Certainly More Than a Memoir

The writer Gurcharan Das had actually evolved long before the corporate honcho or even the “classical liberal” as he likes to call himself. The eponymous The Three Plays, a compilation of the historical play Larins Sahib, along with Mira and 9 Jakhoo Hill, were published when the author was still in his twenties. He has since, as he writes in his memoir, Another Sort of Freedom, sold Vicks vaporub in the dusty towns of India, rising to be Managing Director of the US-based multinational Procter & Gamble (P&G), before plunging full-time into the defence of liberalism.

Gurcharan Das took “early retirement” from Procter & Gamble and returned to India in 1991 to “sell” the economic reforms that had been ushered in by a government headed by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. He shot off a letter to Union finance minister Manmohan Singh and two newspaper editors he wished to write for from the P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, before taking another drastic right turn in his life. The author had swerved drastically from his track before, switching to majoring in philosophy from engineering at Harvard University and then equipped with that lofty degree to stoop to selling Vicks vaporub in India.

Since 1991, Gurcharan Das has written the best-seller India Unbound, followed by the The Elephant Paradigm, India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State, The Difficulty of Being Good and more recently The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal. His writer’s repertoire has traversed the realms of fiction (A Fine Family: A Novel, Mouse Merchant: Money in Ancient India, written with Arshia Sattar) history (Condition of the Sikhs in Canada, Marwaris, From Jagat Seth to the Birlas, written with Thomas A. Timberg) and philosophy (Kama, The Riddle of Desire).

He was, as he writes, born in 1942, while World War II was raging and “Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Hirohito were bashing everyone, blowing up the world”. He had barely begun attending school when “the weary British got up and left India.” What followed was a partition of the subcontinent, in which his home in Lahore was apportioned to Pakistan.

“Partition was my moment of political awakening. Although I was very young, it left an indelible scar. In later years, I did try to establish some reliable numbers in relation to this putrid stink of history but found that no one is quite sure. The consensus is that it rendered around 10 million homeless; 20 million Hindus left West Punjab and East Bengal, while 18 million Muslims went the other way to Pakistan,” writes the octogenarian, who obviously has not, like millions of others in India, been able to erase those haunting flashbacks from his childhood.

As with his childhood, Gurcharan Das’s reminiscences of his youth and adulthood also trace the evolution of India, from freedom from British rule in 1947, to those trying years of the licence permit raj and then finally the economic reforms of 1991 and thereafter. His Mumbai sojourn opens up the drawing rooms of the influential and his advent in Delhi in 1995 gives rare glimpses into the minds of the men who ushered in liberalisation in India, winning for the country economic freedom.  The author’s interview with Prime Minister Narasimha Rao is worth recounting.

“As we sat down, Rao was at pains to convince me that he was a loyal Congressman, merely continuing the party’s socialist legacy. He was cautious, defensive about the reforms, insisting that he was merely trying to bring efficiency to the system. He kept talking about

 ‘ reforms  with a human face’.” This meeting took place in 1995 while Rao’s minority government faced flak from both the Opposition and his own party in the aftermath of the 1991 reforms.  Now that two generations have been born since India discarded the socialist path and opened up many previously forbidden sectors to Indian and even overseas entrepreneurs, this story surely, is worth recounting.  

 All through this narrative, the reader is on a philosophical trek on the author’s pursuit of “moksha” (freedom in Sanskrit) and “laghima” (living lightly) and its true interpretation. A memoir, said Gurcharan Das at the launch of his book, was about “connecting the dots” in a bid to “find the pattern of one’s life”. In that endeavour, the author offers a very readable, often funny and intimate vision of India too.