Editing A Writing Machine

The academic can complicate what seems simple even while simplifying the seemingly complex —that’s what made Ram Guha a pioneer of sorts as a writer of history.

- Rukun Advani

IT may be best for me not to begin my recollections of Ramachandra Guha along the standard template that recommends the phrase “The first time I met...” The reason is that our first meeting was inconsequential. Apparently we met on a college badminton court 44 years ago, around July 1974. Since Ram didn’t go on from this badminton court to become Deepika Padukone’s father, this first encounter’s location, at least, was not an augury of the direction of Ram’s future fame.

I have no idea what Ram was doing near a badminton court in the mid-1970s because his interests lay in a corner of a different field, the cricket pitch. His agenda even then was anti-Hindutva, though it took a peculiar shape as it had got mixed up with his interest in cricket. His aim in those days was to disprove the Hindu idea of reincarnation by circumventing his own afterlife through becoming either Bishen Singh Bedi or Erapalli Prasanna in this life. Failing either of those two options, he seemed to have resig ned him self to a third, which was to become Gundappa Vishwanath.

Since I was not passionate about cricket, for the remainder of our college years Ram and I lived proximate lives without ever coming close. I knew roughly who he was, and I also knew precisely what ‘type’ he was—he was what was called in those days a ‘sports type’. This knowledge was a subconscious certainty somewhere inside me that if there was a fellow in our college who was never going to amount to anything intellectually, his name was Ram Guha. He would develop his muscles, grow into a hunk, even perhaps wear a turban, and the climax of his aspiration would be to draw Viv Richards out of the crease and bowl him round his legs. In short, to my mind Ram Guha was someone who could be safely written offand forgotten about.