Do we have a sense of history?

Pratibha Patil’s theory of purdah and Taj Mahal in a spurious SMS contest points to the way in which our past has been forged in the national consciousness, cast and recast in a brazenly dubious, shallow manner

Manisha Sethi Delhi

Do Indians have a sense of history? As a nation, we are not perhaps utterly devoid of a sense of our past, but our collective historical consciousness is certainly in need of urgent examination. Two recent incidents are fairly illustrative of the muddled nature of the answer to this question.

First, the presidential candidate of the 'secular' UPA-Left combine smugly linked the practice of purdah to the arrival of the Mughals in India. Second, a near national frenzy was created over the inclusion of the Taj Mahal in a spurious list of 'Seven Wonders of the World'. Both point to the way in which our past has been forged in the national consciousness, and how it is being continually cast and recast. 

But let's first look at the claim that purdah is of Mughal/Muslim provenance. Pratibha Patil is not the first to make this assertion — indeed, this perception enjoys widespread currency as a historical 'fact'. The attribution of purdah to the Muslims is really the lynchpin of a certain kind of understanding — and a quite pervasive one at that — of history. Popular historical narratives, Amar Chitra Kathas, box-office Bollywood cinema, and even school textbooks have consolidated our collective sense of history through the constructions of a golden Vedic age and a dark medieval (read Muslim) age.

Certainly, implicit in the rhetoric of 'purdah-is-a-Muslim-invention', the belief in the revered status of women in the Hindu past and a corruption of this idyllic state as a consequence of 'foreign' invasions. Some of the usual suspects of this script are Gargi and Maitreyi, the ancient women seers, as well the Rajput princess, Padmini and 'the invader', Allauddin. Our sense of the past is an admixture of prejudices, mythology and history.   

Conceptions of the past have always been driven by contemporary political concerns. Opinion has been divided, in the first place, on whether Indians have a history, much less a sense of history. Beginning with German philosopher Hegel, philosophers, historians and assorted Indologists have imagined India as a land where nothing moved and little changed for centuries — a land of incomparable sloth and political paralysis.

James Mills' History of India was a mammoth and utterly contemptuous catalogue of all that he thought was responsible for the sluggishness of the natives. Piqued by this propaganda, the search for roots became the principal agenda for 19th century nationalists. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee made an explicit link between national pride and a 'sense of history'. “A nation without history is doomed to eternal despair,” he wrote in Bangaler Itihas. “There are a few unfortunates who do not know who their parents are; and a few races that are unaware of their forefathers.” Nehru himself undertook to 'Discover India' in his magnum opus; before him a less distinguished author had already penned the compendious Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History.

Though written from a variety of ideological positions, all of these various streams were united by the grandness of their sweep, the belief in the eternal 'tolerance' of the Indian civilisation which absorbed foreign influences of the successive waves of incursions and conquests. If Nehru held up this tolerance as the most positive aspect of Indian history, Savarkar singled this out as its most debilitating feature, which had left the nation emasculated. But whether hailed or reviled, the sponge-like character of the 'Indian civilisation' set up an opposition between the tolerant 'original' civilisation and the marauding 'invaders' — and it is this dichotomy that has persisted in popular imagination. 

Commentators and activists often make a distinction between the virulent saffronisation being carried out by the Sangh Parivar's band of 'historians' and the gentler, secular versions promoted by the Nehruvian school, without recognising the continuities between the two. Our school textbooks and public discourse, right from the early days of Independence, represented a largely hegemonic version of history. The juggernaut of nationalist history flattened out the 'little histories', either killing them by embrace or occluding them altogether.

Ask any high school student; no, ask any average Indian about Birsa Munda, Kanu and Siddhu, even Ashfaqullah Khan or Khudiram Bose, and you are likely to draw a blank. Therefore, predictably, the histories of the Northeast remain submerged in our collective historical consciousness, with the region only appearing as a tableau in the Republic Day parades. 

So should it surprise us that Pratibha Patil mouths what appears to be a very Rightist view of our past? Not really.

But what does the Seven Wonder spectacle tell us about our sense of history? For the thousands, perhaps millions of Indians who voted (via SMS) it was an expression of their pride in India's cultural heritage. Television channels vied with each other to remind the ordinary citizens of their duty to ensure Taj's inclusion in the 'seven wonders' list.

The list was sponsored, as is well known, by a private company. It raked in millions through the SMS deluge its 'speculative venture' campaign unleashed. TV and mobile companies reaped rich profits too. And in the end, we have a nation satisfied by what it perceives its 'soft power' could achieve — namely, the inclusion of one of our most famous monuments in a dubious list by spending millions of rupees on a mobile service. That is, clearly, an 'Indian Idol' version of cultural heritage was successfully and spectacularly manufactured by the market. 

If the symbol of romantic (and domesticated) love remains the most feted of all monuments, there are hundred others that lie crumbling, their histories and legends untold and forgotten. Razia Sultana, the first female Mughal ruler, lies in a desolate, forsaken, dilapidated tomb near old Delhi's Turkman Gate, in the midst of the Walled City's grime and smog, hidden behind a maze of ancient lanes. No 'touristy' queues line outside her grave, and it is doubtful that it can ever be up for any SMS competition. The truth is, such market hooplas are unlikely to inspire us to either respect our rich cultural heritage or galvanise our government to preserve these legacies. Mass frenzies are never amenable to that.    

Then, do Indians have a sense of history?

The answer is as simple as an open book. Or, shall we say, an open monument.

Yes. And no.

The writer teaches Comparative Religion at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and is Consultant Editor, Biblio