Remembering Victor Kiernan

As I complete 90 years of my residence on this earth and ponder over my long career as a teacher, I am struck by the happy accidents that marked its progress alongwith the missed opportunities to learn a little more and become a better teacher. Of such accidents three stand out in my memory.

The happiest accident occurred at the very beginning of my career as a teacher in Delhi University. A teacher in Delhi College, I got the opportunity to teach ‘political thought’ to the post-graduate students in the Department of History at Delhi University, for the simple reason that supposedly a difficult subject to teach, there were not many takers for it in the History Department. This is where I came to acquire whatever little reputation I had as a teacher.

The second happy accident was the publication of Reason, Revolution and Political Theory, as an adhoc response to a provocation in the classroom when my students wanted me to explain and defend an observation I had made about a colleague busy building a cult of Michael Oakshott [who had succeeded Laski at the London School of Economics (and Political Science)]. The book was a great success. The reviewer in the Economic and Political Weekly wrote: “The testament of a fearless faith in the revolutionary role of reason and confidence in the scientific method makes the book a distinguished one in the best sense of the word.” The Monthly Review Press in the USA and Lawrence and Wishart in London wanted to publish the book in collaboration with the People’s Publishing House (PPH), the CPI publishing house, which as the original publisher had the copyright. Palme Dutt wrote to me: “I have now received the copy of your book, and looked at it with interest and appreciation.” He also informed me that Lawrence and Wishart are “proposing to bring out an English edition” and that in a departure from the usual practice at Labour Monthly he shall be arranging for a review of the book in the journal. The American and English editions never materialised, thanks to the CPI crowd in Kirori Mal College, who did not approve of my politics and influence among students and teachers in Delhi University. They not only wrote a very hostile and illiterate review in the Mainstream under the collective name of Gadfly but also circulated this review among Marxist scholars abroad who were likely to receive this PPH publication. The book, however, gave me the much needed academic credentials and soon landed me invitations to Professorship at the JNU and Delhi University. Opting for Delhi University I joined it as Professor of Political Theory in 1972.

The third happy accident was the invitation to deliver the Moin Shakir Memorial Lectures at Marathwada University in 1991, which resulted in Crisis of Socialism—Notes in Defence of a Commitment, which has given me an unsought for and unde-served reputation as a Marxist scholar.

As I go over my correspondence, among the missed opportunities I notice the fact that I have been singularly amiss in keeping up contact or correspondence with scholars from whom I could have learnt much by way of such contact or communication.

I recall E.P. Thompson, who visited India during the Emergency. He sought me out and we had a long discussion on matters of mutual interest, including India’s Emergency. He appreciated my critical assessment of his Poverty of Theory and wanted me to send him a note on it. I did the needful and he wrote back: “Thank you so much for your warm and encouraging letter about ‘Poverty of Theory’. (I thought of you more than once when I was writing it and hoped you might approve of this or that sentence).” On his return to England he sent me a note he had written on his visit to India during the Emergency. Alongwith suggestions on how to use his article, he wrote, “you may use it in any way you like (including publication). But this permission I give to you and to you only. …I authorise you to use any part of it if it should seem to you helpful.” I circulated Thompson’s article on the Emergency among my radical friends in Delhi University and am still trying to retrieve it to be able to share it with others. He also invited me to write my analysis of the Indian political situation for the forthcoming edition of Socialist Register. I never wrote this article and, typically, did nothing to keep up corres-pondence with E.P. Thompson, not even after he sent me an autographed copy of the revised edition of his book on ‘William Morris’.

So it has been with other scholars—Barrows Dunham, Howard Parsons, Dale Riepe, Howard Selsam, James Petras, John Lewis, Niharanjan Ray, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff and many others, most of whom wrote to me after taking notice of my book, Reason, Revolution and Political Theory. For example, the very first letter I received was from Dale Riepe. He wrote, “I have just been enjoying very much your new book, Reason Revolution and Political Theory. Right now I am about half finished, but I became quite excited reading it, so thought I would congratulate the author while I was in the mood”. Howard Selsam wrote to say, “I like it very much, find it quite unexceptionable in fact.” He also wrote, “I confess I was disappointed not to find any reference to me.” I immediately wrote back that I had read his writings and benefited much from them, but for some reason none of his books were on my shelves and since the book was based on my personal collection and not on library-work I missed making a reference to him. I may add, the second and third editions of the book carried a reference to Howard Selsam. Incidentally, he had also received a copy of the Mainstream review, apropos which he wrote, “But who is this anonymous Gadfly who wrote such a scurrilous diatribe against you and your book? I don’t find any name attached. He shouldn’t want one, I hope I never read anything like it. He’s a madman and writes as badly as he thinks. It must be pretty awful to have to put up with that kind of ‘criticism’, which isn’t really criticism but gutter vituperation. He must be some kind of crazy ‘leftist-rightist’, or goodness knows what. I just noted it’s a collective name for a group—but it took one person to write anything so bad.”

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IN this regard the missed opportunity I most regret is in relation to Victor Kiernan, who was not only my teacher in Lahore but was an exceptional scholar with deep interest in India—a country which loomed large in his affections, larger than any other part of the world in the twentieth century. There was much to be learnt from him. His writings ranged from Wordsworth to Faiz and Iqbal and the ancient Latin poet, Horace, from a History of Tobacco to two volumes on Shakespeare, from Evangelicalism to mercenaries and absolute monarchy, diplomatic history, Indo-Central Asian problems, Paraguay and the ‘war of the Pacific’, of Chile, Peru and Bolivia, to say nothing of The Lords of Humankind, Marxism and Imperialism, America, the New Imperialism, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960, a full scale study of the Spanish revolution of 1854, State and Society in Europe 1550-1560, The Duel in European History, etc. A recognised authority on imperialism, he co-edited A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, writing entries on agnosticism, Christianity, empires in Marx’s day, Hinduism, historiography, intellectuals, Paul Lafargue, nationalism, M.N. Roy, religion, revolution and war. The title of Hobsbawm’s obituary notice in The Guardian,—“Historian with a global vision of empires, Marxism, politics and poetry”—, conveys some idea of the quality and range of Victor Kiernan’s scholarship.

Victor Kiernan’s practice of Marxism, critical and non-dogmatic, ‘resilient and open minded’, in Hobsbawm’s words, critically assessed, was an important factor in working out my own approach to Marxism, the Marxism of Karl Marx I have called it to distinguish it from the ‘official Marxism’, that once flooded in from Moscow.
A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, carrying a document from the Communist International to the Indian Party, Victor Kiernan came to India direct from Cambridge in 1938 for a stay of one year, and stayed on for eight years (he left the Party “silently” in 1959, three years after Hungary). He found the job of a teacher in the still under construction Sikh National College at Lahore whose principal, Niranjan Singh, a Gandhian nationalist, was looking for the best talent available as teachers in the college. Under-standably, Victor Kiernan’s identity was kept secret from us in the students’ movement. In fact we discovered his communist identity only accidentally. This is how it happened. As the tin went around collecting funds for the Party, two contributions intrigued us, a five rupee note, a very generous amount at the time and a khota eight anna coin. The next day the Party unit in the college met to discuss the matter. The five rupee note was traced to Victor Kiernan. (The khota coin was traced to a Zoology teacher in the college.) Our discovery was soon confirmed when P.C. Joshi asked Victor Kiernan to write a reply to ‘Marxism is Dead’, by Brij Narain, a local Professor of Economics, who, like many others, was worried about the growing Marxist influence in the students’ movement of Punjab. Victor Kiernan’s hurriedly written reply was later published as ‘In Defence of Marxism’ in the name of a leader of our students’ movement.

Membership of a banned organisation hindered our access to Victor Kiernan. The only long discu-ssion I ever had with him was on the subject of ‘People’s War’. As the Japanese attack on India seemed imminent, the Party decided to organise a guerrilla training camp in the lawns of Forman Christian College, and wanted me to head it. I had strong political and personal reservations about it. It was the discussion with Victor Kiernan which finally persuaded me to accept the commander-ship of the camp.

I lost contact with Victor Kiernan when he returned to England in 1946. The contact was briefly resumed when he learnt that I had written a book. Thinking that it was a book on India’s freedom struggle, Victor thought of it in terms of its relevance for a course on the national movement in India he was planning for his final year students. Later discovering that it was a book on Oakshott, who, incidentally, was his teacher at Cambridge, he reminisced about him, “I remember being in a seminar of his on Hegel and Marx, which he began by making it clear that he preferred Hegel.” About my book he wrote, “I am sure it was worthwhile to write a detailed reply to him”. He was happy to note that the book “was written in good English, unlike most books I see from India nowadays”.

The contact was resumed on a more regular basis rather late in the late eighties when I had published a few articles on Indian politics, (publi-shed mostly in Mainstream), which I considered worth bringing to Victor’s notice and wrote to him along with these articles. Though “horribly busy”, he responded very warmly. Initially he saw me, as “helping to keep the flag flying in this unhappy world”. Later, he wrote: “I compliment you on the part you have been playing ever since your college days”. In his response he wrote: “I was delighted to get your letter and articles; it is always good to hear from old friends after a long time, and all the more at a time of life when too many old faces have disappeared…. I enjoyed all your papers, especially the autobiographical one, which brought many past things back to memory. Yes, those were exciting days we lived through when the dear old Party seemed to be soaring towards heaven.”

Over the next two decades, through letters, typed or handwritten, or just scribbled, mostly without care for the language—which however was a major concern with Victor for anything published. In these letters, occasionally he touched on the issues I had raised in my article. For example, “many thanks for your article on the Ghadar revolutionaries. They were splendid fellows, and very much deserve your tribute to them,—though I suspect the survivors in our day were not quite equal to the involutions of the Party line concocted at Bombay” (where Party headquarters was then located). Later in a letter he wrote, “You have a good quotation from Lenin in your Russian essay, about the need to read Marx critically—something the Party in our younger days lost sight of too much.”

Otherwise he shared with me a detailed account of his work with the Socialist History Society, set up as successor—with wider aims—to the old CPGB Historians Group, his meetings, conferences, lectures, literally everything he was doing; his observations on current global politics and plans for the future; his happiness at the publication in India of Prakash Karat-edited Across Time and Continents: A Tribute to V.G. Kiernan; his satisfaction at the publication of the Chinese translation of his The Lords of Humankind in Taiwan —“some slight consolation for China’s defection from socialism”; occasional assurances, “I don’t think we need to be afraid of Eric Hobsbawm sliding too far to the Right, but he is very much alive to the need for realism—a virtue hard to measure exactly”; an odd footnoted observation, “I also heard this week from your neighbour Kishan Singh. He thinks the Sikhs are a reactionary lot of stick-in-the-mud” with a scribbled addition, “I am sure he is right”; or plain news such as: “One of our old Marxist historians, George Rude, has just died.”

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OF his observations three (on capitalism, Britain and terrorism) may be noted.

On capitalism: “But all we said about the Enemy was and remains true, and your civil liberties paper brings this out very well in the setting of India …. The repressive legislation you speak of,… as you say such legislation is not an accidental by-product, but is rooted in the fabric of Indian society and class structure.

“It is hard to see how capitalism can change now, except for the worse, especially in the field of imperialism.”

“Your opening to the first essay I think strikes the right note as well. Capitalism has lived too long, and is decaying. How to get rid of it, without plunging the world into chaos, is a question hard to answer. Every country has problems of its own to solve, yet every country has Uncle Sam’s bombs hanging over its head, as the Chileans discovered not long ago.”

“But I feel more and more that the way forward in the next decade or two must be an indirect one, instead of a frontal attack on capitalism—drawing on peoples’ feelings about the environment, and local and human rights and so on. All progressive roads must in the end converge in some form of socialism.”

“Ecology may prove to be the master key to the future”, an argument he repeated more than once.

On Britain: “In Britain the Communist Party began with revolutionary talk, echoing speeches in Moscow, whose situation was quite different. Our revolution, one could feel, was steadily losing credibility from year to year. We must have lost some ground through being so divided. Our recent elections have shown where this has left us—or rather the ‘New Labour’ election that put Blair in power, a mountebank with more than a streak of bloodthirstiness. This time I had to vote Liberal for the first time, in the hope of the Liberal Party supplanting the old Labour Party. But it is a miserable situation, worst of all through the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.”
“The CPGB went so badly wrong by following the Soviet lead too obediently over Hungary.”

On terrorism: “Governments nowadays are all denouncing terrorism, and one useful thing that historians can do is to point out that most of the ‘terrorism’ that has burdened the world has been from above in the work of armies and police forces.” Elsewhere he wrote of “the odd irony that Gandhi managed to convince the world that India has always been the chosen home of Non-violence”.

The following passages convey something of his plans for the future.

“An odd coincidence that you are completing a work on Socialism, and I am trying to complete something I have been struggling with for too long, on glimpses, political or literary, of Socialism in Britain from 17th to 20th century.”
“As a change from all this I have been going back lately to the superstructure,—Art and Society,—Religion in history,—and just now thinking about old India,—Vedas, Brahmanas and so on,—and the question of how far Buddhism was trying to break away from Brahminism. I feel sorry that in my India years Marxists were understan-dably too busy with other things to think about Theory, and there was no one to discuss such problems with.”

“I would very much like to see some arrangements emerging for regular exchanges of views and experiences between socialists in India and over here. I will look for a chance to suggest something of the kind.”

“I wish I had known of your whereabouts when I was last in Delhi, six or seven years ago, but I am still hoping for one more visit to India …,—and if this comes off, I shall be looking forward to seeing you and talking about the good old days. In the meantime, take care of yourself—and very best wishes.”

In his letters he shared with me everything that he was doing or was happening to him, including his ailments—“the cluster of ailments” as he once put it. In fact his ill health was a constant concern during those decades and seemed to be affecting his work with “good many unfinished projects left over from my teaching days, when time was more limited”, so much so that wanting to spare him the burden of correspondence with me, I wrote to him that while I will keep on sending reports of my doings and publications, he was under no obligation to respond. Yet he kept on responding. He wrote back, “It is always agreeable to hear from you and learn something.” Again, more specifically in reply to the packet of articles and the letter I had sent him he wrote, “Letters like yours are always very welcome. I have just been re-reading it,—or rather the articles from Mainstream it contained.”

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OF course he read the articles I sent him very seriously, occasionally finding the argument even useful for his own lectures: “I shall be able to make some good use of your paper, for instance what you say about 1947 meaning only very imperfect freedom for India, if ‘India’ means the Indian People.” Obviously he liked some articles more than others.

Of my lecture on “Forgotten and Forbidden Things” he wrote, “I really liked your lecture immensely.” ‘Crisis of Socialism’, he called it “a splendid article” and wrote, “It was a pleasant surprise to see my name in the essay. You make very forcefully what I feel is the most important point,—that even if the USSR has come to an end, it did do a great deal for world progress; it defeated fascism, and forced capitalism to change its methods very considerably, and helped directly and indirectly to bring an end to colonialism. And people like us can feel that we learned a great deal from our years in the C.P., even though in Britain it has collapsed, and in India has not got nearly as far as it ought to have done …. Now people are saying ‘Marxism is dead’ over again. I am sure Marxism will recover, but it will have to revise some of its basic ideas fairly thoroughly. Marx had too much confidence in the working class as a revolutionary force, and too little in the potential of capitalism for development and expansion.” Again, “as you say the collapse of a Marxist USSR, whatever its imperfections, has left a gap. I hear from others too that both the Indian Communist Parties have been drifting into a fossilized condition.” He was enthusiastic in his response to ‘Recovering Marxism’ (a chapter from my book ‘Crisis of Socialism’), calling it “a gift I really value …. What is important is to make it clear that the flag of Marxism is still flying, and to set right as many of misrepresentations or misunderstandings of it as possible. You have done your share of this very well.”

It is true that much as I wished, Victor never explicitly stated his understanding of the Indian situation for the obvious reason that he lacked the requisite information or as he put it “Of course I can’t try nowadays to follow any Indian affairs, in any detail.” Generally he was content to endorse my understanding of things, underlining the particular argument that appealed to him. He came close to making a statement of his own position when he found some “detailed statements” in my articles to be “intriguing”. But he leaves it at that and does not pursue the argument any further. However, we are not entirely clueless in the matter. Kiernan writes “India seems to be in a bad way” or “India has been a disappointment”, and his letters had several odd statements relevant to this situation: “With the shift of economic policy inspired by the cry of ‘All power to the capitalists’”, “I hope that misgivings about India’s very hasty globalisation, or surrender to capitalism will grow”, “sufficient progressive forces can be rallied to stem the drift into the US clutches”, even the question is asked: “What would Nehru have thought of things as they are now?”All this together with his endor-sement and appreciation of my articles does give some idea about his view of the current Indian situation.
Typical of the man and of our relations was the message he scribbled on the greeting card for the year 2002: “It has always been an encouragement to get your letters and articles, and I only wish I had more energy left for an exchange of messages. Still, as you say, we have to keep on plodding, bad as the skies may look. Our bogus ‘New Labour’ Premier is selling Britain to the villainous American plutocrats, but there are beginning to be signs of a reaction against this miserable ‘policy’. I hope Pakistan and India will not give way to the same kind of folly as Britain has been indulging in.”

Firm in his commitment to Marxism and socia-lism, firm in his opposition to capitalism and imperialism, firm in his plodding for the socialist cause and firm in his hopefulness about the future of India—that is how I remember Victor Kiernan, my teacher and comrade.

A distinguished teacher and former Professor of Political Theory, University of Delhi, the author has been associated with the communist movement since 1939 and has written several books on Marxism, socialism and Indian politics.