History As Politics

[This is substantially the text of the Professor Athar Ali Memorial lecture, organised by the AligarhHistorians Society, at the Aligarh Muslim University on 8 February 2003, titled History and ContemporaryPolitics in India. Incidentally, Professor Thapar has recently been named by the Library of Congress inWashington as First Holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South]

It has long been recognized that there is a link, between theories of knowledge and the lens of ideasthrough which the authors of these theories view knowledge. This has an application to scientific advances aswell as the formulations of the social sciences. However, such links between knowledge and ideology do notjustify the passing off of political agendas as knowledge as is being done in the rewriting of history by thepresent central government ; and that too of a kind not based on the understanding of history current amonghistorians. Far from advancing knowledge, this new history on the contrary, is being used for forging anidentity that can be exploited to support political mobilization. As a historian therefore, I am deeplyconcerned with what is essentially an assault on history, and the use to which it is being put is, at the sametime, an abuse of history.

Some of the organizations that constitute the Sangh Parivar have, since their inception, used education toforge this identity. It is in some ways ironic that these organizations took education as a means ofideological imprinting far more seriously those who were committed to the values of an independent, modernsociety. This method of creating an identity through doctoring history is familiar to us from the treatment ofhistory in Pakistan and Bangla Desh as well, although the identities thus forged are different. The tragedy isthat in India there has been a strong tradition of independent historical writing of an extremely high qualitythat is now under attack.

The attempt in India is currently focused on history, but it raises the broader issue concerning the natureand quality of the new educational curriculum now introduced at school level, and with the intention ofextending a similar interpretation of history to university level as well. Defending history assumesimportance because the attack is not confined to history alone since the nature of the attack suggests thatthe social sciences in general will now be targeted. Furthermore, the defence of the discipline of history asan exploration of knowledge is also part of the defence of the idea of India as a democratic, secular society.

The aim to establish democracy, secularism and social justice became the ambition of the independent stateof India in 1947. The debate on democracy was encapsulated in the discussions on adult franchise and theholding of regular elections. A secular society implied that there would be no discrimination on the basis ofreligion and to that extent the state would distance itself from religion. Secularism assumes the right tofollow the religion of one’s choice, a right stated in our constitution. Social justice requires that therebe an equality of citizenship and a priority for human rights. Earlier governments endorsed these values, andeven if their practice was inadequate, the goal was clear. Negating these values was unheard of even if theywere problematic for some sections of society.

The undermining of democracy today lies in insisting that Indian society is constituted of communitiesidentified only by religion.Since in a democracy the wishes of the majority prevail, it is said that theHindus being the majority community in terms of numbers, should determine public decisions. This of coursemakes a mockery of democracy, since a democratic majority is not a pre-determined majority and decisions canand do cut across identities of religion and other identities. It is also a refusal to concede that actuallyIndian society in the past had multiple identities - of caste and social hierarchy, of occupation, oflanguage, of religious sect and of region. Religion was only one amongst these. The focus of each identity wasdependent on the issue in question.

Pre-modern societies tend to regard social hierarchies as normal and although there was some questioning ofthese, this was not an axiom of social organization. Questioning hierarchies is fundamental to modernization.Nor was there in the earlier past any significant concern with issues of human rights, whether they related tothe availability of justice, employment, education, health, welfare or other minimum facilities. In theprocess of modernization and particularly after independence, these were seen as the necessary foundation tothe development of the nation. But today, with the reversal of the values that Indian independence stood for,they are of little consequence. They are under attack from state policies, from the leaders of industry andbusiness houses that are supposed to provide an alternate leadership, and from those supporting a nationalismthat gives priority to the Hindu citizens of India, rather than maintaining the equal rights of all citizens.This change is encapsulated in the notion of Hindutva, claiming to be guiding force of Indian nationalism. Itis constantly referred to and continually redefined as and when it becomes necessary.

Hindutva is becoming the primary example of what has elsewhere been called, ‘double-speak’. It startedas a political slogan in the writings of Savarkar and since then has been explained in every expedient waypossible. So we have had Hindutva meaning Hindu Rashtra, that is India or as recently explained, Indianness.We have had Hindutva equated with Hinduism. This equation is unacceptable to many Hindus for whom Hinduism isnot an aggressive ideology, and the Hindu religion does not require to be defended by organizing the killingof Muslims and Christians. Nevertheless, Hindutva has a following, and an influential following at that, amongmiddle-class Hindus. It has given a new shape to what it describes as the Hindu religion and despite itshostility to Islam and Christianity, it borrows substantially from these religions in its structure andorganization. This makes it different from earlier Hinduism. I have elsewhere referred to Hindutva Hinduism asa form of Syndicated Hinduism.

Hindutva has also rather perversely, been described as secularism. And now we are told that Hindutva iscultural nationalism. But we are not told whose culture is being made the national one out of the manyhundreds of distinctive cultural communities that constitute India. Because cultural nationalism implieschoosing a single culture and defining it as national, the inevitable choice will be upper-caste Hinduculture. This is a contradiction in India where the Indian identity has grown out of multiple cultures acrossthe social spectrum. As is normal to all cultures these constantly mutated and changed, within the changinghistorical process.

Despite its initial geographic and ethnic meanings, the term Hindu finally settled as the name of areligion. It has been argued that the early religions of India were essentially religions of orthopraxy ofconservative ritual practice, rather than orthodoxy, of conservative belief. Religion in India was a mosaic ofjuxtaposed cults and sects. Some of these had an inherent and close identity with particular social groups,others deliberately cut across groups. There was no single label by which they described themselves and theywere identified as Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta, Lingayat and so on. Belief ranged from animism to the mostsophisticated philosophy. This permitted a flexibility of belief, although not a flexibility of socialidentity. I am not suggesting that if belief is not rigid it brings about tolerance, although this may be so,but rather, that a distinction has to be made between intolerance inspired by religious agendas and thatinspired by the rules of social organization. There was more of the latter than the former. The form taken bythe Semitic religions in their Indian manifestations, particularly at the popular and regional level were alsocharacterized by similar tendencies.

The new form now being given to Hinduism is at the root of the particular view of Indian history andculture of the current ideology of the Sangh Parivar. This is evident from the attempt to replace existingviews that range over many historical explanations by a single view, supporting this ideology.

This new attitude among those now in power is not unconnected with their trajectory of knowledge. I shalltry and demonstrate this with reference to the way in which history is being projected. Let me preface this bysaying that the updating of knowledge is necessary to the advancement of knowledge. This involves the constantassessment and rewriting of studies that advance knowledge, as for example, standard works in history. Indianhistory has been rewritten with each advance in knowledge. The rewriting has moved from an initial colonialinterpretation largely drawn from Oriental research and the requirements of the colonial state, to thequestioning of this interpretation by historians sympathetic to the national movement. This in turn wasquestioned by historians of the last fifty years who were intellectually wide-ranging Liberals, Marxists,vehement non-Marxists, and such like. They covered a range of opinion. The most striking aspect of thisrewriting was that the changes of interpretation grew out of intense debates and discussions, as well ascritical enquiries into the historical data and the generalizations derived from it.

The so-called ‘new’ history that is currently being propagated has been introduced in entirelydifferent ways : through mangling existing school textbooks by insisting on absurd deletions ; throughsurreptitiously introducing new textbooks without going through the normal procedures of having them vetted byeducationists and historians ; through trying to control the history syllabus of all Indian universities bymandate of the University Grants Commission ; and through imposing the authority of the party in power byarbitrary actions preventing the publications of research institutions such as the ICHR. This change is notthe result of investigating new theories of history ; it is the imposition of propaganda.

I would also like to argue that the theories being expounded in the Hindutva version of Indian history area jump backwards to nineteenth century colonial history - the history that had been questioned by nationalisthistorians and discarded by more recent historians. Not only is it a borrowed history from colonial writingbut it endorses the worst aspects of Orientalism. Fundamentalist histories of various kinds in ex-colonies,base themselves on the initial colonial theories about the history of their colonies. In this the Hindutvaversion of history is no exception. We are now being forced to return to nineteenth century colonial history.This is being dressed up as a new, original, authentically Indian version of history. It is none of this. Itmerely repeats much of what was said in colonial histories of India and without even the sophistication ofcolonial authors.

The colonial interpretation was carefully developed through the nineteenth century. By 1823, the Historyof British India written by James Mill was available and widely read. This was the hegemonic text in whichMill periodised Indian history into three periods - Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the Britishperiod. These were accepted largely without question and we have lived with this periodisation for almost twohundred years. Although it was challenged in the last fifty years by various historians writing on India, itis now being reinforced again. Mill argued that the Hindu civilization was stagnant and backward, the Muslimonly marginally better and the British colonial power was an agency of progress because it could legislatechange for improvement in India. In the Hindutva version this periodisation remains, only the colours havechanged : the Hindu period is the golden age, the Muslim period the black, dark age of tyranny and oppression,and the colonial period is a grey age almost of marginal importance compared to the earlier two. This alsoechoes the views of Sir William Jones and Max Mueller. It allows a focus on the Hindu and Muslim periods whichas we shall see was part of the political stand of the religious nationalisms of the early twentieth century.

Anti-colonial nationalist historians, often referred to as secular nationalist historians, had initiated acritique of the colonial period, but tended to accept the notion of a Hindu ‘golden age’. They did notdistance themselves to assess the validity of such descriptions. Many were upper caste Hindus, familiar withSanskrit and sympathetic to the idea of a glorious Hindu past. This was in some ways an attempt to assuage thehurt of having been reduced to being a colony. Similarly, the argument that the Muslim period was based onPersian and Arabic sources tended to attract upper-caste Muslims to this study and they too were sympatheticto what was stated in the sources without questioning them too closely. Even those who critiqued Mill’speriodisation merely changed the nomenclature from Hindu-Muslim-British to Ancient-Medieval-Modern inimitation of the periodisation of European history. There was a debate over colonial interpretations, but withless effort to change the methods of analysis or the theories of explanation.

Mill’s projection was that the Hindus and Muslims formed two uniform, monolithic communities permanentlyhostile to each other because of religious differences, with the Hindus battling against Muslim tyranny andoppression. This was the view of many colonial writers on India and in terms of presenting historical sourcesis exemplified in Elliot and Dowson’s, History of India as Told by her Own Historians, published inthe latter half of the nineteenth century. Chroniclers of the medieval courts writing in Persian and otherswriting in Arabic are included, the assumption being that there was no writing of Indian history prior to thecoming of Islam. Nor was there concession to segmentation within the communities in terms of varying historiesof castes and sects.

This view was further reinforced in the colonial theory that the Muslims of India were foreign and alien.The subject was treated as if Muslims were - one and all - migrants, all claiming descent from the Arabs,Turks, Afghans, Mongols and what have you, who settled in India. This may have held true for a fraction of theelite, but as we know the vast majority of Muslims was Hindus converted to Islam. The few claims to an originbeyond the frontiers of the sub-continent were more often claims to status rather than a statement of ethnicorigins. The regional and linguistic variations among Muslims in India gave rise to many cultural andsectarian differences that militated against a uniform, monolithic religious community. Groups labelled asHindu were also treated as if they were identical and conformed to a single, homogenous culture.

Aziz Ahmed for instance, writing in 1963 characterized the sources of medieval history as being the Muslimepics of conquest in Persian and the Hindu epics of resistance in Hindi. These are the concepts now used inthe new textbooks. There was conquest and there was some resistance but there was much else besides thatshould be discussed. The conquest and the resistance were more frequently over territory, political power andstatus. Religion was not the dominating factor as is clear from studies of these epics. The fading away offormal religious boundaries was particularly evident in the non-elite sections of society - in effect, themajority of the people. But their religion was regarded as inferior and set aside, even by historians. Whatearlier historians failed to emphasize was that conversion is seldom a break with the previous way of life. Itinvariably carries many of the culture ways of the earlier identities. Further, not all the Muslim migrantswere invaders since most came as pastoralists, traders, adventurers and associates of Sufis and other suchsects.

The views establishing what is now the Hindutva version of history are reflected in the writings andbeliefs of the founding ideologues of the RSS and of Hindu nationalism. V.D.Sarvarkar’s definition of anIndian required that he be a person whose pitribhumi (the land of his ancestors) and punyabhumi(the land of his religion) had to be within the territory of British India. This for him disqualified theMuslims, Christians and Parsis - and he added the Communists to the list as well. M.S. Golwalkar statedunambiguously that non-Hindus could not be citizens.