India and Faraway Lands

Title: India and Faraway Lands – 5000 Years of Connected History

Author: Ashutosh Mehndiratta

Publisher: Amaryllis, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9789355431844

Pages: 351

 

Have you ever wondered whether there existed a historical book that tells a little bit of all things covering all times and which is easy to read as well? And whether events that happened in India could be correlated with happenings elsewhere in the world? As suggested by the Butterfly Effect, chaotic systems can diverge by a huge amount in no time in response to a small change in initial conditions or stimuli from outside. In a similar way, events occurring at one end of the continent can influence those at the other end much more predominantly than we imagine. India was always vulnerable to happenings in faraway lands. It would be astonishing to know that the Indian national movement was influenced by the American Civil War (1861-65). The war hindered the movement of cotton from US fields to British markets, which then sought the material from India as an alternative that led to price rise and the development of a native textile industry. As you know, it was the local industrialists who bankrolled the national movement. This is just a sample of how the global events are so closely related to each other. If you miss the earlier event, you can still study the latter, but it loses its sense of origin and unanswered questions linger. It is precisely the niche of this wonderful book in finding the common thread of human history. It covers a period from the beginning of agriculture to the present both in India and the world and tells the story of our global past. Ashutosh Mehndiratta was born and raised in New Delhi. He is an MBA holder and has had a long career in the consulting and technology industry. It was his experience straddling between India and the West for almost three decades that sparked his interest in global history.

 

A great charm of this book is the author’s daringness to reformulate and re-apply the principles used to explain a historical phenomenon at a particular instant of time to other periods and we realize with a sudden surge of amazement that it suits perfectly well there also. As just one example, the author denominates the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) fought mainly between Britain and France as a world war in stature. In fact, he calls it World War Zero as 1 and 2 are already taken. As usual, France lost which changed the world map. It ceded Canada and its possessions in today’s USA to Britain. In India, the French were permitted to return to their posts but forbidden from maintaining any troops. This ended their Indian ambitions, which was much forcefully felt at home. Voltaire played down the loss of French territory in America as ‘a few acres of snow’, but deeply lamented the loss of India. French soldiers then turned mercenaries and joined the native princes.

 

We have seen western powers interfering in the domestic affairs of Asian and African states by playing one faction against the other. It is amusing to realize that some native Indian states also practiced this meddling in troubled waters of faraway lands. The excellent rapport which existed between Haider Ali’s Mysore state and the newly independent USA is a ripe case in point that is interestingly described in this book. Both states were united by their common enemy of Britain. Mysore was one of the first states to recognise the USA. In 1781, Pennsylvania legislature launched a battleship named ‘Hyder Ally’ to return the favour. Tipu Sultan had extensive links to the French. In 1787, Tipu dispatched a mission to the court of Louis XVI at Versailles seeking an alliance, proposing that 10,000 French soldiers be based at Mysore. His ardour was dampened after the British managed to rope in the Ottoman emperor into the game. He sent a letter to Tipu admonishing him in allying with France who was ‘the enemy of Islam’ as Napoleon had conquered Egypt. The newly formed US maintained a surprisingly open and warm relationship with British India and the native states. The book captures the vivid engagement with American adventurers and businessmen as part of their nation-making. American trade with India started to wither after the US lost their neutral position after the French-British rivalry was over with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. In parallel, the machine-made products had weakened the world market for Indian products. As America’s focus shifted to continental expansion and domestic issues, India gradually faded away from its horizon for over a century until the onset of World War II when Roosevelt picked up the threads again.

 

The book includes some interesting tidbits you won’t find elsewhere. Have you ever wondered how Vasco da Gama, rounding an unknown continent and sailing uncharted waters, headed right to Calicut which was the leading spice emporium on the west coast of India? The Portuguese had arranged a spy named Pedro de Covilham who reached Calicut the previous year through Egypt and Arabia. He reported on the bustling spice trade there and informed about shipping routes from southeast Africa to India. He spoke fluent Arabic. Many more such anecdotes can be seen in the book. The author also traces the inspiration Gandhi had received in formulating his nonviolent creed from great scholars such as Tolstoy, Thoreau and John Ruskin and the circumstances that prompted them to write books which made them famous.

 

Even though the book is an excellent article of scholarship with an impressive reference list, one shortcoming needs to be pointed out. The book’s story on Islamic expansion seems to be taken from an Islamic hagiographic work. The Arab invasion of Sindh, which inaugurated a millennium of continuous invasions and heart-wrenching slavery for India, is ascribed to the capture of Arab ships and women by pirates off the coast of Sindh and this insignificant incident is hailed as a justifiable provocation for full-scale retaliation. The fall of Umayyad caliphate is pegged to their non-adherence to the fundamental Islamic tenet of equality as the Arabs enjoyed a superior social and administrative status and preferential treatment in the Umayyad regime. The author further accuses them to have deviated from the core essence of Islam with imperial magnificence and grandeur as compared to the ‘humble and austere lifestyle’ of the founders of Islam (p.192). Here, the book meekly repeats a pious but false Islamic narrative without critically examining it. This is all the more grating as we know that the Muslim kingdoms were at the forefront of facilitating slave trade through its entirety in capturing and selling black slaves to European and American merchants and white slaves for internal consumption in the Middle East and flourished on it. Where was the fabled equality then? And Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery only in 1962 when it could no longer dodge the pressure from western powers. The author’s bias is prominent in the narrative of the crusades too where the readers get the impression that they were a series of unwarranted attacks on the Muslim world whereas they started as a spontaneous resentment at the ill-treatment of Christian holy places around Jerusalem. This book states that Pope Urban II delivered a rousing speech laced with ‘exaggerated accounts of the persecution of Christians’ for initiating the crusade. Similarly, the influence of Indian religious scholar Shah Waliullah on the violent Wahhabi ideology of Saudi Arabia remains unmentioned even though the cleric and the philosophy are described separately. It is now widely accepted that the Wahhabi ideology is the fountainhead of Islamic extremism in the world.

 

The book declares Shigurf Nama e-Vilayet (Wonderful tales of Europe) by Mirza Sheikh I’tessamuddin, a Bengali munshi who travelled to Britain from 1766 to 1769 as the first travelogue in an Indian language. In Kerala, the honour is traditionally assigned to Varthamana pusthakam (newsletter) by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar which is a travelogue to Rome in 1790. Obviously, this should be news to Kerala historians. The book also includes an enigmatic comparison between India occupied by Britain and ancient Britain occupied by the Roman Empire in the early centuries of Common Era. The modernization drive of the ascendant power is similar in both places and the 1857 Rebellion has an exact parallel in the revolt of Boadicea who is compared to the Rani of Jhansi. Not long after withdrawing from Britain, the Roman Empire vanished and a similar fate also occurred to the empire in which the sun never set.

 

This book is a treasure-trove of knowledge each page of which is a condensed form of several decent-sized volumes that are accessible only to scholars. Rarely do we find such an effort in the world in general and in India in particular. It adopts a reverse chronological format as each chapter goes further and further backward in time than the previous one. Each chapter ends with a paragraph that raises questions on how the events presented in that chapter came about and serves as the key to the previous chapter thus providing a nice link between the two. The book is also gifted with a good bibliography and comprehensive index so that readers who want to pursue further are not lost along the way.

 

This spectacular result of several decades of research is highly recommended for all classes of readers.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 2

Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 2

Author: Edward Gibbon

Publisher: Everyman’s Library, 1993 (First published 1781)

ISBN: 9781857150957

Pages: 592

 

This is the second volume of Gibbon’s great work published in 1781. This volume deals with Constantine, the emperor who accepted Christianity and firmly rooted it as the state religion in Europe which still continues and his successors for four generations till Valentinian I. This period is notable by the reign of Julian, who was a nephew of Constantine. Julian turned back to the cultural roots of Rome and Greece and reinstated the native religion for a brief period. The era handled in this book also describes the growing antagonism with the Persian Empire on the east and the barbarians on the north who were getting more belligerent after the term of each emperor. We also read about the most fundamental schism in Christianity that separated the followers of Arrian from the mainstream. The spiritual dissensions had overflowed to the streets and both sides were locked in pitched battles in many provinces of the empire. When the volume ends, we see faint traces of the Gothic threat on the empire’s northern border as the barbarians increasingly find assimilation in the Roman military. Enervation is setting in in the Roman society which increasingly turns to mercenary troops to fight its battles.

 

Like what he did in the first volume, Gibbon earmarks a considerable amount of space to highlight the specific case of Christianity and how it was different from other religions including Judaism, from which it diverged. It was initially a sect of people who separated themselves from the communion of mankind claiming exclusive possession of divine knowledge and disdained every form of worship except its own as impious and idolatrous. Roman policy viewed with distrust any association of people, however harmless. Christians regularly met in secret for their religious services. The number of martyrs was very inconsiderable. The Jews, on the other hand, were a nation while the Christians were a sect. Every Christian – newly converted – rejected the beliefs of his family, his city or province with contempt. With Constantine’s ascent to the purple, the roles of persecutor and patron were interchanged between Christianity and paganism.

 

Christians enjoyed great tolerance and prosperity most of the time. Gibbon notes with a touch of mischief that this was far more dangerous to their virtue than the severest trials of persecution. The pagan jurisprudence was also far more enlightened than we see even today in countries which follow religious law. The charge was communicated to the accused party well in advance. This allowed him to flee and return when the coast is clear again. Bribing the judge to obtain a false certificate of compliance was also feasible. But the fanatics among Christians denounced these avenues and craved to become martyrs in order to attain the joys of heaven. They abhorred life on earth and sought ways to step into the afterlife. Sometimes they rudely disturbed the festivals and profaned the temples of paganism with the design of exciting the idolaters to take revenge on them. They compelled the judges to give orders for their immediate execution.

 

We read from Gibbon’s examination of the Christian clergy that their moral precepts were far laxer than the present even though believers usually dream up a glorious past when everything was just about perfect. Paul of Samosata was one such corrupt bishop of Antioch. He extorted money from the rich and diverted it for personal use. He freely indulged in the pleasures of the table and received two young and beautiful women into the episcopal palace as the constant companions of his leisure moments. But public opinion was not supportive to this gesture and they did not buy into his probable argument that he had done it to test his vows of chastity. Evidently, Gandhians were still far away in the distant future. Fellow bishops ousted him with their own authority and Aurelian confirmed it. The whole body of the clergy was exempt from all public service, all municipal offices and all personal taxes which pressed on their fellow citizens with intolerable weight. The duties of their holy profession were accepted as a full discharge of their obligations to the republic. Seeing the novel ways of corruption in the clergy, Valentinian enforced an edict that forbade the clergy from receiving any gift, legacy or inheritance from their rich spiritual daughters. It also admonished them not to frequent the houses of widows and virgins. Christianity was moving towards its first schism around this time. In the course of their internal dissensions, the Christians have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.

 

Constantine proves the dictum that a lost member is one added enemy as far as religions are concerned. He was the first Roman emperor to leave paganism, but demolition of temples was already being celebrated as one of the auspicious events of his and his sons’ reigns. The terrors of a military force silenced the faint and unsupported murmurs of the Pagans. But the emperor was also the sovereign pontiff of paganism. Thus, the Christian emperors were invested with a more absolute authority over the religion which they had deserted over that which they professed. Zealous emperors used this pole position to further weaken the native religion. At the same time, Constantine persecuted heretic sects within Christianity with as much ruthlessness as the religion had itself suffered at the hands of his predecessors. He in fact believed that he is saving those from eternal damnation in hell.

 

The long line of Roman emperors after Constantine is dignified by his nephew Julian, who was named ‘the apostate’ by the Church as he renounced Christianity and went back to paganism. He was not the natural leader after Constantine’s death as his sons received the purple investiture. Julian was kept at an arm’s length from the capital city of Constantinople and left to deal with fierce barbarians who were getting more cumbersome and bolder with the passage of each decade. Julian was made the governor of Gaul threatened by German barbarians under the careful scrutiny of his cousin Constantius who was the emperor. Julian defeated the Alemanni tribes at the Battle of Strasbourg, a battle in which the Germans possessed the superiority of strength and stature, the Romans that of discipline and temper and won. When Constantius suddenly died at the time when Julian had raised the banner of rebellion, he was elevated to the throne with the open support of the army of Gaul. Julian was humane and philosophic. His decrees were always founded on the principles of justice and permitted toleration of all religions. But he encouraged the native temples incurring huge expenditure from the state treasury. The scarcest and most beautiful birds were transported from distant climates to bleed on the altars of the gods. And he repaired and decorated ancient temples. Julian was killed during his Persian invasion from an injury inflicted by an enemy soldier.

 

This volume includes an extensive survey of the bureaucracy, taxation and jurisprudence under Constantine. Many of its features Christianity would later emulate in its ecclesiastical administration. Constantine sent missionaries to different parts of the known world to spread the gospel. Gibbon comments that ‘the rays of the Gospel illuminated the coast of India’ (p. 276).as if the coast of India was plunged in darkness without it! As this volume ends, we find the empire engaged in an uneasy and precarious peace with its Persian neighbours and forceful subjugation of the barbarians on its north which was slowly getting slackened to the eventual detriment of Rome. As it stands, Volume 2 is a good stepping stone to move on to the later volumes.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

Jugalbandi

Title: Jugalbandi – The BJP Before Modi

Author: Vinay Sitapati

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9780670091072

Pages: 409

 

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India is a member of the Sangh Parivar – one among the basket of organizations orbiting around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh insists on internal discipline and submission of the individual will to the collective will of the movement. Even then, the clout of the leader’s personality plays a large part in weaving together the destiny of the organization. This is more than evident in the larger than life charisma of the present prime minister Narendra Modi. Before him, it was the party’s first prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his disciple-cum-friend-cum-colleague Lal Krishna Advani who adorned that role. Vajpayee and Advani played a unique act in Indian politics notorious for its dog-eats-dog antics. These leaders worked selflessly, supported each other and let the other concentrate on the field where he had more proficiency than the other. Vajpayee was a good parliamentarian and a scintillating orator. But he had no experience in working grass roots with the masses, in which Advani excelled. He sensed the pulse of the people from the slightest ripple and accordingly guided the party. The chemistry between these two leaders is compared to a musical performance called ‘jugalbandi’ which literally means ‘entwined twins’. Jugalbandi is a performance in Indian classical music that features a duet of two solo musicians. This extends also to dance in which a competitive play develops between the dancer and the tabla player. The book describes the story of the birth of Hindu nationalism and how it came to power under the leadership of Vajpayee and ends with BJP’s electoral defeat in 2004. Vinay Sitapati is an associate professor of political science and legal studies at Ashoka University, Delhi. He has authored many books on Indian politics and his book on P. V. Narasimha Rao, titled ‘Half Lion’ was reviewed earlier here.

 

The partnership between Vajpayee and Advani lasted six eventful decades. Advani was born in Karachi in a rich family which had to abandon its wealth to flee to India after partition, while Vajpayee came from a rural background within straitened family circumstances. One was poor, the other was rich; one was provincial while the other was anglicized, but their union overlapped all shades of the political spectrum. They were born in a decade in which a new political identity covering these two contrasting characters under one single umbrella was taking birth – Hindu nationalism. The two met when Advani joined Vajpayee’s team as his secretary after Vajpayee was first elected to the Indian parliament as an MP. Advani was confined to Vajpayee’s shadow till the mid-1980s when the Ayodhya Movement gathered momentum. At that time, Vajpayee’s moderate line failed to find much takers and the mantle moved to Advani. This continued till 1995 when Advani publicly declared that Vajpayee would be the prime ministerial candidate in the next year’s elections. The book hints that Advani never recovered his stature in the party thereafter.

 

Sitapati deftly follows the trajectory of the relationship between Vajpayee and Advani which traced all shades from hierarchy to genuine friendship. The parliamentarian Vajpayee’s team in which Advani joined as his secretary transformed into his immediate family. Vajpayee groomed Advani to handle positions of responsibility in this period. One such opportunity presented itself in the 1973 Kanpur session of the Jan Sangh. Balraj Madhok, who was one of the founding members of the party, broke with Vajpayee who had assumed presidency of the party after the accidental death of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Madhok openly criticized Vajpayee’s socialist leaning in the early 1970s. The session saw Advani being elevated as party president. These years converted their friendship into partnership. Vajpayee and Advani never let the presidency out of their hands from 1968 to 1998, with only a two-year gap in between. Advani’s raise from a cautious backroom operative to the head of the party was entirely due to Vajpayee and he never forgot the favour.

 

A good point of the book is its exposition of the rise of Hindu nationalism. It steadily grew from 1925 and poised for a big leap after India’s partition. Then came Gandhi’s assassination and its perceived links with Gandhi’s assassins denied them a place in the national mainstream until the Emergency (1975-77) when it came back to reclaim it. The author disputes this conventional narrative and argues that the mainstreaming of RSS took place during the China war of 1962. Indian army was unprepared for taking on the Chinese, and the ill-fed troops were easily outmaneuvered. The RSS fully supported the war effort and even offered its cadre to assist the troops. As recognition of this heroic effort, Jawaharlal Nehru permitted uniformed RSS cadre to march on Rajpath as part of the 1963 Republic Day parade. More than 2000 RSS volunteers in their organizational uniform – white shirt, khaki knickers, belt, black cap and full boots – took part. Congress leaders protested this in party meetings. Nehru countered that all citizens had been called upon to participate and so the RSS also did. A senior leader again asked why the Congress’ own Seva Dal was not invited. Nehru’s reply was that the Seva Dal had only 250 uniforms and knowing that the RSS strength would be much greater, he thought Seva Dal would make a poor show in contrast (p.52).

 

Sitapati pinpoints Vajpayee’s strengths and weaknesses to his sharp focus on parliamentarianism and representational democracy. He believed that the modern norm of ‘one person, one vote’ created Hindu nationalism. Contrary to Left-Islamist accounts, it was not the colonial power which midwifed its birth. The colonial regime’s doctrine of communal electorates pandered to the Islamic vested interests and ran counter to democratic principles. On the home front, it was never the hardliners who made Vajpayee insecure; in fact, he needed them to justify his own existence. It was the orators who could replace him in parliamentary debates who threatened him the most. Vajpayee’s foreign and economic policies were shaped primarily by the desire to be liked by parliamentarians. The author claims that when Vajpayee was seemed to be marginalized in his own party in the wake of the strident Ayodhya Movement, Rajiv Gandhi invited him to join Congress party. But Vajpayee, always mindful of discipline bordering on self-negation, just listened and laughed. His turn came after 1992 when the disputed structure at Ayodhya was pulled down and hardliners had to retreat for some time.

 

The founding and growth of BJP occupies a very informative part of the book. Incipient Hindu anxiety over conversions in Meenakshipuram and backlash of Muslim fundamentalism following the Shah Bano verdict catalyzed polarization among the majority community. Congress and its allies utilized caste reservation for OBCs in government jobs to keep the fault lines in Hinduism intact. The author lists a number of reasons that accelerated a consolidation of the Hindus as a vote bank for the first time in history. The factors include decline of the Congress system, reaction to backward caste reservations, polarization caused by the Ayodhya Movement, Hindu epics shown on television, the inevitability of a Hindu party winning in a Hindu-majority country and the economic liberalization and a growing middle class. Contrary to popular consensus, this book posits that it was the Congress which enjoyed the first fruits of the Hindu vote bank in the form of a sympathy wave in the 1984 elections held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards.

 

Obviously, the last chapter in the Vajpayee-Advani jugalbandi is the BJP’s rule from 1998 to 2004 with Vajpayee as prime minister. Advani never interfered with the prime minister’s work and was always content to play second fiddle. However, he put his foot firmly down when Vajpayee seemed to be playing for the media gallery. The Agra summit between Vajpayee and Pakistan President Musharraf fell apart when Advani refused to allow any leeway to Pakistan - however minuscule - in publicly arraigning it for terrorism it exported across the border. Another event occurred after the 2002 Gujarat riots when the liberal media accused then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi of culpability in the brutal violence. Vajpayee wanted to remove Modi, but Advani stood solidly behind him. This helped to bring in a generational change in BJP after a decade. Anyhow, Sitapati does not pose to speculate on what would have happened if Vajpayee had had his way.

 

After reading this book in full and closing it for the last time, one can’t help wonder what Sitapati had done to Vajpayee’s legacy. There are of course some very good references that reiterate popular perceptions, but along with it, it creates an element of doubt with his unusually candid coverage of Vajpayee’s personal life and his uncategorical relationship with Rajkumari Kaul and her husband. This family stayed with Vajpayee till his death and he had adopted her daughter as his own. Vajpayee is claimed to have declared that though he was a bachelor, he was not celibate (p.55). Balraj Madhok once advised Vajpayee to marry after getting complaints from other RSS functionaries about the women in Vajpayee’s life. The book hints that Vajpayee was vengeful against his political rivals and masterminded Madhok’s exit from the party. At the same time, the author plays up the weak points in Advani’s character as a double whammy. Citing several examples, Sitapati accuses Advani for being indecisive on many occasions, denting his widely held image of a ‘Loh Purush’ (iron man). The book also presents some events that have not yet come into the public domain. It is claimed that the RSS wanted to remove Vajpayee from the post of prime minister in 2002 by elevating him as the President of India and make Advani step into his shoes. Eventually, it came to nothing and the noted space veteran A P J Abdul Kalam became the President.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

Love and Capital

Title: Love and Capital – Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Author: Mary Gabriel

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2012 (First published 2011)

ISBN: 9780316066129

Pages: 707

 

To say that the fall of Napoleon was a turning point in European history would be an understatement. Alongside the political changes, it wrought a profound transformation on economy with the rise of capitalism. Capitalism created a class called bourgeoisie which employed its capital in enterprises that utilized the physical effort of the proletariat to generate profits. In the early stages, the working class was a thoroughly exploited lot who stood even lower in status to machines. Replacement of a machine cost money but a worker could be easily substituted because there were so many of them waiting outside the factory gate for a chance to work. Workers began to unite in many countries under various guises. In Europe, Karl Marx created a theoretical framework that tried to explain the relationship between the modes of production and its effects on the development of social classes. At capitalism’s infancy, Marx set to work chronicling its rise and predicting its fall. As we now know, he was only partly right. But this book is not about his theory – this is all about his personal life. It is the story of a love between a husband and wife that remained passionate and consuming despite the deaths of four children, poverty, illness, social ostracism and the ultimate betrayal when Marx fathered another woman’s child. Scores of biographies of Marx exist, with every possible political perspective. However, there was not one book in English that told the full story of a family that sacrificed everything for an idea the world would come to know as Marxism. This book satisfies that function admirably. Mary Gabriel worked as journalist at Reuters for two decades and authored two more biographies. She now lives in Italy.

 

Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer who was forced to convert to Christianity to keep his profession in the face of rampant anti-Semitism in Germany. His wife Jenny von Westphalen belonged to an aristocratic family and was four years his senior. Close proximity to her younger brother enabled Marx to fall in love and obtain her hand in marriage. Undoubtedly, Marx was the lucky partner in this union. He was without work or income many times in his family life. He spent his life stressing the primacy of economics but was chronically irresponsible when it came to his own finances. Jenny never appeared to lose patience with him. Marx devoted his time to study and Jenny facilitated his work wholeheartedly. The book includes an amusing incident which throws light on Marx’s scholarly inclinations. After marriage, his mother-in-law paid for a short honeymoon for the couple in Switzerland. He went along with 45 volumes of books on Hegel, Rousseau, Machiavelli and others to read during his spare time. His honeymoon studies and reflections produced two of his most famous declarations: religion is the opium of the people and the heart of the emancipation of mankind is the proletariat. However, his literary pursuits did not otherwise seem to impede their relationship as Jenny became pregnant the next month itself!

 

Gabriel treats her subject – the giant of communist thought – with respect and sympathy but never tries to hide or obscure some flaws in his personal life. The greatest of them would be his illicit liaison with Helene Demuth, his wife’s maid, who was sent by his mother-in-law to their Brussels home. She was to help Jenny devote more time to assist her husband with his work and prepare for the second expecting baby. A son was born to Demuth whose paternity Marx was loathe to bear. As always, his dear friend and benefactor Engels came to his rescue and shouldered that vicarious responsibility. He was sent away and grew up to become a friend of Marx’s daughters. It was on Engels’ deathbed that he confessed to Marx’s daughter that her father was indeed this man’s father too. The author had made a thorough search of the extant letters and other correspondence between the Marx family members, some of which contained racist remarks which are not included in the book. She claims that they were not germane to the story and entirely consistent with the norms of that period.

 

Marx did not aspire to be a popular leader. He considered the masses ‘a brainless crowd whose thoughts and feelings are furnished by the ruling class’. But he wanted to teach them because only they could defeat the ruling class. This book is remarkable for its poignant portrayal of the first half of Marx’s wedded life. Poverty and misery were the hallmarks of their existence as Marx eagerly awaited financial returns for the articles and books he produced. Often he took advance money from the publishers and then quickly spent them only to be in hot water with the lender later. He borrowed freely from others and when that source dried out, suffered the pitiless episodes fate threw in his way. One of his infant daughters died due to disease and he had to keep her lifeless body in a room till he could find the money to buy a small casket for that unfortunate child who could not enjoy a moment of comfort while she lived. Such moving incidents there are many in this book. Once a journal under Marx’s editorship collapsed with the very first issue. Its proprietor declined to pay salary and instead offered him unsold copies of the journal. However, the Marx family entertained fellow-travelers of the movement who knocked on their doors in a dignified manner. Both Marx and Jenny were never reluctant to share whatever little they had with their friends and accomplices. When some of his wealthy relatives were nearing their end, Marx keenly looked forward to the share of his inheritance from them. Sometimes he borrowed money pointing to such inheritances as a kind of collateral.

 

An area in which this book excels in is the highlighting of Marx’s role in the organisation of working men of Europe. Marx himself belonged to the class which he pejoratively called bourgeois, but worked for the emancipation of the working class. He was a profound scholar who could not mingle freely with the workers. Despite the severe and scornful public façade, Marx had a depth of feeling for his fellow men that his detractors have not recognized. Many remark that Marx had more hate in him than love. This may not be entirely true and we might have to conclude that he had a healthy dose of each. The masses did not even recognize themselves as having a political voice much less power. They had no conception of how the economic or political system worked. Marx was convinced that if he could describe the historical path that led to their condition, he could provide a theoretical foundation on which to build a new, classless society. He believed that a sustained and successful revolution was impossible without a clear understanding of the history that had brought man to that juncture and a blueprint for the future once the old system was obliterated. Marx’s path to communism consisted of distinct phases such as the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.

 

After reading the book one can’t help envy at Marx’s good fortune to meet two people without whom he would not have risen to the stratosphere of Leftist thought. One is his totally devoted wife Jenny and the other was his unbelievably selfless friend Friedrich Engels. Jenny was not just his wife, but acted as secretary too, copying and drafting his voluminous papers. She, her daughters and Engels were the only people who could decipher Marx’s handwriting. She helped in the editorial offices of newspapers Marx was running and took care of sundry tasks like attending to personal requests from party refugees and those in jail seeking help for their families. Jenny truly understood the needs of the rare genius she had chosen as a husband. For all his faults, she loved Marx deeply and trusted him completely. She saw his life’s work as her own. Engels was a rich man who ran a textile mill that earned good profit. He financed Marx and his family and never asked to return his money. Marx family always received a good share of Engels’ income, including that of the final settlement when Engels sold the mill off so as to be free to work in politics. When he died, a large portion of his wealth was distributed among the Marx children. Of the two men, Engels had the more successful writing career up to Marx’s move to London. But he regarded Marx so highly that he volunteered to put his own aspirations aside so his friend could write without hassles. Engels even claimed to be the father of Marx’s illegitimate child. He cared nothing about his reputation, especially with regard to women.

 

After several decades of loving companionship, Jenny died in 1881 followed by Marx in 1883. However, the book continues its narrative till 1910 when the last of the three Marx daughters died. These were the only children of Marx who reached adulthood and two of them committed suicide. These children had a very difficult childhood raked by biting poverty. Poor nutrition and unhealthy living conditions caused four children to die in their infancy. Marx needed the anchor Jenny and the children provided. All of them substituted Marx’s scholastic interests above their own preferences. He ordered his thoughts only in the midst of their disorder. Throughout his life, theirs was the society he craved. There is a moving section in the book in which Marx acknowledged the sacrifices made by his wife and daughters. In a letter to his daughter’s fiancé, Marx wrote: “You know I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the contrary. If I had to begin my life over again, I would do the same. I would not marry however. As far as it lies within my power I wish to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life was wrecked”.

 

The book has a fine diction which is witty, direct and incisive. The author possesses a fine capability to take the readers along the vicissitudes and ecstasies of the book’s protagonists. Readers get absorbed in the narrative and that’s what makes this work a page-turner. The book is somewhat big with 600+ pages, but we don’t feel the fatigue. However, the book begins with an intimidating character list of 353 individuals which even includes infants who died while four months old. Gabriel takes special care not to delve deeper into Marx’s theoretical work. She is only interested in what the man is and not what he did. In spite of this, there are concise, informative references to labour unrests in Europe and a very good description of the 1871 Paris Commune. Whatever theoretical aspects the author has handled is tempered to suit the general reader. She transforms the forbidding scholar which a portrait of Marx shows into a loving father and husband who had to rush through the backdoor of his house to fetch food and comforts for his daughter’s fiancé who was waiting in the front room to meet him. I think that if the twentieth century communist revolutions had not taken place, Marx would have been revered as a great thinker cutting across political affiliations. At least, that is the man Mary Gabriel introduces to us in this book.

 

The book is strongly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star