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| Nilanjana S Roy: History and identity - Tony Judt, 1857 and 9/11 |
| Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi Aug 10, 2010, 00:40 IST |
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Of all the essays and books written by the late Tony Judt, the historian who died of complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease this week, perhaps the most directly personal were the short notes and blogposts he wrote for the New York Review of Books in his last months.
Judt was a formidable, sometimes controversial, historian. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was his last and perhaps the most magisterial work — “the biography of a middle-aged continent”, as Neal Ascherson wrote, “trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go straight”.
His most controversial work was on Israel: Judt was one of the few intellectuals willing to reassess and change his position in the light of later experience and understanding. His ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe, and he was in his early years a Zionist who worked as an interpreter in Israel. His disillusionment was sharpened by his growing expertise as a historian, and in Israel: The Alternative, a key essay, he drew tremendous criticism for attacking the idea of an ethnic Jewish state, arguing that Israel needed to rework itself as a binational state. For a while, Judt was a pariah in intellectual circles, but his work was ahead of its time.
Of all of his legacies, perhaps the most touching were the series of posts he wrote on his disease: wheelchair-bound, breathing by means of a special apparatus, he brought his analytical mind to bear on his condition. It was in this state that he wrote an extraordinary post, “Edge People”, on his rejection of identity politics: “Identity is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses.” The “fierce unconditional loyalties” he listed — to a country, a God, an idea or a man — had come to terrify him. Instead, he identified with what he called the “edge people” — the tolerant, the cosmopolitan, the truly marginal. For all of his many contributions as a historian, it is this plea, to step away from the narrow comforts and blinkered reassurances of identity politics, that might be Judt’s lasting legacy.
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Delhi in the Mutiny: Mahmood Farooqui has two identities in Delhi — a performer of the almost-forgotten art of dastangoi, and a historian whose researching skills were often pressed into service by the writer and historian William Dalrymple.
His Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857 is a remarkable work, despite its occasionally over-academic tone. Farooqui’s research into the archives uncovered a city that is far removed from what we might imagine, given official records of the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857. In his retelling, the city comes alive in all of its complexity, with paan shortages, complaining soldiers, courtesans who were also accomplished petty thieves and then, as now, diminishing civic services and corrupt officials.
But more than the colour that surrounds a city under siege, ruled by the increasingly shaky Bahadur Shah Zafar, what Besieged has to offer is a version of history that is different from either the “patriotic” tale of the Great War of Independence or the British tale of betrayal and rebellion. Farooqui has an instinct for the telling detail and he offers a persuasive re-reading of 1857. I hope this will be the first of many histories from this particular dastangoi.
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Amitava Kumar’s latest book, A Foreigner Carrying In The Crook Of His Arm A Tiny Bomb, is an interesting example of a recent trend: the dual title. Neel Mukherjee’s Crossword-winning novel, Past Continuous, has been released in the UK as A Life Apart; and Amitava Kumar’s Foreigner… was published in India as Evidence of Suspicion. It reflects the decades when books published in the UK would cross the Atlantic under a different name — a phenomenon that is still seen in recent times, as when JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in the US under the title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Foreigner.../Evidence of Suspicion was written in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, and Kumar’s focus was on the crimes of the Indian and the American state, post-Mumbai and post-9/11, as he catalogues the impact on those who were subjected to “the extraordinary presumption of guilt on the basis of their faith”. Re-reading this in the wake of the US release, what is of interest is how relevant Kumar’s arguments are to the current discourse around the Maoist insurgencies.
“I’m telling you this here so that you can see how ordinary men and women whose lives are entangled in the war on terror tell stories about themselves and their place in the world,” Kumar writes. “Theirs are stories that bring together, whether as acts of fancy or as pictures of grim reality, different parts of our divided world.” This is, whether you’re reading the Indian or the US edition, an essential book for our times.
nilanjanasroy@gmail.com
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