In a 2002 essay in Granta, you wrote that when you first came to America, you were surprised to see a dean at Yale University carry a heavy carton from his car and walk up three flights of stairs, rather than have a coolie carry it for him. What do you think foreign visitors to India would find most surprising and what preconceived notions of India do you think are most often proved inaccurate?
A
If by 'foreign' is meant Western, I think first-time visitors to India will find the density of humans surprising, even unnerving; so also the chaotic nature of the traffic! The preconceived notions that are most likely to be overturned are those of India and Indians as essentially 'spiritual'; for they can be, and often are, aggressively acquisitive.
The visitors for that World Cup will be mostly male, middle aged, and from England and Australia. In that sense the potential of that tournament for developing tourism is limited. In any case, cricket is not uniquely Indian -- but the gorgeous temples of the South and the forts and mosques of the North are. I trust that it is India's cultural and architectural heritage, rather than a modern game invented in England, that will prove more enduring in attracting visitors.
Q
In visiting a country, it's often helpful to understand the culture or the psychology of the country. For example, those visiting the United States might find that reading up on the Puritan Work Ethic or Manifest Destiny might explain part of what they'd see and experience as visitors. From a historical perspective, what is imperative to understand about India for visitors?
A
That there is no one or singular 'Indian culture'. This land is more diverse than any other-- diverse in terms of religion, language, ecology, dress, cuisine, and so on. It has more Muslims than Pakistan, more Christians than Australia, and yet is mostly a Hindu country. It has more languages than the European Union, and all with their distinct scripts too. Do not look for an 'Indian essence'!
Q
India recently celebrated its 60th anniversary and your new book, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, shines a light on post-Independence India. While part of the motivation behind tourism may be leisure activities, travel is also frequently undertaken out of a desire to better understand other countries. So what itinerary would you suggest that would allow a tourist in India to best understand the most recent 60 years of the country's history?
A
Start in Delhi, the political capital, fly then to Bombay, the financial capital, from there fly east to Nagpur in the heart of India. Two hours drive from Nagpur is a village named Sewagram where Gandhi lived between 1934 and 1947. Here, in and around the Mahatma's ashram, you will get a sense of what is still, essentially, a land of villages. Return to Nagpur, and take a slow, leisurely train down to Bangalore in the south, an 18 hour journey through plains and hills and plateaus, with the languages on display changing with the landscape. Bangalore itself is the visible face of the modern, high tech India. If you have no time left, fly home from Bangalore; but if you have a few days still on hand, drive from Bangalore to the west coast and take the Konkan Express up to Bombay, to pass through another set of richly diverse landscapes. En route, you can stop for a day at Goa, that unique blend of Indian and Portuguese culture.
Published: November 2007
Ramachandra Guha was born in Dehradun in 1958 and educated in Delhi and Calcutta. He has taught at the universities of Oslo, Stanford and Yale, and at the Indian Institute of Science. He has been a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and also served as the Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. After a peripatetic academic career, with five jobs in ten years on three continents, Guha settled down to become a full-time writer, based in Bangalore. His books cover a wide range of themes, including a global history of environmentalism, a biography of an anthropologist-activist, a social history of Indian cricket, and a social history of Himalayan peasants. His entire career, he says, seems in retrospect to have been an extended (and painful) preparation for the writing of India After Gandhi. Guha's books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The prizes they have won include the UK Cricket Society's Literary Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History.
