM to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, to hear him speak. The Centre’s seminar room was packed, for a considerable reputation had preceded Guha. In the 1940s, he had been an important leader of the Communist Party of India’s student union. When the Second World War ended he spent some years as an activist in Paris; after returning to Calcutta, he left the party in 1956 in protest against its support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He then went abroad again, living as a radical and itinerant scholar in France, eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Although he had published merely one book and a handful of articles, even before the appearance of Subaltern Studies there was a certain mystique about Ranajit Guha in the predominantly male left-wing circles in Calcutta. (That his two marriages had both been to European women added to the mystique. That, when invited to teach for a term at the University of Chicago, he had been refused a visa by the State Department – because of his communist past – reinforced it.)

  On that day in the early 1980s, Ranajit Guha spoke at the Centre in Calcutta on how to write the history of peasant protest. He advised Marxist historians – the only kind present in the audience – to pay more attention to culture, and to explore the mentalities of peasant insurgents rather than merely judge whether, in some teleological sense, their actions represented class conflict or class collaboration. In this endeavour they could learn from what he termed the ‘more sophisticated social sciences’, namely, linguistics and anthropology.

  At the conclusion of the talk, the first question was asked by an exact contemporary of the speaker, a Marxist economist historian who had stayed loyal to the party through the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the revelations of the Gulag, and so on. The old Stalinist felt betrayed at this call to deviate from the catechism. The only way for a Marxist to assess the actions of an individual or a group, he said, was to determine whether they objectively represented class conflict or class collaboration. Ranajit Guha heard him out with a increasing impatience, and, when he ended, counterposed with a question of his own: ‘When [the Maratha chieftain] Shivaji hugged [the Adil Shahi commander] Afzal Khan with a pair of concealed tiger claws, did this represent conflict or collaboration?’ The younger men in the hall – there were few, if any, women present – roared with approval.

  IV

  My own doctoral research in Calcutta was in part ‘history from below’ and in part what is now called ‘environmental history’. The example of Subaltern Studies spoke to the first tendency; but not at all to the second. This was because in the India of the 1980s, Marxists tended to treat environmental concerns as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle. However, my own travels across the country had taught me that careful husbanding of natural resources was critical to the survival and subsistence of rural communities. I could see that the creeping desertification of parts of central India had endangered pastoral livelihoods, and that the destruction of the Himalayan forests had led to scarcities of fuelwood and fodder, and also increased the risk of landslides and floods.

  Back in the 1980s, Marxists dominated Indian historiography. To be sure, there were different kinds of Marxists: orthodox Marxists, heterodox Marxists, Marxists who took their cues from Lenin and Stalin, Marxists who took their cues from Mao and Gramsci. However, what united these different kinds of Marxists was their absolute indifference to nature and natural processes. Not only did they all deny that environmental degradation could have economic and social costs in the present, in studying the past they altogether ignored the ecological dimensions of agrarian life in India. Their focus was entirely on the cultivated field and the social relations around it: between landlords on the one hand and labourers, tenants, and sharecroppers on the other, or between the state and the rural community as a whole. Marxist historians studied rents and taxes, wages and profits, protests and conflicts around taxes and wages, but little else. Even cropping patterns and cultivation techniques got little attention. And the fact that agriculture was made possible only through access to water, pasture, and forests was outside the bounds of their comprehension. This indifference to the natural world that made rural life possible was manifest even in such ostensibly ‘classic’ works of agrarian history such as Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India and Ranajit Guha’s own A Rule of Property for Bengal.[fn3]