The Trojan Horse affair; an official’s version

John Holmwood

The claim that ‘hard-line Islamist’ governors and teachers were taking over schools in Birmingham (and elsewhere) emerged in early 2014. The story was actively promoted in the media, fuelled by leaks from the different investigations that were put in place by official bodies. Eight years later and few journalists have sought to revisit the affair, not even in the aftermath of the Serial/ New York Times Trojan Horse podcast. The latter provided a detailed examination of the affair and the letter that instigated it over eight episodes. However, no British journalist working in the mainstream media has sought to re-examine the affair in the light of the holes in the official narrative that the podcast revealed.

Instead, the response has been to reiterate the ‘findings’ of a number of different inquiries – for example, by Ofsted, the Education Funding Agency (EFA), the Clarke Report and the Kershaw Report. They all arrived at similar conclusions and, so, the ‘facts’, it is held, are not in dispute. Moreover, the convergence among the different inspections and inquiries, is, itself, also confirmation that something was seriously amiss.

This official version of the affair is central to a recent book on its aftermath, The Birmingham Book: Lessons in urban education leadership and policy from the Trojan Horse affair, edited by one of the key figures in a number of the inquiries, Colin Diamond. Although not responding to the podcast directly –  he is reported elsewhere as calling it ‘one-sided’ and ‘unethical’ – the book covers the main events, albeit with an eye on the future beyond the affair and the lessons learned.

The ‘facts’ that he and most other commentators believe to be confirmed, however, derive from uncorroborated claims by ‘whistleblowers’. These were leaked to the media by the Department for Education (DfE), and, to a lesser extent, by Birmingham City Council (BCC). They were later set out in the Clarke and Kershaw reports, both published in July 2014, where it was argued that they formed a pattern. However, no specific allegation was tested in these reports. The implication was that, even if some of the claims could not be corroborated, sufficient of them would remain to prove the case against the teachers and governors. Paragraph 6.6 of the Clarke Report, for example, lists 20 allegations against Park View School, together with the laconic observation that, “it is only fair to point out the Trust disputed most, if not all, of the … allegations.” As we shall see, the various inquiries were also not independent of each other.

The affair unravels

I will begin with the part of the Trojan Horse affair that Colin Diamond and mainstream media commentators do not discuss. This is what happened after the Clarke and Kershaw reports were published. Clarke proposed that professional misconduct hearings should be pursued against those involved. Cases were not begun against teachers and senior leaders associated with Park View Education Trust (PVET) until September 2015 and against teachers at Oldknow in November 2015. They were the first time that the allegations were properly formulated and the evidence to support the charges put forward. This was well over a year after the claims against the teachers were publicised and after major changes to the government’s counter extremism strategy, Prevent, were introduced following the affair (the consequences of the affair in a new Prevent duty on schools and other providers of public services plays little part in Diamond’s book).

Many of the lurid claims that formed the media narratives – of both conservative and liberal commentators, alike – did not make the ‘cut’. Moreover, the overarching charge that was laid against the teachers had nothing to do with ‘extremism’, but involved, ‘agreeing with others to the inclusion of an undue amount of religious influence in the education of pupils’ (as it was put in the NCTL Hearing against the senior leaders at PVET).

The cases dragged on for over eighteen months and in May 2017, the main case against the senior leaders collapsed and other actions were discontinued. The reason was malpractice by lawyers acting for the government who had failed to disclose evidence relevant to the defence. There was some outrage expressed in the media that the teachers had ‘got off’. There was no examination of the implications of the collapse from the perspective of the veracity of the claims made against them, nor of the nature of the charges that had been put forward against them.

Yet, from the first headlines about the affair in March 2014, its scale and scope had been slowly unravelling. It had started with 21 Ofsted investigations, 2 EFA investigations and 2 official reports, but had come to focus on just 4 schools. Media reports at the height of the affair anticipated as many as 100 teachers being charged with professional misconduct. In the event, 6 hearings were planned, involving just 12 teachers.

One hearing involving 2 teachers failed to get to the starting line; then there were 10. One hearing involving 2 teachers provided a guilty verdict, which was quashed at the High Court for procedural irregularities associated with non-disclosure of evidence; then there were 8. Another hearing ended with a not proven verdict, and  one other found the teacher guilty of minor irregularities meriting no further action; now there were 6.

The most significant of the cases involved 5 senior leaders at PVET (those charged included the white, atheist female head teacher and senior executive at the Trust, and a Sikh teacher). The collapse of this case left just 1 person, the acting head teacher at Oldknow who had joined the school in April 2013. He was found guilty. His case had been brought later than the others (in November 2015), but it concluded before the High Court quashed the first case, precipitating the concerns about the non-disclosure of evidence. By the time that the full extent of the misconduct by the government’s lawyers had become evident he was out of time for an appeal.

The slow unravelling of the cases against the teachers might have stimulated media interest, but it did not. The Panel’s judgement in the senior teachers’ case was also noteworthy. The defence had moved that the hearing be discontinued on the grounds that the case against the senior leaders had not been made out. The Panel was disinclined to accept this argument, but it also had to consider the implications of the newly disclosed evidence. It is important to note, as did the Panel, that the new evidence could have been included within the hearing. Although disclosed at a very late stage, it happened while the hearing was still underway and so could have been tested by extending the hearing (as had already occurred on several occasions). The Panel refused to discontinue on the grounds put forward by the defence, only to do so abruptly because of serious ‘impropriety’ by the government lawyers.

There was no media call for the lawyers to be charged with professional misconduct, no media examination of the specific charges that had been laid against the senior leaders, no examination of the evidence that had been put forward, or the arguments made in cross examination.[1] Instead, there was a simple default to the ‘facts’ supposedly already established by Clarke. Much of this is laid out in two episodes of the podcast (and in a book written by myself, together with Therese O’Toole, Countering Extremism in British Schools? The truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair).

Cleaning the stable?

Colin Diamond was appointed in August 2015 as deputy to Sir Mike Tomlinson who had been made education commissioner for Birmingham. Three years later Diamond left to take up a post as Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Birmingham where he runs an MA in Educational Leadership. The book is the fruit of that experience. It purports to be an insider’s account of rebuilding school governance in Birmingham, but it is coy about subjecting the affair itself to retrospective analysis.

Instead, it is something of a ‘bricolage’ with school leaders associated with the MA programme supplying chapters, each introduced with an editorial commentary by Diamond. I will not address the chapters separately (which are of variable quality, including some that are very good), but how they are interpreted by Diamond. Overall, the flavour of the book is well-captured by the foreword from Professor Mick Waters: “reading this book, it is easy to imagine the screenplay for a film of the ‘feel good’ genre. The vignettes appear so often. With the right music, a cinema audience would be carried along with a story offering an emotional switchback” (page iii).

It is clear that Diamond sees himself as a hero in the story, but he is reticent about his role. He decries the ‘Islamophobia’ of Michael Gove and media reports and suggests that it is mistaken to see the affair as being about ‘extremism’.  Indeed, at one point in the book he also declares his opposition to the idea of ‘fundamental British values’  – he calls it a “latter-day exhumation of the Tebbit test incorporated into statute” (page 336). Yet, even if the duty on schools to promote fundamental British values was introduced after the Trojan Horse affair and seemingly in response to it, they were a central concern of the Clarke Report and the other inspections. They were cited in the banning order issued against Tahir Alam in September 2015, for “conduct which is aimed at undermining fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” Diamond seemingly affirms the veracity of the Clarke Report at the same time as distancing himself from its framing.

Much of what Diamond writes is self-justification after the fact, and it is not accompanied by any real reflection on his own role in the unfolding of the affair. According to him, ‘Trojan horse activities’ happened within the schools and needed to be stopped. Moreover, he believes that they were of long standing and have remained ever-present within the local community continuing to cause problems in the form of significant community pressures on school leaders –  for example, around LGBT issues (it doesn’t help that his introduction to a chapter on the parent protests of 2019 which discusses the ‘No Outsiders’ curriculum at Parkfield school treats that curriculum as being about prospective changes in sex and relationships education; it wasn’t, the curriculum was designed to promote ‘fundamental British values’ under the new Prevent duty).

What is needed, Diamond argues, is strong leaders with good relations with local communities. Cometh the hour…

Trojan Horse, the prequel

Let’s rehearse how this all squares with his own role in theaffair as an official within the DfE drafted in to organise its response to the Trojan Horse allegations.

We know from evidence disclosed in the misconduct case brought against the senior leaders at PVET that the DfE’s Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism Unit (DDCE) were involved in the initial set of Ofsted inspections of 21 schools. They were also directly involved in the EFA inspections of PVET and Oldknow (these schools were the only ones where misconduct cases were brought against their teachers).

This preliminary focus on extremism in the planning of the inspections was denied by one of the inspectors in the hearings, but email messages prior to the inspections confirmed the active involvement of DDCE. Paragraph 124 of the Panel Hearing’s conclusions, for example, stated, “Had the emails which had recently been disclosed, and which had been shown to the Panel, been available at the time she gave evidence, the Panel considered it was reasonable to assume that, taking account of the thoroughness of the cross-examination, these emails would have been put to her to suggest that she had greater knowledge than she was prepared to admit with regard to the reasons for the inspections taking place.”

Prior to his appointment as deputy commissioner in Birmingham, Colin Diamond, on his own account, was the official at the DfE with responsibility for organising the EFA inspections. Like the inspector in her evidence to the misconduct hearing, he is also shy about the involvement of DDCE – “I was asked to pull together a team drawn from the department’s official educational adviser team (experienced school leaders and former Ofsted inspectors) who would work with Education Funding Agency staff to find out what was really going on in the PVET academies and in Oldknow Junior School following the Ofsted inspection judgements” (pages x-xi).

Diamond also fails to inform readers that the inspector involved in the two EFA investigations for which he was responsible – the one who was criticised in the Panel Hearing  conclusions – also went on to be educational adviser to Peter Clarke and drafted the sections on PVET and Oldknow in that report. So much for the idea that the different inspections and inquiries were dealing with findings arrived at separately. Moreover, they were all curated through the DDCE. Indeed, Mr Justice Philipps specifically commented (para 37) on the role of the head of the DDCE in amending the wording of the Panel judgement when quashing the case against the two teachers.

Diamond presents then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, as ‘paranoid’ about Islam. He refers to events a year earlier at Al-Madinah, a faith-designated, ‘all-through’ school in Derby. This, he says, “felt like a dress rehearsal for the events that unfolded in Birmingham in early 2014, and is significant because it appeared to prove to Gove that there was indeed a thin line between the political Islamism advocated by a minority of the Muslim population and the views of the overall Muslim population in the UK” (page 22). The school had been set up in September 2012, but was declared inadequate by October 2013. As Diamond presents the story, it went in a space of a few months from being outstanding in its first inspection after being set up, to being placed in special measures. It would turn out that it was its non-Muslim headteacher, Andrew Cutts-Mackay, who acted as a ‘whistle-blower’ against the governing body.

This was one of a number of actions against Islamic faith schools initiated by the DfE around the same time. The Ofsted report indicated serious problems of governance, while the EFA report was concerned with financial mismanagement and irregularities. Neither report indicated a prefiguring of Trojan Horse concerns with ‘political Islamism’ although there were media reports of ‘religious hardliners’, including by Richard Kerbaj and Sian Griffiths for the Sunday Times. They would go on to write the first media reports on the Trojan Horse affair. Moreover, although financial irregularities at PVET were alleged in their EFA report, none were found in a subsequent audit conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers notwithstanding it being flagged as a possible concern within the EFA report. Why, does Colin Diamond connect them?

He does not say anything about his own walk on part in the ‘dress rehearsal’ at Al-Madinah where he was part of the team seeking to find a solution. This included seeking the support of various educational bodies representing Muslim interests, which would themselves come to be discredited by Clarke. Ultimately, this initial intervention in the school proved to be unsuccessful and the DfE resolved the situation by closing the secondary school and incorporating it within Greenwood Academies Trust. It is this experience that preceded Diamond’s role in relation to the EFA inspections of PVET and Oldknow. It is disingenuous, then, for him to represent the concern with ‘political Islam’ as simply deriving from Michael Gove. It is something he also brought to his own engagement with the Trojan Horse affair and it was deeply embedded within the DfE.

I mention these connections because they are important in how Clarke approached the Trojan Horse affair under the influence of DfE ‘insiders’. The example of Al-Madinah seems to have suggested that a ‘turnaround’ at a school – from ‘outstanding’ to ‘failing’ – could happen over a matter of months and be occasioned by the government’s flagship academies programme which gave governing bodies and senior leadership teams a free hand. This scenario would seem to be crucial in the only successful prosecution, that of the acting head teacher at Oldknow who had only joined the school in April 2013.

Park View had become a ‘converter academy’ in April 2012 following an ‘outstanding’ Ofsted inspection report. It was then invited by the DfE to become a Multi Academy Trust and ‘sponsor’ two failing schools, Nansen primary in October 2012 and Golden Hillock secondary school in October 2013. This was the ‘takeover’ described in the Trojan Horse letter of November 2013 outlining an Islamist plot. Of course, the academies programme involved introducing the practices and personnel from the sponsoring school. So what was it that was problematic about Park View’s practices?

Let’s turn to chapter 5 of the Clarke Report which purports to discover the ‘ideology’ (a term taken from the 2011 Prevent Strategy) attributed to PVET and its ‘agenda’. The core of this ideology is presented across paragraphs 5.2 and 5.3:

“Rejecting not only the secular and other religions, but also other strands of Islamic belief, it goes beyond the kind of social conservatism practised in some faith schools which may be consistent with universal human rights and respectful of other communities. It appears to be a deliberate attempt to convert secular state schools into exclusive faith schools in all but name. This agenda, though not necessarily the tactics involved, appears to stem from an international movement to increase the role of Islam in education. It is supported by bodies such as the Association of Muslim Schools–UK (AMS-UK), the International Board of Educational Research and Resources (IBERR), the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the recently closed Muslim Parents Association (MPA). The movement provides practical advice and religious legitimisation to those who, in the words of the IBERR, seek to ‘Islamise the provision of educational services’. Some of the individuals who have featured in the investigation were associated with, or held positions in, these bodies.”

Notice that none of these allegations about ‘ideology’ would form part of the professional misconduct case against the senior leaders at PVET and Oldknow. But it was a framing that was being developed by the DDCE. It is part of Colin Diamond’s account of the pressures on headteacher Cutts-McKay leading to the rapid collapse of Al-Madinah after a period of initial success.

This was the script that set up expectations about what happened at PVET and, at least initially, positioned the longstanding Headteacher at Park View and Chief Executive of PVET, Lindsey Clark, as being in a similar position to Cutts-Mackay. Ms Clark was expected to describe similar pressures to those described by him. She did not; instead, she endorsed the policies and practices that she had implemented together with her Chair of Governors, Tahir Alam. And so it was that a white, atheist and feminist headteacher would be charged with being a ring leader in a plot to Islamicise schools.

Notice, too, a possible explanation of why no-one was interested in the question that animates the Serial/NYT podcast of who wrote the Trojan Horse letter. If the circumstantial evidence they set out points towards the headteacher at Adderley primary school (who was confronting a difficult HR investigation), she is positioned as potentially a ‘whistleblower’ similar to Cutts-Mackay and, thereby, in need of protection. This was so notwithstanding possible problems in her methods – as the podcast sets out, Colin Diamond was assigned that role of managing the Council’s approach to the Adderley employment tribunal, given that it remained an LA school.

School improvement

The main focus of Diamond’s book is school improvement, especially in urban areas and for working class and ethnic minority young people. His story about the lessons from Birmingham is straightforward. School improvement can be achieved, he argues, by good school governance and a proper appreciation of the cultural and religious heritages of the pupils. Birmingham schools had longstanding problems going back to the 1990s and involving problematic behaviours of parents, governors and teachers, against which some brave senior leaders had stood out, albeit with local leadership from Birmingham Council and national leadership fracturing after the acceleration of the academies programme in 2010.

But this narrative bears little weight even if it has traction within the media. Sir Michael Wilshaw was also reported in an interview with a Sunday Times journalist before stepping down as Chief Inspector of Schools, as saying that, “Birmingham city council is ‘a rotten borough … beyond redemption’, whose powers to run schools and social services should be overhauled because children are at risk … ‘the “appalling children’s services” and “awful schools” in Britain’s second largest city had been his greatest cause of concern during his five years in office. He warned that a repeat of the so-called Trojan Horse scandal, which saw a radical Islamic ethos introduced to schools in the city, was likely unless the government acted.”

The poor general state of the council’s governance was the subject of the Kerslake Report, commissioned in July 2014 with a view to its possible break-up. It deferred the matter of schooling (a part of the wider scope of children’s services) to Kershaw and Clarke, but provided a statistical analysis (in an annexe to the report) that was missing in the Clarke and Kershaw reports, which provided no data on school performance in Birmingham. Kerslake reported in December 2014 together with comparisons between Birmingham and other similar councils – among them, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle – as well as England as a whole. On all measures – poverty, unemployment, adult qualifications – it was among the worst performing councils and below the national average.

The only exception was schooling, where Birmingham had out-performed all the other councils since 2008-9 in terms of the proportion of pupils achieving at least 5 GCSEs including English and Maths and had a higher proportion of schools judged to be ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted.

In effect, by the time of the Trojan Horse affair Birmingham was a model of school improvement. Indeed, an Ofsted/Audit Commission report in 2002 had declared its school improvement policy to be outstanding. Park View had also been a failing school in 1994 when Tahir Alam became a governor and, as Chair in 1997,  appointed Lindsey Clark as headteacher. By 2006 it was judged to be one of the most improved schools in England, and in 2012 it was judged by Ofsted under Sir Michael Wilshaw’s new, more rigorous inspection regime to be ‘outstanding’ and in the top 14% of schools in England by examination results.

In fact, it was an exemplar for the government’s argument that good schools could overcome socio-economic circumstances. For example, while 15% of pupils in schools nationally received free school meals (28% in Birmingham), over 70% of pupils received them in Park View, which indicates the deprivation which many of its children experienced. While over 80% of pupils at schools nationwide spoke English as a first language (64% in Birmingham), in Park View that figure was only 7.5%, adding to the immense challenges that the school managed to overcome. But 98.8% of Park View’s pupils were from a Muslim background, and it is that fact that was most salient in representing the school as ‘risky’.

Surprisingly, Colin Diamond does not discuss how these outcomes by PVET could have been achieved, despite his mantra that good outcomes depend on good governance. We can be certain, however, that had his book been written in 2012, there would have been a chapter by Tahir Alam, or Lindsey Clark, setting out their approach (9 of his 14 contributors, including Diamond himself, have an honour for services to education; Lindsey Clark was awarded an OBE in January 2014 and was due to retire in March at around the time the Trojan Horse story broke).

There is a chapter in the book on the subsequent ‘turnaround’ success of Rockwood Academy (the re-named Park View) by the chief executive of its MAT. But the school’s achievements at GCSE in the latest data are well below that of Park View in 2012 and below the current average for Birmingham, while that of Birmingham schools, more  generally, has also declined to be at the national average.

Other of Diamond’s governance heroes have question marks against them, too. Bev Mabey, author of a chapter in the book, and Chief Executive of Washbrook Heath MAT submitted her resignation in September 2021 following an EFA investigation and report into financial irregularities at the Trust in November 2020. Diamond also cites Pat Smart, CEO of Create Trust and former headteacher at Greet Primary School in Sparkhill as a guiding spirit. Greet primary had converted to academy status in 2016, having been judged outstanding at its last Ofsted report in 2007 (it had an interim assessment in 2011 when no issues were identified). Its latest Ofsted report just prior to the book’s publication was that it ‘required improvement’. Great leaders can also experience difficulties it would seem.

Despite the fragile status of some of his exemplars, Diamond seems to have a blind spot about acknowledging the success of Park View and the good governance through which it was achieved. Nowhere is this more evident than in his editorial introduction to the chapter by Kamal Hanif, who was appointed deputy head at the school in 2003 and continued his association through to the Trojan Horse allegations – according to Diamond, Hanif “recognises the damage done by a small group of governors at the time Park View became an academy and took on responsibility for Golden Hillock and Nansen schools, which then became the epicentre of Trojan Horse” (page 32).

Hanif’s chapter describes something else, specifically the damage of the Trojan Horse affair in terms of the aftermath of accusations against teachers and governors reinforcing suspicions about Muslim teachers and governors. In addition, he describes Park View school as having been beset by racist and Islamophobic attitudes among white staff, with which the senior leaders had to contend. In contrast, he comments that, “during my time at Park View, governance was fair, free and liberal” (page 47).

Diamond allows that there was racism at the school directed against pupils and staff, but does not pause to consider how this might have been bound up with the subsequent allegations made against Muslim teachers.

White allyship?

So just what was going on at the DfE at the time of Colin Diamond’s involvement there? Why does he swither between the idea that the Trojan Horse allegations apply to a brief period when schools became academies, formally free to pursue policies separate from those of local authorities, and the idea that the problems of harassment of senior teachers by Muslim parents, governors and teachers was longstanding. Indeed, it would seem that a different longstanding problem of ethnic minority underperformance was being addressed successfully and it was being done by greater involvement of parents with their children’s schools as ostensibly promoted by the official ideology of the academies programme.

In fact, the disbelief and dismay about this improvement was not restricted to racist factions within schools, as identified by Hanif, it was also being mobilised at the DfE.  Diamond refers to a third official report on the Trojan Horse affair by Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary at the DfE, in January 2015 about what the department had known about the affair prior to 2014. This report addressed a presentation to the DfE in 2010 by a Birmingham headteacher, Tim Boyes. The latter came armed with a Policy Exchange report on ‘Faith Schools we can Believe in’.

Although the latter report addressed faith-designated schools, it argued that there was a vulnerability of schools to extremism and that the “new academies and Free Schools programmes could be exploited unless urgent measures are taken to counter extremist influence.” (page 5). It recommended the setting up of a centralised ‘Due Diligence Unit’ within the DfE to offset the consequences of outsourced functions at the DfE. As already indicated, the DfE had begun actions against Islamic faith schools, including Al-Madinah, and, with its actions against PVET and Oldknow was beginning actions against academies serving Muslim pupils.

Boyes’s presentation to the DfE began from the Policy Exchange analysis and set out how the ethnic minority presence in Birmingham had grown, together with communities increasingly living parallel lives. He also argued that activists from within the Muslim community were putting pressure on schools, through governors linked with the Muslim Council of Britain, and that there was pressure to introduce Islamic collective worship in schools. Boyes argued that there was a specific problem of Muslim-majority schools to which the answer was that “schools in the Pakistani dominated wards need to be robustly  linked, not done to, with outer schools” (ie schools serving predominantly white pupils). In other words, trusts made up of Muslim-majority schools were potentially problematic, but this could be mitigated by placing Muslim majority schools in Trusts where the other schools, including the lead school, were white-majority.

Wormald’s report did not dwell too much on the implied failures in management of the academies programme, though it did argue that the DfE had been insufficiently vigilant. It argued that a proper response had been made, namely by setting up the new Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Unit (which was further enhanced after the Trojan Horse affair). This was the very unit that came to play such an important role in managing the DfE’s response to the Trojan Horse Affair.

Notice, too, that a connection between religious difference and alleged extremism is, from this moment, instituted within the DfE. We might expect Colin Diamond to say something about the role of religion in maintained schools. Certainly, the Clarke Report seemed to be misinformed, unaware of the requirement on all schools to teach religious education and to provide daily acts of collective worship. Under local authority responsibility, both aspects – curriculum and determinations for other than Christian collective worship – are the responsibility of the local Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE). However, academy schools do not need to follow the local SACRE curriculum and their applications (or renewals) for determinations for other than Christian collective worship are made to the DfE.

For the most part, Diamond says very little about religion. He argues that a multifaith locally agreed RE syllabus is “more important than ever” (page 340), and wishes academy schools to adopt it voluntarily. The Birmingham SACRE, Diamond argues, was “one of the few local organisations to emerge with credit from Ian Kershaw’s report” (page 340). In fact, PVET continued to teach the curriculum after Park View and its associated schools became academies. Diamond seems unaware that Humanists UK, who supported whistleblowers at Park View, had also had the Birmingham SACRE in its sights for its emphasis on learning from religion, rather than about religion and not including humanists within its representation.

What about collective worship? Diamond has even less to say on the topic, but one of his contributors, Heather Knights, CEO of the National Governors Association, identifies this as a key issue, indicating that her organisation has sought the end of this requirement. However, given that it continues to remain a requirement and that Park View had had a determination for Islamic collective worship from the SACRE since 1996, it is not clear how, or why, this became such an issue. The suspicion must be that the Trojan Horse affair was a convenient means of pursuing a secularist agenda, notwithstanding that the schools were acting within the law as it currently existed.

What we do know from the misconduct hearings is that the determinations at Park View and Oldknow were due for renewal in 2013. We also know that the DfE had in place no process and no expertise for evaluating them (they initially sought advice from the SACRE). Clarke had no understanding of the legislative requirements in the area, but, as we have already seen, an idea was forming in the DfE about the problematic nature of Muslim organisations and collective worship, in part as a consequence of the Al-Madinah ‘dress rehearsal’, but also through the Policy Exchange report and Boyes’s submission to the DfE. The applications for renewal of the determinations alerted the DDCE and set in train actions to protect the academies programme from its ‘subversion’ by new converter and sponsored schools.

Two versions of what happened were parlayed. One that it represented longstanding problems in Birmingham, the second that it was a problem of newly formed academies. In truth, it was neither. The school improvement programme in Birmingham had delivered success, including the increased representation of ethnic minority and minority religious school leaders. Several chapters in the book show the reversal of that representation (Warmington, Campbell-Stephens, Iqbal) and especially of Muslim school leaders as a consequence of  the Trojan Horse affair.

Diamond’s solution is that there should be a network of partnerships connected through successful trusts to create a local system for cities that would “enable the co-construction and co-delivery of school improvement” (page 333). He describes how this was set up in Birmingham, together with Birmingham Educational Partnership (a newly-established  independent agency), the council and DfE (including the DDCE), and the Regional School Commissioner (page 334). Diamond describes himself  as a ‘White ally’ (page 350), but, perhaps unsurprisingly, what he proposes is remarkably like the solution that Tim Boyes described to the DfE in 2010. Indeed, Boyes re-emerged in 2015 as the CEO of Birmingham Educational Partnerships that sits at the centre of the local system in which BAME interests are to be nested.

Conclusion

There is one thing that all can agree on about the Trojan Horse affair. It set back school improvement in Birmingham, it undermined community schools, it reduced ethnic minority participation in leadership positions in schools, and it made the participation of ethnic minority educationalist –  whether as teachers or governors – more precarious. The official view – including that of Colin Diamond – is that these consequences should also be laid at the door of the governors and teachers associated with Park View and Oldknow. As I have shown, this is barely credible.

It is clear that the DfE believed that the problems they identified with the schools at the centre of the affair had  emerged over a short period of time after the schools became academies in 2012. In fact, there was no evidence that anything had changed and the takeover of other schools was with the approval of the DfE and the involvement of their school improvement officials. They agreed to the appointment of staff from Park View (and, in prospect, from Oldknow) into interim positions to bring about necessary change. However, the official inquiries threw up a cordon sanitaire around the DfE’s involvement similar to that which the Serial/NYT podcast found at Adderley Primary.

Instead, the DfE and BCC allowed the idea that what Colin Diamond calls ‘Trojan Horse activities’ stretched back to 1996 and earlier. In contrast, as I have shown, while the period from 1996 to 2012 was characterised by increased involvement of ethnic minority educationalists in school governance and leadership in Birmingham, it was also a period in which the school improvement programme achieved considerable success and outperformed other comparable cities. It did so against considerable hostility from white professionals as some of the contributors to Diamond’s book set out.

It would seem that it was ‘ideological extremists’ at the DfE that wrought the damaging consequences of the Trojan Horse affair. They traduced a poor Muslim community and educationalists working to secure the educational rights of its children for their own political advantage. They were aided and abetted by the media, but the main explanation of their ability to control the narrative was that, under the academies programme, education has become highly centralised with no countervailing powers. All the main agencies involved in evaluating the affair –  Ofsted, the EFA, the Clarke Inquiry and the NCTL – were agencies of the DfE. Ian Kershaw – brought in by BCC – was the Managing Director of Northern Education Ltd (a private company providing educational services). He became CEO of Northern Education multi-academy trust in October of 2014, which he left in 2017 following criticism by Ofsted of its failure to raise standards in its schools. [Article modified 04.10.22 following clarification by Mr Kershaw].

The most damaging legacy of the Trojan Horse affair is the subordination of schools to arbitrary, centralised and authoritarian power and the failure of the liberal media to hold that power to account. Colin Diamond’s book merits close reading to uncover the alternative narrative within it that cannot be suppressed – no matter how hard its editor looks away.

Note:

[1] A defence barrister in the case discusses the way in which witness statements to the Clarke inquiry were given and how they were converted into witness statements here.

John Holmwood is emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham . He is the author (with Therese O’Toole) of Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press 2018) and (with Gurminder K. Bhambra) Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (Polity 2021).

Header image credit: Wilshaw chats to pupils at Park View school. Photograph: Andrew Fox for the Guardian

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Holmwood, John 2022. ‘The Trojan Horse affair; an official’s version’ Discover Society: New Series 2 (2):

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Moushumi Bhowmik

I came to Ranajit Guha’s work only recently, late in my life. If I had been a first year at university then my teachers and peers would tell me what to read and how to read him. Now I must seek assistance in writings on Guha, from his readers, scholars and critics; in interviews and reminiscences.

The good thing about coming so late to someone’s work, especially to work as vast and deep as an ocean, is that by now I have a measure of my own self, I know that I have not learned to swim and I can’t even stay afloat, but barely dip my ankles in the water. I also know a thing or two about what I can take home after hours of sitting by the shore; some sand sticks to my feet, that I must  dust off before walking in through the door. But I keep with me the sights of the rising waves I have seen and their sound as they come crashing, ships which cross the horizon, small fishing boats, even drowning people I was unable to save.

It is with such sounds and sights and feelings that I tried to loosely sketch an impression of Ranajit Guha, translating what I have understood to be some of his lifelong concerns and questions, into song.   

On 20 October 2023, when we had gathered at the University of Sussex to remember Ranajit Guha, two weeks of systematic destruction of life in Palestine had passed, following the 7 October bloody Hamas operation against Israeli occupation. Is there no daya left in our hearts? Where is the quality of empathy? There was an all-pervasive feeling of helplessness, even on the faces of those who were courageously marching to stop the killing spree. 

Around 2008, Ranajit Guha had started to write a Bengali book entitled Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Empathy/Compassion: Rammohan Roy and Our Modernity) which was first published in 2010. 

‘We easily forget’, he wrote in its Prelude, which he subtitled ‘The Victory of Cruelty’. ‘If we couldn’t forget, then perhaps our very existence would be unbearable under the weight of remembrance. So, we need to forget. Even to those who witnessed Partition [of India] in their childhood and youth, that experience has faded now as [the colours and details] in an old scroll painting. The dust of Mahakal (Endless Time) falls on the past and everything fades away. Dust has begun to settle on the communal frenzy in Gujarat which happened barely seven or eight years ago. Which is why millions of people are unable to see in their minds’ eyes what they had actually seen. However, we know that the discipline of history and forgetting are sworn enemies. Hence, with my belief in justice [attainable through remembrance], I have picked up my pen to write about a much older time, to remind ourselves of 2002. [Lest we forget.]’ (Guha, 2021: 13; translation mine). 

‘Daya diye hobe go mor jiban dhute/Noile ki aar parbo tomar charan chhnute‘ (I must wash my life with daya/ How else can I touch your feet?) Rabindranath Tagore’s 1910 song rang in my ears. Ranajit Guha wrote extensively on Tagore and I wonder if this was one his favourite songs? His student, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote after his death that in writing only in Bangla/ Bengali during the last decades of his life, Ranajit da was ‘returning home’.  In her memoirs Danube, Ganges, and Other Life Streams, Methchild Guha wrote: ‘Ranajit and I discussed many times what our roots were. He feels rooted in Bengali language and culture irrespective of where he lives, and, believing it crucial to maintain this sense of identity, he kept pressing me to similarly acknowledge the culture and language that had formed me,’ (Guha, 2014: 49).  

The Bengal of Ranajit’s birth is where I have travelled over the past decades, listening to songs and stories and making recordings of what may be considered ‘small voices’ of history, with my machine and in my memory. But ‘small’, says who? In the pouring rain of the monsoon month of Sraban, the women of Barisal are singing songs to the snake goddess Manasa; the song rises above the sound of the rain, then it drowns, and rises again–one female voice leads, others repeat the lines. I have heard them and imagine that Ranajit had also heard such sounds when he was a small boy, for Barisal was his birthplace. Perhaps this was also the language and culture that had formed him? Why did he not write about these little things of his own history? 

Ranajit Guha ‘turned down all requests to write an autobiography,’ wrote Partha Chatterjee. ‘He even did not want to give any long interviews on his life and work. He would refuse saying, “It is not possible to write the truth about one’s own life. Whatever autobiographies you read, know that they are full of lies.”” (Chatterjee, 2023: 86) But for some reason he did give Partha Chatterjee a long interview on 1 and 2 July 2018 in his home in Purkersdorf on the edge of the Vienna Woods; he was 95 at the time. They talked about books he read as a boy, the library at home, his grandfather, teachers, early friendships, introduction to communist ideology, Tagore, Bankim, his comrades, literature, politics, history-writing, subaltern studies and so much more, but not much about the interior of his childhood home and other realms of feeling. The conversation is marked by the stark absence of voices of women. There was an externality in that conversation, such as there is in Bengali male intellectual addas.

How to listen to that absence? How to interpret it? In The Art of Listening, Les Back wrote about the need for deep sociological listening, which is ‘tied to the art of [‘thick’] description’. (Back, 2007: 21). We must be able to listen to both the presence and absence of sound.

It is interesting that Ranajit Guha had opened up in a different way during another conversation that he had with the Bastar folklorist Harihar Vaishnav in Canberra in 1991. The master dhokra or bell metal sculptor Jaydev Baghel of Chattisgarh was also present in the room, along with anthropologist Chris Gregory. Ranajit Guha was talking in Hindi and this translation by Pritha Banerjee is from a  special volume  dedicated to him which was published after his death by Anushtup in Kolkata, edited by Simool Sen. ‘I am a Dukkhabadi (I incline towards sorrow),’ Ranajit had said to Harihar Vaishnav. ‘I see both happiness as well as dejection. I have seen both. But I perceive a sense of remorse in the unprecedented fate of mankind. […]  But the battle must be waged. It doesn’t matter whether you triumph or fail. The struggle must go on.’

Vaishnav then asked him if there was any one incident he remembered which gave him both inspiration and pain?  ‘I don’t know about any specific event,’ Ranajit said, ‘but there is one that I can recall. You people are all young, born after Independence. There is one event before Independence that has left a mark on all people’s lives — British Rule. Before our independence, the era of British rule was an era of humiliation. I cannot begin to tell you how deeply humiliating the situation was. An Englishman had the power to come to this country and demean its own citizens. My childhood was situated within this corridor of humiliation. My family was an elite, upper class family in Bangladesh. We were big Hindu landowners. When I was a child, I saw peasants being thrashed with shoes by members of zamindari (landowning) families like mine. There was a farmer who lived near my house. He was older than me. I used to call him Dada. Although I belonged to a wealthy family, he brought coconuts for me. When he went fishing in the river, he used to take me along in his boat. I saw my uncle and his servants in our zamindari family pummel him with shoes. One day, he was heartbroken and left his home and the village. He thought my family was affectionate towards him. But they beat him with shoes – that was sheer insult! He left in a small boat. My young mind was affected by this. This agony occupied my mind since childhood. This is a short anecdote. It’s not political. It is empathy. It is sympathy. My discernment, my anger come from that place.’ 

I think it was a real political act on the part of Ranajit Guha to draw from the deep well of empathy and fight the battle ‘that must be waged’, throughout his long life. 

Here is a clip from my presentation at a memorial event for historian Ranajit Guha (1923-2023) at the University of Sussex on 20 October 2023. My presentation-performance was entitled ‘Some Small Voices of History: Listening after Ranajit Guha’. The composition I sing, first setting the context, is of the Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, written in 1910.

References

Back, Les 2007. The Art of Listening (Oxford, New York: Berg)

Guha, Methchild 2014.  Danube, Ganges , and Other Life Streams  (New Delhi: Permanent Black)

Chatterjee, Partha ed. 2023 Ranajit Guha Sahityer Satya (Kolkata: Anushtup)

Guha, Ranajit 2021. Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Kolkata: Adom)

Sen, Simool ed. 2023. Ranajit Guha Bishesh Sankhya (Kolkata: Anustup)

Moushumi Bhowmik is an Indian singer-songwriter, writer and researcher based in Kolkata.

Header Image Credit: The Travelling Archive

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Property and the Political Economy of Colonialism

Gurminder K Bhambra

Ranajit Guha, as set out so clearly in the other articles in this issue, was a complex man. He was at the University of Sussex for close on twenty years and is most well-known for work that he did at the end of that period; that is, his work on historiography and the setting up of Subaltern Studies. My own initial encounter with Guha’s work was through these very studies. In particular, I was taken with the way in which he used historiography to investigate the exclusion of the subaltern from the structure of academic disciplines and thereby revealed the parochial and partial nature of the histories produced. Here, I want to return to his earlier work; to his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement.

Guha had started work on this topic in the 1950s and it was published in 1963 by a French publisher around the time that Guha started as a lecturer at Sussex. By all accounts, Asa Briggs, then Dean of the Social Sciences, who would go on to become Vice Chancellor, had invited Guha to apply for the job on the basis of this work. Around the same time, Briggs was also involved in bringing the economic historian, Donald Winch, to Sussex. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, was published two years after Guha’s and ostensibly dealt with similar themes. It was developed from his dissertation which dealt with ‘the optimal conditions for colonial economic development’ and was primarily focused on Britain’s settler colonies with only a brief discussion of India via the work of the Mills.

The overlap between their concerns is sufficient, however, for it to be a puzzle – at least ostensibly – as to why they never appeared to acknowledge the work of the other. Winch did reference Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India, which had been published just prior to Guha’s book and with which it was often compared and addressed in tandem. One reason could be that provided by David Fieldhouse in his review of Winch’s book which notes that while Winch ‘is good on economic theory, … [he] is obviously less strong on colonial history’. However, this would be to point to an intellectual divergence that was confirmed only through Guha’s later work directly addressing the colonial context. A Rule of Property is as much focused on economic theory as is Winch’s text and I will discuss the implications of their similarity subsequently. First, to the text itself.  

A Rule of Property addresses the debates that took place between East India Company administrators in Bengal in the late eighteenth century around the status of land, how it was best to be managed, and the consequences of this for the possibility of colonial governance and deriving revenue over the longer term. The focus of the debates was the idea of a ‘permanent settlement’ or solution. The primary impetus was that a new way of organising the ownership of the land was required and that this would be best served by entrusting its care to ‘a class of native entrepreneurs who had solid interests in the land and were politically reliable’ (p9). That is, the proposals being debated were around establishing a right of private property in land. The security of landownership was deemed to be necessary for the creation of a sound administration.

It was acknowledged by the colonial administrators of the time that they held no good title to the land. Alexander Dow, for example, noted that while the provinces were held ‘in appearance, by a grant from the present emperor’, in reality, they were only maintained ‘by the right of arms’ (quoted in Guha p25). As such, what was necessary was to establish the legitimacy of dominion beyond that which was provided through the act of conquest. This was done by developing economic theories that saw the territory governed as if it were a Company estate. This estate could then be parcelled out to local zamindars who would come to own the land, permanently, as property and be made responsible for the payment of taxes on it, thus ensuring a steady stream of revenue for the colonial government. It was this separation of the right of ownership from the right to collect revenue that would establish the permanence of dominion.

Guha, impressively and rigorously – as Sanjay Subrahamyam notes in his obituary – ‘took apart the minutes, proposals and counterproposals that were presented and debated in the administrative councils of the time’. He set out their different economic premises – deriving from mercantilist, physiocratic, and classical political economy – and demonstrated that, despite their differences, they nonetheless shared a common political focus, establishing the permanence of orderly dominion. However, this political orientation, is much less a concern for Guha in A Rule of Property, rather, his focus is on the detail of the economic debates.

As an aside – as I was reading in preparation for this, I came across reference to a review of Guha’s book, by Sarvepalli Gopal, published in 1966, who regarded it primarily as an exercise in British intellectual history, with the implication being that it was therefore of little concern to historians of India. A Das Gupta similarly suggested that the book had little to do with India ‘because India existed beyond the thoughts of Englishmen’. Guha rebutted this critique in the 1981 preface to the second edition of his book (comment and critique took longer in the times before social media) by stating that if the historical origins of the concepts and theories underpinning the most important land reform introduced by the British in India, which led to the statute of permanent proprietary rights, wasn’t important to the study of Indian history, he didn’t know what would be. Nonetheless, there was something to the critique.

While the importance of Guha’s book appears clear, to me at least, I am interested in the place of colonial histories in the book, or, rather, their absence. It is obvious that Guha is not unaware of them and, given his subsequent work, he is alert to the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of disciplines and the production of histories. So, what accounts for his failure to locate the discussions of the East India Company administrators within their colonial context and discuss the implications of their theories with regard to that? I suggest that this is where the overlap between Guha and Winch is perhaps more pertinent.

The illegitimacy of colonial rule may have been so obvious to Guha that it was regarded as otiose to even mention that this was the context in which he was working. However, another explanation could be that, as a Marxist – as he was then and later – he worked within a frame of political economy that regarded capitalism as the more significant historical moment. One whose unfolding through time and history had to be understood in its own terms.

In Guha’s presentation of the discussions that were happening among colonial administrators about how best to organise the ownership and distribution of the land under their control, there is no questioning of their right to do so. The act of conquest is seemingly naturalised and forms no part of the contextualisation of the subsequent discussions oriented to establishing a permanence of dominion. As Subrahmanyam notes, Guha also had very little to say about ‘the complex property regimes [of the Mughal period] that had been in place before Company rule’. Something that was not omitted by at least one of the administrators under discussion, Dublin-born Phillip Francis.

This flattening of history and elision of its complexities enables colonial conquest to be made subordinate in an account of political economy oriented around ideas of capitalist development. This is also enabled through the way in which the debates constructed Mughal rule as despotic or feudal, at the same time as establishing a neo-feudal settlement. The British established despotism in the provinces and then claimed that Oriental despotism was the reason that they were needed in order to bring progress and modernity to these benighted areas!

While Guha’s political commitment to Marxism shifted over time – with him coming to support the Maoist Naxalbari peasant movements in the 1970s – the refusal to consider colonialism as central to the emergence and development of capitalism perhaps blunted the force of his arguments. Even in the terms of his own book, A Rule of Property, the question of colonialism is central to the emergence of the very need, on the part of the colonial administrators themselves, for a Permanent Settlement and yet this context is relegated to a few paragraphs.

I remember giving a lecture that mentioned British colonial rule in India and a student coming up to me afterwards and asking, ‘but what were the British doing in India?’ ‘Well, quite,’ I replied.

What were the British doing in India? And under what authority were they seeking to determine the patterns of land ownership and distribution there? And further, how do their understandings of property in the colonial context continue to shape our understandings in the present and how are our contemporary understandings inadequate to the extent that we do not acknowledge the significance of colonialism to the emergence of the very idea of property?

Not taking colonial histories seriously in the development of economic ideas is a shared elision in the work of Guha and Winch. While their political orientations may well have been different – Winch identified strongly as working class, whereas Guha saw himself as belonging to the Third World – what they had in common was a failure to acknowledge the significance of colonial histories to the emergence of a global political economy.

Guha’s identification with the struggles of the peasantry in the 1970s no doubt went on to shape his reflections on history and historiography, even if he did not return to consider the implications for political economy. This was also a moment when, as Vinita Damodaran notes, postcolonial nationalism was beginning to devour its children. Fifty years on, as political figures in India seek to decolonize from the ‘double empire’, it would be a shame – to put it mildly – if postcolonial perspectives were mobilized in the turn to populist ethno-religious nationalism as opposed to being the counter to it. Guha’s political commitments would undoubtedly have been with the latter.

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is author of Connected Sociologies and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. She is also co-editor of Imperial Inequalities and co-author, with John Holmwood, of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory.

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Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher

Adi Cooper

I had the opportunity to share my reflections regarding being taught by Ranajit Guha at an event at Sussex University celebrating his career on 20th October 2023. I have had, and continue to have, a very varied career – I am a long away from where I was in 1984 submitting my PhD on the tebhaga movement, the sharecroppers’ struggle that took place in Bengal in the late 1940s. I have worked in the charity sector, as a paramedic, as a qualified social worker, manager and senior leader in Adult Social Services. I continue to work in the specialist field of safeguarding adults in England. This may appear quite random but there is a connection between then and now. People requiring safeguarding are often the most marginalised and vulnerable in our society in England; sharecroppers were amongst the most oppressed and dispossessed in rural communities in Bengal.

Tebhaga

It is no exaggeration to say that Ranajit Guha changed my life; first in motivating me to undertake my degree in the School of African and Asian studies (AFRAS) in Sussex University, and then to undertake a PhD on sharecroppers’ struggles, particularly the tebhaga movement. In 1976, when I was choosing a subject for my PhD, no one had studied the tebhaga movement, which grew from a pre-history of peasant activism and was led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party of India.

Ranajit supported me to do my PhD in so many ways – significantly by advising me to do a PhD in the first place. I wanted to go to India after 3 years of studying Indian history and he said – ‘don’t go as a tourist but go as a scholar’, so I did. In Kolkata his connections sent me to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences where I was supervised, befriended and supported by so many people through different networks, scholars and students. His name opened doors.

I had read – probably directed by Ranajit – Sunil Sen’s memoirs of being an activist in Dinajpur in the tebhaga movement. I wanted to know more: how, what, when and where the movement had taken place. I wanted to understand how marginalised and oppressed Bengali sharecroppers became the fighters, resisters, and activists in the tebhaga movement, demanding to keep a larger share of the crop, challenging the landlords and oppression in their lives. I wanted to record their history. I undertook conventional research and found written records in the Writers Building in Kolkata and government archives in Dhaka. I wanted to go beyond and behind these texts to find out from people who were still alive in the late 1970s what they remembered, and I was fortunate as so many people were able to tell me their stories.

I learnt Bengali before I left England and spent 2 years meeting and interviewing over 200 people who had been involved in the tebhaga struggles. I searched out people, followed up leads, used different networks to find them. I collected their memories, stories and songs. I spoke to so many different people, in towns and villages, young and old, men and women, in West Bengal and Bangladesh; landlords, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, peasant activists and communists, including a Minister in the West Bengal CPM government. I travelled all over Bengal and then returned to England to write the PhD thesis. I tried to do justice to their experiences.

Studying the tebhaga movement was unconventional because it was about Bengal – both East and West Bengal, now Bangladesh and India. My privilege as foreign scholar was that I could do this, at that time, when local historians couldn’t cross the international border. This helped me with my own issues about being a white English woman doing this work. Local scholars assured me that in this way I could make a helpful contribution. In current discussions and debates about decolonising, I can frame this discomfort in a clearer way.

The post-colonial legacy of guilt haunted me even though my own family were immigrants to the UK, and anti-imperialists. They were communists. In this context I remember walking through some paddy fields with an interpreter (because my Bengali wasn’t adequate for understanding all the local dialects), in single file behind an elderly peasant activist who was walking ahead of us, whom I was going to interview, talking to himself. ‘What was he saying?’ The interpreter told me – ‘he was asking himself, ‘why has this English woman come all this way to speak to me. This because of international communism’. This has stayed with me for decades. There was some truth in his reflection because I had been brought up with an internationalist perspective in a communist family.

Studying in Sussex

Ranajit had been my tutor throughout my undergraduate course, as well as supervising my PhD. I had met him in 1972, arriving in Brighton after travelling overland from Pakistan. Coming back to Sussex I really wanted to know more about the history of the non-European world. A schoolfriend introduced me to Ranajit and I was inspired. I moved across to AFRAS and this changed the course of my life. University life in Sussex in the 1970s was very different to how I understand it might be now. Sussex had a radical reputation both academically and in terms of the student experience. The radical approach to learning was why I had applied to go there: the inter-disciplinary schools of studies and the more fluid approach to curriculum, with courses based on cross-cutting themes like ‘millenarian movements’, rather than historical periods. I was attracted to the radical political activism that Sussex was known for. I was already involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement, anti-Vietnam demos, school student radicalism in London. Sussex was perfect for me.

It was a privilege to be taught by Ranajit although I don’t think I recognised this at the time – you take for granted that your experience is normal when you are young and have little to compare it with. I have memories only of tutorials with 2 or 3 other students. Ranajit spoke about whatever the subject was – he was hugely knowledgeable, and there were discussions and debates. I remember him talking about the way in which Greek philosophers taught their students through discourse. So, his teaching methods did make sense. What was this like for students? Exciting and scary. Writing essays to explore ideas. Being pushed to think and consider different ways of thinking. Light bulb moments. Stimulating and intellectually challenging. Terrifying and I was always in awe of him. Our essays would be tightly critiqued with respect and ambition. Correcting our use of language. ‘Inspirational and challenging’ as I called this piece.

He was an intellectual giant – Anna (another student of Ranajit’s in the 1970s) reminded me that he learnt Gujarati to read Gandhi’s work. He referenced Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, structuralism and post structuralism, semiotics. We learnt how to deconstruct text – being able to read other stories from what was on the surface, to see through to what was behind and the stories that weren’t told. This was his biggest legacy. Anna reminded me of her arguments with him about feminism – would sexism fade away with capitalism as a relic of feudalism? And he always had the last word. Studying with Ranajit was never dull. He always went to what was most important – issues of justice and human rights, class analysis. He also said that history was the true and only worthwhile academic discipline. He was so astonishingly erudite; he would use literature and multiple cultural references; unapologetically an intellectual.

AFRAS had a very strong identity – we learnt about imperialism and post-colonialism from radical scholars. So different to history in school. It was a great place to be and learn. Ranajit was part of that – he had his own style and brilliance. Additionally, it was special but not unusual to be invited to academics’ homes to meet other students. I did feel privileged but a bit overwhelmed to meet the scholars that Ranajit brought together. It was helpful to know that there was a community of interest, in which he was the centre. The connections were helpful when I went to India and in validating what I was doing, which always felt niche and isolated, particularly when I was in England.

When I came back to England in 1979, I experienced serious culture shock on re-entry. Looking back, I think Ranajit’s high standards of scholarship and his critique of my writing triggered a writer’s block and I made the very difficult decision to change supervisor. I moved to work with Terry Byres at SOAS, who helped me through this. I completed my PhD on sharecroppers struggles and sharecropping in Bengal in 1930s and 1940s. It was published in Kolkata and part translated into Bengali and published in Bangladesh. I was driven to ensure that at least there was a record of what I had been able to find out. I owed it to all the people that I had met. Decades later I emailed Ranajit, prompted by Shireen Huq, a mutual friend who visited him in Austria (she also studied with Ranajit in the late 1970s). I said what I’d been doing over the many years and got a lovely response from Mechtild Guha; there was closure.

Remembering those years, I want to also reflect on our politics at that time. We were intellectually and academically applying a Marxist lens and critiquing it – so my PhD was about the economic history of sharecropping as a semi-feudal mode of production, as well as a political history of a peasant struggle. Ranajit introduced us to what was happening in Indian communism at the time, including the Naxalite struggles. This had significant personal resonance for me; coming from a communist family, as a child living through the 1950’s Cold War backlash of anti-communism, parents who had been deported from America due to McCarthyism. This was another connection. I had a tutor who could make some sense of that. Researching a peasant struggle led by communists was amazing on a personal level. I was in West Bengal when the CP(M) came to power after Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule: this was an extraordinary experience for me. All the hammer and sickle graffiti on the walls and communist red flags waved in demonstrations on the maidan. This was incredible for someone whose grandfather, a Polish tailor, had heard Lenin speak in Paris. In India and Bangladesh, my communist party family identity was an asset, not something to hide. People trusted and helped me in my research because of it. As the elderly peasant activist said – I had come to speak to him ‘because of international communism’.

Postscript/legacy – some final words

Looking back, I just feel very grateful to have had the experience of being taught and inspired by Ranajit. In subsequent decades I have randomly come across people who knew his work, so belatedly I have understood that during those years he was developing his subaltern studies approach. It is always such a surprise and a gift to have those conversations. I have continued to utilise the skills I learnt, and I have always maintained my values and commitment to supporting people who are most marginalised and excluded. For the last 15 years as a social work leader this has taken the form of transforming the ways vulnerable adults are safeguarding in England.

I ceased my academic career once my PhD was published, although have developed one in social work. But I have come back to this part of my life. An American professor sought me out a few years ago; I showed her the notebooks recording the interviews that had been kept in the loft, unopened for 25 years. She wrote a blog about the encounter. That was a key turning point. Subsequently Dr Layli Uddin contacted me and with her encouragement and support, I have been transcribing the interview notes. I want to place the transcripts in archives so others can access them, reflect, analyse, and learn from these stories.

This is also part of Ranajit’s lasting influence. I still believe that this work is so important – there is an ongoing interest in subaltern studies; in the histories of people, seen to be at the margins but really at the centre. There is so much richness in these recollections of their experiences, their memories. This is a legacy that I want to pass on to others. A legacy that wouldn’t exist, if not for Ranajit Guha.

References

Adrienne Cooper Sharecropping and Sharecropper’s Struggles in Bengal 1930-1950, K.P.Bagchi, Kolkata, 1988

Sunil Sen Agrarian Struggles in Bengal 1946-47 P.P.H. Delhi 1972

The full text of the presentation is in the upcoming volume:

Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): Bishesh Sankalan (Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): A Special Commemorative Collection). Edited by Sourav Chattopadhyay, Kolkata: Alochana Chakra, 2024. ISBN: 978-93-83208-15-9.

Adi Cooper OBE is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, Independent Chair of two Safeguarding Adults Boards in London and Adviser for safeguarding adults (Partners in Care and Heath). She is a Non-Executive Director of Social Work England. She also works as a safeguarding consultant and has published books and articles on safeguarding adults. She is a qualified social worker and worked in Adult Social Care for over 30 years, including as Director of Adult Social Services, Housing and Health for nine years. Her PhD thesis about the tebhaga movement was published in Kolkata on ‘sharecropping and sharecroppers struggles in Bengal 1930-50’ and she studied as an undergraduate and post-graduate with Ranajit Guha at Sussex University. Twitter @adi_coo

Header Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (government open data licence, India)

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Cooper, Adi 2024. ‘Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):