After Hobsbawm

Price: Rs 699; Pages: 336

What is left,what is remembered and what is still fit for use in the heritage of classic bourgeois culture? This rather large question,articulated 143 pages deep in Fractured Times,in the 12th chapter titled Heritage,is the theme of Eric Hobsbawms last book. The ready answer is: not much. But the considered answer could be like that of the quirkily insightful Viennese intellectual Karl Kraus,who anatomised his age with the efficiency of a scalpel but threw up his hands in the Thirties and protested: Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein. Or,About Hitler,nothing occurs to me. Hobsbawm,too,does not completely come to grips with the disruptive technologies which rapidly changed human geography,politics and behaviour and erased the certainties of his age.

These essays were written between 1964 and 2012,the period when history reached warp speeds and society,culture and politics changed so rapidly that they practically threw contrails. This span of time began with birth control,ballistic missiles,Nimby Not In My Backyard activism and LSD. It ended with the moral collapse of Wall Street,the beginnings of a multipolar world and the establishment of terrorism as a form of war. When even the actors in this drama are unsure of what theyre doing,when the sum of human knowledge has become too large for the human mind and can only be housed in server farms,it is probably excessive to expect a historian to comment insightfully on everything that is going on.

But Hobsbawm gives it a good shot,as usual. His interests range from the role and function of the intellectual through the relevance of cultural festivals in the 21st century in which they are multiplying like rabbits to the inexplicable myth of the American cowboy,a marginal being who made no impact on history. The period covered ranges over what,in his earlier work,Hobsbawm had termed the Age of Empire and the Age of Extremes. Nine of the 22 essays presented here are either new or previously unpublished in English. Several are translated from German by Christine Shuttleworth,and it is interesting to see what a difference a Continental readership makes in terms of tone and focus.

Hobsbawm returns to old concerns here. An interesting thread follows the democratisation of the arts,particularly music and literature,and its effect on political identity and nation-building. He points out,for instance,that at the time of the Risorgimento,most Italians did not speak Italian. It remained for public education to linguistically unite the nation. In India,it may be recalled,Indira Gandhis government had tried to roll out standardised Hindi as a national language,in support of the project of national integration. The imposition met unrelenting resistance in language-sensitive Tamil Nadu and even in north India,it caused some disquiet among speakers of old power languages like Bengali and Maithili. Finally,standard Hindi was propagated by the soft weapon of film and television.

Another interesting parallel with Italy: when the Italian Communist Party came overground after the fall of Mussolini,it took the practical decision to go easy on atheism and recruit practising Roman Catholics. In a similar flash of brilliance,the morosely Stalinist leadership in West Bengal had had the bright idea of sharing power with Durga and Kali. If the party had tried to curb public religion,it would not have lasted till Didis poriborton. The mother goddesses would have blown it away decades ago.

The Italian references,and the sobering observation that even today,there are no jokes about the Stalinist era,come to the defence of a historian who has been pilloried for being obdurately leftist. It was sometimes impossible to be on the same political wavelength as Eric Hobsbawm,but it was equally impossible to deny the amplitude of his concerns and the clarity of his observations. He was one of a generation of teachers and public figures who,in a confusing,depressing world,had clutched at the straw of Stalins murderous experiment,refusing to believe the evidence of their senses. Everywhere,some of the best minds of the time had this vulnerability. Today,even after the global meltdown,some of the best minds regard capitalist mechanisms as sovereign remedies. Ideological excess remains a very human trait.

Hobsbawms last book is politically unexceptionable but slightly unfulfilling. By making sense of the past,historians help us hazard a guess at the future,but this book stops just short of the present. In which the democratisation of culture is again a fast-moving project. Hobsbawm writes of the change in the music industry from the shared experience of the concert hall to the privacy of the personal player. He also mentions the impact of the internet. But the fact that culture is again being shared,not in the concert hall but on social media,and on an unprecedented scale,does not find mention.

An example would illustrate the impact. Andrea Bocelli,possibly the greatest living Western classical singer,has built an open-air theatre in Lajatico,the out-of -the-way Tuscan village where he was born. It is closed all year except for one day in July,when he organises an international concert for an audience of a few thousand. In contrast,Bocellis rendering of Nessun Dorma at Lajatico has been viewed 15 million times on YouTube. That is the scale of this force multiplier of cultural democracy.

But for his age,the eternally curious historian would have ridden this jet stream,too. Though he did not come to grips with the phenomenon,he knew that a tremendously disruptive period lay ahead. Who can tell on what terms reason and revived anti-reason will coexist in the ongoing earthquakes and tsunamis of the 21st century? he asks,in the context of the terror wars. Disarming humility from one of the greatest minds of the last century,yet another reason to value Hobsbawm. The world will miss him.