History from below: What shaped the thought of E P Thompson, the great historian of ordinary working people? By Priya Satia
In 1976, a momentous six-week visit to India during the Emergency under Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi pivotally fuelled the vehemence of his scathing essay ‘The Poverty of Theory’ (1978) and undid his usual embarrassment about his father. On arrival, EP was warmly welcomed in acknowledgment of his father’s friendship with the late prime minister Nehru. He put on tape his childhood memories of Nehru. He was quickly dismayed, however, to witness the extent to which Indira had abandoned her father’s democratic principles.
Worse, the Moscow-directed Communist Party of India supported her repressive measures, obligingly coining theoretical abstractions to justify the Emergency’s abuses. The visit left him profoundly disturbed by the convergence of Western modernising theory – an updated version of the liberal progress narrative – with Moscow-directed socialist theory: both envisioned an intellectual elite imposing progress upon the nation through top-down, capital-intensive, technologically driven development. Both, to him, were vulgar in their unpoetic political vision.
EP recorded his impressions in an unpublished document
titled ‘Six Weeks in India’. But after Indira’s fall in 1977, he described his
Indian visit in The Guardian in 1978, speaking
as the proud son of his father while he publicly shamed members of the British
Left for having supported the Emergency out of misguided loyalty to Indira as
her father’s daughter. India was ‘perhaps the most important
country for the future of the world,’ he declared, ‘a country that merits no
one’s condescension.’ He foresaw ‘unpredictable and creative things’ in its
future – as long as it averted authoritarianism. ‘There is not a thought that
is being thought in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind,’
he concluded – the spirit of dissent that he so valued and had been exposed to
through Indian thinkers as a child….
https://aeon.co/essays/what-shaped-e-p-thompson-historian-and-champion-of-working-people
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