Would you have approached the writing of your memoir differently if you were not someone trained to write about the past?

Yes, there is a difference. Most memoirs, written by various people, are narratives about the past and the emphasis is on the narrative and the time and place in which it was written. Where the author is a historian it does bring in a certain difference. The historian is interested in more than the narrative, because the interest extends to seeing the event in the wider context of the particular time in which it happened. A historical understanding of a time or an event does involve something of an analysis — however brief it may be — and therefore either touches upon or explores more fully the meaning of an event, and not leave it just as a description of what happened. The time, the place, and the persons involved cannot be set aside. Explaining all of that involves far more than just a mention of what happened. And of course, every reader wants to know more.

You write about being picked to raise the Indian flag at your school on August 1, 1947, when, as you write, the Indian people transitioned from being subjects of empire to citizens of a nation-state. Would you say that the leaders of the time did not do enough to disseminate the concept of citizenship beyond urban/elite enclaves? Did the flag-bearers of Nehruvian secularism engage with the ‘subaltern Hindu’ the way Hindutva did and continues to do? I ask because there is now a stream of analysis that squarely faults the liberal, Nehruvian elite for the rise of Hindutva – as some sort of ‘revenge of the subaltern Hindu’.

At the time of Indian independence, I was 15 and we were conscious of nationalism and the coming of a free India. But we were not too aware of Hindutva lurking in the background, or making a bid for authority. Nationalism, it was thought, could only be an essentially secular ideology and its association with anything religious was marginal, if at all. Hindu and Muslim nationalisms did not have primacy as nationalisms. They were better viewed rather as aspects of the marginal role of religion in support of politics. There were some people that thought it to be a good thing that nationalism had the approval of religion.

I certainly would not hold the liberal Nehruvian elite responsible for the rise of Hindutva. There was a clear separation between the two, with secularism more widely supported to begin with, and also being seen as essential to nationalism. Gradually this changed. The explanation for the rise of Hindutva has to be sought in other changes as well. I would also attribute it to those agencies that supported Partition. These included organisations that endorsed the ideology of Hindutva. They were accumulating authority and asserting it through some of the new agencies of the state that were being established, and the latter did on occasion take positions that were not in conformity with democratic norms.

The question that needs to be asked is why Hindutva forces were given this authority both within these organisations and more generally in society as a whole. Hindutva was encouraged by those who felt that contemporary decisions about social functioning had to have the sanction of the Hindu religion.

You have said many times, and also in your memoir, that Hindutva can never be an anti-colonial force because it is rooted in discredited colonial ideas such as the two-nation theory. Is the decolonising of the Indian mind a prerequisite for the allure of Hindutva to fade?

Hindutva, which dates to the 1920s, was created by the wish for the continuation of colonial practices and colonial functioning. The authority of Hindutva would have been opposed by any democratic institution. Therefore, it was in the interest of Hindutva that there be an agency that supported its ideology. Together with control over society by those that supported Hindutva, there was also the need for the justification, explanation, and presence of Hindutva, which remained a somewhat hidden requirement, even if practiced in a less obvious way than before. Why was this so? The Indian middle class had accepted the colonial theory, emphasised by James Mill, that India consisted of two communities — the larger Hindu and the somewhat smaller Muslim — and that the two were permanently hostile to each other. In other words, what was referred to as the two-nation theory. Communal conflict, therefore, could not be avoided. This two-nation theory remains embedded to this day in the ideology of the Hindu Right.

The other colonial theory that was eagerly appropriated was the claim that the Hindus were descended from, and lived in, the land of the Aryans (pitribhumi), and that Hinduism drew from the land where Aryan teaching was propagated (punyabhumi). Where the Arya lived was associated with purity of race and where the Hindu religion originated was a sacred area.

The creation of the Indian identity has drawn from the supposed historical features on which it was built. The study of the Vedic texts led to the notion that the people who founded the community were a race of Aryans. Race as a social category has now been questioned. But a century ago, race and religion were fundamental to the creation of communities, and these two continue to hover.

The contradiction was that highly centralised theories were also sought to be incorporated into ideas of secularism and democracy, which assumed a society to be less centralised. This raised problems that we are battling to this day. Secularism obviously confronts that which makes for Hindutva and its basic religious givens. That explains why there are problems with explaining what the relationship is that Hindutva has not only to Hinduism but to religion in general.

Democracy also poses problems for Hindutva since it does not accept the religious hierarchy inherent in Hinduism and religion in general.

The rights of citizenship are primary and there can be no democracy if they are absent. A question that is central today is: How can the equivalent of citizenship in a democratic format be made functional in Indian society if the agencies that uphold democracy are made ineffective? Hence the fears of the possible collapse of various social agencies, such as the judiciary, education, state institutions, that uphold a society. The fears seem to increase with the decisions that are crowding in on each other.

There is much talk these days ‘Indic civilisation’. Is it a robust category for understanding the past?

Civilisation has often been referred to in recent times in connection with the establishing of new nation-states. I have problems with its use in this context. My understanding of civilisation is that it requires many features that are not always easily present and have to be created. It requires an extensive territory that may well cover socio-economic features of more than one kind. Given the way it has been used for past histories, it certainly covers more than one kind of social formation. If the reference is to more than just one kind of pattern followed by the society, then the variations have to be adjusted.

If we take the usual categories, there are certainly more than the single pattern of the dominant slave or serf society, and in later times, there is mention of varieties of feudalism, as has been discussed in the work of Chris Wickham with reference to European feudalism, not to mention the different dimensions of the functioning of labour. In fact, some of the more interesting aspects of the exploration of patterns in European socio-economic history are precisely the diversity of the patterns and how this diversity had an impact on European history.

Apart from the extensive territory that came under the control of those who administered a civilisation, an important aspect was that civilisations not only extended their control over large areas but also that these areas could slowly take the form of smaller states claiming a degree of independence, and being smaller states, leading sometimes to change in the definition. This often happened after there had been an inter-face between divergent cultures, with some degree of cultures merging in various ways to allow the creation of new patterns.

Such inter-faces are now more frequently recognised in the coming together of diverse groups, some emerging from a maritime base and others settled in agricultural land. Some even adopted patterns that could be somewhat different. Whereas previously migrations could end up settling in new lands, having migrated over large expanses, now there was a recognition that communities could migrate by traversing seas and settling in new coastal or in land areas. Such areas can be close by or even at some distance if the distance being traversed involves relatively easy travel by sea or over land. When the history of India is viewed as long distance migrations, then the communities involved were not small in number. The migrations could be quite extensive, with the emergent cultural patterns expressing diversity.

It could be argued that among the most interesting aspects of what we recognise as a civilisation is precisely the new cultures that evolve from these frequent interchanges in various parts of the territory. They either evolved in a singular fashion or else evolved through a substantial inter-face of many cultural forms. I sometimes think that the important feature of a civilisational mode lies precisely in its creation of new cultures.

We have to recognise that what is sometimes the most significant development in history is the very creating of fresh cultures from the earlier ones having to evolve. We emphasise the singularity of civilisations but in fact what gives them greater validity is the fact that they create and provide us with new cultures. The creation of cultures is perhaps the most thrilling aspect of historical continuity. This way of viewing civilisation is of course a change from the way we have been explaining it in the past as the great and glorious periods in the history of a society. The presence of the social sciences now in history, such as sociology, economics, anthropology, demography, environmental studies, forces us to look upon history and all that it is associated with in a different way.

How would you compare the climate for dissent and academic freedom today with what it was under the British and during the Emergency?

There are some continuities, as for example, in the resort to certain laws under which people were arrested. Sedition was one of these introduced and established by the British, to whom it remains faithful as its long life still continues. The arrest and incarceration of people who keep awaiting a trial for a lengthy period remains in practice. In the Bhima-Koregaon case, for instance, within the past decade, initially six people were arrested and eventually the number rose to 16. Five of us were petitioners wanting bail for those arrested but none of our attempts met with any success. What surprised me was that these six were respected academics, lawyers, writers, and poets and hardly the kind of people who would be plotting assassinations and acts of terrorism – what they were accused of doing.

The Emergency was generally no better but there were some small differences. There was, at least initially, a concern to explain to the international world why such an Emergency with its strict governmental controls over free speech and expression had been declared. When international intellectuals wrote a letter condemning the Emergency, an attempt was made to respond to this letter and explain why the Emergency was necessary. Having refused to be part of this response, I remain unclear as to what happened to the response. Admittedly, it was a mere gesture and did not amount to the many arrested being released on bail. I do not recall any official justification for the arrests.

Incarceration by colonial power was often most severe, such as when people were placed in the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Island. The construction of the jail goes back to the end of the 19th century, and was of such an order that no communication between the individual prisoners was possible, and the living conditions were deplorable. Prisoners had to fulfil additional daily quotas of intensive labour and were punished if they failed to do so. The resort to hunger strikes rarely provided a solution.