: Ramachandra Guha: Why India must heed a professor’s warnings from 1937 about ‘tamarind tree leaders’ #IndiaNEWS In 1937 – a decade before the formal declaration of Independence – Indians

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Ramachandra Guha: Why India must heed a professor’s warnings from 1937 about ‘tamarind tree leaders’ #IndiaNEWS
In 1937 – a decade before the formal declaration of Independence – Indians got a measure of self-rule when governments elected on a limited franchise were formed in the different provinces of the raj. This was seen as a step on the road to full representative government. Shortly after a Congress government was sworn into office in the Madras Presidency, a Tamil intellectual made a remarkable speech about leadership, whose ideas strikingly resonate with the political culture of India today.The intellectual in question, K Swaminathan, was at the time a professor of literature at Presidency College. Speaking in 1938 at the Annamalai University, he told the assembled students that there were, in essence, two different kinds of political leaders – those who saw themselves as indispensable and those who did not. He singled out one name in the latter category, writing: “Mr Gandhi has been deeply concerned and studiously careful these last three or four years to train his successors. His last desire is to make himself indispensable… Neither Jawaharlal Nehru nor Rajendra Prasad would be what they are but for Gandhi; and yet neither is a mere yes-man. Mr Gandhi could make heroes out of common clay; what can he not...Read more

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