An Anthropologist among the Marxists and other Essays by Ramachandra Guha

Author:Ramachandra Guha [Guha, Ramachandra]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Tags: An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays
Publisher: Orient Blackswan Private Limited
Published: 2016-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Exiles in Their English Peace: Karl Marx and Nirad Chaudhuri

I

N June 1994, briefly in London, I asked my host, Gopal Gandhi, to accompany me on a trip to Marx’s grave in Highgate. We set off-on a warm Saturday afternoon by tube to Highgate station. We came out of the station into the sun and proceeded to ask the first man we saw for directions to the cemetery. ‘Climb the stairs onto the main road, and turn right’, he said. ‘It’s about two hundred yards away, on your right—you can’t miss it’. We did as we were told and started walking. A vista of houses and shops, street fronted, of stone, built in the early years of the century, was all we saw on both sides of the road. A park on the right-hand side briefly intervened but there was no sign of any graves within. We walked on, down a gently sloping road, talking, as two Indians would, of Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. I told Gopal the story of how Gandhi, in his seventy-fifth year, tried to read Das Capital while interred in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona in 1942–3, but found the going too difficult and gave up after the daunting first chapter on commodity fetishism. Gopal told me, in turn, the story of a press conference conducted by Gandhi’s successor, Vinoba Bhave, at the height of the ‘Bhoodan’ movement. Vinoba was asked the difference between Gandhism and Communism, and he answered, ‘Communism is Gandhism plus Violence’. This quickwitted reply pleased the reporters, but afterwards the sage manqué was brought down to earth by Jayaprakash Narayan, who challenged him: ‘If Communism is Gandhism plus Violence, is Gandhism merely Communism minus Violence?’

We talked and walked till the two hundred yards became two thousand. The houses were now set further apart from the road, visibly newer and with well-kept lawns—we were in suburbia. We had been the victims, we realised, of an ill-informed ‘know-all’. Then we spied a petrol pump, the equivalent in London of the paanwallah, so to speak, the station where everybody calls and where the employees make it their business to know every local landmark. ‘Here is where we’ll find out’, said both of us together, and walked in. An adorable old lady sitting behind the counter told us we would have to go all the way back to where we began. ‘Just before you reach the tube station’, she said, ‘take the curving road to the right, climb Highgate hill, and there is the cemetery, on the left, as you go over the crest. You can’t miss it.’ And then, as we thanked her and went out, ‘Give Marx my love.’

We retraced our steps. Highgate hill proved to be a hard and surprisingly steep climb. I had not realised that London could have slopes as steep as any in Shimla. The day was hot and I was overdressed, guided by my learned notions of an English summer day, as mistaken as my notions of the English landscape.

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