Marxist to Hindutva: How NCERT history book rows mirror a battle for India’s past

The period being talked about is the same, but the interpretation of the past has undergone a discernible change.

Contested past

Indian history as a modern discipline was first written by the British after conquering the land. Much research has gone into how this history framed India’s past.

Pointing out that colonial histories of India periodised the past as Hindu India, Muslim India and British India, historian Gyanendra Pandey argues that in so doing, colonial writers saw religion as the moving force in Indian history — something that they saw as the opposite of the “modern”, “secular” west. Significantly, modern India was not characterised as Christian India despite the British rulers being Christian – thus projecting them as a people who could transcend religion as rulers and were thus “modern” in their outlook.

Indians, in contrast, were seen as intrinsically religion-driven. This also legitimised the presence of the British to “civilise the natives”.

There are examples of this. In his History of British India written in 1817, James Mill saw a progression from a backward Hindu India to a more civilised Muslim India and then the most civilised British India — thus legitimising British rule and also seeking to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. He also saw Muslims as “masculine” and Hindus as “effeminate”, and denied the existence of any composite culture in India.

After the Revolt of 1857, when Hindus and Muslims both rose in revolt against the British, V A Smith wrote a history of India where he portrayed “Muslim rule” as barbaric. Such history writing became one of the instruments of the Divide and Rule policy.

The nationalist alternative

With the freedom struggle came a new writing of history, which argued that the mixing of Hindu and Islamic influences had created a composite culture in India. The idea was to frame Hindus and Muslims as co-travellers in the national journey rather than as adversaries. Historian Tara Chand, who wrote Influence of Islam on Indian Culture in 1936, was closely associated with this shift.

Not just historians but freedom fighters contributed to this reading. The core argument of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India is that while there were conflicts as outsiders came to this land, these were invariably followed by a grand resolution that set off creative developments. Nehru was appreciative of Akbar but critical of Aurangzeb for “setting the clock back” through his policies that angered many local kings. Later works of “secular” historiography have also sought to defend Aurangzeb by showing him to be a complex personality.

Along with Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai — a leader of both the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha — also made a sharp distinction between the coming of Muslims and British to India. In his work Young India, Lajpat Rai wrote, “The Muslims, who exercised political sovereignty in India from the 13th century up to the middle of the 19th century, were Indians by birth, Indians by marriage and Indians by death. They were born in India, they married there, there they died and there they were buried. Every penny of the revenues they raised in India was spent in India. Their bias, if any, against Hindus was religious, not political…”

The Marxist turn

From the 1950s began Marxist historiography in India, with D D Kosambi among the first well-known Marxist historians. Here, “secular historiography” underwent a change. While medieval times were culturally seen in much the same way as nationalists earlier had, Kosambi turned his critical gaze on ancient India, demolishing what many Hindus considered their beliefs through a sharply “rational” lens.

In his 1962 book Myth and Reality, he took up several such beliefs, arguing that they were myths and not history. He asserted in the book that his purpose was not to admire the “beautiful lily of Indian philosophy” but to look into the “swamp of popular superstition” from which it emerged. In this, there was a break with Nehru, who saw myths positively as part fact and part fiction that pulled people out of the drudgery of everyday life and made them believe that their ancestors did great things.

The trend set off by Kosambi would emerge repeatedly among Marxist historians and those aligned with them, with historian D N Jha famously writing a book The Myth of the Holy Cow on beef eating in ancient India, thus suggesting that Hindu beliefs of the present were based on a myth.

Many have since argued that a similar critical gaze was not turned towards fundamental Islamic beliefs in India, leading to the charge that this history writing was “biased”. The argument about medieval India was that while the Ulema tried to put pressure on kings to impose Islam on subjects, many Muslim kings adopted an approach akin to what is considered “secular” or “cosmopolitan” or “pragmatic”.

After the Congress split in 1969, Indira Gandhi fell short of the majority mark in the Lok Sabha by about 45 seats. Given her shift towards the Left at this point — illustrated by the slogan “Garibi Hatao (eradicate poverty)” and policies such as bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses — she got the support of the CPI and some Independents to form the government.

“The CPI was delighted to join in, seeing Mrs Gandhi’s Left turn as an opportunity for expanding its own influence,” historian Ramachandra Guha writes in India After Gandhi.

At the time, the Left was the pre-eminent intellectual force, and not just in the country. Aligarh-based historian Saiyid Nurul Hasan, who was a Communist, was the Union Minister for Education, Social Welfare and Culture from 1971 to 1977. Many NCERT textbooks were authored by scholars with a background in the Left. JNU, set up in 1969, also had a Left slant primarily through its faculty appointments.

Rise of BJP

The BJP’s rise to power under Atal Bihari Vajpayee saw the replacement of old NCERT history textbooks — authored by scholars like R S Sharma, Satish Chandra, Bipan Chandra and Arjun Dev — with books authored by those like Makkhan Lal, Meenakshi Jain and Hari Om.

The books, which drew criticism from many “secular” historians, were again replaced when the Congress-led UPA government was in power from 2004 to 2014. JNU historian Neeladri Bhattacharya was chief advisor to NCERT in the production of the new textbooks.

It is these textbooks that have undergone deletions and replacements under the Narendra Modi dispensation, which has seen “secular” historians in general and Marxist historians in particular as ideological adversaries.

Hindutva history writing sees India as foundationally Hindu and focuses on “Muslim conquest” in medieval times.

The Hindutva camp has yet to produce a historian of global professional repute, though archaeologist B B Lal was a well-known scholar with Hindutva leanings.