Eric Hobsbawm, the famous British historian who died at his home in London on October 1 at the age of 95, mesmerised the audience when he delivered a lecture at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi a few years ago. The hall was packed and listeners were squeezed on the floor between the aisles, and sideways and forwards as well. It was a reception fit for a rock- star.
Every description of Marxist, non-Marxist, anti-Marxist, lapsed Marxist, and those who might fashionably describe themselves as liberal, thronged the audience. Indeed every generation that lives in the city was represented, and this was no surprise. After all, three generations of scholars — students and others — across the world have raised themselves to maturity reading Hobsbawm’s celebrated works.
His three volumes in English on the 19th century are a classic- Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire — and the fourth, Age of Extremes, which deals with the bulk of the 20th century from the First World War to the collapse of Soviet Communism, will doubtless soon be regarded as one, given the sheer range of what it covers, including thoughtful reflections on what has come to be known as the Third World. Hobsbawm also published in German and Italian.
There is likely to be a worldwide consensus that he was the world’s most famous historian, particularly in the last third of his long and illustrious life. And this is not just because he was a Marxist and a communist, which of course he was.
Indeed, Britain in the era starting before the Second World War and lasting almost uptil now has produced a string of celebrated historians who were Marxist and Hobsbawm’s contemporaries. As Mohit Sen, the late Marxist exegete and Indian communist intellectual, says in his memoirs, speaking of the time he was a student at Cambridge, “I had heard of him in the Communist circles where I moved as the most brilliant of the Marxist intellectuals who had shot into prominence when Marxism seemed to be the waver of the future in Cambridge in the 1930s.”
But this cannot be why non-Marxists, even anti-Marxists, looked up to Hobsbawm as a special genus. The reason must lie elsewhere. What is striking about Hobsbwam is his quality of enticing the reader into a compact that involves reading about the lives of ordinary people — not the high and mighty who stride the stage — and the events that shape them or that they shape. All this in language that keeps the spirit up without distorting the reality.
In terms of sheer scholarship and marvellous story-telling, Bandits, Primitive Rebels, and Labouring Men are not just great history but also literature of some merit. What’s more, under an assumed name, Hobsbawm wrote jazz reviews for the New Statesman, revealing the full range of his talents. To quote Sen again, “What was fascinating was his fantastic memory for facts His presentation was swift and dramatic. He was even better in a small gathering. He was an outgoing and friendly person. His fantastic range of knowledge was not confined only to history.”
In Tales of Marx and Marxism, Hobsbawm notes “the discussions of Marx and Marxism cannot be confined either to the debate for or against, the political and ideological territory by the various and changing brands of Marxists and their antagonists. For the past 130 years it has been a major theme in the intellectual music of the world, and through its capacity to mobilise social forces a crucial, at some periods a decisive presence in the history of the twentieth century.”
Hobsbawm made an incisive and clinical survey of this territory, sparing no one, leaving no criticism out, releasing no ilk or brand of Marxists or communists from the closest non-partisan scrutiny. This is why he elicits respect across the board from professional historians and other readers alike even when they are partisan. This in part is Hobsbawm’s magic, and makes him not only a Marxist historian but an Olympian of history-writing.
According to Sen, “Hobsbawm believed that in the conditions of democracy and open ideological combat, it was essential that Marxism fought its battle with excellence and practical proof rather than reference to texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.”
Hobsbawm knew a circle of Indians who were at Cambridge in the thirties and the forties and, going by the estimate of peers, perhaps held the most affection and respect for Indrajit Gupta, the future general secretary of CPI and later Union home minister, for his intellect and integrity.
He followed Indian events with knowledge, interest and clarity as the Age of Extremes amply shows, both in their historical dimension as well as current political merit, and not in terms of just broad-brush treatment but also in regional detail.