Abstract
A ‘Jat agriculturalist, who had to till the soil which was to be his inheritance’ (p. 9), as Khushwant Singh describes him in the foreword, Hardwari Lal was a brilliant student who studied at St. Stephen’s College of Delhi University, chose a career in civil services, but left it for more creative stints in education and politics. These two professions were to ‘go hand in hand with him throughout his life’ (p. 18). Hardwari Lal died in October 1997. The last six years of his life were devoted entirely to writing in newspapers, a collection of which has been produced in this book, organized around specific themes pertaining to the Indian Constitution and politics, political institutions and education.
To a discerning reader the book presents itself in two distinct parts: a comprehensive hundred page introduction ‘reconstructing, the life of Hardwari Lal by his daughter and editor of the volume, Prem Chowdhry, is followed by an anthology of Hardwari Lal’s writings published in major North Indian newspapers (primarily The Hindustan Times and The Tribune) right up to 1997, the year of his death. The two parts represent different genres of writing and require, therefore, different tools and modes of reading.
It is the first section of the book, where, through what Chowdhry calls ‘slices’ of Hardwari Lal’s life, garnered from fragments of his own writings, his diaries—both completed and unfinished—and through a web of shared memories— her own and of others—that one enters into the world of the ‘one’ educated man in Haryana. These aspects of his lifeworld would have otherwise remained largely unexplored and obscured by the more ‘public’ aspects of his life as an educationist, as the head of institutions which he either founded or helped to develop and as a politician who resolutely defied any politics based on deference and sycophancy, while lamenting the general decline in institutions and political leadership.
Interestingly, the first section, built through reminiscences of friends, family members and colleagues, the editor’s own recollections and Hardwari Lal’s personal writings, offer a wealth of information on community and kinship networks, domestic work/labour and family life, as well as realities of the daily life of common people. This account of Hardwari Lal’s life prefaces and is placed by the editor as ‘a challenge to the established account’ (p. 18) which is to be found in subsequent sections, in the more public rendering of politics and society, constituted by the ‘past and the present’ of Indian politics, to cite Hardwari Lal’s own words.
The historian’s craft which has been deployed to weave together the narrative of Hardwari Lal’s life in the introduction is enriched by the narrator’s own location, her ‘personal experience as a member of the family’ (p. 19), which, she confesses, ‘becomes inevitably and inextricably meshed’ (p. 19) with the reconstruction making her ‘deeply implicated in this account as one of its participants’ (p. 19). Yet, the only time that the narrator actually makes an appearance in the narrative as a member of her father’s lifeworld, is when she recounts the traumatic experiences of the Emergency and her own appearance in the State High Court to apprise it of the treatment meted out to her father at the hands of the police. What is presented to the reader is a dexterous weaving and meshing of material from diverse sources (archival, oral history, and so on) to build up a dense and intense story of the socio-political milieu inhabited by Hardwari Lal. Indeed, this section takes the reader through Hardwari Lal’s experiences of significant signposts and events in the history of colonial India and the Partition as well as the national Emergency in 1975. He witnessed these events, as an evacuee/bureaucrat in the first case, and a hounded and persecuted MLA in the latter. It is the larger setting of the socio-economic contexts within which these events unfolded that bring out the specificities of the region (Punjab/Haryana) and its deeply political history.
In tracing Hardwari Lal’s educational trajectory, Prem Chowdhry takes the reader through the complexities of land relations in an arid region with a history of out-migration and skewed sex ratio that could provide a possible explanation for levirate marriages and a sexual politics accommodated by a rural patriarchy of sexual politics. In addition, issues such as domestic power and hierarchy, the requirement of family labour, in particular women’s labour in the household and village economy are also addressed. In the specific case of Hardwari Lal, the difficult life of an agriculturalist and the contribution of the women of Hardwari Lal’s family through their labour to his education have been etched out skillfully. The interplay between the politics of marriage, bride price, education, status and social mobility make for extremely interesting reading, not just in the experiential realm of Hardwari Lal’s life, but the socio-cultural life in the community at large.
Hardwari Lal is central and crucial to the narrative of the region’s history and politics in the introductory section authored by the editor. The subsequent sections reproduce a collection of writings on politics authored by Hardwari Lal where the narrative voice claiming authorship of his actions disappears. This is replaced by the ‘objective’ chronicler of the institutional history of the nation and its politics where he speaks of institutions that endured the vicissitudes of a ‘politics’ which unfolded in ways that were both perplexing and disappointing for him. Indeed, the inability of the administrators and politicians in independent India to live up to the promises of the National Movement, and the progressive decline and degeneration of institutions and constitutional democracy after Independence is a theme running through the entire book. In the introductory section of the book, the ‘complete demoralisation of services’ (p. 61) in the aftermath of Independence and the ‘creeping disenchantment in the rural areas with the new government’ (p. 63) are noted in Hardwari Lal’s jottings of his own experiences as a civil servant in the (then) Punjab:
I can never forget a village wise-acre’s sarcastic remark made at a rural gathering which I was addressing just before the first general elections of 1951–52. I said that at last Indians were free to choose their own government. The man got up and asked if they were ‘free to recall the British’, whose objectives and efficient administration, they were very much missing. I was really flabbergasted at the villager’s insight (p. 63).
On the other hand, in his political articles in newspaper columns for the reading public, the experiential domain, which is so important in the first section of the book, makes way for a different register of recording political developments, where Hardwari Lal does not appear either as a witness or a participant. The ‘constant nibbling of the Constitution’ (p. 157) by unscrupulous politicians in an article published in The Hindustan Times in February 1995; the decline of the Parliament in another article in December 1995 in the same newspaper (p. 184); the abuse of parliamentary privileges and immunities (p. 180) and a concern with corruption which seems to have bothered him from the early years of Independence, are addressed and argued meticulously in a language steeped in and adept with legal constitutionalism. While there is discernable discomfort with the Congress as a dominant system, disgust with the environment of sycophancy and disgruntlement with political leaders, there is also an unwavering faith in the system put in place by the Constitution itself (‘good vehicle, rotten drivers’, p. 156).
Significantly, the published articles by Hardwari Lal seem to endorse a style of leadership, which following W.H. Morris-Jones, may be termed modernist/nationalist. Morris-Jones distinguishes between modern and traditional leadership in terms of a contrast between the political institutions of a nation-state and the structures of an ancient society, which he sees as two strangers, who although they have not grown up together meet and cohabit two parallel worlds of politics, and effectively, also represent two different languages or idioms of politics. 1 The language of modern politics associated with an Indian elite is steeped in the grammar and accents of a politics which is the language of the Indian Constitution and the courts; of Parliamentary debates, of the higher administration; the major political parties and the entire English press. Traditional politics, however, relied on a different medium as its language of expression, which had caste and community as its core, where political authority was an extension of a certain hereditary status within a system of carefully graded privileges and obligations.
It is indeed interesting that the lifeworld of Hardwari Lal foregrounds his Jat identity, his rusticity and his Haryanvi roots. He both contributed and suffered from the vicissitudes of Haryana’s politics. His published writing reflects an entirely different idiom of politics. He was the national-constitutionalist and modernist who was pained by the indecorum in Parliament. He appreciated the norms of constitutionalism, believed in constitutional democracy, limited government and judicial activism and went into meticulous details of legal and constitutional histories of comparable provisions in other Parliamentary democracies (primarily Britain). It is perhaps the combination of the two idioms, the contact zones, the areas of cohabitation of the two, their peaceful interpenetration and the plurality of the political worlds and languages of politics occupied by Hardwari Lal where his true political persona may be gauged.