Nightblind at noon

Despite a kaleidoscope of exciting writing, our public culture is bereft of history

Vikram Bedi Delhi

Although not a professional historian, I am an avid follower of new historical literature. This taste for history was seeded by my old Polish-Indian Jesuit teacher’s enchanting lectures and slide shows on Hindu temple architecture. His revelation of the seductive strangeness of the past remains inspiring. He invited us to believe that history matters and is exciting. I felt empowered to possess stories that contradicted some of the historical commonplaces of grown-ups.

Talking, then, as a lover of history, it is disheartening to note the marginality of professional history in India’s contemporary public culture. Why is history only professional or for schoolchildren? Why did the “de-saffronisation” debate die down even before it could incite a genuine historical turn in the country’s public culture? Why is popular-yet-professional, narrative history so weak in India as a publishing genre?

The colonial jibe (most famously made by James Mill, the utilitarian thinker) was that Indians were “a people without history”. Indian historical productions (chronicles, oral story-telling, itihas, puranas) were disparaged for being too given to fable and hero-worship, too enchanted and cosmological. While recent research by eminent historians has qualified that picture considerably, it remains very hard to deny these apparently unfair, orientalist claims. (It is another matter that the British were themselves rather given to myth-making and historical fancy.)

Admittedly, a part of the modernity of colonial and post-colonial India has consisted of the production of histories of more realist kind. But, most of this “modern” output now stands exposed for its only apparent rational-critical quality. Many scholars, from Romila Thapar to Nicholas Dirks, have shown that too much of our modern historical output has been about manipulating the past in order to shore up embattled nationalist and other (e.g., regional and caste) identities in the present. Rather than ground our futures on constitutional ideals, the past that has been made to serve rhetorically as a foundation for them. The afterlives of the pre-modern, fabulist, sacral “cultures of time” have also proven too strong in our public culture, impeding adequately sophisticated historical understandings. Although not nearly blameless, Nehruvian-nationalists and communists have been less guilty than the Hindu right-wing.

The result has been monumentalised pasts: manipulated and commanded collective memory. We have been led to believe that the past isn’t really “another, unfamiliar country”, uncanny enough to force us into rethinking our settled, more or less official, beliefs and values. Our pasts-as-heritages, our complacent sense of traditionality are incitements to amnesia—if the nature of the past and its ties to the present are so pre-given, why should we bother to continually “dialogue with the dead”? Because we revere the past, we take it for granted, despite all political sides garbing their reduced versions of it as historical “science”.

The irony is that younger historians of India are notable for their dynamism, sophistication and range. Histories of state formation, gender, caste, tribal groups, religion, human-environment relations, of pre-modern globalisation and cosmopolitanisms, Indian modernities, are some themes that inform contemporary professional Indian history making it impressive. Many debates are raging. A lot of this work is deeply relevant to current doubts about identity and its politics/ethics. A lot of it is, therefore, edgy and gripping, precisely because it usually refuses the romantic, nostalgic and commemorative, and subverts historical pieties of not just the Right but also, often enough, the Left.

Consider the following illustrations of how the past, if it is allowed to, refuses to be reduced to the convenient formulae and templates. Work by Richard Eaton reveals how rare it was for pre-colonial Muslim proselytisers and propagandists, the Sufis included, to stress the egalitarianism of Islam; they emphasised anti-idolatry and monotheism, instead. Where does that leave Left-historians’ claim that lower-class/caste Hindus converted because of Islam’s egalitarian promise? The same historian has conclusively shown that of the hundreds of ‘Hindu’ temple desecrations perpetrated by Muslim power-holders, the vast majority were temples closely associated with the political rulers being displaced, while other temples in the same areas were consistently left untouched. Moreover, the destruction of temples closely patronised by enemy rulers was, he shows convincingly, standard enough practice in medieval India, routinely undertaken even by Hindu rulers. Where does that leave the Hindutva historian-ideologues? 

Another, more general, example new research has revealed the strength in India of the phenomenon known as the modern invention of tradition. From Hindustani classical music to nationalised religious identities (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh), from the culturally and economically feeble tribal to the strength of regionalist patriotism (e.g., Narendra Modi’s Gujarati asmita), the “traditional” and the authentically indigenous, seen as unaltered legacies from pre-modern times, have been revealed to have been deeply transformed and sometimes even invented in the last two centuries, fundamentally affected by different, changing modern contexts/western ideologies. And in ways that subvert the cultural boundaries, hierarchies and distinctions drawn in our popular identity politics, including by the Left. Manipulated, romanticised pasts are dispelled, disavowed

complicities exposed, without the

historian immodestly setting herself up as the final arbiter of present-day

contentious claims.

A new cause of our anti-historicism is the audiovisual media’s ongoing takeover of public culture. Its ad-fuelled cult of the new and the live may seduce people away from the past-as-sacred-tradition and from the illiberal opposition to change. But it is certainly making us almost wilfully forgetful, other than via feel-good, simulated pasts (Lagaan).

We remain trapped between “knowledge of history is useless” and “India is a 5,000-year-old glorious civilisation”. Indeed many of us adhere to both claims simultaneously. Too many young people subscribe to backward-looking chauvinisms, even as they experience the present under the sign of aspirationality and fantasy, i.e., the future.

The task of history-teaching at school, then, must be to seek, via imaginative new pedagogy, to create a love for the complex, troubled pleasures of knowing the past. One has high hopes of the Krishna Kumar-led NCERT’s new history textbooks. We also need professional historians to take a popular turn and produce more texts capable of seducing non-academics. If only the NCERT or other reliable agencies, public or private, could also produce more, compelling audio-visual material (not a la Discovery Channel) that, scripted and narrated by professional historians, could be used to incite aesthetic-cum-moral appreciation of the past among the general public (not least the young.)

Philosophers claim that democracies are historical societies par excellence. That leaves us with plenty of history still left to make but also, crucially, to know. Despite his religious calling, that is probably what my old teacher-priest-historian believed, too.