More about Ram Guha

Ramachandra Guha has an interesting column on Dom Moraes in today's Hindu. But this post is not about Moraes, but about Guha. At some point in his article, he quotes Isaiah Berlin.

Isaiah Berlin once described the political tradition to which he belonged as being composed of a "small, hesitant, self-critical, not always brave, band of men who occupy a position somewhere to the left of centre, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on their left ... This is the notoriously unsatisfactory, at times, agonising, position of the modern heirs of the liberal tradition."

Some hard faces on the right. On the left -- hysteria, mindless violence, and demagoguery. A liberal who sees more harm on the left than on the right? I think in Berlin's case, this is perfectly understandable. For,

Isaiah Berlin’s response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Born a Russian subject in Riga in 1909, he spoke Russian as a child and witnessed both revolutions in St. Petersburg in 1917, emigrating to the West in 1921. He first returned to Russia in 1945, when he met the writers Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. These formative encounters helped shape his later work, especially his defense of political freedom and his studies of pre-Soviet Russian thinkers. [From the description of "The Soviet Mind" at Amazon]

Guha is an ardent admirer of liberal sensibilities. He is a proud heir to the liberal tradition that Isaiah Berlin spoke of. He perceives a decline of the liberal thought in India, and often laments over that. For instance, see his EPW article -- "The Absent Liberal". So far so good. But as a historian based in India, is it okay for Guha to be a verbatim Berlin? The single most threatening force in today's India is from the RSS, from the right. In India, you see "hysteria, mindless violence, and demagoguery" only on the right. You might see a few "hard faces" on the left though. (Irfan Habib is not a Narendra Modi, and Namboodiripad was not a Stalinist). Unfortunately, Guha often deliberately chooses to be verbatim Isaiah Berlin. He described himself at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (2003) thus:

I describe myself as someone with moderate views with extreme expression… I am only just left of centre. I have found people that are far left can be much worse than far right views.

I only hope that he was misquoted.