In memoriam

Satish Saberwal 1933-2010

Satish Saberwal was an unusual intellectual and a person of rare qualities. A Punjabi by birth and early upbringing, in which his Arya Samaji mother had a lasting influence, he moved to Calcutta with his parents, and graduated from there with a B.Sc. Independent by temperament, he abandoned studies to work for a living as a salesman and, later, supervisor in a printing press. During this period he got attracted to a Quaker Centre, where he met, among others, the anthropologist N.K. Bose, and an Afro-American sociologist, William Cousins, who introduced him to the subject. These encounters and experiences left a deep impact on him and in 1957, Saberwal decided to become a sociologist. He found work as an interpreter with an American couple, both anthropologists, Ruth and Stan Freed, who were engaged in fieldwork in a village near Delhi.

Soon afterwards, Satish managed to go to the USA. Almost immediately on arrival, he married Edith Storer, whom he had met in Calcutta, where she had been engaged in social work and interested to learn about Indian culture and history. In 1962, he enrolled as a graduate student in anthropology at Cornell University. Among those who had an influence on him there were Jack Roberts, Morris Opler and Victor Turner. He did fieldwork in Kenya on the political institutions of the Embu, and found the experience highly educative though stressful. He got his doctorate in 1965.

After three years in Canada, first at the University of Alberta at Edmonton and then at McGill University, Satish returned in India to become a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He spent five years there (1968-73). He studied social mobility in the town of Phagwara and produced a crisp and insightful account (Mobile Men: Limits to Social Change, 1976). He was one of the most active Fellows ever at IIAS and not only organized a conference on the anthropological study of urban institutions and processes, but also played a leading role in others as editor, including one on cultural policy.

It was at the IIAS that Satish met Romila Thapar. They discovered several common interests, and she persuaded him to join the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU in 1973. He stayed there until his retirement in 1996. During the years at JNU, Satish pursued with firm determination a set of research themes, besides teaching many sociology courses and supervising Ph.D. students. Notable among his research interests was the character of a traditionally internally segmented, caste-based society and the challenges it faces in adopting and working modern, i.e. western, bureaucratic and democratic institutions. He also became interested in the role of religious ideas and institutions in Europe and India. He was convinced that the encounter of indigenous and imported institutions had created an enduring crisis in India that survived the attainment of independence: indeed, it was deepened. Wages of Segmentation (1995) and Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Indian Society (1996) contain the outcome of his studies on these themes.

After retirement, a student’s question during a visit to Lahore got Satish working on the sociology of the processes that led to partition and kept communalism alive in India after independence. He worked on this for eight years, and produced his last and arguably most important book, Spirals of Contention: Why India was Partitioned in 1947. The argument, characteristically terse but accessible, has many strands. For example, Hindus were glad to see the British vanquish Muslims, who had earlier vanquished them . Later, even as the former wanted the British to leave, the latter wanted them to stay. It was all about the dynamics of power, but not only about that. Culture and social organization too were crucial variables in the contestation games that saw the communities institutionalize differences more deeply than similarities. The so-called composite culture existed, but ‘emerged from the shadows (only) rarely.’ There was nothing inevitable about partition: no single cause produced it. It was a cumulative (spiralling) process that eventually acquired a force that was stronger than the will of any leader, however great, or the agenda of any political party.

The book came out in early 2008. A few months later, Satish was diagnosed to be a victim of the dreaded Motor Neuron Disease. He told me before the year was out that the knowledge that he had done his life’s work as a scholar made it easier for him to face his affliction. Satish’s scholarly pursuits were marked by unremitting dedication. When he arrived at a question, he did what it took to find an answer. Nothing was taken on trust, no effort spared to find relevant data, no ideas borrowed uncritically, no conclusions jumped at or evaded for non-scholarly reasons. Whenever a definite dead end was reached – as with his efforts to include China in his Europe-India project – he just gave up. Pretence and pretensions were alien to his conception of the role of a scholar.

In personal relationships, Satish’s guideline was authenticity. He had a rare capacity to reach out to people, irrespective of who they were, intellectuals or manual workers, friends or casual acquaintances. He was as robust in his appreciation of the work of others as he was forthright in his criticism. In his personal life too, authenticity is what mattered. In his austere lifestyle, there was no place for things or modes of behaviour that did not serve a legitimate purpose. He enjoyed company and lively conversation, which he would often light up with his ringing laughter, but he did not indulge in partying.

Satish Saberwal never wasted any time. He passed away much sooner than his family and friends would have liked. But his going ended the unbearable misery of two years. It also leaves one with a sense of deep loss.

T.N. Madan

 

Laxmi Chand Jain 1925-2010

WITH the passing away of L.C. Jain, we have lost more than an eminent Indian. A rare example of a public intellectual who throughout his life sought to embody the values of the freedom struggle and the early years of independence and nation-building – values that far too often appear strange to the contemporary generation of our rulers – LC also served as a link with the (unfortunately) dwindling numbers of social activists and movements struggling to introduce healthy correctives in our social and political life. No wonder, to his younger compatriots, he was always more a colleague than a senior exemplar.

A bland recapitulation of his biography, undoubtedly impressive, only thinly captures the richness of his many engagements. Like many of his generation, he was deeply influenced by the struggle for independence. Both the Mahatma, as also B.N. Ganguly, the eminent economist who taught him at Hindu College, sensitized him to not only the higher values of public life but equally the need to think beyond the immediate challenge of independence to imagining a social reconstruction different from the prevalent paths suggested by the dominant western experience. Post-independence, he became an active participant in the Indian Cooperative Union founded by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and along with Sudhir Ghosh, Gandhi’s private emissary, played a stellar role in setting up the township of Faridabad to help rehabilitate over 50,000 partition refugees from the North West Frontier Province. This experience, subsequently recorded in the remarkable City of Hope, of a self-help driven, bottom-up approach to rehabilitation and resettlement in extremely trying circumstances still stands as testimony to what we as a people are capable of doing, even though these lessons seem now to have been lost.

The inspirational leadership of Kamaladevi infused in him an aesthetic sensibility and an abiding interest in and involvement with India’s handicrafts and handlooms, not merely as artifacts but whose revival and role in our everyday life both enrich us and provide income and employment to millions of artisans. With others, Laxmi played a key role in helping set up the Cottage Industries Emporium, the All India Crafts Council and the Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation. Many of these ventures became an important feature of our First Five Year Plan.

Laxmi was an intensely political person, not however a politician. He worked closely with the Gandhi Peace Foundation and the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development, institutions set up by Jayaprakash Narayan. He also played a key role in setting up Super Bazar in Delhi, probably our first effort at making available articles of daily consumption at affordable prices by sharply reducing the pernicious role of middlemen and traders and increasing the linkages between producers and consumers. Alongwith close friends like Raj Krishna and J.D. Sethi, he was a fervent advocate of decentralized, participative development based on the active agency of free individuals. Little surprise that he was uneasy with the turn towards public sector giganticism and state control that so came to mark our public policy in the late 1950s and ’60s.

Like many of his friends, he supported JPs call for a ‘total revolution’ – an orientation that hardly endeared him to the then establishment. Post the lifting of the Emergency, he supported the Janata government, in particular the efforts at panchayati raj. His role, alongwith Ramkrishna Hegde and Abdul Nazir Sab, in designing the revolutionary panchayati raj scheme in Karnataka is worth recollecting. It is another matter that the ‘empire’ struck back and subsequently reversed many of those pioneering steps. Years later, under the V.P. Singh regime, when Laxmi and Rajni Kothari joined the Planning Commission, they made another attempt to revive these ideas. Again, the effort remained short-lived, an experience that he subsequently recounted in Grass Without Roots.

One can add to this rich life. There was Laxmi’s role in the global movement questioning the efficacy of large dams as also his open support to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, this despite serving in the Planning Commission. The report of the World Commission on Dams, of which he was vice chairman, became a landmark document which contributed to enriching our understanding of the dangers of ‘destructive development’. For this and other contributions, he received the Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1989.

He was active in the efforts to enhance press freedom and independence and helped endow the Chameli Devi Jain award for outstanding women in the media. Later, as India’s Ambassador to South Africa, he not only helped communicate our experiences at peaceful transition and reconstruction, but learn from South Africa’s efforts at effecting its policy of truth and reconciliation, lessons that we can gain from in situations like Kashmir, incidentally another of his abiding concerns.

Seriously ill for the past few years, LC was engaged, with the help of his son, Srinivasan, in penning his memoirs, an account, which when available, will not only help illuminate a fascinating and rich life, but hopefully guide us in pursuing a path of value-based public engagement.

His presence will be missed.

Harsh Sethi