Intellectual Trajectory

Could you tell us a little about your intellectual and academic trajectory? What impact did growing up in the immediate, post-independent period in India have on you? What relationship does this have to the fact that much of your work has focused on nationalism?

I did not actually begin my academic career studying nationalism. I completed my PhD at the University of Rochester in political science where I studied international relations and nuclear war strategies. The political science department at Rochester was one of the earliest departments that focused on rational choice theory. I used to do game theoretic models of arms races and things like that. That is how I actually began, believe it or not…! I suppose I did that kind of work because I was in a political science department at an American university and this was the kind of work being done there. Although even as I was doing it, I was quite certain that I was going to go back to India after I got my PhD.

Immediately after I finished my dissertation, I returned to Calcutta, where I was born and brought up. It was obvious that there was no way I could pursue the same kind of work in India because there was no one else doing it; nothing in the intellectual atmosphere would have made that kind of work meaningful. When I returned it was early 1972, in the immediate aftermath of the Maoist uprising which took place from about 1969-71. That was the period I was away. Many of my friends in college were involved in the movement and by the time I went back, some of them were still in jail and a few had been killed. So what I did was basically set a part of my training aside and retrained myself in areas in which other people were doing work.

In the early 1970s, a great deal of research was concerned with agrarian structures and peasant movements. The whole atmosphere was charged with questions regarding the nature of the Indian state. Even before the Emergency in India (1975-1977), as far as Calcutta and West Bengal were concerned, the face of the authoritarian state had become very, very clear in the period of the Maoist uprising and immediately afterwards. So people were preoccupied with questions about the violence of the state and the possibilities of political movements based on the peasantry. Those were really the major questions posed by the Maoist movement.

So that is what I began to think about. The way of proceeding to answer those questions, given the methods then popular, was to examine the historical context. In other words, how had the independent Indian state emerged? The whole story of the movement against colonialism, and the question of how the Indian peasantry was involved with that movement and with the formation of that state, these became the central questions. So that is how I entered into the field. It was not nationalism that was my immediate concern; it was much more the specific history of the emergence of the Congress Party and the way in which Congress had included the peasantry within the national movement. This was the issue I ultimately took up: the emergence of, broadly speaking, yes, movements of nationalism, but specifically, the kind of nationalism adopted by the Congress that found a base in rural areas by trying to organize peasants into the anti-colonial struggle.

For the next three or four years, I lived in Calcutta, but for about 15-20 days of the month, I would go into various districts and just talk to people. There are now much better organized sources on the subject (that archive got organized precisely in that period, the '70s), but at the time when I began work, there was no organized archive for this. Something like the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi which now has a very good collection of local literature from all parts of India in all Indian languages - nothing like that existed at the time. The only way one could do this work then was to go into different rural districts and talk to people. At the time, there were still people around who were important leaders as well as middle-ranking, local leaders of these movements in the 1920s and 1930s. So that is what I did; I just talked to people like that. And this was when my interest in the larger subject of nationalism developed. As you will notice, in a sense, even there, my early work was really concerned with the relationship between the national movement and the agrarian question.

You were trained in American political science, a rather narrow field as you have just suggested, and you have explained your intellectual trajectory upon your return to India, but you managed to develop a highly unusual and expansive range of interests. You are often characterized as a Renaissance man for this reason, given your work in theater, music, cultural studies, history, politics, international relations. What made that possible?

I do not think this happened consciously at all. It is just that I became engaged in the activities and interests that were part of urban life in Calcutta. Theater, for instance, was not only part of academic and political life, but very much a part of urban life in Calcutta at the time. One of my interests - which many people in the academic world are not aware of - is sports. I was an avid soccer fan, which was, again, very much part of the urban life I am describing. Maybe someday I will write about football in Calcutta, a sport which I think is really a major part of urban India.

In the 1970s, there was the film society movement which was very much part of what people did in the city: watching classic European films which were never shown in regular theatres. There were about 15-20 major film clubs in Calcutta which acquired these films from various foreign embassies and consulates. Theater, in some ways, was part of the same kind of search: to become acquainted with modern European culture. Unlike the cinema which was actually available - if you looked for them, you could find prints of Italian neo-realist films, French films and so on - there was no way you could actually see European productions of Brecht, Ibsen, Pirandello, or anything of the kind. The classics of 20th century European theater were produced sometimes as adaptations, sometimes as straightforward translations, for the urban theater enthusiast in India. Brecht was the greatest favorite. In the '70s there were something like 300-400 theater groups in Calcutta (this is probably still true today). There were only about ten theatres. Nothing could run continuously for 2-3 weeks; auditoriums were booked per night. You could just walk into any of these theatres on any night and one or the other of these groups would be doing a production of some European classic. This again was a very major part of the urban life I have been talking about.

It is rather curious now, thinking back on this period, that the same people who were concerned with political questions also seemed to look for certain forms of politics and certain forms of the state that were not simply copies of Western political formations. The differences seemed quite striking: the fact that India was very largely an agrarian-based, peasant-based country, so different indeed from the modern West - by which I mean the contemporary West. Yet, at the same time, there was such an urge to know about the modern West and, in a sense, to imbibe what seemed to be the best of modernity. The two went together. So I was, in a sense, completely a part of this. One did not think of this as consciously cultivating a Renaissance spirit or anything of the kind!