How to Write It 
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
- India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha Buy this book
- The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future by Martha Nussbaum Buy this book
It may seem perverse to begin an essay on India by invoking a historian of France: Eugen Weber, who died this year, a colleague of mine and a formidable presence at UCLA. He wrote a book in 1976 on how France became a proper nation by transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But the Weber I knew, and bantered with during the last years of his life, also had an Indian past of which he felt periodically obliged to speak, though he spoke of it to me with discomfort. Born in Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly French history. He maintained his affection for India and visited it a few times in later years. It was an affection that was tempered by chilling memories of the religious violence he had witnessed at close quarters in 1946-47; hence the discomfort he felt in talking about it.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Other articles by this contributor:
Diary · Another Booker Flop
Where Does He Come From? · Placing V.S. Naipaul
print layout
tell a friend