Soliloquy

When I first got my hands on The Indian Conservative: A History of Indian Right-Wing Thought by Jaithirth Rao, I had a few moments of immense disquiet and anxiety. Left-leaning despite being a centrist, I was anxious as to what the book would hold for me and whether the ideas it promulgated would change the way I looked at the world altogether. In the event, my fears turned out to be uncorroborated as Rao did nothing as such. 

Early on in the book, he makes the distinction between a conservative and an extremist and made me heave a sigh of relief after drilling home the message that I wasn’t about to become that which I detested the most. Religion in general means little to me, but Rao made the point lucidly that one can very well be a conservative despite being a deist (which I admittedly am) or even without believing in any God. 

He writes eloquently on how being a conservative means to ‘conserve’ the good of one’s past but have no hesitation in throwing the bad out. An ideology which focuses on individualism perhaps much more than pure leftist or pure rightist philosophies do, being a conservative also means taking time to ring in changes in long-established cultures and traditions, with the oft-repeated analogy of ‘not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’ 

The arguments Rao makes in the economic sphere can be received well by folks from all spectrums of political discourse for the results of a state-dominated financial polity are for everyone to see. Harking back to India’s past to monopolise its ongoing proceedings is a technique he uses rather well, bringing forth several comparisons to Raja Rammohun Roy.

The constant, and sometimes unfounded critique of Marxist ideology is off-putting, but one needs to realise that Rao is only making his points seem bigger by diminishing those of his most significant adversaries. As Frank Smythe put it in The Valley of Flowers a long time ago, there can truly be no action without inertia. This book challenged my stance on a lot of conservative philosophies and made me look at its principles with a fresh outlook altogether, which is perhaps the highest praise it, or any book, for that matter, can get.

Rating: 4.5/5

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