When historian and author Ramachandra Guha is in the room, it’s difficult not to ask him about cricket even if the evening’s theme is Mahatma Gandhi’s relevance to China.
So, braving the thought of publicly displaying my shallowness in an evening of serious reflection, I mumbled a question about Sachin’s retirement.
Luckily, Guha was quick with his response, almost as if he had anticipated it. Sachin should decide himself, Guha said, adding that it should be left to the cricketer’s conscience.
“Sachin should look at his conscience,” Guha said. He mentioned Sachin’s crucial innings of 80-odd against Australia in the first test. Had he not played that innings, the tone of the series could have been different.
“We need to remember this. So let him decide about retirement. As a former cricketer I will never advise a cricketer when to retire,” Guha said.
Guha was in Beijing last week to attend the Capital M literary festival and to talk about whether Gandhi was relevant to China.
As Guha often does in his writings, he shared a rare anecdote: China’s involvement in the germination of Gandhi’s Satyagraha-style of protests in South Africa. (He had shared the same anecdote at a gathering in Kolkata in January but the story is worth repeating.)
According to the historian, more than 1000 Chinese immigrants had courted arrested along with Indians in the first Satyagraha protest in Transvaal in 1906. The non-violent protest was against racial laws against Asian immigrants in the Transvaal area.
Guha said it was an interesting footnote of history that the Chinese participated in the first Satyagraha protest.
Guha wasn’t the only Indian author interacting with readers in the Beijing this past week. Sumita Dawra, a diplomat at the Indian Embassy, launched her book “Poor but Spirited in Karimnagar” in China at an interactive session at the Bookworm literary festival.
The book is about her experiences as the District Collector in the Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh. It talks about that travails of a civil servant amid poverty, malnutrition, shortages among the people and working in an area where leftist insurgents were active.
Dawra told her audience that she wanted to write about the issues that civil servants face during their field work but is not known outside the network of bureaucrats.
China and India presents an interesting comparison in governance she said; while in India, according to Dawra, more decentralisation could have a positive effect on the poor and the marginalized, China heavily centralised governance has lifted millions out of poverty.
Dawra who is currently the economic counselor at the Embassy laughed when asked whether she would be penning another novel on India-China diplomatic intrigue.
Two other Indian authors – Rahul Bhattacharya and Kunal (his talk was slated for Wednesday evening) – also presented their works at the Capital M literary festival.