R: Dear Prasanta,
Thanks for your warm and encouraging letter. Yes, the crude Marxist
was Ashok Mitra. I do hope to put together a companion volume to
'Anthropologist...' but it might take some time. Over the next year I
will write, with luck, essays on the great writer and polymath Shivram
Karanth (whose centenary falls next year), on why and how I came to
enjoy my research on Verrier Elwin (he too was born in 1902),and on the
Chipko leader Chandi Prasad Bhatt, one of my all-time personal heroes.
The book will start with the essay on Dharma and end with the essay on
Arundhati Roy!
  I trust your research goes well.
with regards

Ram

P:Dear Dr. Guha,

I was reading this article on 'The Hindu'by Gail Omdevdt 

on the use and abuse of Gandhian ideas about economy. 

The hostility towards market is what bugs Omdevdt and I 

think I agree with her on that. What would you say about 

that and how does that tie up with the Kumarappa/Schumacher 

approach on small economy.

Best,

Prasanta

R: Dear Prasanta,
 My current position would be this -- that the Gandhian ethic of
decentralized, eco-senstitive development, as promoted by Kumarappa,
Schumacher and the ilk, is a valuable corrective to orthodox 
approaches, and it demands that we be more sensitive to resource use and
sustainability, to political equality, etc. but its hostility to the
market is not warranted. In other words, let us not treat is as a total
charter or blueprint (as a dogmatic Gandhian would) but as the voice
that is sobers andcalls to our ethical conscience and  humanizes.
    Give my regards to Gautam Bhadra. I haven't seen him for fifteen
years. He is a remarkable man.

yours
Ram

P: Dear Dr. Guha,

I have been following your articles on T. G. Vaidyanathan and I

loved them.  But I think I would disagree on the point when you say

that you would see to it that your son does not get initiated

via the thread ceremony like any other Brahmin. Is'nt that

his decision to make? And I do not think that to be a

very liberal idea, I mean thrusting one's beliefs about 

religion on another person, even to one's children. Hope you are 

doing well.

Best,

Prasanta

R:Dear Prasanta,
Thank you for your letter about TGV. I was travelling, hence the 
delayin replying.
Your criticisms are well taken. Let me rephrase it this way -- I will
not get the thread ceremony done for my son at the usual age, 13 0r 14,
but after he is an adult if he wants to go ahead so be it.
Trust your work goes well.

Ram

P:Dear Dr. Guha,

I read your two articles on Chandi Prasad Bhatt long
back but was waiting till you write on Karanth as you
hinted me you would. That I got this week. I read both
your essays in 'The Telegraph' and in 'The Hindu' with
avid interest. But as always I will bother you with
some queries. First, a general point: why do you tend
to get intrigued by people with broad spectrum
interests. I have noticed this before and in Karanth's
case (you name 15 and more professions) that gets
confirmed once more. Is it because you think there is
something fundamentally liberal and sensible about
having wider rather than pointed interests areas? If
so, I would agree with you. Second, it seemed from
your tone that you would rather prefer a lone tusker
(like Karanth) than a disciple-gatherer (like
Tagore)--in other words you like an outsider, a
fiercely individualistic man more. But I thought you
were a man of the middle path who did not subscribe to
extremes (as it seemed at least from your articles on
Arundhati Roy). I hope by the phrase 'a fierce
individual' you mean something different than a
detached loner which Karanth was possibly not.

Thanks again for the essays. My work goes on.

Best,
Prasanta

R:Dear Prasanta,
 
Your fascinating and intriguing and probing letter.
We will have to have a long adda to thrash all this
out, but before that I will have to search myself
very critically and thoroughly!I write, it is true, about Indians I admire or
respect. But my pantheon is quite capacious and
catholic. I suppose since I am not a specialist I
like chaps who dabble in this and that. I am of
course a moderate, but I sometimes joke that I am a
man of moderate views, these sometimes expressed in
extreme fashion.

 Ram

--------

With Dipesh Chakrabarty on British Marxist historians, religion and 

the Subalternists.

P:Dear Dipeshda,

I just finished reading "Habitations of Modernity" and thought of

writing to you.It is an extremely interesting coincidence
that I was just reviewing Dr. Sarkar's recently
published "Beyond Nationalist Frames, Postmodernism,
Hindu Fundamentalism, History" for a John's Hopkins'
e-journal. I think the first section of your
book(especially the first 2 essays) is an excellent
rejoinder to Sumitda's "Decline of the Subaltern..."
essay (in 'Writing Social History') and the essay
"Postmodernism and the Writing of History" collected
in the book I just mentioned, that you must have read.


I am especially intrigued because I am myself working
with the sectarians in seventeenth century
England--mainly with the Digger Gerrard Winstanley,
who was a deeply religious man and a diehard radical
at the same time.  

But Dipeshda, I think I would differ from you when you
seem to suggest that the British Marxist historians
were not interested in relgion. May be I have misread
you. The subaltern historians might have had important
differences with them and you speak rightly about
Hobsbawm (in his autobiography, I found a deeply
dogmatic and unrepentent Marxist speaking) but I think
Christopher Hill is one person who has singlehandedly
taught us the connections between religion and radical
politics, especially he shows that any uncritical
distinction between modern and medieval in the
European context might be such a slipery terrain
(something that you are trying to do with the contours
of enlightenment). Of course, Hill would not probabaly
approve of the ontological approach the way you imply
(but I know for sure that he was also deeply
interested in continental philosophy), but he was
certainly an antinomian to the core. And speaking
about antinomianism, I also cannot forget Thompson's
posthumously published "Witness Against the Beast",
where the rational/irrational debate is contextualised
with respect to the poet William Blake. 

So I guess, I would love to see you writing someday 
differentiating these nuances among the British
Marxist historians (you have acknowledged briefly that
you had to homogenise them for polemical purposes) and
then critique notions of unbounded rationalism, which
I think, is the right thing to do. This approach is
especially important if we are to fight communalism in
India and (it seems everywhere in the world now)! The 
Right must be met in its home turf. That is true
liberalism.

Congratulations again for these wonderful set of
essays. I hope you carry on with similar vigor and
polemical sharpness in future.

Best,
Prasanta

D: Dear Prasanta,

I came back yesterday from a two-week hectic (but
rich) trip to Kolkata to find your message on my
computer. Thank you for writing to let me have your
appreciation of Habitations. I bought Sumitda's book
in Kolkata. I have indeed read some of the essays in
it, in particular the one on postmodernism. In
general, I find Sumitda to be an excellent scholar of
modern South Asian history but not a deep thinker. But
historians, as a tribe, often do not like the business
of thinking; they expect stories to do the job. And it
definitely works - to a degree - in good hands.

I entirely take your point about Christopher Hill et
al. I am made particularly aware of what you say by
some of the scholars of the 17th/18th centuries I
personally know, such as Jon Mee, Nigel Smith,
Kathleen Wilson, and others. Blake scholarship, I
gather, is specially rife today with debates about the
rational and the non-rational. So I concede that there
is more ground for conversation between historians of
British popular radicalism and us than I make room for
in the essays in Habitations. I must say, however,
that E P Thompson on the working class was read in an
entirely sociologistic manner in India in the
seventies (as was the Hill of *The World Turned Upside
Down*). My polemics was directed against that reading
but that is also what makes it, as you say, dated. I
would like to read more into this area - can you
direct me to some of the more important contributions
in recent times? 

There is yet another question to which you allude and
which needs to be considered. For most historians,
taking religion seriously means making religion into
an object that can be historicised. This method hardly
ever challenges the methodological secularism of the
social sciences. Do you think that in your reading
Hill gets beyond that?

Thanks again for these generative criticisms.

With best wishes,
Dipeshda

P: Dear Dipeshda,

Thanks for your very thoughtful reply. I completely
agree with you about the common historians' penchant
for empiricsm/positivism. I remember having long
discussions with Professor Rudolphe Gasche and Ernesto
Laclau in Buffalo on this very point.The historian
/literary critic is not ready to think
phenomenologically. Even those Marxists who know their
Frankfurt School well, do not take the leap from (or
have dialogue with)Hegel to Heidegger. For the Lit
crit, an easy exit is  Kantian (and safely liberal
!)aesthetics, and that is what they often do, when
they actually read texts--go back to New Criticism of
the IA Richards, William Empson variety.

Your point about reading Hill and Thompson
sociologistically is well taken; I can see where your
ire is directed, and I think it is well directed.
Indeed , mostly they have just read Hill's
potboiler--"The World Turned" and think they have
exhausted Hill scholarship. I also could never
comprehend how they can ignore such chapters as
'Christian and Appolynian' and some more chapters
towards the end, in Thompson's "Making". 

But I must concede that Hill was, in the final
account, a historicist; but at least he was not an
antiseptic secular historian. 

In India, I can name you one person who is capable and
inclined to do a phenomenological reading of early
modern British radicals: Amlan Dasgupta of Jadavpur.
The last time we met, we agreed how the RSS/VHP has
usurped the space left by the haughty
Marxists/liberals: the space of popular religious
consciousness. It is only that the Oxford training of
Amlanda did not provide him with much continental
philosophy for doing that kind of research with early
modern radicals. 

Yes, Kantleen Wilson at Stonybrook, John Mee at Oxford
and particularly Nigel Smith at Princeton, are doing
excellent works. Smith, I think, is outstanding.You
might look at one book for a balanced outlook, David
Mulder,"The Alchemy of Revolution." New York, Bern,
Frankfurt, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1990. Also for a
stauch Marxist viewpoint (but that which engages with
the latest scholarship and one that you might pit
yourself against), James Holstun,"Ehuds Dagger, Class
Struggle in the English Revolution." London & New
York: Verso, 2000. Also, for a general overview,
please see ,F Dow, "Radicalism in the English
Revolution "(1985) and J McGregor & B Reay (eds),
"Radical Religion in the English Revolution" (1984)

 Also, since you frequentlly visit Australia, you
might meet and speak to Lotte Mulligan,Judith Richards
and Richard Graham of Latrobbe University. They had a
celebrated debate with Hill on this very point of
historicising religious radicalism.

My own work lies in a cusp between phenomenology and
history and I am trying hard to to do a Ginsberg kind
of microhistory with some amout of 'thinking', as you
put it.

I am defending sometime next year and would very much
like to do a comparative analysis of the early modern
English religious radicals and the Indian religious
radicals ( looking at the Lokayata tradition from a
phenomenological viewpoint). I had spoken to Ramakanta
Chakrabarty and Gautam da from that perspective and
both of them directed me to some good reading.  

Anyway, it is wonderful to converse with you. I
hope we carry on such dialogue. 

Best,
Prasanta

D: Dear Prasanta,

Thanks very much for the references, I will follow up
on them. The debates you are involved in are very
helpful, since the Indianists continue to be so
suspicious of religion. Most of them smell some kind
of Orientalism in my interest in questions of religion
in *Provincializing Europe.* 

I will be visiting Stony Brook in early March and
expect to continue the conversation with Kathleen
Wilson and others.

I was interested to hear about Professor Amlan Das
Gupta. My time in Kolkata is usually so hectic that I
miss out on making new and interesting acquaintances.
Thanks for telling me about him.

With best wishes,
Dipeshda