The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches (1877 to the Present)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

When this volume was conceived, I thought it would be a simple job of compiling a few famous speeches, something many other editors have done in the past. But once I began reading material for it, several new dimensions which had not struck me earlier began to emerge. Like every historian, the first question I faced was that of historicity. A historian’s hindsight, intuition and his location in a historical context are what normally help him read facts and decide on their historicity or otherwise. How does one relate a particular speech to the history of the time and then call it historic? How does one confer on a speech, or even a fact, a trans-historical status and value, and then bestow on it a representative character? These were the issues which immediately needed to be grappled with before one began the process of selection and collection. For me, therefore, compiling this book was a more difficult task than it might have been for those who are innocent of the-historian’s dilemmas.

Which speech is historic—this is not an innocuous question. It is a question with political, social and cultural perspectives attached to it. Looking back at any specific period, there is always a danger of viewing it from the limited perspective of the brief moment in time that we inhabit. It is crucial not to look at any age in isolation from what led up to it and what came after, and as a result of it. This led me to read the histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries——which have shaped a number of contemporary trends and ideas that constitute our world view——with a long-term historical perspective. Equally, since the present too colours the way a past is viewed, I felt it important to allow a careful understanding of our times to enter into a debate with our recent history. The present volume is an outcome of this endeavour. Not all questions will be settled in these pages but they inform everything from the selection to the arrangement and presentation of the speeches.

What emerged from my reading of the history of the last two hundred years of the subcontinent was the fact of a long and continuing struggle the struggle for freedom. Freedom premised at the universal plane may be seen as the leitmotif of human quest, and most of the speeches in this volume verbalized that quest in myriad ways. I was often surprised at the language, emotion and dream articulated especially in the important speeches made in the six or seven decades prior to independence and in the decade immediately after 1947. Leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and M.G. Ranade most often spoke in the voice of universalism and humanism, something they themselves may not have consciously known. As a historian working in an intellectual milieu where anti-humanism and anti-universalism are often the keys to success in academia, this collection increasingly became an academic challenge for me: that of presenting as valuable and path-breaking ideas and commitments which are considered mere common sense by later generations.

I Colonialism, or rather the intelligentsia’s attempt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to understand, negotiate with, and fight colonialism, has been the most significant marker of the history of modern India. A serious reading of the intellectual premises and political arguments of men and women like Surendranath Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji and Annie Besant shows that, though circumscribed by their age and context, these people were making a radical departure from their moorings and were presenting a very powerful critique of the colonial system. They were not the intellectual or political collaborators of colonialism that many politically prejudiced or historically myopic writings say they are. These early nationalists were trying to evolve the economic, political and moral foundations of a new society.

The speeches and writings of public persons in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India indicate that they had not merely understood the might and exploitative agendas of the colonial power, but also realized the fact that the society from which this power had emerged had undergone an industrial revolution which had far-reaching consequences completely unprecedented in human history. They recognized the role the industrial revolution had played in making England the most modern and developed country at that historical juncture. They were also aware of the social and scientific benefits that could accrue to a backward society like India from an engagement with England. This led them to look towards England to help India transcend its internal morass and help usher in a modern society. For Naoroji and others, British colonial presence in India was providential, at least to begin with, as it provided Indian society—a stagnant one which had missed out on the scientific and industrial revolution in the West—an opportunity to catch up. In fact, they intuited what Karl Marx would write later about the regenerative role of colonialism: that the colonial state in India, through its ideas, institutions and instruments and exploitation, for example, the railways, hastened social and political change. This provided them with a blueprint for a new society for India too—a modern, industrial society. Thus, their speeches were marked less by rhetoric and more by a close and detailed analysis of the facts and processes involved in the rise and maintenance of colonialism. They were also conscious of their own role in such a context. This nuanced and complex understanding of the empire of the day and a perception of the role of intellectuals and political lenders, as glimpsed in the first few speeches in this book, laid the foundations of modern-day Indian sensibilities, whether in politics, or on social questions, or in an understanding of India’s economic location and policies.

It was in their critique of the colonial system that these intellectuals made the greatest contribution. They provided a detailed analysis of the way colonialism worked through its sophisticated and elaborate system of finances, manipulation of currencies and trade policies, establishment of communication linkages for economic and administrative facilitation, integration of executive and judicial powers in local governance, and racial appropriation of the instruments of administration. The early nationalists’ eye for detail and meticulous work thus ‘deconstructed’ the empire, exposing its internal circuitry as it were, and provided the intellectual foundation of Indian nationalism (which Bipan Chandra, one of the finest historians of modern India, has called ‘economic nationalism’ in his book Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India). At the level of public engagement, their attempts to criticize the economic policies of the empire and the colonial state and at the same time develop democratic methods and institutions to fight those policies laid the foundations of India’s democratic polity as well. It is here that their efforts to model institutions after the nineteenth-century British parliamentary system become significant. Their political tracts, economic treatises and speeches at various platforms indicate the evolution of a vision anchored in the core values of a parliamentary democracy which later influenced India’s political and social evolution.

Interestingly, much of contemporary intellectual engagement with India’s modern history, particularly in our metropolitan centers or in the West, is characterized by a downplaying of the career and vision of these early nationalists; they are dismissed as lightweight liberals or condemned as the empire’s collaborators, intellectual or economic or political. Or their vision and discourse is assumed to be a matter of common-sense understanding and therefore not worthy of being studied. This has resulted in making many discussions on modern-day Indian democracy, the state and the economy a-historical, grounded on extremely superficial assumptions or currently fashionable theories in the West. A serious exploration into the foundations of many of the issues facing contemporary India——the success or failure of its democracy, the evolution of its institutions and economy——will indicate that they have their roots not in the hoary past of the Vedas or the ancient republics, but in the intellectual and political engagements of public men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no getting away from this foundational truth.

A historically inclined perspective helps one discern that the national liberation movement was not merely one single movement of political liberation, but, as many would say in their speeches, a beautiful movement unique in human history. It was the gradual unfolding of the movement into multiple streams which made the quest for political freedom against the colonial state meaningful. This also proved the early nationalist assertions—which even Nehru made when he was president of the Congress in 1929—that Indian nationalism was entirely different from its Western counterpart. It was liberating and inclusive rather than exclusivist. It welcomed every class and all streams of political and economic thought, some of which were antagonistic to- its inclusivist nature itself Though articulating such dimensions in public speeches made the speeches substantive, it also tended to make them quite long as the speakers tried to locate the interconnectedness of issues.

The intelligentsia and public men at the turn of the twentieth century had a palpable sense of a movement in India on a vast scale. It is with such sensibilities that Surendranath Banerjea, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Pherozeshah Mehta were speaking and writing in that era. They were in constant search of a plan of action, a vision for India. Their speeches may sound sedate by the standards of today is political rhetoric or literary fashion, but they were expressing ideas at a time when the common Indian did not have the wherewithal to even speak up, nor could he or she thoroughly comprehend their implications. The spell of colonial rule, as Bipin Chandra Pal would say, was upon us; it was our mai-baap. Pal called it maya or illusion under which Indians lived, Later historians and particularly those who studied the national movement thoroughly used the word hegemony to explain the ideological sway that colonial rule had over Indians. The speeches of Naoroji, Mehta and Gokhale were not simple acts of eloquence; they were political acts of awakening people and impelling them to shrug off the imperial cast. Given the British arguments that India was not and never had been a nation and that it was merely a geographical imagination, an attempt was made quite often in the speeches to imagine and create an India. Thus, there were conscious efforts to argue that even if India was not a nation in the modern sense of the term, it could be constituted as one owing to its historical and economic rationale. It could be moulded into a nation and indeed it was becoming one.

At the same time, the movement was not born of any anti- foreigner or anti-alien sensibility. After all, the notion of videshi or alien has always had manifold implications in a society like India where the primary identity till recently was of one’s caste or village. A journey through the speeches in this book will indicate that rarely did a leader or intellectual try to defend an anti-colonial position on nativistic grounds, i.e., India is for Indians and foreigners should leave. The Indian nationalist leadership never argued that the British should leave India only because they were foreigners. It was rather the notion of justice which constituted the core of their arguments asking the British to leave. British rule, as Naoroji famously described it, was ‘un-British’). Many among India’s intelligentsia of the time had envisioned that British rule in India would usher the principles of liberal democracy as voiced in the British Parliament, the press and in the works of Bentham, Mill and others. However, the gradual realization of the lack of fair play in dealing with India on several fronts, mainly economic, became the reason for an increasing disillusionment, a sense of injustice which would culminate in the demand for the withdrawal of the British from India.

The argument for the British quitting because they were foreigners did also exist, of course, though it always constituted a second line of reasoning. This fundamentally racial argument came to provide the intellectual basis for some internal movements among those Indians who wanted to voice their rejection of the hierarchies within the Indian social system. Many tribal and non Brahmin caste movements used the nativistic and racial arguments to assert that Brahmins and upper castes were outsiders and had been exploiting the indigenous peoples who had been relegated to a low—caste status.

However, it was the economic critique that constituted the core of the argument against colonial presence and it began with the grand old man of India, Dadabhai Naoroji. His drain theory and its understanding of the exploitation of India under colonial rule was the cornerstone of the entire national movement. What Naoroji initiated in the British Parliament in 1892 and repeated at various public platforms was then carried forward by Pherozeshah Mehta, who excelled in tearing apart official claims at various forums-—the legislative assembly, the Bombay Corporation or the university senate. His speeches, full of sarcasm, wit and sheer confidence, set the benchmarks for debate on public issues. Surendranath Banerjea, acknowledged as the first public leader of modern India, was completely devoted to arousing nationalistic sentiments among the people of various regions, and his speeches attracted many future leaders.

The colonial critique of the early nationalists also contained an awareness of India’s social malaise and in this they were the inheritors of the different socio-religious movements of the nineteenth century. From Raja Rammohun Roy, whom Surendranath Banerjea referred to as the greatest Indian reformer, to Jyotiba Phule, G.K.Gokha1e and Badruddin Tyabji, everyone was involved in social reform, thus broadening and enlarging the canvas of their engagement. With the heightening of political consciousness, there was a tension brewing between those championing the political question and the others who also demanded social reform. At the end of the nineteenth century, particularly after the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, this conflict reached a high. Attempts were made to ensure that the controversy did not cause a rift in the nascent political processes and organization. It did not, for example, take much longer than its third session for the Congress to announce that it was not going to Entertain any demand for social reform of any community unless the demand had an overwhelming support from that community itself interestingly, this decision was taken by people who themselves were the greatest social reformers in their own respective communities, people like Tyabji and Naoroji. At the same time, the apprehensions that the controversy would have divisive effects were proved right when Syed Ahmad Khan, who was involved in modernizing the Muslim upper classes through his Aligarh movement, came to oppose the Congress. The tussle between the reformers who gradually voiced themselves through the Indian Social Reform Conference and the groups which came to critique the primacy of social reform brought the dilemma to the fore. K.T. Telang, a leading intellectual of the period, created a furore when he suggested, as a via media, that political processes should be given precedence over social reforms Diner this involved lesser resistance from society. It was only with the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi on the scene that the political demand Bud the social question came together cohesively on the same platform. Gandhi not only amalgamated the social and political movements but also launched the biggest ever social change movement in the country- the removal of untouchability. His speech at Benares in 1916 announced his arrival on the scene with a canvas much larger than what the leadership of the time had envisaged. It was a direct attack on the norms, language and composition of the leadership of the era. From 1920 onwards, one can see the political movement constantly engaging with the issues of untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity and the amelioration of the rural poor.

Very soon the question of leadership and representation became the centre of most public speeches. As the British, strategically, decided to lend representative status to different leaders or groups, there were strong clashes for such status among India’s public leaders. There were more than a few who argued that they represented the Hindus or the Muslims or, as B.R. Ambedkar claimed, the depressed Glasses. Gandhi, in his straight and simple manner, claimed that he represented all Hindus and all Muslims and the depressed classes. The language of representation gave the speeches of this period a very strong authoritative character coupled with a narrowness not evident till now. These varying claims of representation, which were heard most clearly during the Second Round Table Conference in 1931, with the British seeking different representatives for different communities—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, depressed classes, native princes——reached a climax when Veer Savarkar claimed in 1937 that he and his party, the Hindu Mahasabha, represented the Hindus, and M.A. Jinnah in 1940 declared that he was the sole spokesperson of the Muslim nation——a nation which he said had no common bond with the Hindu and therefore had to be given separate status as Pakistan.

A VIVID, CAPTIVATING HISTORY DF INDIA, IN THE WORDS OF THE MEN AND WDMEN WND SHAPED IT

At their best, speeches highlight the concerns of the times and inspire a a nation to great acts. From Surendranath Banerjea’s 1878 speech on the issue of Indian unity to M.A. Jinnah’s address in 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan, from Homi Bhabha’s espousal of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy in the 1960s to Rajiv Gandhi’s remarkable address on disarmament in 1988, from Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s first budget speech in the imperial legislative council in 1902 to Manmohan Singh’s equally epoch-making one in 1992, great speeches have shaped the development of India as we know it today.

The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches brings together over a hundred and fifty of the most influential and important speeches in our history, including Dadabhai Naoroji’s maiden address to the House of Commons in 1892, Bhagat Singh’s soul-stirring statement in court during his trial in 1930, Veer Savarkar’s presidential address of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937 articulating ‘there are two nations…the Hindus and the Moslems, in India’, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s classic, ‘Tryst with Destiny’. There are also others on an eclectic range of subjects - politics, economics, science, social and religious reform-by some of the best minds of India: C.V. Raman and Jagadish Bose, Sir Syed Ahmad and Pherozeshah Mehta, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi, P.C. Mahalanobis and Amartya Sen, among others.

Thematically arranged and skillfully introduced and contextualized, each speech proves the enduring potential of human oratory to motivate and enrich. The result is a definitive and inspirational chronicle of a nation in the making.