How Jawaharlal Nehru wrote the history of India

In his book, Mukherjee emphasises Nehru’s scientific approach to history as a means to understand the present and shape the future, setting it apart from colonial and communal ideologies.

Excerpt:

Nehru and the Discipline of History 

I believe that Nehru, since as early as the 1930s, provided a scientific framework, partly demonstrated in his own historical writings, that was in sharp contrast to the colonial and communal framework. Decades later, some of the most distinguished scholars of the country adopted and developed the Nehruvian framework. Much can be learnt from Nehru in this sphere even today. 

While referring to Nehru’s outstanding historical works, Glimpses of World History, Autobiography and The Discovery of India, all written in British jails between 1930 and 1944, Professor Irfan Habib made a very significant comparison with Antonio Gramsci’s iconic Prison Notebooks:

‘These prison works invite comparison in both 

quantity and quality with the kind of writing 

that Antonio Gramsci produced as a communist 

prisoner in fascist Italy. There are true similarities in 

that both . . . went to history to find answers to the

questions raised in their minds as men of action.’

As Nehru himself said, ‘Because fate and circumstances placed me in a position to be an actor in the saga, or the drama of India, if you like, in the last twenty or thirty years in common with many others, my interest in history became not an academic interest in things of the past . . . but an intense personal interest. I wanted to understand those events in relation to today and understand today in relation to what had been, and try to peep into the future . . . one has to go back to (history) to understand the present and to try to understand what the future ought to be’. Irfan Habib quoted Marx’s famous statement, ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’, to argue that for a ‘man of action’ like Nehru, history was not just a directionless descriptive narrative placed in a chronological order but a resource from which one sought to understand the present in order to try to shape the future. 

Nehru urged historians to approach history in this manner. For example, just when India was emerging from the holocaust-like situation caused by communal strife and the Partition of the country on that basis, and the newly born Indian state was to embark on the path of building a secular, inclusive country, Nehru tells historians in December 1948: ‘History shows us both the binding process and the disruptive process. . . today a little more obviously—the binding or the constructive forces are at work, as also the disruptive or the fissiparous forces, and in any activity that we are indulging in we have the choice of laying emphasis on the binding and constructive aspect or the other.’ While exhorting the historians to emphasize the former, he warns, true to the rigours of the discipline of history, ‘We must not, of course, give way to wishful thinking and emphasize something which we want to emphasize . . .which has no relation to fact.’ However, he goes on to say, ‘Nevertheless, I think it is possible within the terms of scholarship and precision and truth to emphasize the binding and constructive aspect rather than the other, and I hope the activities of historians . . . will be directed to that end.’

This is what Nehru himself did brilliantly in his classic work The Discovery of India, while the colonial/communal approach was to constantly try to weaponize any conflict in the past to exacerbate it in the present. 

The colonial/communal interpretation repeatedly emphasized the ‘trauma’ experienced as a result of Hindu–Muslim conflict. These theories of trauma were often created centuries after the so-called traumatic events. A case in point is the alleged trauma felt by ‘Hindus’ because of the destruction of the Somanatha temple by a ‘Muslim’ invader, Mahmud, the Sultan of Ghazni (now in Afghanistan) more than a thousand years ago in 1026. After Independence, a demand was made that a grand temple be constructed at Somanatha. K.M. Munshi claimed in 1951, ‘. . . for a thousand years Mahmud’s destruction of the shrine has been burnt into the collective sub-conscious of the [Hindu] Race as an unforgettable national disaster.’ In fact, there was no evidence of a thousand-year-old trauma. Munshi, perhaps unknowingly, was reflecting the colonial perspective created in the 19th century. Because the earliest mention discovered so far of ‘Hindu Trauma’ caused by this ‘Muslim’ invasion in 1026, which had to be avenged, is nearly 800 years later, in 1843 when the issue was brought up in the British House of Commons! Colonial historiography since the 19th century has used such events to evolve a notion of permanent confrontation between the Hindus and Muslims, laying the basis of the ‘two-nation’ theory, which argued that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct nations. The communalist picked up this theme and amplified it. The eminent historian Romila Thapar, using a multiplicity of sources, convincingly demonstrated that no such permanent confrontation between Hindus and Muslims occurred historically as a result of the destruction of the Somanatha temple. One hundred and fifty years after its destruction, a Hindu king rebuilt the Somanatha temple without even a mention of Mahmud having destroyed it. Two hundred and fifty years later, land was given to a Muslim trader to build a mosque on land belonging to the estates of the same temple with the approval of the local Hindu ruler, local merchants and priests! No signs of a ‘trauma’ in the ‘collective memory’ of Hindus is visible until it was a ‘memory’ constructed much later under colonial patronage by their allies, the religious communal forces. Destruction of religious places was routinely carried out across religions and sects often to loot the wealth of these institutions or to establish authority in ancient and medieval times and was perhaps treated as such. Nehru himself had a much more nuanced account of Mahmud Ghazni than that portrayed by the colonial/communal combine, where he sees him as ‘far more a warrior than man of faith’ who used his army raised in India under a Hindu general named Tilak, ‘against his own co-religionists in Central Asia’.

The nationalist intelligentsia in the colonial period put forward a totally different interpretation of Indian history from the colonial/communal one, where they were not trying to create memories of historical ‘trauma’ in order to create differences in the present. On the contrary, they drew on the reality of Indian society and how it organically dealt with religious, caste and other difference through the birth of new religions like Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism or movements spanning

many centuries like the Sufi and Bhakti movements. Jawaharlal Nehru perhaps best argued this position in his magisterial magnum opus, The Discovery of India, written from prison in the early 1940s. The lessons that Nehru tried to draw from Indian history were connected to his imagining of India’s future as a modern democratic country based on enlightenment values, ‘the Idea of India’. He focused on some critical aspects of India’s civilizational history; an openness to reason and rationality, a questioning mind and an acceptance of multiple claims to truth, a dialogical tradition of being in conversation and discussion with each other, the ability to live with difference, accommodate, adjust, resolve and transform rather than violently crush difference. Further, given the current push towards a narrow, ‘frog in the well’ outlook, Nehru made a significant observation about Indian history:

‘If we look back at India’s long history we find that 

our forefathers made wonderful progress whenever

 they looked out on the world with clear and fearless 

eyes and kept the windows of their minds open to give 

and to receive. And in later periods, when they grew 

narrow in outlook and shrank from outside influences, 

India suffered a setback politically and culturally.’ 

Interestingly, Amartya Sen, makes similar arguments and expands on both these themes in a number of his writings, decades later.

Nehru drew from the Indus valley civilization, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Gita, Buddha, Asoka, Alauddin Khilji, Amir Khusrau, Akbar, Vivekananda and Gandhiji to illustrate the above. He also emphasized how shared traditions in language, music, poetry, painting, architecture, philosophy and everyday practice, cutting across religion and caste, contributed to the creation of a composite culture. While talking of songs composed by Amir Khusrau he said, ‘I do not know if there is any other instance anywhere of songs written 600 years ago (in the ordinary spoken dialect of Hindi) maintaining their popularity and their mass appeal and being still sung without any change of words.’ He talked of the emergence of the Indian civilization that occurred over the centuries through the ‘absorption’, ‘assimilation’ and ‘synthesis’ of all the influences India was exposed to through trade, invasions, migration and intermixing. From the Indus Valley civilization 5000 years ago to the Dravidian, Aryan–Central Asian, Iranian, Greek, Parthian, Bactrian, Scythian, Hun, Arab, Turk, early Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Afghan, Mughal, etc., all leaving their mark: 

‘like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon 

layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, 

and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden 

or erased what had been written previously.’

It is to this organic process through which the Indian people had learnt to negotiate differences of multiple religions, languages, castes, etc., that colonialism came as a shock. It was as if Indian history ‘ceased’, to use a word used by the African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral for the period of colonial rule lasting nearly 200 years. Colonialism not only stopped the dynamic process of negotiating differences but actually froze or even accentuated these differences. And the communal forces were the chief instruments in their hands for accomplishing this task. The world has learnt at a very heavy cost, from Ireland, the oldest colony, to recent events in Palestine (about the Imperialist role on which Nehru has much to say) and the experience of large parts of Asia and Africa, including India, that the longest lasting legacy of colonialism has been that it left behind a divided people.