Sanjay Subrahmanyam is one of the leading historians of the subcontinent and Europe. Born in 1961 in Delhi, he studied economics at St Stephen’s College and did his PhD in economic history at the Delhi School of Economics. Subrahmanyam moves fluidly among the intellectual and academic cultures of India, Europe, Britain and the United States, where he is a professor of history and social sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much of his work explores the interactions and exchanges between the European empires and India across the centuries. His best-known books include The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700 (1993); The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (1998); and Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (2017). Alongside his scholarly work, Subrahmanyam is one of the finest essayists of his generation. His book Connected History (2022) collects some of his articles on Indian literature and history, many of which originally appeared in the London Review of Books.

Thomas Meaney conducted this interview with Subrahmanyam this September while he was visiting Paris. A condensed version of the conversation appears in the print edition of Granta 173.

You were born fourteen years after Indian Independence in 1947. What was your impression of the British Empire growing up?

Growing up in the 1960s, the British Empire was not much of a subject of regular conversation, and people did not usually express violent anti-British sentiments. It was only at the age of eleven or twelve that the subject of the anti-colonial movement came up in our history classes, and most of my classmates were perplexed by the avid nationalism of our teacher, a very intelligent Bengali woman whom I remember fondly to this day. There were actually a few Anglophiles around in our neighbourhood, one of whom even grew hybrid roses in the fond hope of exhibiting them in the annual Chelsea Show. When the Indian television, which was run by the government, eventually showed British Top of the Pops programmes in the late 1960s with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and the Moody Blues, there was a lot of enthusiasm in some households, and only a few realized that Engelbert had been born in Madras [Chennai]. Within my family, there was a bit of a division. My father was a convinced nationalist who cordially detested the British Empire. But my maternal grandfather who had been recruited into the colonial bureaucracy in the 1920s, and then served Jawaharlal Nehru and his ministers like Krishna Menon, still had a distinct weak spot for the ‘white man’ (as he called the British in Tamil, vellaikkaran). My mother was caught between the two, but was probably more inclined to her father’s views.   

You come from a family of bureaucrats, of Tamil Brahmins. What did it mean to come from this particular segment of society?

There were about five or six significant social groups in India who, in the course of the nineteenth century, collectively accepted the idea of British-style education, and of working for the colonial state. The Tamil Brahmins (or ‘Tambrams’, as people jokingly call them now) were one of these. My family belongs to the larger subgroup in this category, the Smartas, and I know for certain that at least one of my great-great-grandfathers already had a Bachelor’s degree from Madras in the 1860s. His father had worked for the East India Company as a minor official with the title of jawab-nawis. So far as I can discern, some members of the family possessed modest amounts of landed property, but quite a few became lawyers, judges and bureaucrats. There were also scientists and intellectuals, but as a rarer breed. By my grandparents’ generation, the women sometimes had a fair level of formal education, though it was only in my mother’s generation that they went to university, starting in the 1940s. As a social group, they still usually practised sub-caste endogamy, and two of my uncles, one paternal and one maternal, were the first persons in the family who broke from that. The extended family was therefore quite open to certain new ideas, but socially conservative, even though the nature of their jobs meant they were at times exposed to people from various strata in Indian society, and even foreigners, usually from the West. They certainly had strong prejudices, for example, against lower castes and Muslims, which one would often overhear in conversations as a child. For my father, this was something of a struggle, because his family and he were really at odds over a lot of these questions. If you look at the photograph of my parents’ highly traditional Brahmin wedding in Tiruchirappalli in 1952, you see that there is a Sikh gentleman, a friend of my father, prominently placed between my mother and father. That was a statement I believe. They tried to convey some of that open attitude to us.

What modern Indian literature made an impression in your youth? Did someone like R.K. Narayan matter to you? Did you develop any relationship to the Tamil intellectual world?

Certainly, authors like Narayan, with his low-key sensibility, were widely read and very influential as I was growing up, and deservedly so, but also other people writing in English like Santha Rama Rau, Raja Rao, Kamala Markandaya and the part-Indian Aubrey Menen. For me, the great discovery when I was about sixteen was G.V. Desani and All About H. Hatterr (1948). I still believe this is one of the funniest novels I have ever read.

Since I largely was educated away from south India, I got very little formal exposure to Tamil in my education. After studying at a Navy school, I was in a school in Delhi run by Gujarati Gandhians. If anything, my formal exposure was more to Hindi, and to a degree Sanskrit. My mother subscribed to Tamil cultural magazines like Kalki, Kumudam and Ananda Vikatan, and she also sang Carnatic classical music, where the lyrics are often in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit. I wound up absorbing some of this culture from her, but not enough. So, when I reached my twenties, I had to educate myself in Tamil and found I had a lot of catching up to do, then my mother did help me to an extent.

Aubrey Menen is known for his playful version of the Ramayana which was banned in Nehru’s India when it appeared in 1954, long before Salman Rushdie got into his trouble with Indira Gandhi for Midnight’s Children. How do you see the relationship between ancient epics and modern fiction in India?

This mania with banning and censorship goes back a long way, and concerns both books and films. Repressive colonial habits die hard. The curious episode of the Ava Gardner starrer called Bhowani Junction (1956) is a case in point, where opposition from the Indian government meant it had to be shot in Pakistan. The issue of the epics is a complex one. We have to remember that most Indians have contact with regional language versions of the epics written in the medieval and early modern periods, rather than with the more inaccessible Sanskrit texts. An example is the extremely popular Hindi version of the Ramayana by Tulsidas, which is written in catchy metres that permit memorization and even make spoofs and parodies of it easy. As the great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan (who also translated U.R. Ananthamurthy) pointed out, these regional versions contain interesting and significant variations which are worth remembering, as in the Tamil version of Kampan from the thirteenth century. There’s no doubt that the epics are such rich and intricate narratives that they remain an important resource for a panoply of writers, including Vikram Chandra and Shashi Tharoor in English, but also figures like Viswanatha Satyanarayana in Telugu or the great playwright Girish Karnad in Kannada. And these are narratives that are also the basis of popular performance traditions, which means that they don’t remain confined to the Hindus, both with respect to audiences and to performers. It’s worth remembering that the very popular Hindi Mahabharat on television in the late 1980s was largely written by Rahi Masoom Raza, a progressive Muslim writer.  

The writer Vivek Shanbhag has argued that ‘English is not merely a language in India, it’s a kind of power’. Would you agree?

The relationship between English and the Indian languages is a tortured one. Part of this can be attributed to the ‘cultural success’ of the British Empire’s education agenda, if you compare it with the Dutch in Indonesia, for example. You may not like the status and cultural cachet that English enjoys today, but you can’t do without it for certain purposes, and acquiring English is often seen both as a means and a sign of social ascension, not only in India but in many other former British colonies. You see this with India’s cricketers, who often come these days from small towns and modest backgrounds.

At the same time, over the last sixty years, the struggle with the hegemony of English has not destroyed the sphere of the Indian languages, or their resonance in many spheres, including politics. And these are languages that are often spoken by tens of millions of people: Bengali by more than 200 million (also in Bangladesh), and Tamil by 80 million or more, including in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, not to mention Hindi and its 600 million speakers. Together with the struggle, there has been a more creative side, some linguistic adaptation in both directions, which one can even see in popular music and its lyrics. The fear that haunts many people is of a genuine linguistic impoverishment, when groups in search of social and economic mobility will let go of their grasp of their mother tongues, fail to properly enter the Anglosphere, and remain in a kind of linguistic limbo or no man’s land. I hope this proves an exaggerated fear, though it is a legitimate one. These were issues that the post-independence modernizers failed to grapple with adequately.

Were they too concerned about further cracks and breakaways from the nation under construction or was it more the inertia of a largely English-speaking bureaucracy that they were inheriting? Did they have other options?

There were certainly no easy options, and still are none, but the matter required sustained political and intellectual engagement. Certainly not the iron fist used in the Soviet Union to impose Russification and Cyrillization. In the first two decades after Independence, the southern states were probably not given enough of a voice in these discussions, as many of the dominant politicians on the national stage came from the ‘Hindi belt’. After Nehru’s death, there were the violent anti-Hindi agitations and the invention in 1968 of what came to be called the ‘three-language formula’ – a national educational policy that mandated students learn English, Hindi, and one regional language – which was in turn perceived as asymmetric in the burdens it placed. In sum, the question remains a sort of open sore, albeit not the only one.

One of the major political episodes in your own formation would have been the Emergency – the 21-month period from 1975–1977 when prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and ruled by decree. How did the Emergency affect you? How do you think it affected elite Indian culture?

I was in high school during the Emergency years, from 1975 to 1977, but many of us were well aware of what was going on. In those years, my parents were in Madras, so I lived away from home and my informal foster-parents were a couple from Maharashtra who were close to the socialists from that part of India, some of whom like Mrinal Gore and Madhu Dandavate had been thrown in prison.

Since I and my friends at that time were very interested in music, a case that caught everybody’s attention was of the south Indian actress Snehalata Reddy who died of mistreatment in prison, and whose son was a popular musician. Besides this, my brother gave me regular news and gossip from Nehru University where he was studying at the time, and which was a major site of repression.

I would consider this period my political coming-of-age, and rumours were rife in school about the forced sterilization campaigns of the megalomaniac Sanjay Gandhi, and the ruthless demolitions of buildings in Old Delhi. As a consequence, I developed a visceral aversion to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and all the feckless privilege that they represent. This was only exacerbated by having to live through the anti-Sikh pogrom of late 1984, which the Congress organized.

You were too young for the first major dosage of Maoism injected into Indian intellectuals, peasants and tribals in the 1960s. Nevertheless, at an intellectual level, especially in your field of history, the prominent presence of Marxists is unmistakable. What was the source of the appeal of Marxism to Indian intellectual elites in the 1950s and 1960s and later?

India was not that different in this respect from many other parts of the non-Western world, where Marxism was very appealing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, whether in Turkey, Japan or Latin America. Further, after 1947, there was no sustained repression against Marxist intellectuals, as happened elsewhere. They were even able to assert themselves and become a kind of lobby, supporting and promoting each other, until a major factional struggle broke out, which it did in the 1960s. The appeal of Marxism was of course its claim to unsentimental rigor, its concern for real social change, where the Congress by the 1950s had begun to lose credibility, even among its erstwhile supporters.

Eventually, the establishment Marxists allied to the Soviet Union’s line were outflanked on the left by the Maoists with their more radical agenda, but they still remained important. There were also disparate groups of intellectuals who claimed to be ‘liberals’, but as the analyses by Ram Guha and Chris Bayly have shown, this is a term that is very difficult to make clear sense of in the Indian context. Some liberals were in favour of a free market and for less state intervention, while others were just ecumenical in their intellectual tastes, so that ‘liberal’ came to mean someone who was in her/his own view not doctrinaire.

The difficulty that the Marxists faced was that along with some remarkably creative minds like the great ancient historian D.D. Kosambi, or Ranajit Guha or Susobhan and Sumit Sarkar, they also attracted many people who were extremely rigid, repetitive and doctrinaire, and this became even more evident when they were the ones to call the shots in the institutional landscape.

But there must be something more exceptional about the Indian situation. Marxism made more headway in India than it did in many other former British colonies. The conditions seem to have been more propitious for its reception than in, say, Pakistan with its larger, more formidable land-owning class. Is part of the reason that the Congress, with its acquiescence toward landlords, left itself vulnerable to criticism about persistent caste inequalities and the like?

From a certain point of view, the resentments created by Pakistan’s class structure should have helped the Marxists, except that by the late 1950s there was already US-backed Army rule. In India, while there was periodic repression, it was more limited, and the communist parties found a place in the system but at the price of a great deal of compromise. They may have had a social and economic agenda, but their leadership was very much drawn from the upper castes. And in the case of West Bengal, over several decades of rule, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) became a machine for the distribution of patronage and thoroughly entrenched in a corrupt rural politics. Leaving aside the Maoists, who are not concerned with governing, the two other main parties have gradually been ‘normalized’. Concerns about caste-based inequality are now carried mainly by other parties.

You have recently written with reserved respect of the founder of Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, a shadowy yet central figure in the writing of Indian history. But how do you judge the collective over time and as a whole? Why do Guha’s incisive raids on historiography – lucid, cutting, brimming with insight no matter how one judges them ultimately – appear so much stronger than later contributions of Subaltern Studies? What happened along the way?

Guha was a brilliant prose stylist, probably one of the two greatest in English in that generation of Indian historians, along with the younger Ashin Das Gupta, though the two were never on good terms. Guha was also sarcastic and irreverent, and no great respecter of reputations either in India or in Britain. But he also had his visible weaknesses, and these were inherited by his school and became magnified in the 1990s. His own exaggerated devotion for Barthesian neo-structuralism became the later uncritical devotion to other maîtres penseurs. I believe that besides the usual suspects from the French and German postmodernist pantheons, the later Subaltern Studies was also influenced in unfortunate directions by anti-historical ideologues like Ashis Nandy. Further, Subaltern Studies came over time to be divided between scholars like Partha Chatterjee and David Hardiman who had the requisite Sitzfleisch to pursue empirically based projects patiently, and others like Gyan Prakash who were looking for easier formulaic solutions. Success can be heady, and Subaltern Studies was partly a victim of its success. Overall, however, no one can deny the enormous impact they had on modern Indian history, and on postcolonial studies more generally. Their impact on the period before 1800 is far less significant, but still, what they showed was that a group of historians who (with a few exceptions) were not from the West could have a real voice in the formulation of general debates. This was no longer the old clubby history of Past and Present and the Annales.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now been in power for more than a decade. Do you think there is anything like a right-wing intellectual milieu in the country?

There are relatively few historians, sociologists or anthropologists of quality in India today who both have genuine scholarly stature, and openly sympathize with the BJP. To be sure, there are now such people like Sanjeev Sanyal who have penetrated the market for popular history and biography with some degree of success. But this is easy enough with the backing of trade presses and their marketing machinery, even if one writes slapdash and derivative books.

In literary circles, there are certainly a fair number of pro-Hindutva figures, including some trained in cultural studies in the US, who are adept at channelling postcolonial vocabulary, including Saidian terminology. The other major exception is possibly among the economists, who are the group among social scientists who have always been the most attuned to power, and among whom there were pro-BJP figures even before 2014. This was sometimes based on the fond hope that Hindutva and free-market liberalism would go hand in hand. It remains to be seen whether in another ten years, things will change further if the BJP retains power. For that to happen, the intellectuals in question will possibly have to persuade the spokesmen of the BJP to abandon some of their more ludicrous positions, which even fly in the face of common sense. Certainly, I can see a number of younger popular historians already with their fingers in the wind, looking for openings. 

When we think of the development of modern Indian literature, it can be hard to avoid seeing it as a companion of the national movement itself. How do you think about the relationship between literature and the Indian nation-state?

I understand that there is a temptation to bring everything in India, whether it’s literature, music or art around to its relationship to nationalism. But as my friends in the art world have always taught me, that is surely impoverished as an analysis, because there were also many writers and artists whose central concern was not the nation-state, and even writers like Tagore or later Manto had far more to them than their views on nationalism. Though I am far from being a specialist, my understanding was that even the canonized Hindi poets we were taught in school and who belonged to the movement called ‘Chhayavad’ were also grappling with their relationship to language and sound, as well as philosophical and metaphysical questions, which had far more resonance to them than merely their engagement with nationalism.

Reading Velcheru Narayana Rao’s histories of modern Telugu literature, I come away with the same feeling that reading these writings through the lens of political attitudes has not always been particularly fruitful, because they also had to do with formal experimentation, registers of the language and so on.

Besides, for many writers, loyalty was above all to a region and a linguistic community, rather than to India writ large. We see this is the case of both Punjab and Bengal, two regions which had to grapple centrally with Partition, and where the reading public was not willing to abandon writers just because they now belonged to the ‘other side’, as a career like that of Kazi Nazrul Islam exemplifies.

Twenty years ago, William Dalrymple predicted that the future of the Indian novel was in the diaspora. Your review of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger was effectively an obituary of that tradition. What exhausted that literary form? Did the diaspora simply run out of actual experience in the country to make their writing credible?

I think the diaspora can most credibly write about itself, but that is a subject of limited interest as such, since it can so easily descend into self-pity about cultural alienation. Dalrymple’s idea that diaspora writers are ‘natural bridges between cultures’ also suggests he has not spent that much time talking to Indian diaspora communities. Of course, there can and should be writers in the Indian diaspora who don’t want to write about India at all, and whom we want nevertheless to read not because of their identities but because of the quality of their writing and imaginative powers.

The problem, as Dalrymple acknowledged only in passing, is that in the 1980s and 1990s, we entered the era of huge advances, even running into millions of dollars. Writing the next great Indian novel from a perch abroad became an industry of sorts, something like flying in to Los Angeles to meet an agent for a movie audition. But as I know from living in LA, most of those would-be movie stars wind up waiting tables in restaurants. Similarly, there was a vast over-production of repetitive novels from the diaspora using similar literary devices, often with blurbs written by the same self-promoting arbiters of good taste, that caused a market crash. To analyse this, we may not need literary critics as much as marketing specialists, who will also possibly tell us how these more ‘highbrow’ works fit in with popular bestsellers written by the likes of Chetan Bhagat or Vikas Swarup, which lend themselves easily to popular film adaptations.

The International Booker Prize has recently gone to two writers in vernacular languages, Banu Mushtaq and Geetanjali Shree. How do you think about this development?

From an Indian perspective, this is excellent to provide some balance to the excessive prominence of the Indian English novel and short-story tradition. The two books are of course very different, in their form as well as in what they set out to achieve. Mushtaq’s short stories translated from the Kannada seem more like gritty social realism, with an unmistakable feminist political undertone. In the case of Shree, with whom I had friendly relations in the late 1990s when she was frequently in France, I have read some of her earlier works in their Hindi versions, and I know that she is in fact almost perfectly bilingual, but prefers to write in Hindi. One realizes though that in the case of such international competitions like the Booker, much depends too on the quality of the translator.

Perhaps the publishing industry will be willing to spend more on translations, and not just on multi-million-dollar advances. This does evoke a version of the problem set out in the late Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (1999) of how one compares literary works produced in vastly different cultural milieus.

In the early 2000s when one entered a bookshop in Delhi or Mumbai and tried to buy an up-to-date and accessible biography of any of India’s pre-colonial rulers, even of the most famous ones such as Akbar or Aurangzeb, they were missing. Have things changed, and are Indians writing more accessible popular histories of these subjects, as well as modern ones?

There has been a rash of popular history writings in the last ten or fifteen years, largely propelled by the big trade publishers, whose tastes are usually very predictable and traditional and who shy away from methodological innovation. The old-style biography has had a big resurgence, both of figures from the distant past and those of twentieth-century India like Indira Gandhi, V.D. Savarkar, P.N. Haksar or Krishna Menon. But the overall result is a rather mixed bag for a variety of reasons. Some authors have an obvious political agenda, seeing their subjects in purely instrumental terms with regard to contemporary political quarrels. In the case of such works on pre-colonial India, they are often written by authors without the requisite textual and archival skills, who simply wind up regurgitating what was written by colonial writers in the 1910s or 1920s in a more breezy, and easily accessible prose. In the midst of all this, there are of course some works which represent fresh and insightful research, sometimes because archival papers or sources have recently been made accessible which throw new light on a subject in recent history. I am thinking of historians like Srinath Raghavan, Janaki Bakhle, Vinayak Chaturvedi, or, famously, Ram Guha, whose biography of Verrier Elwin is possibly his best book in that genre. But it’s very hit or miss.

In both William Dalrymple and Amartya Sen’s later work, one reads a lot about India’s gifts to world civilization. Sen writes at length about Indian contributions to discursivity and the art of dialogue as well as reason in general, and Dalrymple focuses on other civilizational achievements. What is going on here? Are these authors trying to reclaim the nation from the BJP? Perhaps it’s unfair to group them together.

There are indeed some common threads in these two works, and similar reasons to criticize them, no matter how well-intentioned they are. Of course, they are both largely derivative and don’t depend on any particular research insights of the authors, Dalrymple straying far into the ancient period in his book, and Sen equally far from his real competence in economics and ethics. Often, they don’t seem to be able to distinguish between mere clichés and things of actual analytical or historical interest. But the biggest issue is that they both wind up reifying India as an object, and don’t reflect in the least on debates concerning the issue, or indeed on whether it is meaningful to think of India as a constituted civilization which has agency and ‘does’ or ‘achieves’ things. We can possibly add them to the shelf with books like How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and How the Irish Saved Civilization.

But wouldn’t the defence of Dalrymple and Sen be to say: look, we are dealing with a BJP-dominated national government that is attempting to enlist the Indian past for its own chauvinistic purposes. Even right down to the archaeological digs in the country, they are finding what they want to find. We – the liberal, decent lovers of India – are trying to reclaim the Indian past back for a more reasonable liberal secularism, so please give us some slack. In other words, the books seem to be political interventions rather than historical or intellectual ones, and may demand to be judged as such, no?

I think both have been afforded an enormous amount of slack by reviewers for precisely those reasons. However, if you adopt the methods and tactics of your adversaries in order to gain ground from them, the results can be disconcerting. We may wind up with something like the last scene from Animal Farm. I wish more people would read books by historians like Manu Devadevan, which are both well-researched and make balanced arguments on these questions about the long-term trajectory of India. 

In the London Review of Books more than a decade ago, your colleague Perry Anderson identified what he called the ‘Indian Ideology’. At its most basic the Indian Ideology is full of self-congratulatory, dubious platitudes about the ancient lineage of the Indian nation, its unique diversity, its robust democracy, etc. In particular, Anderson expressly trained his sights on Indian liberals, and tasked them with not recognizing Gandhi’s deleterious effect on the country’s politics, and the way that caste, far from being antithetical to Indian democracy, is in fact constitutive of it. His articles were vehemently attacked by Subaltern intellectuals in particular. What did you make of them?

Well, Perry wasn’t exactly inclined to cut his opponents slack, was he? He was being a provocateur, as he often is. But the response was really quite disappointing, both in India and among diaspora intellectuals. Of course, people with expertise in Indian history and politics could find any number of small and large errors in what he wrote. There was a circling of the wagons, and a lot of name-calling about gringo arrogance which avoided addressing the real issues that he raised. Besides, there was also a smug response to say that all of this had already been said, by Indians of course. In my view, if only more Indian intellectuals worked on other countries, they would know what it feels like when people from an inbred elite ‘gang up’ on you. It reminded me of reactions in Portugal in the late 1990s to my work on Vasco da Gama and Portuguese expansion, where it descended to trivia about Camões and The Lusiads. Only Arundhati Roy from her Ambedkarite perspective took up cudgels for Perry. And that is why the kind of books we mentioned earlier continue to be churned out, repeating the same sorts of self-satisfied clichés.

Writing about Indian liberalism has become an academic cottage industry. Some, like Christopher Bayly, have argued that it exercised ‘hegemony’ over Indian thought from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. But weren’t other ways of thinking in the country more important than this relatively small kernel?

Intellectual history in India, and the history of political thought more particularly, is still a fledgling field. Bayly and Ram Guha were among those who gave it a real push, and now there have been other contributions, by historians as well as philosophers and literary scholars. But the difficulty remains the focus on a narrow band of Indian thinkers who mostly wrote in English. And even these are often treated superficially. I was quite surprised to see how badly Bayly misunderstood someone like K.M. Panikkar, a gadfly and mercenary who became a strange sort of Nehruvian ideologue. What is obviously needed is a set of studies of different regional traditions on the one hand, and a debate on the adequacy of categories like ‘reformers’, ‘conservatives’, ‘liberals’ and ‘secularists’ on the other.  

For the past few decades India has been remarkably stable compared to its neighbours, where there have been either dramatic regime changes and collapses or ongoing instability. What kind of effect do you think this stability has had on Indian intellectual and literary culture?

There has not been any drastic regime change in India comparable to Pakistan or Bangladesh, or a civil war as has happened in Sri Lanka with the Tamil separatist movement. There is no doubt that such changes and upheavals have had a major effect on cultural life in those countries. Meanwhile in India, even though national elections have been regularly held every five years since 1999, the political changes have been more subtle and their effects on intellectual and literary culture have been harder to discern. One turning point was the emergence of the BJP as the dominant national party in 2014, a position it continues to hold. This has led to the withdrawal of state patronage from many groups and individuals on the intellectual and cultural scene who had been important in earlier periods of Congress dominance, though some have cleverly navigated the transition. This has gone hand in hand with the dismantling of some key educational institutions, including universities. Paradoxically, one effect of this has been to reduce the importance of Delhi as a pole, in relation to many of the regional centres. At the same time, the obvious growth in religious and communitarian tensions has meant an expansion of subjects considered to be taboo, which are not addressed because of self-censorship. The media, both in print and electronic, has particularly been affected by this, though there are some refreshing new trends like the rise of political stand-up comedy. Some participants and observers now hope that new sources of cultural and intellectual patronage will emerge, for example from the newly rich in the corporate world. But nothing guarantees either the good taste or the sound ethical orientation of such actors. If anything, my experience with them tells me to be very sceptical.   

Historically, a great deal of what became Indian literary culture flowed from Bengal. When one turns to contemporary India and power, it’s unmistakable how much flows out of Gujarat. Not only the leader of the country but also two of its wealthiest businessmen. It seems no accident that Gujaratis occupy a unique place in the Indian state and business. How do you account for this recent resurgence or prominence of Gujaratis in modern Indian society, or has it just always been there, starting with Gandhi himself?

Not only Gandhi but Jinnah was from Gujarat, and Gujaratis played a key role in the emergence of Bombay (Mumbai) as India’s leading metropolis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Earlier, between about 1400 and 1800, Gujarat was in many ways a key hub of Indian Ocean commerce, with Gujaratis playing a trading role from the Red Sea and East Africa, to Java and south-eastern China. The Gujarati intellectual and religious tradition was also quite unique, combining orthodox and heterodox forms of Islam, with Hinduism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism. During the period of the British Empire, the Gujarati diaspora spread further, and in the second half of the twentieth century, they came to settle in increasing numbers in the UK and US. Perhaps because of their reputation as astute business people, the intellectual and cultural role of Gujaratis has been neglected, leaving aside the Parsis (or Zoroastrians). In recent decades, the region’s reputation has also been marred by important incidents of religious violence such as the pogrom carried out against Muslims in 2002. In any event, we know Bengal’s intellectual prominence after 1860 was not based on any corresponding economic prosperity. It remains to be seen if Gujarat’s economic surge will have an intellectual counterpart. 

How would you characterize or describe Indian capitalism today? Someone like Amartya Sen lobs praise at earlier generations of capitalists, such as the Tata family, who – like the Carnegies – built scientific institutes and ‘gave back’ to Indian society. The new capitalists like Gautam Adani seem different, but also perfectly compatible with the Hindutva programme of the BJP. Has a break of any kind transpired?

I have an abiding interest in the long history of capitalism in India, in its many manifestations and from early modern times onwards. The Tatas were very good at managing their public image and papering over some of the more unsavoury aspects of their history, with regard to the opium trade or financing British colonial expeditions. But they did provide a certain model of philanthropy and personal frugality, which was then adopted by members of groups like Infosys, as distinct from the ostentatious vulgarity of the Ambanis, for example. The real problem of the last three or four decades has been the explosion of the dollar billionaire class (of whom there are now nearly three hundred), who often practise versions of pretty open crony capitalism. Of course, this happened elsewhere too, as David Cannadine’s study of Andrew Mellon in the US shows. The real question is whether it will be possible to produce a capitalism with a real emphasis on smaller entrepreneurs, and markets that are competitive rather than manipulated and monopolized by Indian ‘robber barons’. The issue also remains whether this is a process in which participation will go beyond the usual suspects, which is to say the mercantile castes and Brahmins. Some significant counterexamples do exist of course. I note that some analysts are still optimistic about this ‘trickle-down’, as works on India’s ‘new capitalists’ suggest. However, the jury is still out.

When one listens to the BJP home minister Amit Shah talk about the greatest threats facing India, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether he and the rest of the BJP think it’s Naxalites, Khalistan supporters, farmers, human rights activists and western NGOs or Pakistan. Then there is the matter of trying to manoeuvre between the US and China. What do you think the greatest strategic dangers to India actually are?

As Tzvetan Todorov wrote in his book The Fear of Barbarians (2008), many forms of nationalism generate paranoia, and see enemies everywhere, both within and without. To me, one can translate this into a different language. There is obviously concern on the part of the Indian state that with a form of accelerated economic growth that is accompanied by widening inequalities, various sizeable groups of disenfranchised people – whether the urban poor, or marginal peasants and footloose rural labour, or tribals whose lands have been expropriated – will want better political representation and living conditions. These struggles could turn violent in India, as elsewhere. That is undoubtedly a long-term threat to the viability of the political system as it stands, and it needs more than band-aids as a response. On the external front, the focus has been on threats from Pakistan and China for decades now. But it has turned out that in the short to medium term, the real ‘rogue’ polity is the US, which cannot be counted on as an ally either by India, or even by Europe, or Japan. The emergent new world order of which my father – the defence strategist K. Subrahmanyam – wrote, in the years before his passing in 2011, seems hopelessly optimistic now. India will have to brace itself for a rough ride, but so will the rest of the world.

Read on: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Blood and Bombast’, NLR 147.