A quest for an Indian self

At a time, when a lot is being said and anticipated about India’s future, Ananya Vajpei’s Righteous Republic takes a step back and points us towards a few of India’s founding fathers, who were intellectual and mass leaders, thinkers and writers.

The book looks at how these people explored their past through tradition, philosophy and art and also tries to trace the intellectual history of Swaraj — the search of sovereignty and the search for oneself.

An alumnus of Oxford University, Ananya spent five years juggling between her full-time teaching position in the US and writing the book, which has bagged several awards for non-fiction this year.

“I had a heavy teaching load but I would work at night and spend weekends and vacations in the library. I happened to live at the Harvard University campus and I basically wrote the book in that library. At a point of time, I had to take a semester off from teaching and that is when I did a bulk of the writing. It was tough, but I guess writing a book is tough,” she adds with a smile.

The book, divided into five chapters, looks closely at the lives and ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore.

And a lot of questions arose immediately on her choice of these specific five. She says, “I looked at a very large range of people between the late 19th and mid 20th century during the nationalist and anti-colonial period.”

“These were thinkers with a wide range of ideas, who very consciously engaged in reading history and looking at India historically. They played a prominent part in shaping ideas, transforming their time and influencing people. They not just provided political and cultural leadership but also thought leadership.”

She does agree that her choice of painter Abanindranath Tagore was a little unusual. “Abanindranath was the odd choice, as an artist he was known in a different way than somebody like Gandhi but he is the father of modern art in India and a new nation should have a sense of its own artistic tradition and its own history of art. Also, he allowed me to talk about a host of other people in Kolkata and Santiniketan, like the Tagore family, who were part of the Bengal Renaissance.”

The author, who has been busy touring for the last year and a half with Righteous Republic, has already started working on her next book, which is going to be a biography of B.R. Ambedkar. “Ten years back when I was writing my doctoral thesis on caste politics and the history of caste in Maharashtra, Ambedkar played a major role in shaping my dissertation. Now in this book, I focused on his founding of a new sect of Buddhism and what it means for modern politics and the nature of his political thought. And after investing close to 15 years on this, I sensed that there was much more there that I was interested in exploring; he is a very complex figure and has written voluminously on a lot of subjects like caste, partition, constitution, untouchability, Gan-dhian policies, race and liberalism,” she says.

Of late, accolades have been pouring on the author who won the Crossword Award for non-fiction this year as well as the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, and the Tata First Book Award for non-fiction. She feels that so much appreciation can only boost her morale and speed up her next book, even though there are matters like funding, research and extensive travel involved. “If I was generous to myself, I would give it 4-5 years but I would like to get a book out sooner if I can, because right now I feel there is a lot of momentum. I have had a good experience with my first book and I am feeling charged up. I recently won several awards, so I feel encouraged and I would like to work much more efficiently than I did last time,” concludes the author, who is presently a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS).