The Hindu : Scholar who loved India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 09, 2003

International

International

Scholar who loved India

By Enders Wimbush

George K. Tanham (1922-2003), a long-time friend and scholar on India, died at his home in Washington D.C. on March 29, following a prolonged illness.

Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Tanham was educated as a historian at Princeton and Stanford. During World War II, he served with the 7th Armoured Division of General Patton's 3rd Army, rising to Captain in the Field Artillery. He earned a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, Air Medal, Purple Heart, and a boxful of campaign medals. For a moment of particular heroism, France awarded him its Croix de Guerre Avec Etoile d'Argent.

After the war, Tanham taught for several years at the California Institute of Technology, but he moved in 1955 the Rand Corporation, where he remained in one capacity or another, including vice-president and trustee, until his death.

By the early 1960s, he had begun to distinguish himself as a pre-eminent specialist on the dynamics of counter-insurgency warfare. His Communist Revolutionary Warfare: The VietMinh in IndoChina (1961) was one of the first books of its kind and became a minor classic.

In 1992, Tanham published Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, the study that gained him most prominence. In it Tanham sought to understand the cultural and historical factors that have shaped Indian strategic thinking. Indian elites, he argued, "show little evidence of having thought coherently and systematically about national strategy.''

Moreover, history is a poor guide for understanding Indian strategic thought because "Indian history is often dimly perceived and poorly recorded,'' and until fairly recently "Indians knew little of their national history and seemed uninterested in it.''

So, how does one explain Indian actions and views about power and security? Tanham focused on four key elements. Geography lent Indian thinking an "insular perspective and a tradition of localism and particularism.'' The discovery of history by Indian elites in the past 150 years was the second element, which leads inexorably to the third: the primacy of culture in India's world outlook and the "assumed superiority'' of this culture.

Finally, Tanham pointed to the experience of the British Raj, which nurtured in Indian thinkers a predisposition toward a predominately defensive, land-dominated strategic orientation. Tanham's small essay touched off a roaring debate among Indian thinkers, later captured in a volume Securing India, which contained Tanham's original essay and responses from a wide range of Indian specialists.

George and Kathleen Tanham saw India as a second home, and it was with the greatest sadness that they recognised in the last year that his failing heart would make another visit impossible. Almost until the end, Indian friends visited him in Washington.

Throughout his years in Washington, especially in his last years, scarcely a night passed without a salon in his living room at Ward Circle or, on the summer porch of his beloved home in Strasburg, Virginia. Much of India's elite at one point or another passed through.

(The writer is a former associate of George K. Tanham at the Rand Corporation).

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