Written by Alok Rai |Published: August 3, 2019 12:29:54 am
House for History
Despite the centrality of the question of privilege, Anand Bhawan, the Gandhi residence in Allahabad, was also the place where the most influential vision of India’s modernity — and socialism — was born
This would have been a difficult book to write at the best of times. At a time when it has become de rigueur in public life to boast about the humbleness of one’s origins, it must have been doubly difficult. There is a considerable literature of great houses – Brideshead Revisited and Howard’s End are the ones that come first to mind, as the symbolically resonant foci of densely imagined lives — but the English country house is a durable narrative device in both high, and popular, literature. But the device — as much in Evelyn Waugh as in Agatha Christie — inevitably brings with it a certain limitation of social range. At a certain point in her “intimate history” of our own great house, Anand Bhawan, Gitanjali Surendran remarks that it had become “an idea and not just a place.” I am not quite sure if she quite understands how problematic an assertion that is, particularly in a time when another inevitably related “idea” — the “idea of India”, which is so much in the air, and up in the air — is so fiercely contested.
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