Movers & Shapers
THESE 70 ICONS UNITE THE COUNTRY, ITS TERRIBLE POLARITIES, ITS TREMENDOUS POSSIBILITIES AND ITS WONDERFUL PLURALITIES
Seventy icons who unite the country, with its terrible polarities, its tremendous possibilities and its wonderful pluralities
Iwant all Indians to be Indians first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians, said B.R. Ambedkar, whose great contributions to democracy have been viewed through the narrow prism of caste in post-Independence India. Competitive loyalty, he felt, should not overwhelm our national identity, whether that loyalty arises out of religion, culture or language.
Unfortunately, modern India has grown in quite a different trajectory. All manner of anarchic and arcane identities have taken over, unleashing conflicts that the national fabric is yet to recover from. Indians have found themselves trapped in a witch’s curse, at the mercy of a constantly boiling pot of trouble and toil. Despite a Constitution which is not a mere lawyers’ document but a vehicle of life, and a spirit always the spirit of age, the contradictions of postIndependence India have often strained the ties that bind us. Yet there is something that unites India, its wonderful pluralities, and yes, even its terrible polarities.
If India is a work in progress, then there are some great men and women who have contributed to the task of nationbuilding. This special issue is dedicated to 70 movers and shakers, who have literally uprooted and changed how we think, behave, do business, learn, serve, amuse ourselves and engage with politics. For better or worse, they have changed the course of India’s destiny. Take Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. His greatest contribution was in the effective way he was able to ensure the accession of over 550 princely states to the Union of India, but his organisational skills had been honed by his years as Mahatma Gandhi’s disciplined lieutenant. Or Pandit Ravi Shankar, who took Indian music globally to an audience thirsty for novelty. Or Raj Kapoor, who was the first crossover filmmaker from India, mixing both a cheekiness imitated from Charlie Chaplin movies and a socialism learned from his writer friend Khwaja Ahmad Abbas.
Their struggles have often seemed insurmountable. Take M.S. Subbulakshmi, who was born to a devadasi but became the foremost exponent of Carnatic music. Or Sunil Gavaskar, who was a star in the Indian cricket team when it thought playing to win was a thoroughly ungentlemanly thing to do. Or even R.K. Narayan, who wrote in English about the ordinary, everyday lives of small-town Indians, at a time when the novel was completely in the grip of Englishness.
There are controversial people too whose legacy is not undilutedly positive. Indira Gandhi, with her populist propoor and anti-capital rhetoric, forever changed the politics of symbolism. No politician since her could dare to be too close to corporate India or too extravagant in their private life—that she tampered with the federal nature of the country, unleashed Emergency on political opponents and left a lasting culture of sycophancy on a once great party are also true. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who unbottled the caste genie, which consolidated the divisions in an already fractured society, by implementing the Mandal Commission recommendations. Or even Chaudhary Charan Singh, the first post-Independence leader to put the cause of peasants—not just rich farmers—in the national domain. For good or bad, our estimation of greatness is also not constant. Some of our greatest leaders are most open to criticism. Take Mahatma Gandhi. As Stanley Wolpert writes, he was an apostle of love who had to preside over the most brutal partition. Shiv Visvanathan says of Jawaharlal Nehru, he thought big so his mistakes were big too, but “no man embodied the political, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of modernity so immaculately”. Or indeed, as Sunanda K. Datta Ray writes so fondly of Subhas Chandra Bose, he wasn’t as flashy as Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, but he was surely every bit as mysterious. Legend doesn’t do justice to his utterly secular and plural legacy.
The greatness of these icons and indeed of India is that regardless of lunatics on the fringe trying to force their way into the mainstream, the country continues to welcome reinterpretations, reinventions, rediscoveries and revisions. As Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India, “India is an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.” And indeed, that is the overwhelming sentiment that will leave you at the end of reading about these 70 Great Indians, the number chosen to coincide with India’s 70 years. Their lives find an echo in the events of today, whether it is knowing which direction our secular nation should take, our status as a soft power globally, how we see ourselves philosophically as a people, and most of all, how we define ourselves in the utterly modern concept of Indianness.