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.