CHENNAI: In the first half of the 20th century, British-born Indian anthropologist Verrier Elwin became the voice for the tribals of India. In those years — the 1940s — his life underwent multiple changes in succession. He denounced the clergy to work with Mahatma Gandhi, then parted ways to champion tribal communities, and became the first foreigner to be granted Indian citizenship.
Much after Elwin’s passing, historian Ramachandra Guha comes across Elwin’s autobiography and his life, like Elwin’s, undergoes metamorphosis, albeit on a smaller scale. He reads the autobiography and leaves the academic knot he had tied with economics to chase a life in sociology and history. Cut to June 2023, Guha, already a globally revered historian, wins the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography for his 2022 book Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom. A book, which has been “living in his mind for 25 years”.
“Reading Elwin basically changed my whole life. I became a scholar because of him. I had even written a biography on him in 1999 (Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India). Since then, I had always thought I would write a companion to that book. The Elwin book was about one individual who fascinated me but this book, after narrowing it down, came to be about seven people,” he says about the origins of Rebels Against the Raj.
Guha is pleased to have received the Longford Prize in the ‘Historical Biography’ category. “I have written across various genres. I have written about contemporary history (India After Gandhi); I have written about cricket (The Commonwealth of Cricket). But I have always found writing a biography to be the most challenging of literary forms. You have to be almost like a novelist, but you cannot make things up. So in that sense, it feels nice to be recognised for a historical biography,” says Guha.
Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven foreigners who came to India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became Indian to the extent that they ended up lending their lives to the Indian Independence Movement. If writing a biography is a towering challenge in the literary world, how much greater was the challenge in writing Rebels…?
“So, the challenge was to maintain a balance between the seven people. In the beginning, I thought of structuring the book by writing seven separate life stories. Then I adopted a different method. Chronologically, I began with Annie Besant, who came here in 1893, and then I moved on to the second person. But I then returned to Besant and essentially told all their stories in an interweaving manner. For instance, if a cricket historian had to write about Indian cricket in the ’90s and ’00s, he would interweave the stories of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Virender Sehwag and Anil Kumble. For that is the larger story of Indian cricket. He wouldn’t just write about Tendulkar. I think this whole idea of a group biography poses a very attractive literary challenge. To write about several individuals around a unifying theme,” he explains.
To Guha, this book is also one about politics. “In a sense, my book is a challenge to the very crude, jingoistic nationalism that prevails in India today. Indirectly of course. It’s a story of seven individuals and is not a political or ideological work. In fact, the book starts with two epigraphs from Gandhi and from Rabindranath Tagore, which addresses that a foreigner need not be a bad person. British imperialism was bad, but a common Britisher can be good, bad, whatever. Presently, people don’t seem to make this distinction. The notion that you’re bound by your identity and cannot transcend it is a very anti-human idea. So, I hope my book contributes to changing that,” he concludes.