Reading Rammonohar Lohia
What we remember and what we have forgotten about Rammanohar Lohia’s in his birth centenary year is as much a comment on the state of political and intellectual life in contemporary India as it is on the man who lived a short and intense life of mind and action. In part it is a reflection of his strong personality and iconoclastic mind that bifurcates his memory into two strands that talk past one another: the small and dwindling band of Lohia’s blind admirers who are still too dazzled to see anything beyond ‘doctor sahib’ and the equally blind critics who are too prejudiced and self assured to even read what Lohia had to say about some of the big questions of our time.
With the passage of time, the passionate quarrel among his critics and admirers may fade into a vast ocean of silence and forgetfulness. It is not clear which of these is worse – the partial and skewed memory or the ridiculing forgetfulness. What is clear, though, is that both the critics and admirers of Lohia interpret him through a series of memories of his political action rather than through his writings. The problem is not that he did not write enough or that his writings are not accessible. His collected works (still a partial collection of his writings and speeches that does not include most of his letters and statements) run into nine volumes, dating from his first published article in March 1933 to his death in October 1967. He founded and edited several journals, from Congress Socialist to Mankind and Jan. His writings cover philosophy, history, mythology, culture, language, literature, art and environment beside of course contemporary affairs, economy, civil liberties, society and politics. The real tragedy is that despite the availability of such a wide corpus, Lohia is rarely read.
This has resulted in a skewed memory. In the world of politics, Rammanohar Lohia is remembered today as the originator of OBC reservations, the champion of backward castes in the politics of north India, the father of non-Congressism, the uncompromising critic of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the man responsible for politics of anti-English. The disappearance of socialist movement from the political map of contemporary India has meant that the economic agenda of Lohia – his campaigns against poverty, unemployment and price rise — is almost forgotten. The narrow, inward gaze of contemporary politics has also meant an erasure of the memory of the international dimension to his politics – his resolute pacifism, opposition to nuclear weapons, protest against racial inequality, advocacy of Indo-Pak federacy and the dream of a world without visas and passports. A small stream of political organizations and movement groups has struggled to keep a fuller memory of Lohia’s politics alive.
Compared to how he is remembered in the world of politics, his memory in the world of ideas is more intriguing and a sad commentary on India’s institutionalized academia and its English speaking intellectuals. There is a deep irony here. Lohia has faded away from the world of ideas precisely when some of the themes signaled by him have risen to respectability and prominence in the western and therefore Indian academia. After the ‘linguistic turn’, social sciences are more sensitive to the significance of culture as an instrument of dominance and power. But that has not led to scholarly attention to Lohia’s writings on this theme that preceded post-colonial cultural critiques by well over two decades. The power of language and the role of English as a language of power has become a commonplace in social sciences. Yet Lohia’s ‘Banish English’ campaign is still viewed as a parochial voice of a Hindi supremacist. His critique of Euro-centricism has not invited even a gesture of acknowledgment from the post-Saidian scholarship. Although post-modernist cultural criticism has become more trendy, Lohia’s resolute philosophical anti-objectivism, rare for a political actor and that too from the left, has drawn no attention.
After the collapse of Soviet Union, there is recognition that the model of development that Soviet style socialism shared with capitalism needs a rethink, but that has not spawned any interest in Lohia’s advocacy of small machine and economic decentralization. Despite much interest in Dependency theories of underdevelopment, there has been no follow up of Lohia’s thesis of the twin origins of capitalism and colonialism. The experience of twentieth century revolutions has led to a realization that struggle against inequality has to be fought separately for each dimension, but Lohia’s ‘Seven Revolutions’ are yet to register on the radar of Indian intellectuals.
Affirmative action is in news and has gained more academic respectability than before. While roots of Mandal are traced back to Lohia, there is little realization of the concept of equality that informed his thinking neither on social justice nor about his warnings and note of caution about the policies of affirmative action. We do not remember, for example, that for Lohia shudra included women of any caste. While feminist strand of thinking has got strengthened in Indian academia, Lohia’s feminist tracts have been forgotten by Lohiaites as well as the Indian feminists. Also forgotten are Lohia’s dialogues with Ambedkar and Periyar and the fact that Lohia’s utterances on caste were animated by a concern with what are now called Dalits.
Insufficient attention to Lohia’s ideas is reflected in a deficient reading of his intellectual biography itself. While Lohia was more careful about acknowledging the sources of his ideas, Lohia followers continue to see him as an iconoclastic thinker with no precedence, who learnt from no one other than Marx and Gandhi. This has led to insufficient attention to the German roots of his thinking or on the impact of the dialogue with Ambedkar and Periyar. It is well known that Lohia’s ideas developed as an internal critique of JP. Lohia was reluctant to explicate it, but this was not done by the post-Lohia scholarship either. In general, the task of placing Lohia in his intellectual context, specifically that of socialist thought in 20th century India, remains to be undertaken.
The birth centenary of Rammanohar Lohia is a good opportunity to remedy this amnesia. While the birth centenary celebrations have resulted in many activities and seminars devoted to Lohia’s ideas, there is a need for systematic reading of Lohia. The proposed Study Week on Reading Rammanohar Lohia would do precisely that, namely read Lohia’s texts closely and subject it to meticulous scrutiny. The Study Week is divided into sessions devoted to pre-specified texts of Lohia. Each session would be led by a scholar who has worked on that aspect of Lohia, but this would not take the form of paper presentation. The sessions would be devoted to careful textual scrutiny and criticism by all the participants. Since the basic idea is to encourage a reading of Lohia by a new generation of scholars, a majority of participants are younger scholars who may or may not have written much on Lohia but who are willing to engage with him.
The schedule of the Study Week is given below:
Day 1
Session 1: Inaugural/keynote address and discussion
Session 2: On interpreting Lohia: How do we read Lohia’s texts, speeches and ‘fragments’? Lohia’s commentators: review of existing secondary literature
Session 3: Lohia’s early writings (1933-1942)
Session 4: Economics after Marx
Day 2
Session 1: Critique of Marxist philosophy: abstract/concrete, materiality/spirituality, immediacy, concept of time
Session 2: On Gandhi, Gandhism and Gandhians: Gandhism and Socialism, Anecdotes of Mahatma Gandhi, Three types of Gandhians
Session 3: Wheel of History
Session 4: Lohia’s critique of Eurocentricism and his internationalism
Day 3
Session 1&2: Key writings on Socialism: Marxism and Socialism, Asian Socialism, The Doctrinal Foundation of Socialism, The meaning of Equality, Statement of Principles, Seven Revolutions
Session 3&4: Interval During Politics and other essays in cultural criticism, mythology, religion, literature and art
Day 4
Session 1: Caste System
Session 2: Writings on the Gender question
Session 3: Language
Session 4: Political programme and strategy
Day 5
Session 1: India, China and the Northern Frontiers
Session 2: Writings on foreign policy and rest of the world
Session 3: Climatic concerns and development
Session 4: An agenda for re-reading Lohia
[…] over two decades. “In the world of politics,” as one of his ardent scholar-activist followers has put it, “Lohia is remembered today as the originator of OBC reservations; the champion of backward […]