Historical wrongs

History-writing has been subject to several mutations the world over during the past half century or so. In the context of increasingly clea...

History-writing has been subject to several mutations the world over during the past half century or so. In the context of increasingly clearer admission that all forms of knowledge have historically grown through a cumulative, though not a concerted effort of all humanity; the creation of historical knowledge in each region is best seen as a part of evolving global patterns.

Seen in this perspective, Indian history writing has witnessed one major transition in the 8217;50s and 8217;60s and is poised for another in the 8217;90s. Down to the mid-8217;50s, most history writing and teaching was pivoted on ruling dynasties in ancient and medieval India, and around viceroys and governors in modern India. The divisions of ancient, medieval and modern itself was predicated upon dynastic shifts, though the terms were first used as late as 1903 by Stanley Lane-Poole: ancient India ended with AD 712, when Muhammad bin Sam invaded India and medieval India, with the death of Aurangzeb in AD 1707.

Two elements shaped thisperspective: the dominant inherited frame of history-writing in India8217;s medieval centuries, and the dominant assumption everywhere that history was the creation of great deeds of great men.The age old view that ancient Indians had no sense of history has been ably contested by V.S. Pathak and A.K. Warder in the 8217;60s and 8217;70s and by Romila Thapar in the 8217;90s. Warder, following 8220;a really solid piece of constructive research, at last8221; by Pathak, affirms the existence of a historiographical tradition from the Vedic to the medieval times, and Thapar traces the evolution of several strands of historical consciousness in early India and reconstructs the social context of each.

The medieval centuries, however, posited an altogether different conception of history. The large number of court chronicles written in India in the Persian language envisioned history essentially as manifestation of human will, especially the ruler8217;s will. The religious element also entered as a constituent of the ruler8217;s nature. Thus theevents of a reign manifest the ruler8217;s personality. Hence, Alauddin Khalji conquered the Deccan because of his ambitious nature; Muhammad bin Tughlaq ended up a failure as ruler because his nature consisted of contradictory qualities; Akbar was tolerant towards the Hindus, for such was his nature and Aurangzeb was intolerant because of his natural religious dogmatism. This stands in contrast with medieval European historiography, where divine will is the sole cause of the occurrence of historical events. This is understandable: medieval Ind-ian historians were all courtiers with varying shades of commitment to Islam; European historians were all ecclesiasts and saw history in unshaded theological colours.

The historical vision in general everywhere also centred on rulers, battles, empires and administration until very recent times. It was in protest against this approach that Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the celebrated French journal, Annales, in 1929 in search of 8220;a total history8221;. In the 8217;30sand 8217;40s, dynastic history was giving way to a comprehensive social and economic history. This was a major shift.

This shift came to Indian historiography substantively with the publication of D.D. Kosambi8217;s An Introduction to the Study of Indian History in 1956. Kosambi, by profession a mathematician, was an assertive Marxist and the book altered the terms of historical discourse to class structure, class conflict, social and economic transformation. From the mid-8217;50s to around mid-8217;80s, the historical problematics centred on one or another aspect of this paradigm. And, very significant contributions were made to it by Irfan Habib and R.S. Sharma, among others, with their publications in 1963 and 1965. This was also the age of the growing influence of Marxism in intellectual endeavour as well as political and social spheres everywhere, for it was the age of Fidel Castro and Che Gueva ra, Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh. This was the age when an alternative vision of societal transformation pervaded the air.

Inthe 1990s, things have moved a long way off from that vision and have brought history writing to yet another threshold. Once again newer problematics are being constituted: the history of ecology, of time and space, women, interpersonal relationships, perceptions and images, and so forth. This is happening in the community of historians around the world. It is, therefore, a sign of life among professional Indian historians that they have been sensitive and responsive to the waves of change in the constitution of historical knowledge, looking at it increasingly as a very complex rather than a monocausal process. Religion too finds a place in this complexity.

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Indian historiography has not only received these waves of knowledge but also contributed to them. The very fact of rewriting Indian history is a major contribution, for it alters perspectives on other parts of world history. But, more specifically, subaltern historiography in India is the object of respect and source of inspiration for many such studiesin several other parts of the world and one does not have to be a subalternist oneself to appreciate this.

If history-writing then is a living rather than a dead discipline, sensitive to nuances, complexities and developing perspectives, to view it exclusively as the story of religious combat and to view any complex explanation as a conspiracy of a few leftist historians who came to positions of power and thus propagated their false historiography is a charming demonstration of simplicity itself. Indeed, when the Marxist threshold in history writing was crossed, its father-figure, D.D. Kosambi would not touch any government patronage with a barge pole; Nurul Hasan was not the minister of education, nor Satish Chandra the UGC chairman; nor had the ICHR yet been established. At any rate to reduce all these awesome changes in history writing everywhere in the world to the conspiracy of the leftists in India amounts to both looking at intellectual creativity simply as the result of state patronage andattributing to the State and the leftists an amount of power far beyond their capability.

To be fair, such few professional historians as the BJP has in its camp have seldom levelled these charges at least in public. They leave this task to the likes of Sita Ram Goel who, one learns, does full time business for profit and part time history for pleasure, and Arun Shourie who, too, one learns, does journalism for a living, specialising in the investigation of non-BJP persons8217; scandals and revelling in the discussion of virginity and hymens and has recently taken to proclaiming himself the historian and everyone else as 8220;historians8221;. Good luck to them.

The writer is a professor of medieval history, JNU