A very posh Bombay person with all the right credentials: Cathedral School and Elphinstone College followed by Oxford University. With his distinctly Parsi looks, deep voice, and English accent, one could easily pass him off as another member of the city’s dwindling Parsi circle, given to intellectual pursuits that interest very few. And yet, that was not all. As he himself liked to put it, Zareer Masani was not just Parsi but also half-Kayastha, with half his roots in Uttar Pradesh, which remained an important and recurring part of his personality.
He started his career as a journalist for the BBC and as a biographer. His thin book, Indian Tales of the Raj, was meant to complement Charles Allen’s Plain Tales of the Raj. Zareer focussed on the lives and thoughts of people in India who were collaborators, or shall we say coparceners, with the British in creating and sustaining the Raj. He captured the strange combination of admiration, resentment, opportunism, and even idealism that characterised these individuals. This book can be dismissed as an undergraduate effort on the history of trivia, but that would be a mistake. In fact, one could argue that the seeds of his later evolution as a historian are to be found in this book.
Zareer wrote a biography of Indira Gandhi. The book was unimpressive, and the subject was formidable and difficult. With Indira Gandhi, I believe that biographers would be better off sticking to specific aspects of her persona rather than trying to describe her in entirety. She was simply too contradictory and controversial. In this context, Jairam Ramesh’ focussed work on Indira’s love affair with ecology stands out as an enchanting and important read.
Zareer came into his own with the publication of And All is Said, an autobiography that was also a stunning portrait of a complex family. Zareer’s parents, Minoo and Shakuntala, did not live in a conventional marriage; they lived in a ship forever on stormy seas. Minoo and Shakuntala were talented individuals who, in retrospect, should probably have remained friendly lovers. The institution of marriage was simply not for them. Zareer had his own problems as he explored the challenges of being a gay person in the years before it became easier. But these problems were trivial compared to the impossible dilemma of dealing with a mercurial mother and a hyper-rational father. And All is Said is a quotation from Goethe about Kalidasa’s Shakuntala. For Zareer and his readers, she remained an enchanting damsel from a distance, but impossible up close.
Zareer wrote an excellent book on Macaulay, who to this day remains a bugbear for Indian nationalists of different hues. Zareer carefully analysed the Whig origins of Macaulay’s thoughts and wanted readers to acknowledge that even as Macaulay was susceptible to the fashions of his day—fashions which we today consider politically incorrect—he was also a solid Whig ideologue and an intellectual who influenced public policy in a meaningful and sometimes seminal way.
Zareer discovered me because he was intrigued by my essays on his father, Minoo Masani, and on Macaulay. I was a kindred spirit who was not ashamed of being a Macaulay-putra and I had known Minoo years before I first met Zareer. He tracked me down in Mumbai, and a friendship began. He asked me to moderate his book launch at the Crossword bookshop, located at Kemps Corner. Being the natural habitat of us South Bombay types, many familiar faces turned up. I was quite forthright in my questions, and Zareer held up well. The Kayastha-Parsi non-marriage, the difficulties of being the son of a very eminent person, the need for exile for reasons including his sexual identity—he dealt with all my queries with superb aplomb.
Zareer continued to visit Mumbai often for the oldest and best of reasons. He was involved in some complex litigation regarding an apartment (we call them flats) that he had inherited. There is no one in our fair city who is not embroiled in a dispute about a flat. It kind of defines us. We would meet at the Willingdon Club, another posh landmark that retains a weary charm while acknowledging that it has seen better days.
Also read: No accident India forgot Swatantra leader & my father Minoo Masani, the beef-eating Parsi
I will miss Zareer
Zareer and I found much in common. Like his father Minoo before him, Zareer had moved away from undergraduate leftism to a mature conservative stance. I hailed from Madras, the town of Rajaji. Minoo Masani was a prominent figure, and it was Rajaji and Minoo who had started the Swatantra Party, the last best hope of the early days of free India. The baneful socialism of the Congress party, which inflicted continued poverty on our country, which sapped the initiative of citizens, and more or less forced them to turn corrupt as they dealt with the dragon of the permit-license raj—all of these were vociferously opposed by the Swatantra Party. We spent several evenings lamenting the fact that the Swatantra Party star faded too soon and too abruptly.
Zareer’s evolved views on the Raj were shared by me. I had argued elsewhere that future historians would regard the period of British rule in India as an extraordinarily important and creative period. Zareer and I agreed that even as we acknowledge the contributions of Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, RG Bhandarkar, and M Visvesvaraya, the foundations of the modern Indian weltanschauung were laid by Warren Hastings, William Jones, James Prinsep, and indirectly by Macaulay. Zareer reached back to his first book and made the case that many sensible Indians collaborated with the British; they even welcomed them. If this were not the case, so few of them could never have ruled a country as large as ours. Soldiers who joined the British Indian Army thought of themselves as proud professionals. Several Indians, like the Dalits, saw British rule as liberating. Others saw in it an opportunity to modernise while preserving the best of the past, thanks in part to the efforts of people like William Jones. In his later years, Zareer turned away from writing books and feverishly wrote articles. He rubbished the popular view that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal Famine and defended the positive contributions of the Raj in archaeology and antiquarianism.
The one area where Zareer and I differed was his unwillingness to see Hindu nationalism as a legitimate conservative force. Zareer felt that Partition was a bad thing and was forced on Jinnah by a Hindu-centric Congress. I argued in a Naipaulesque way that Partition was both inevitable and desirable, as we were up against an external quasi-imperialist irredentism. I used to tease him that the Anglican Cathedral School indoctrination had made him susceptible to new-fangled fashionable words like “majoritarianism,” which I found quite meaningless. Our exchange and banter were always friendly, even affectionate. After all, we were on the same page on the big issues, and let us not forget that we could spend hours discussing the legal problems associated with Mumbai flats!
What is the appropriate requiem for Zareer? In many ways, Zareer reminds me of my other Bombay friend, writer-poet Dom Moraes. Both were sons of extremely talented and successful fathers. Frank Moraes was a giant in Indian Journalism; Minoo Masani will go down as one of the more important figures of Indian public life in the second half of the twentieth century. Both Dom and Zareer suffered from the wounds of desperately dysfunctional childhoods. Both were talented and full of promise. Both achieved much, but their achievements fell short of their promise. Dom will not be counted with Philip Larkin. And Zareer, although a competent historian, is not a Jadunath Sarkar. Zareer’s critical contribution, however, may be that he provided a corrective to the shambolic nonsense that comes from the superficial anti-colonialists at JNU and AMU.
I, for one, will miss Zareer, and from down here, I can assure him that his inherited flat has now gone into fresh litigation. On that note, a good cup of tea is called for, both upstairs and downstairs.
Jaithirth Rao is an entrepreneur and an investor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)