The central argument in this collection of essays by Sudhir Chandra,
written over a period of thirty-five years, is that contemporary social
consciousness is marked by an underlying ambivalence that resists
analysis in terms of neat binary categories. Exploring the interplay of
contradictory impulses and the confluence of apparently irreconcilable
forces in the making of social and political phenomena, the essays deal
with a wide range of issues concerning our colonial past and the
postcolonial present. They reflect the author's inclination to view
social/political/historical movements and personalities in terms of an
ever-varying mix of what we are taught to look upon, normatively or/and
analytically, as opposites.
Trained as a historian, the author deals with the early stirrings of the
nationalist consciousness in nineteenth-century India to show that the
same person or group of persons or movement often revealed both
progressive and reactionary attitudes. This counters the received wisdom
which views these as sets of oppositions - reformist versus revivalist,
secular versus religious, nationalist versus communalist. The
ambivalence, further, reveals itself equally in the texts of
nineteenth-century writers and in cataclysmic events like Hindu-Muslim
riots in the Gujarat of today. Two essays devoted to Govardhanram
Tripathi, a rarely researched Gujarati litterateur, bring out the
unresolved contradictions that underlay his own consciousness and that
of his society. More than a century later, the post-1992 riots in Surat
and the Hindutva terror unleashed in other parts of Gujarat in 2002
reveal the vulnerability of broader social forces. Gandhi's realization
of the failure of swadeshi in the wake of the Noakhali riots, as indeed
the dilemma posed by his attitude to religious conversion, further prove
the point. Rather than being a unique rupture, he emerges as a
fulfilment of intimations that the nineteenth century abounded in. Even
if it could be seen as a universal human condition, the essays remind
us, ambivalence is always specific, unfolding the dynamics of social
forces. That is what human history is all about.
