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The problem
THE idea of rewriting history is under a cloud. From the discussion that
has followed the ICHR move to stop the publication of the Towards
Freedom project volumes and the NCERT directive deleting passages
from the existing school textbooks, the very notion of rewriting has
emerged tainted, as if it inevitably means the play of hidden hands,
unrevealed agendas, manipulating minds. This is tragic. For historians,
rewriting is a creative act; it is the way history as a mode of knowledge
develops. In developing new perspectives historians critique dominant
frameworks – their enclosing limits and repressions, their silences and
erasures – and rework accepted notions of the past.
The past does not come to us with a unitary truth embedded within it; the
facts that historians mine do not ever speak with one single voice. As our
perspectives change we look at the past in new ways, reinterpret events,
discover new meanings within them, pose new questions that could not
even be formulated within the limits of earlier frameworks of analysis.
So historians tell different stories of the same past, refigure evidence in
diverse ways in the act of rewriting history – an act that enriches our
conceptions of the past.
The act of rewriting history itself is not objectionable. But all forms of
rewriting are not the same. If rewriting is so integral to the growth of
historical knowledge, we need to continuously examine the nature of
rewriting: the assumptions that underlie the arguments, the questions that
are posed, the mode in which knowledge is authenticated, the structure
of the story that is elaborated. And in scrutinizing the process we need to
differentiate between ways of rewriting that are legitimate and
productive and those that are problematic and intellectually
unacceptable.
When researches into India’s past began in the late 18th century and early
19th centuries, Orientalist ideas structured historical representations.
Inspired by the romanticism and classicism of the time, Orientalists like
William Jones and H.T. Colebrooke returned to the ancient past,
discovered its greatness and defined a specific notion of a glorious
classical age. It was in this age, so the Orientalists told us, that the
essence of Indian civilization – embodied in its language, laws,
institutions and religious texts – came into being. Subsequent to this
golden age there was a continuous or cyclical decline to a degenerate
present before the British rule. If India had to develop, its lost past had
to be rediscovered, its essence had to be properly understood, its juridical
and religious texts had to be translated and canonized, its poetry had to
be recaptured. The Orientalists saw themselves as the mediators who
would define this relationship between the past and the present. As
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codifiers and translators they would be the ones to discover the ancient
texts and ascribe to them their true meanings. As researches into ancient
texts and projects of translation proliferated, and institutions and journals
for Asiatic researches were set up, modern history in its colonial form
began to take shape.
For the liberals the dynamism of historical time in the modern West
contrasted with the static time of the Orient. This immobility, they
underlined, could only be broken with the intervention of an external
temporality – the civilizing power of the West. Within the frame of this
liberal history, British rule provided the moment of great rupture, when
a primitive, static, backward, caste ridden, Oriental despotic society was
transformed and modernized in progressive stages through education,
rule of law, railways, expansion of the market and diffusion of useful
scientific knowledge.
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Yet the strength of this liberal consensus was somewhat illusory. Beneath
the intellectual hegemony at the top other forces were at work. A range
of alternative narratives of the past undercut the new nationalist history
that was taking shape. We see the production of this alternative
sensibility at least at three different levels. Partha Chatterjee’s essay in
this issue points to one level. As history became professionalized in the
20th century, dominated by academics grounded in the art of archival
research, the ‘old social history’ was displaced from academia. While
this history was modernist – in the sense that it too sought to authenticate
its arguments through reference to archival sources – it was tied to the
culture of the region and the community and implicated in the politics of
sectarian conflicts. Dislodged from the academia it continued to flourish
outside it.
Beneath this level that Chatterjee discusses there were others. Within the
schooling system we see a similar layering of knowledge. The vision of
a new Nehruvian India was expressed in the histories produced by the
NCERT. Written in opposition to colonial and communal representations
of the past, the NCERT texts sought to present a secular nationalist
history that focused on our common past, our shared heritage, our
collective struggles, foregrounding the bonds that tied the nation together
rather than the sectarian and communal strife that tore communities
apart.
While these texts were increasingly prescribed all over India, the number
of schools that accepted the NCERT system remained small. Out of a
total of around 1,25,000 recognized secondary and higher secondary
schools in India no more than 6200 schools are at present under the
CBSE, though a larger number of schools accept the NCERT syllabus up
to class eight. Outside the NCERT system, within schools run by
community organizations and political parties, children were being
socialized into a different cultural sensibility.
The Saraswati Shishu Mandirs that the Jan Sangh began setting up in the
early 1950s proliferated all over the country, the number of schools
controlled by the Vidya Bharatis booming to over 4000 by the 1990s. In
these shishu mandirs – discussed by Tanika Sarkar in this issue – the
nationalist secular history was turned upside down. While the NCERT
texts were formally accepted in these schools for the purposes of public
examination, a supplementary course on Bharatiya Sanskriti initiated
children to the ‘real’ history of India.
In this history, all creativity is traced back to the pre-Muslim past, all
glory is discovered in ancient India. From the medieval times follows a
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If the past has been witness to a history of Hindu tolerance and Muslim
tyranny, the present requires the Hindus to empower themselves,
transcend their effeteness, assert their masculinity and erase the painful
history of past wrongs. The call to Hindu assertion here becomes a
metaphor for a war against Muslims. In the madrasas, as Nita Kumar
shows in her essay, we again see a multiplicity of texts and heterogeneity
of teaching. The NCERT texts are accepted for the purposes of
examination, but students are initiated to the teachings of Quran,
reaffirming the significance of defining their identity in relation to the
text. This is particularly so in the madrasas run by the madrasa boards.
Outside the schooling system, in the bazaar, popular tracts on local and
national histories circulate another mode of historical knowledge.
Cheaply produced and widely read, these tracts, in fact, structure the
quality of popular historical sensibility. Many of these tracts are cast in
a mythic mode, but they are sites of present sectarian battles. We see
seemingly ancient myths refigured to convey communal meanings, and
present political projects legitimated through mythic returns to the past.
Popular faith and belief, notions of collective hurt and wrong, do not
exist frozen in an immemorial time; they do not come down to us with a
fixed essence – already formed in the mists of time. They are constituted
and refigured through practices of cultural production and modes of
socialization, through ideological battles and pedagogic interventions:
the nature of teaching, the ideas naturalized through textbooks and
circulated through popular tracts. The politics of Ramjanmabhoomi and
the nightmare of Gujarat cannot be imagined without the passion and
emotion that this structured faith generates.
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What is this craft of the historian that I see under threat? Academic
history writing is emphatically a modern discipline. The history of its
growth is intimately linked to the history of modernity – a history that no
critique of modernism has been able to transcend. Even the most radical
anti-modernist history, I suggest, is profoundly modernist.
Yet, can history get away from this discipline of evidence? If we talk of
evidence and record, do we inevitably succumb to the epistemological
naivety of positivism? The anti-realist turn and the persuasive power of
narrativism and constructionism has created amongst sensitive historians
a complicated, ambivalent relationship with a set of binary categories
inherited from positivism: fact/fiction, history/myth, truth/falsehood.
The old terms of these oppositions can no longer be sustained, the lines
of difference as they were perceived earlier have been powerfully
critiqued. But can we merge the categories together? I think we need to
rethink such categories in new ways, problematizing them, opening them
up for scrutiny, refiguring them, without necessarily giving them up. To
throw the categories overboard would be to destroy the conceptual
possibilities of differentiating between different forms of knowledge. It
would be to undermine the very basis of history as a discipline.
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Narratives of the past that are freed from the ‘discipline of evidence’,
from the constraint of the archive, operate within a framework of
knowledge that is not history in the modern sense of the term that we are
discussing. Yet we cannot dismiss these narratives. If they are
constructed without reference to records, if they fabricate history, we
need to understand the nature of that fabrication: the structure of the story
that is told, the politics of its production, and the strategies deployed to
authenticate the story.
But when history is mobilized for specific political projects and sectarian
conflicts, when political and community sentiments of the present begin
to define how the past has to be represented – what can be told and what
had to be erased, when history is fabricated to constitute a communal
sensibility, and a politics of hatred and violence, then we need to sit up
and protest. If we do not then the long night of Gujarat will never end.
Its history will reappear again and again, not just as nightmare but as
relived experience, re-enacted in endless cycles of retribution and
revenge, in gory spectacles of blood and death.
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NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA
Footnote:
1. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, Part IV, p. 117. Ricoeur helps us
reconceptualize the notion of the trace, the document and the archive.
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