Christopher Bayly

Duration: 1 hour 13 mins
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Description: An interview of the historian Chris Bayly, made on 24th July 2014 by Alan Macfarlane and edited by Sarah Harrison
 
Created: 2014-09-26 15:13
Collection: Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng (English)
Transcript
Transcript:
Chris Bayly interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24th July 2014
0:05:07 Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1945; there I grew up and didn't leave until I went to university; I had two very different styles of grandparents, one basically Londoners, cockneys; my grandfather fought in the First World War; that was one of the interests that started me in history; he was in the Egyptian Campaign with Allenby, moving up into Palestine, then Turkey, and was eventually shot by an Ottoman plane, I think in 1917, and spent a long time in hospital in Egypt; it was there that he was actually educated because he came from a pretty poor background; his stories were absolutely fascinating and I grew up listening to the difference between Indian soldiers on the Eastern Front and how the Australians were always out of control, and that sort of thing; most things you would hear from everybody but it was very interesting at the age of seven or eight to hear about all this; on the other side of the family, my grandfather was an evangelical Christian who had been a boxer; they had also started in London but had come down to Tunbridge Wells during the Depression; this is my father's side; although my grandfather was very religious, for some reason he decided to get rid of my father as early as he could; he effectively indentured my father into the Merchant Navy at about the age of fifteen; that meant that my father also had an extremely wide-ranging career; he was in the Merchant Navy until 1953; he did the Atlantic run, and on one occasion he went up on the Soviet side, which was of course extremely dangerous; before that he had been to the East, bringing copra from India to Britain, and took goods across the Atlantic to the United States, then all the way back across the Pacific; so it was a very interesting introduction into world history and geography; in 1953 he retired from the Merchant Navy and became a geography teacher in Tunbridge Wells; so I had both geography and a very early introduction into colonial and world history through my father; going back further is rather difficult; there were stories about members of the family who were illegitimate, some of aristocratic illegitimacy, other stories about how they were very poor; I haven't really been able to make much sense of it; there are Baylys spelt my way in Northern Ireland as well as East Kent, and I never really understood there was a connection between them, but about three weeks ago somebody wrote to me and said there was a connection; that somebody from Northern Ireland, a kind of aristocrat, went to Sandwich in Kent and developed housing and estates there; this would have been in the mid nineteenth century, so it is possible that there is a connection between these Baylys; my earlier family background is more or less unknown to me

5:17:15 My father I think was very committed to teaching but I think he was always a little sad that he had given up his career in the Merchant Navy; he became the next in line to a Captain so had a good career and probably could have gone on and made a lot more money; he did have a very strong sense of commitment, a kind of patriotic commitment of that period; they both did, my mother worked in the countryside during the war and used to talk about how the bombs flew over when she was planting vegetables; my father said he had left the sea because he felt he ought to help develop the country again after the Second World War and the destruction of London, in particular; he came back and became a teacher, but I think he was always rather sad about that and felt that he should have carried on with the much more exciting career; he taught in what was then a secondary modern school which was at the lower end of schools in those days; I seem to remember that the students couldn't be classed as bad or backward; I met quite a lot of them when I was growing up, particularly from the age of seven to ten, and they always seemed to be able to talk to me about things; at the stage I was about to go to a grammar school it was interesting to see another part of the education system; my father was very demanding in the sense that he always expected one to take academic work very seriously; he was very good at making me write, and I think that was the most important thing he did for me; I had to write long sentences and paragraphs and he was quite rigorous about it; he failed miserably in regard to mathematics which I was never any good at, and I am not quite sure why that was; it is interesting that my brother was a very good mathematician and went on to do medicine at Oxford, became a doctor, has now retired from that to teach in a university as an osteoporosis specialist; so I don't think it was a genetic fault, but for some reason I just didn't get on with mathematics and science at all; early on, partly under the influence of my father, I had become interesting in archaeology; in those days my father used to take us out to archaeological digs; I remember going to High Rocks, an area of sandstone cliffs about twenty miles from Tunbridge Wells, where Mr Money used to do digs on a neolithic site; I remember my father was the one who used to dig the trenches while I was scraping away, and I found quite a lot of interesting things; my greatest find was a neolithic flint axe head which was a rather nice piece, and now I think in the Tunbridge Wells museum; at the same time we used to travel south down to Sussex and look at the older villages there and the Norman castles; so from an early age I was interested in earlier history and I think that that was where the bug bit me

9:27:15 My mother was a disciplinarian; she always kept a beady eye on our work; she was not particularly well-educated in a formal sense but she was highly intelligent; she had been to the girls' grammar school in Tunbridge Wells though probably left at the age of sixteen; my impression is that one actually acquired more education by the age of sixteen then than kids do now by the age of eighteen; she wrote extremely well and was always interested in what I wrote and always used to criticize it; I think one of the things my mother did for me was to develop more of a kind of imaginative streak; she was very keen that I painted, and that sort of thing, and when I was writing my early history of neolithic people I would do little sketches; although a hopeless mathematician, I was not bad at art and I could have gone on to an artistic education if that had been appropriate, but by the age of fourteen one had to choose what to do; I am still doubtful whether its a good thing to push kids on to do only three or four subjects at 'A' level or whether it is better to let them do a much wider Baccalaureate system; I had the latter type at home though I had to limit myself when doing academic work

11:27:10 Despite working on the Raj I do not have any "imperial" antecedents; what I do have is subaltern imperial antecedents; subaltern now means peasantry or labourers in the towns in revolt against colonialism and the domination of capital; however, before about 1970, subaltern meant the middle level of officers, both in the army and navy, and also in the administration; to that extent I was more in the subaltern class of imperialists; my grandfather was a non-commissioned officer in the First World War, my father in the Merchant Navy never reached captain; I think it is very interesting that when we used to talk about his feelings about the East, perhaps when I was nine or ten, he used to talk about the people he'd encountered in India, particularly their uppity and high class manners; these were people who were not much more than subalterns themselves, but he didn't notice a difference in the way that he and his crew reacted to the Indians in India and the way he felt the higher level British in India reacted, even people who had been influenced by this ideology; so there was a sense that he was the next level down and didn't altogether approve of the Empire; although they were both very patriotic, my parents were never particularly imperialist and didn't take a strong racial view; one reason for that was that in the early days - in the 1950s - they used to take exchange students from France and take them around the Kent and Sussex countryside; at least two of them were Africans and they seemed to get on very well with them; there was a man from French West Africa, a lovely chap, huge and tall; this was when my brother was really quite small, and I remember we used to push him about in a pram; my mother was there with this very tall African, and all the people in Tunbridge Wells who saw them would come and look into the pram to see what colour the baby was; my parents did not seem to have a racial view but they were very worried about Communism; this wasn't surprising in those days as we had air-raid warnings and had to go down into shelters as everybody was worried about nuclear attacks; I remember one of the schoolteachers in about 1954 saying that we must all stand as one of the great men of history had died; this was Stalin; this was pretty extraordinary and tells you something about the deep divide in this country at that time about the nature of Communism; within a few years, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and everybody was a bit quieter after that, but the Russians were there, either as a threat or as the people who had saved us during the war; I also remember 1962 ; my father always used to bring in tea in his dressing-gown, and I remember that day when I got up very fast he said he didn't think we would be alive in the evening; this was right at the height of the Cuban missile crisis

16:34:21 I went to grammar school at eleven; it was a very good school; most of the teachers were Oxbridge graduates who couldn't get jobs anywhere else; they had come into the profession during the depression and then they had gone to war, so they all had very wide experience; some had been in the Navy; one who was particularly influential was an English teacher who had fought through Italy and used to talk about the battle of Monte Casino, so I was very interested when I finally went to Italy at seventeen to go and look at Monte Casino; the school was very good, partly because it wasn't a rote teaching school; these people were disappointed academics, they all used to teach us things that interested us rather than things we ought to know; my history teachers were quite remarkable because we always used to have a topic to deal with, say, the Norman conquest, and we were supposed to get from 1066 to 1150; we never got beyond 1080 because these teachers would always bring up issues, ask us questions and we would ask them, so it was a very interesting form of education; the only downside perhaps was being forced to do sport; I think that the things that rankle with me above everything else now are religion and sport, both of which I was forced to do at school and both of which I decided to have nothing to do with later in my life; the other thing about the school was still very influenced by the nearby Public school, Tonbridge School; our headmaster's kids were actually at Tonbridge, so there was always a sense that we were aping it; in some ways it was a good thing because the educational standards were pretty high, in other ways it did tend to tell us that there was something wrong with us as we were in the wrong type of school ultimately; its only in my sixth form career that people from Skinners' School actually went to Oxford; I was one of the first, but most of them had gone to pretty good universities; there had been a tradition in the school of going into the army, particularly the Indian Army, another interesting background to my later development, but the universities favoured were Birmingham or Manchester until the early sixties when a few went to Oxbridge; my parents had given me the option of trying for a scholarship to Tonbridge, but I said I would rather not as I wanted to stay with my friends; I would have been twelve or thirteen when it was still possible on the basis of the beginning of a grammar school education to take some kind of exam and get to the local Public school; on that point it is striking in comparison with today that there was an awful lot of free education in the fifties and sixties and I didn't pay a penny towards my Oxford education; the thought of £9000+ fees to us is quite horrifying; its also counter-productive as we already know

20:53:24 The names of teachers escape me, but there was a very fine teacher of English history - Chamberlain was the name - who was one of these people who used to stop and ask questions; he would recount his experiences; this was one of the extraordinary things - it also happened with Richard Cobb who was my teacher in Oxford when I was first there - that we would get off the point very quickly, but the points we got onto were really most interesting; I suppose the great advantage of this education was that although it was dominated by certain things that we had to get through, it always veered off at an angle and went into interesting byways; in a way it is the interesting byways that I remember rather than the actual teaching, particularly the mediaeval and early modern stuff that I learnt; there was also a very interesting English teacher who again had tremendous experience of the Second World War, again in Italy, and used to talk about Italian towns which I later visited; I would say that some of these teachers were remarkable even by the standards of higher education today; one of the influences from the Headmaster, Mr Beeby, who was very solicitous and interested in the students but very much of the Public school ethos, effectively made me do Latin, Greek and ancient history; I said I wanted to do history so he let me do that as well; so I did four 'A' levels; my Latin wasn't bad and has been quite useful to me as I can still manage most romance languages, but I regret not doing German which would have been equally useful to me, particularly in the Indian context; I can still read Greek script but can't make anything of it, so it was a bit of a waste of effort; ancient history was another matter as both on television and radio it was important at that time; classical history gave me a sense of how you might structure history and argue a historical case, more from Roman and Greek history than from modern history, which was still taught in a Euro-centric or Anglo-centric manner

24:36:07 I didn't enjoy games and one of the things that put me off them was the notion that they improved the character and built the soul; I remember some of my colleagues who were good at games saying they were much better people than me because they could kick a ball around; I thought this was nonsense; I particularly disliked being made to run long distances in the mud every other day, as I remember it, and I didn't like the type of attitude that developed on the games field where you got kicked and shoved; the game I enjoyed was tennis until I got a bad knee at twenty-five; the Combined Cadet Force, a kind of First World War operation in both guns and strategy, was a way I could get back at the sportsmen as I quite enjoyed shooting rifles and was quite good at it; on religion, I was not Confirmed; my father was a kind of pantheist which a lot of seamen are in a way, and he did believe in a way in something called God; my mother from this cockney family was extremely anti-religious and her family's anti-religion went back three generations; I suspect it was more anti-clerical than anti-Christian; my father's relations were very religious and they always tried to get me to church, but I reacted against that as I did sport; that does not mean that I don't take religion seriously as an historical phenomenon; one of the points I made in 'The Birth of the Modern World' is that the nineteenth century was a period when religion flourished, secularism only went so far in certain parts of Europe, mainly in the twentieth century; in this new book that I am writing on the twenty-first century I have made a big thing about religion because if you look across the Middle East lie the origin of Muslim beliefs; as a historian I am slightly at odds with myself as a person on this issue; I have not had religious experiences but am certainly struck by the beauty of churches, particularly Roman Catholic churches, though in fact my feelings for Roman Catholicism are even more distancing than those for Anglicanism; going to India, to the Golden Temple, when I was eighteen do give a sense of how other people feel religion and how you feel the sense of place; it does not mean you cannot have an understanding of religion, but that certain religions in regard to yourself will never become manifest, but you can understand how other people take it; I have always quite enjoyed Hinduism, in fact I have a Ganesha in my garden so when my Indian colleagues come they are astonished to find it

29:50:08 I went to Oxford because there had been a late tradition of going to Cambridge in my school; my headmaster, Cecil Beeby, had been to Jesus here, and once we began to send people to Oxbridge, Cambridge was the place they wanted to send people to; at seventeen I read a book 'The Anatomy of Britain' [Anthony Sampson] which was very famous at the time as it was an analysis of the class structure and British life, and I read that Balliol was the best college anywhere in Britain so I applied; they said I would never get in, but I did; I went up in the Spring of 1963, an incredibly cold year, and I took the examination; I think it was in Keble's huge hall, which was a bit intimidating, and I think I did quite well on the written part; I was interviewed in Balliol by Richard Cobb, Christopher Hill and Maurice Keen, and made a complete hash of it; I started talking about my experience with archaeology and was asked by Cobb what could I say about the Neolithic period; I more or less dried up; I knew what to say about Hitler or Henry VIII, but the Neolithic period was past me; then we got onto the modern period as Christopher was very much into his work on the seventeenth century at that point; he asked me about James I; I said what I had been told at school that he was an old man in a hurry; Christopher looked affronted and said James I was considerably younger than he was; that was the end of the interview, but somehow I got in; in a rather similar way to school, Oxford history in those days was limited in the sense that it was Euro-centric, but it had the openness about what you might discuss in a tutorial; one of the teachers had us both read out the essay leaving just ten minutes before the end of the hour for discussion, so we never got anything out of that; on the other hand, somebody like Cobb was quite amazing; you would go to his room for a tutorial at five o'clock and he had been drinking for several hours by that time; he would then descant on all sorts of things, very few of them to do with the essay we had written, but he talked about going into Paris in 1944, what he did when he met his French wife who was, I think, a worker on the railways, he'd talk about the French railways in the 1950s, all sorts of things he had found in the French archives; we had completely forgotten about the Third Republic at that point, but its the oddities that you do remember about your early career; he would go out onto the balcony overlooking Broad Street and proclaim the speeches of Robespierre to the tramps who would gather below and would look up, wondering what was going on; he was a remarkable figure and I really enjoyed meeting him and reading what he wrote about people like Trevor-Roper; I think he glanced through our essays, we would read them but we had much longer with him; he would carry on to the fourth glass of wine, and he would give wine to us which was probably against the rules; Christopher was a different matter; he was much sterner and quite ideological; I remember taking a rather non-leftest view of one or two things and he didn't like that at all; I remember at a Collection him saying that my history was not bad but my political views were quite wrong; I think going to Balliol in those days inoculated me, at least for a time, against the Left; I actually joined the Conservative Association; I did leave it and now I am a pathetic Liberal; again I tended to react against those institutions that I was involved with, right the way through to St Catharine's in Cambridge in the early days; at Oxford I did get to know some of the classicists as my best friends were classicists, and some of those were friendly towards undergraduates; if you were ever in the bar and heard them talk about their careers, that was very nice; I think it was an enclosed but very broad-minded education that I got there; I hardly ever went outside the College except to go to the pubs across the way and occasionally play billiards, and again it was very exclusive; I saw hardly anything of Oxford and didn't know my way around it until I went to St Anthony's later on; it was a curious thing, except you did meet people like Jack Gallagher; he was a big influence on my career; even more important was when I was in my second year one of my friends decided that he wanted to go back to India; he was British but he had taught at an Indian Public school in central India between school and university; he persuaded me to go overland to India; at that point I was going to do Russian history because I thought that was the future, as we all did at that point - the peasantry, Andre Gunder Frank, and all that sort of stuff; I had even started to learn Russian which was odd as I should have concentrated on my other European languages; I used to go out to North Oxford to be taught Russian by a White Russian, but my friend Derek Davis persuaded me to go to India (he later became a high-level civil servant); we did this remarkable trip in 1965; we travelled on what was still called the Orient Express down to Istanbul which was still a city of wooden houses, quite extraordinary, I think there are only three or four left now; travelling across Turkey to the Eastern part, to Erzurum on the Iranian border where I had a real Turkish bath for the first time, then down by bus into Iran; this was during the last days of the Shah which was very interesting because everywhere you would see pictures of the Shah, but I vividly remember a young man in a restaurant jumping up with a knife and brandishing it at the picture; so you began to get the sense that things were not going too well for the Shah at this point; we then went right the way through Iran to Zahedan in the far east, then by train from there to Quetta in Pakistan; that part of the journey took even longer; I think it took three and a half days because the train stopped every other mile to throw the smugglers off; there weren't any windows on the train so the dust blew in and I ended up with a very serious problem in my chest and had to go into the Quetta civil hospital for about a week; there the nurses looked after me very well until one occasion when a nurse came to me to tell me that they thought I only had a day to live; I gave Derek letters for my family but then the nurse came back and apologised as the dying man was not me but in the next bed; I gradually got stronger and we went down through Delhi to Benares and I was fascinated by it, and later I worked on it; then down through Gwalior to that wonderful city with the castle where Derek had taught; we met people there and so I got interested in India; then we came back, and I think that was at the point that we couldn't get back overland because of the 1965 Indo-Pak war and the Iranians had closed the border on the other side; we got across the border just before the Indians closed it and went down Hyderabad Sindh to Karachi, got a Shia pilgrimage boat which was all we could afford, and we were on deck for about four or five days as it went down very slowly to the Gulf and we got off at Basra and travelled back overland; I think it was absolutely formative in my interest in world history to go out overland and come back a different way overland; I have been to Karbala, Najaf, through Syria, to all these fantastic places that have now been totally destroyed - Aleppo, Homs and Hama and up to Iskanderon on the southern borders of Turkey, and up again through Turkey to Istanbul; I got a sense of India from the other side, not dropping out of an aircraft, not India and South East Asia, but India and West Asia, and particularly the Muslim dimension of that; I think that was a very formative experience; then I came back and met Jack Gallagher who agreed to supervise me, and that is where it all started; this was my last year and I was still doing basically European history but there was one single topic on Indian history, a special subject on Britain in India in the time of Warren Hastings; most of it was taught in a factional parliamentary kind of way, but there was Ashin Das Gupta who was there at the time; he said he didn't want to do Namierite stuff any longer and wanted to tell us about India; he introduced us to Bengal, he spoke about Western India that he was then working on, and I thought that very much more interesting than doing Empire from above which was what other members on that course were doing; that decided me to do something on modern India; originally I was going to work of Gwalior in the eighteenth century, but I'm glad I didn't because although that became very significant ten, fifteen years on, at that time everybody was working on the emergence of Indian politics as Seal called it, and I took a much more local view of that, and that is the D.Phil. I decided to study

45:18:06 I had met Jack Gallagher as an undergraduate; he had a room somewhere up the road from Balliol as he was always flitting between Oxford and Cambridge; he agreed to supervise me, and then the question was where to go and St Anthony's was the place interested in extra-European history in those days; I remember having an interview for a studentship there and Bill Deakin was the Warden at that time; I said that I wanted to work on India and he asked why I should want to when the Raj was finished; he said that I should do as I had intended and work on Russia, but I managed to persuade him; I am glad I did so as since then India has become such an important subject; I got the scholarship and worked at St Anthony's for three and a half years until I came to Cambridge in 1970; it was an interesting period to be at St Anthony's; Bill Deakin apart, there was a sense of the height of the Cold War and a lot of people were doing the history of the U.S.S.R., others were working on the Spanish Civil War, and so there was a wide range of people; unlike Balliol they were jetting off all over the world all the time; I remember saying that St Anthony's was a bit like an airport waiting room; that was fascinating and I met some important people there, some going on to be important academics across the world, so important connections; I suppose the most important connection was Sarvepalli Gopal who was the son of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the second President of India; he took me under his wing in a way that Jack didn't; Jack was a fantastic influence as a writer and also as a person, but he wasn't the sort of chap to read what you wrote; when I was in my third year as a post-graduate I went to see him and asked what I should do the following year when my grant ran out; he said he thought I had another two years, but he did phone Eric Stokes and that was how I got to Cambridge; it was an informal, almost patronage system in those days; Jack asked Eric if there was a job there, Eric said he thought there was, and that was it; these days you go through endless interviews for which you have to write this and that, but in Oxford then you could meet someone who asked what you were doing next year and would offer you a job; this would have been 1968-69; another thing about St Anthony's in those days was the perpetual rumour about it being the recruitment place for the CIA and the British equivalent; I am not sure whether that was true but that is what people said about it, but it was important to have this worldwide spread which one didn't get as an undergraduate and to meet people doing different types of history in different parts of the world; Gopal was a very important influence because he was not in the Gallagher-Seal school, he didn't take that view which was a very instrumental view of Indian politics being concerned with getting jobs from the Raj; he was a nationalist and became more of a nationalist as he grew older; he was also very affected by what was a racialized atmosphere in this country then; I remember he had this manner of putting racialist comments down very firmly because he was tall and grand; it was he who was a very big influence on me to work on the local history of Indian nationalism and he suggested the town of Allahabad in North India from which the Nehrus and several other important Congress leaders came, particularly Malviya and the Hindu Nationalist side as well as the more radical secularist side; it was only afterwards that I realized why Gopal had suggested this which was that he was writing a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru which is actually a very good piece if work, its very traditional in style but very full, but he obviously wanted the background of the city; that was fine as I think it was a good thing for me; it meant that I was plunged into the local history of India rather than looking at it from above; I stayed about two years in Allahabad, moved around, went out into the country, met people who were actually descendants of the Malviyas in particular, and that is what captured my permanent interest in India; it was different from the way anthropologists work in that they do formal interviews and fieldwork whereas this was a kind of informal fieldwork; it was a very similar operation in that I went and saw people who were descended from the people that I was writing about; I would ask them about their parentage and how they understood the past, so it was a semi-anthropological type of history; I think the main difficulty I had was actually persuading people that that was the type of thing that they should be doing in history at that point because it was still very much an imperial history, top down; people like David Fieldhouse who is a very good historian, later John Darwin, were very much top down historians of empire; people used to ask why I was doing this local stuff when I should be doing something big, grand and important; that was quite unsettling; after I did the thesis and it was submitted, in fact after I got to Cambridge in 1971, I tried to submit it for publication; the reaction of the reviewers for O.U.P. were very interesting; firstly that it was incredibly detailed local stuff so suppose it should be published, but secondly that nobody was interested in the rural society and that I should do the town; foolishly I junked all the stuff I had done on the countryside and did make it an urban study because urban studies were beginning to boom at that time; this was a big mistake because within about five or seven years, subaltern studies of peasant movements had become the thing to do; earlier we had people writing on peasant history, Gunder Frank, Samuel Popkin etc. and I was wondering why that has gone when the peasant was seen as the future of humanity; everything from nationalism, through subaltern peasant movements was seen in terms of the countryside; if you look at it today the peasant has been the great loser in twentieth century history and is marginalized; if we go anywhere, but particularly to Vietnam where Susan works, the peasant has more or less be excised from the memory; its all about modernization and the urban classes which is an interesting phenomenon; though I did quite a bit of work in the countryside, going out like Nehru had done in the twenties, to try to get some sense of the countryside, the rural part was cut out of the thesis and never published which I am really rather sorry about

55:51:07 I came to Cambridge initially as a research fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies and was employed by the precursor of the E.H.R.C.; I had two rounds of that; I was employed to put the thesis into print and to do another piece of work, but I also became a Fellow of St Catharine's because Eric took me under his wing and introduced me to the College; St Catharine's has been very good to me apart from the last couple of years when they threw me out of my room; it was quite a peculiar place back in the 1970s, centrist and right-wing in politics with the exception of some people like Eric, but also very traditional; I remember my first dinner in St Catharine's when we spent the whole meal discussing the form of the cross in Chapel; I wondered what I was doing there and thought of Balliol; but it was a friendly place with under twenty fellows at that time; although it had an antiquated feel in one sense, a lot of the people there did have overseas experience during the war; Eric himself had been involved in the Eastern Front and had brought people back from Singapore, the Indian National Army detainees back to be tried in Delhi; he then went on to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Africa, and had a wide and interesting range of knowledge; the bursar, Stanley Aston, had been involved in the British invasion of a French island I had never heard of; another interesting thing at St Catharine's was the teaching, and compared to Oxford there was a great deal of extra-European history being taught; it was still mainly in a kind of imperial vein but was much broader than anything I had encountered in Oxford; I was immediately thrust into that by Eric himself who said he didn't want to do any more college supervisions so would I do them; he suggested I start with the Aztecs and Incas, which was what we did in the old world history courses in the 1970s; I had to prepare to teach these in about a week to undergraduates who were drugged up to the eyebrows in those days; I remember one chap who wore a kimono to his supervisions, so a very odd experience; I then got up these courses in extra-European history and that means I have always had an interest in generalizing about world history rather than just doing India; this has led into 'The Birth of the Modern World' and perhaps the twentieth century volume, if I am spared, as the Irish say; there were some very interesting people here, the old Cambridge School of Indian History as it is now called with people like Washbrook, Baker and Anil Seal, mean that it was an interesting time; I am not sure where I stood because that type of historiography was very much an instrumental historiography about Indian nationalism effectively buying into the British State, something that someone like Gopal would never have taken the whole way; my study had something of the analysis of caste and tribe, and how certain castes were more likely to be nationalists than others, but I also had a sixth sense that there was something which we might call Indian civil society developing; so the first book, 'The Local Roots of Indian Politics' is a bit of a mess, it doesn't work because it is somewhere between a Sealite-Namierite study of Indian nationalism and a study of the emergence of civil society; I was never able to work that out because I was heavily influenced by what was being said here, and the general tenor which was Namierite in British and European history at that time; it took me some years to discover that I ought to have been saying something a bit different, nuancing the instumentalism with a sense that this was a national movement, that people had ideologies, were interested in the poor, and so on 1:01:38:09 On choosing a book of mine to take to a desert island is difficult because my work has been a development all the way through; I think in terms of critiquing myself I would need a long book and 'The Birth of the Modern World' would be the one I would take, particularly as more recently this type of connective work has come under attack and this is something I am trying to deal with in the introduction to the new book; is there a way of doing world history, connected history, which doesn't homogenise over-much but still takes the locality, the region, the nation into serious argument; I think the question is a very interesting one, what isn't connected as well as what is connected; there have been several mild critiques of me, but serious critiques of the German Jurgen Osterhammel who has just written a book which puts mine to shame at 1500 pages; I rather admire it in a way but it is a history which builds up from below whereas I try to take a way in from the sides as well as from below; so I would have to take the 'Birth of the Modern World' with me and what I would do with it to actually think about how I would rewrite it in view of critiques of people like Samuel Moyn and others who have argued it goes too far; there is a man called David Bell in Princeton who wrote an attack on too over-connected world history; in terms of the books I like and have been most successful I suppose 'Imperial Meridian' is another one I would take because I rather like taking a period and looking at connections but not across the world but in that particular set of circumstances; I think that worked rather well; for the Indian history it would have to be 'Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars'; the reason for taking that is that rulers, townsmen and bazaars are now the modern India in a way; it is very striking as one of my colleagues has said, that Modi, who is loved by the business community is from a commercial background himself, though a very poor one, actually decided to contest the election from Benares; so that link which I suggest in that book between Indian commercial people, nationalist politics and religion is still going strong; in a sense it has seen out the Nehruvian secular age, at least for a time; I think that will probably come back in the longer run, but at the moment its rulers, townsmen and bazaars that are making the running; I would reread that book and then try to think about how that type of link persisted through the 1960s, 70s and 80s; some obvious reasons why the Indian business classes have survived and prospered particularly with neoliberalism in the 90s, but there are other more interesting reasons why one would be asking questions about the relationship between Hinduism, nationalism and those and other communities as well, the other Backward Castes and so on who are doing very well; what is the connection there; so I would be thinking quite a lot about modern and contemporary India from the perspective of rulers, townsmen and bazaars which really stopped in the 1880s and 90s

1:05:50:19 Of modern India, I do feel worried about the lack of equality, the Piketty point about the growth of inequality; whereas there is now a huge middle class, perhaps 3 or 400,000,000, there are still 4 or 500,000,000 extremely poor people; democracy, which I think has been rather successful in India, has not managed to make much of a dent on that, even compared with authoritarian societies like China let alone somewhere like Japan in the 1960s to 90s; I wonder about why that should be and I can see why people have swung over in such large numbers to the Modi feeling that we must do something about the future; the thing that strikes me most about these recent elections is the way that something that was very powerful until a couple of years ago, namely caste based politics, actually saw quite a setback; although caste is still implicated in politics in a big way, electing people because of caste has become in the last election not so important; that I think is because people have begun to give up on the old style of politics which emerged from the coming together of concern with the lowest castes and the Nehruvian secularism; people have begun to feel that that got us nowhere; the fact that Modi can say we will put up the growth rate as we have done in Gujarat has somehow succeeded in persuading people we need a different type of Indian politics; I just hope that Indian democracy which has done pretty well, particularly in what it has done in civil society organizations, can survive this lurch towards what looks like the right; I am not sure about that; like everything in the world today it looks very dodgy and could go in any direction
1:08:21:18 Married to Susan Bayly who was also an Indian history, but now working on Vietnam, we say we live in a state of permanent seminar; we bounce ideas off each other all the time; Susan reads my work and I read hers; she is buzzing with information about Vietnam and that is very interesting for me as it gives me another way into a society which is very different from anything in India; on the one hand it is more authoritarian, the Communist Party is still dominant; on the other hand it has been much more successful that India in recent years in raising the standard of living of poorer people to the detriment of the peasantry; we talk a lot about that, and when she get back in a month I expect to hear continuously about Vietnam, so she has been a tremendous influence; as far as the overlap, is wasn't even an overlap in the earlier days because she was working in South India which is a very different world from where I worked; it was only because I would go down on the bus to see her in Madras and some of the southern towns, and her interest in Christianity was rather different to mine; I think probably she felt when she got into the department of anthropology that she needed a complete change, and that may have been something to do with me as well; I think it has been a wonderful change for her and I am very grateful to anthropology; I am also very happy about the future of Indian studies, particularly amongst the younger people; I am a bit worried about the loss of my job which was in imperial and naval history and therefore has gone to a very good historian, but not to an Indianist; the same thing has happened in Oxford which is an odd thing to happen when India is coming up the list of interests of people; I think one of the things the University would have to do quite soon is to establish a full chair in Indian studies; that will help the Centre of South Asian Studies and these very good, lively, younger people whom I talk to a lot; we have something like 50+ PhDs in history let alone other South Asian subjects, and that is why we need to keep up the number of faculty and college members

1:11:58:14 A last thought, India is only one locus and I also very much enjoy going to Venice where I shall be going in a month's time; the point about that is that it is more or less a museum city, but it does give you a strong sense of somewhere between Asia and Europe, particularly when you see the houses of merchants from the East which were established very early on; obviously the Venetians were fighting the Ottomans at various points but also there is that interaction; I think its very important to have somewhere other than one's major research area to go to, if only on holiday; it has been very striking to go there over the last twenty years
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