That Questioning Quest

All his disclaimers notwithstanding, Sham Lal’s unrelenting intelligence makes of his ‘‘bits and pieces’’ a whole o...

All his disclaimers notwithstanding, Sham Lal’s unrelenting intelligence makes of his ‘‘bits and pieces’’ a whole other commentators would envy. Here is a sensibility so refined and catholic that it enables him to range wide and deep, traversing centuries and continents as he records his impressions and opinions. There are over 100 reviews and features here on literature and history, politics, social change, the Left, the economy, and on artists, thinkers and writers.

One quails at the thought of reviewing so formidable a reviewer, but let me plunge in, head first. ‘‘Reading,’’ he says, echoing another famous reviewer, ‘‘is by no means a passive act,’’ and he is that rarest of individuals, a reader who actively engages with authors, paying them the ultimate compliment of reading them with care. I doubt that I have ever read as astute or thought-provoking a review of Kosambi’s magnum opus as Sham Lal’s: he compliments him for his unsentimental uncovering of India’s past, then chides him for glossing over the imponderables he encounters. Kosambi says, ‘‘The Bhagavad Gita is still powerful in forming the consciousness of upper class Hindus by furnishing the ideological spheres where they fight out their conflicts.’’ How, asks Sham Lal, does he ‘‘hope to get away with so daft a generalisation?’’ When the base and superstructure paradigm begins to falter, Kosambi begins to argue in circles. Yet Sham Lal commends his courage and the importance of his intellectual endeavour with a generosity born of the truly questing mind.

Of the several strands that run through the book, a few gleam brighter than others. The predicaments of culture and modernity trouble the author, and his readings of M.N. Srinivas, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ashis Nandy and Frederique & Steve Marglin offer an opportunity for his own musings on the subject. In the best tradition of review essays, Sham Lal’s reader is treated to a pleasurably eclectic experience that draws in film, history, theatre, politics, myth — all of which are unexpectedly appropriate to the book he happens to be reviewing!

The betrayal of India by its political class, right, left and centre, is another preoccupation, and it is in these reviews and features that we sense the author’s profound unease with those other institutions of modern society — the media and the bureaucracy. ‘‘Millions of minds,’’ he says, ‘‘are being deformed by a whole gamut of lies told every day by a variety of political operators,’’ lies compounded by corruption and the complicity of the Indian elites. To these Sham Lal adds what he calls a ‘‘conjunction of four developments’’ that have made the management of change extremely problematic: the ‘‘population explosion’’, rapid technological change, democratisation via adult franchise, and globalisation. Taking a leaf out of Sham Lal’s own book, I’d say that I’m with him on the second and fourth, but surely it’s not the populous poor who are plundering our resources, squandering our wealth or straining our services? And haven’t we all agreed that it is the poor, vigilant voter who, every few years, holds our politicians accountable? Like Indian secularism, Indian democracy, too, is an experiment; the contestations and jostling for power that adult franchise has enabled are only an indication of democracy at work. Like it or not.

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But his anxiety about the negative fallout of globalisation was wholly justified. Writing in the very early ’90s on mapping the future, he warned against both, the dangers of homogenisation, and of ‘‘pluralism gone wild’’ — the safeguarding of local cultures in fragile new nation-states should not result in the latters’ disintegration. Sham Lal is acerbic in his assessment of the human rights records of countries who sanctimoniously protest excesses in the developing world, and he is right to be so.

Indeed, he is mostly right, and that is why his writing rings so true.