The first attempt to change an Islamic nomenclature in independent India came soon after Partition. It was not in a UP town, not by the Jana Sangh or Hindu Mahasabha, but in the country’s capital, at a place considered to be the icon of liberal values, when Modern School, Barakhambha Road, renamed its Akbar House as Subhash House. It was still the India of Gandhi and Nehru, but perhaps only one teacher at the elite school expressed his dissatisfaction.
But that was an aberration. While a Delhi school changed a name, India didn’t reject its past. Akbar was included in the pantheon of the greatest Indian rulers, as over the following decades the most influential section of Indian historiography, supported and funded by successive governments, offered sufficient space to Islamic rulers. Marking a reversal, the BJP now wants to rewrite history from “Bharat’s perspective” that doesn’t gloss over the “atrocities” committed by Muslim rulers.
No narrative is final. The historiography under the previous governments can, and should, be contested. But history that’s being rewritten under the present government is not merely to eulogise some leaders, but also, and more worryingly, to condemn several chapters of the past. It cares little for facts, and indulges in ignorance and rhetoric. In 2018, some right-wing ideologues visited the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. They began their lecture claiming that the institute had been a “Leftist bastion” and they now wanted to introduce an Indic scholarship. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The institute had seen a phenomenal range of Indic research; even several of the resident scholars whom the ideologues dubbed Lefties had been working on topics not related to leftist themes.
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It’s not rewriting history. It’s a rejection of any work that has not come from the Hindutva stable. It’s history in search of new enemies, both past and present. One can argue that historiography during the previous governments tried to create the idea of a composite past because it was a political project necessary to heal the wounds of Partition. But the project undertaken by the BJP government doesn’t seek to mend bridges; it only creates new rifts for political gains.
Significantly, the right-wing has chosen the language of victimhood. A majoritarian government with a massive mandate wants to rewrite history because the previous scholarship was “unjust” to the Hindus. This fanning of victimhood makes it all the more hypnotic to its followers. This history is being rewritten from a position of authority, but shrouded as a victim’s cry.
Consider a similar instance in the neighbourhood. Hong Kong is preparing to introduce new textbooks that will assert that it was never a British colony. The Chinese Communist party makes this assertion from the vantage point of authority, and doesn’t portray itself as a victim as it erases traces of the British. But when the BJP talks about the “long slavery”, it assumes a tone of resurrection by a suppressed population and, thus, competes with marginalised groups like Dalits and Adivasis.
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Some of the BJP’s attempts were made possible because the historiography supported during the long Congress rule mainly focused on its First Family. Even the most visible symbols were not spared, as maximum names of places, hospitals and roads went to the family. Consider the absurdity of Congress’s iconography that during the 2013 assembly election campaign in interior Bastar, the party banners read “Indira, Rajiv ka balidan, yaad rakhega Hindustan (India remembers the martyrdom of Indira and Rajiv)”. The Adivasi land of Bastar recognised neither the names nor the ‘martyrdom’, but the Congress could not offer them any local leader.
The Congress even ignored Sardar Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose and Lal Bahadur Shastri, leaving the ground empty for the right-wing to appropriate these icons. Perhaps the most glaring instance is the exclusion of Bhagat Singh, an avowed communist leader, from the pantheon of Indian leftists. Visit any office of the numerous Left parties and you’d find Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. The Indian Left couldn’t locate a single icon in India’s vast history to celebrate and idolise. The right-wing could never have taken a remote stab at Bhagat Singh had the Left not abandoned the revolutionary leader.
That said, the Congress regime did record fascinating debates over the politics of history. In 1969, a young scholar named Sudhir Chandra wrote a scathing review of “Communalism and the Writing of Indian History” in the Economic and Political Weekly. The book was jointly written by historians Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra, and published by Peoples Publishing House. Chandra, who went on to become a great Gandhian scholar, questioned the historiography of the three stalwarts who gave a long rope to Islamic rulers. Chandra wrote that Thapar “wishes to establish that temples were plundered by Hindus and Muslims alike…Were she not anxious to demolish a certain approach, she would certainly have inquired whether the Hindu rulers were as ready to resort to this source of replenishing their treasury as the Muslim rulers were.”
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