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Literary Review
Journeys of the mind
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Memoirs offers fascinating insights into the many concerns of one of India's outstanding intellectuals, says RAJMOHAN GANDHI.
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INSIDE most of us a pedant, too, sits, and if I were to unloose my pedant, he could have a field day with Rajni Kothari's Memoirs. He would note some long sentences. He would comment on the profusion of parenthetical remarks and add that some brackets in this book contain not an aside, or a remark in passing, or an explanation, but a digression, sometimes a lengthy one. He would mark, too, that academic phrases occasionally intrude into Rajni's recollections from his personal or family life. And he would certainly speak of the typos.
But the pedant should be asked to shut up, for this is a moving and important book, as important, possibly, as Rajni's Politics in India, which was written in 1969 and is deemed (as Rajni himself notes) a classic.
The Rajni Kothari of 2002 has moved way beyond Politics in India. He does not disown that book. You do not retract empirical facts about parties, castes, regions, equations and alignments. Neither do you disown a book that provided ideas and impulses to a generation of political science professionals.
But politics and the State in India ceased years ago to satisfy all of Rajni's mind, which was drawn to studies of India's marginalised and unorganised sections (who comprise the majority); of NGOs and youthful groups anxious to affect politics but unwilling to join it; of India's women, tribals and dalits; of life and politics at the grassroots; of the destabilising politics of religion; of changing international equations; and of globalisation.
Testifying to this range of concerns are Rajni's numerous books, papers and articles, many of them provocative of thought and action, all of them bearing an originality that seems to be the Kothari hallmark, and yet none of them quite matching the reputation of Politics in India.
Memoirs: Uneasy is the Life of the Mind is not your conventional autobiography. It seeks to chronicle the journey of his mind, not the passage of his years. Early on in this book Rajni offers the self-appraisal that for decades three passions have occupied his mind — ideas, institutions and politics.
Towards the end of this book, however, Rajni reflects that a fourth element has been just as crucial for him, or even more so — an element that he calls "passion as such, including emotion, love and joyous life together." This is how he spells out the need for it:
What I had left out of my understanding was that an intellectual journey was not by itself fulfilling, just as "engagement in institution building" was not an adequate basis for a complete journey of the mind. As with the institutional arena, so with the intellectual process: they fell short of providing a fuller "life of the mind" and with it of the heart and at bottom of the soul.
One of the themes of this book is a realisation that all the time his wife and life-partner Hansa, who died in 1999, had been supplying the missing emotional element. Caring for Rajni during his numerous and protracted illnesses; goading him to write despite and sometimes because of his illnesses; insisting, no matter what, on laughter, for life was short; enabling, in so far as she could, needy children to find some education and, in 1984, needy Delhi Sikhs to find some support — doing all this and more, Hansa, it would seem, provided the heart power behind Rajni's intellectual output.
Rajni's gratitude is feelingly conveyed, and a similar impact is made by the brief account of his early days as a Gujarati diamond merchant's son who loses his mother when he is four, is unable to find in the new stepmother the love he needs, suffers from illnesses that he can comprehend only decades later, and feels surprisingly happy during visits to his dead mother's village.
Memoirs offers such glimpses from one of India's outstanding intellectuals who, apart from intervening vigorously in national debates for 40-plus years, has helped found institutions like Lokayan and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). It is interesting, incidentally, to find out that Rajni's childhood was spent in Burma, a happenstance that would help him later not to confine his concerns to India.
Rajni writes that those who know him well speak often of his restlessness and of his persistence: he is seen as always being uneasy with the world around him, and as being always "at it". This book seems to reveal some additional characteristics.
One is a habit of always monitoring himself: his intellectual positions, his political positions, his agenda, his way of life, his attitude to those around him. Rajni Kothari's seems to be an unusual example of a life continuously self-examined.
Then there is a remarkable frankness while assessing himself and his relationships. A few pages of Memoirs reveal this honesty. Details are on the whole not given — our author is frank but he is also discreet.
Finally, there is this suggestion of an independent thinking mind, one that really prizes an individual's freedom, but a mind that is ready also to rethink and consider angles not previously included. Whether, since Rajni was born into a Jain family, we think of this quality as being linked to the Jain doctrine of anekantavada (the many-sidedness of reality) or essentially as a personal value, it is quite appealing.
Putting it tersely, we can be proud of — feel a sense of gaurav about — this Gujarati called Rajni Kothari.
Memoirs: Uneasy is the Life of the Mind, Rajni Kothari, Rupa and Co., 2002, p.266, Rs.195.
Rajmohan Gandhi's Patel: A Life was published by Navajivan in 1990. His last book was Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History, Penguin, 1999.
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