In the last week of April two important Indian academics passed away. One was a historian, Ranajit Guha. The other was an economist, Padma Desai. Both events have passed largely unnoticed in India. Guha became the guiding light to two generations of historians, some of whom went on to attain their own iconic status.

Desai had a different achievement: she studied the Soviet economy. But it collapsed in 1991.

Guha, who was a week short of 100, did most of his professional work in England at the University of Sussex. Desai, 91, was based in the US, mostly at the Harvard and Columbia universities. She was also the wife of Jagdish Bhagwati, a VIP amongst Indian economists.

Academically, Guha was by far the more important scholar. He started the ‘subaltern school’ of historiography. Subaltern means lower and he said historians should study the non-elites also because the relationship of the Indian peasants with the elites, especially in the colonial period, told a better story of the period. The approach was basically Marxist.

This new approach led to an explosion in the topics of historical study. Inevitably, in due course, it all went well beyond what Guha had surmised. So you could pick practically anything for your PhD. Trivialism became the order of the day.

It was, in a way, the equivalent of what economics has been doing for the last 40 years, namely, studying the tiniest data sets. As a result, in due course, both have become boring and pointless.

Intellectual curiosity

But both economists and historians have pleaded intellectual curiosity in their defence. That’s doubtless a good thing but the mere availability of funding and intellectual patronage can sometimes lead to academic absurdity on a monumental scale.

How interesting can subaltern-ism be if history is going to be merely a description of exploitation and misery, that too couched in advanced Marxist jargon? So over the last few years Guha’s subaltern studies has been losing its appeal. Even its original apostles have been saying so. But that said, Guha did create a new way of looking at history that has had a lasting impact on the stuff of history. It’s no longer the old one-damn-king-after-another story. History writing is hugely richer as a result. Quite simply, we now know more.

Desai hasn’t left any such intellectual legacy. But it wasn’t her fault that the USSR collapsed so dramatically in just two years. Between 1989-92 it simply ceased to exist. There was nothing left to study. But she was a persistent proponent of the view that America was wrong in trying to isolate Russia and that it needed to stop pushing it. There were virtually no takers for this view.

One ironic result is what she predicted: Russian citizens would trade some democratic freedoms for a better material life. That’s what they have done under Vladimir Putin.

Her life was a constant struggle. First it was against her traditional family. Then it was with what she called a disastrous first marriage. Then it was about being a brown person in a sari from India. That was followed by the Indian community wanting her to maintain her Indian identity. Finally, it was with her daughter with whom the parents had a turbulent relationship.

In all this she found refuge in one man, Jagdish Bhagwati. They didn’t marry till 1991 or so but became very close friends. Of him she said once:

“You are the joker in my pack

The prune in my pudding

Pepper in my pie

My package of peanuts

The moon in my sky.”

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