HOUSE OF WORDS

A new anthology celebrates Parliament's most powerful speeches and reminds us of its rhetorical decline

- BY NAVIN J. ANTONY

On a sunny afternoon in 1980, a father and son rode through West Bengal’s Purulia district on a motorbike.

It was election season, and along the road they came upon a crowd of mostly villagers listening intently to a candidate. The father, a politician from neighbouring Bihar, stopped, bought two cups of tea, and together they slipped into the audience.

“It was a fascinating speech, in Bengali, laced with humour, wit and sarcasm,” the son—historian and media scholar Rakesh Batabyal—would recall decades later in his magisterial The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches: 1877 to the Present. “I have never forgotten the effect of that speech on me. I realised that there is something in the language of each region that gets articulated in its politics and this is generally not translatable, and is best understood in the moment.”

Batabyal says he would remember that afternoon in Purulia every time he came across a roadside meeting or a public speech. “Now, whenever I hear that same gentleman speak in English in Parliament, I feel like whispering in his ear, “Why don’t you speak the way you did that afternoon.” The leader was Congress stalwart and future Union minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, whom Batabyal credits for showing him “how much magic local culture brings to a political speech”.

Very little of that magic finds its way into