Writing
Indian History
By Dr. Gautam Sen
Date: January-February 2002
http://www.hvk.org/articles/0602/198.html
The current dispute over Indian
history and the behaviour of some of its protagonists is little short of
hilarious. The sheer arrogance of the implied claim of India’s Stalinist
historians to some absolute moral and legal title over historical truth is hard
to credit. The underlying contention that the raison d’être of historical
writing has been accepted universally as the examination of variegated
class struggles is breathtaking in its impudence, since nothing could
be further from the truth.
As the writer V. S. Naipaul has
pointed out, it constitutes an arbitrary espousal of some “higher truth”
(i.e. the transcendent objective primacy of class struggles over all other forms
of ascription) that is parochial, to say the least, if not downright perverse.
The manner in which this claim is being put forward also borders on something
akin to racist contempt for rival claims. The failure, in turn, of rival
claimants, the alleged Hindu fascists, to argue an alternative view cogently
does not make it false. Their gut feeling on some basic issues is in fact
perfectly defensible, but their failure to argue coherently and scant regard for
established scholarly conventions make them easy targets.
I have now thrice heard parroted
virtually identical scripts by historians from Delhi University and JNU. The
refrain is the incorrigible stupidity of the protagonists of Hindutva and the
alleged universal abandonment of earlier historical canons by all right
thinking, sane intellectuals. This supercession includes, among other things,
the periodisation of Indian history as Hindu, Muslim and British. Obviously, any
periodisation involves simplification because it is a form of shorthand that
only captures broad contours, but that does not necessarily render it either
untrue or useless. The likes of R.C. Majumdar and Jadunath Sarkar are loftily
disparaged in scholarly work by innuendo and complacent resort to the latest in
fashionable ontologies and methodologies. In public debate their names are
dishonestly misused to dismiss a lesser breed of provincials daring to dabble in
the antecedents of their forbears. This is evidently a forlorn endeavour for
those who have apparently not mastered the Chicago style of footnoting, leave
aside the profundities of critical theory and intricacies of deconstruction;
deep thought, in other words.
Not wishing to spoil a good story
the Stalinists are also apt to regale subliminally racist Western audiences. One
leading Delhi historian hysterically denounced the present Prime Minister of
India in a seminar at the London School of Economics as, I quote, “a closet
fascist” and “Hindu fundamentalism” as anti-Semitic. The latter canard is
repeated unfailingly, on the basis of evidence that is so scandalously thin that
one wonders about their claims on other issues in which scholarly expertise is
claimed. One might be forgiven a sneaking suspicion that the real alarm,
underlying all of this hand wringing in the interests of truth and justice by
these ethereal cosmopolitans, is the fear of an empowered Indian state resisting
the prevailing international political and military order.
The Stalinist insistence that past
invasions of India were inconsequential is novel in the extreme since such a
belief about the meaning of military conquest is embraced by historians nowhere
else. Yet this remarkable fantasy is now an axiom that has taken hold among a
majority of American and British academic specialists working on India as well.
They are also engaged in a chorus of denunciation of Hinduism and its political
manifestations as a calamity only barely exceeded by Nazism. The Islamic
conquest of India, by contrast, is regarded as no worse than a temporary cricket
pitch invasion, followed by the resumption of normal play. The idea that
military defeat and the loss of political power might be a legitimate source of
grievance for the losing side is implicitly rationalised because the Hindu upper
castes have no redeeming features to justify mourning their passing.
Even if one were to concede the
falsity of the claim that iconoclasm by the invaders was rare and motivated
primarily by material greed, as well as dismissing their own surviving accounts
as unreliable, it is surely unreasonable to expect later generations to recall
that past with enthusiasm. But the historians of class struggle and immemorial
communal harmony require that the murder, mass slavery, looting and
institutionalised rape of one’s ancestors by invaders be viewed with
equanimity because, in their considered opinion and against all the available
evidence, it, improbably, lacked religious sanction. This sheer perversity heaps
additional insult upon injury by disgraceful efforts to prove that the victims
of this historical experience were probably themselves the offspring of Aryan
invaders at some point in the distant past, who presumably behaved no better.
This is what India’s historians today require to be publicly funded and it is
only the remoteness of ordinary citizens from this bizarre endeavour that
prevents unsparing scrutiny being directed towards it.
How it was possible for greed to be
a purely secular phenomenon when social life and political action were
synonymous with religion in pre-modern societies, especially Islamic ones, is
left to the imagination. Of course, it is much more plausible that looting,
abduction, etc. were subjectively experienced as the discharge of religious
duty, but this likelihood is ignored by illegitimate imputation of motivations
and sentiment that are entirely modern. A passing knowledge of Islamic invasions
elsewhere would dispel this unlikely invention with respect to India. Any
subsequent sign of Islamic communalism, which, in fact, happens to be one of its
essential and proud distinguishing features, is tidily explained, first, by
British colonial chicanery and, then, the Hindu renaissance as well. One recent
work damns all of the latter, from Ram Mohun Roy, to the Tagores and Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee, as the ultimate cause of partition.
Already a further foretaste of this
fifth column epistemology can be found in the failure to come to terms with more
recent events, which cannot be quite so easily dismissed, because too many
witnesses survive. The genocidal suppression of East Pakistan in 1971,
specifically complemented by the massacre of Dacca’s Hindu intellectuals on
one fateful day, precisely because of their religious affiliation, followed by a
considered policy of mass rape and murder on an unimaginable scale, is already
being ignored but cannot be denied. The unspoken justification that this amnesia
is needed in the interests of communal harmony must be sternly repudiated. No
doubt, the erasure of Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage and the tragic
destruction of the great Bamiyan statutes will, in time, also find
“scientific” and historical rationalisation. However, it is doubtful if
these politically inspired Stalinist “cosmopolitans”, on the forefront of
intellectual genocide against Hinduism, will dare to invent subterfuges to
obscure the fate of the twin towers of New York. So much for the courage of
their convictions!
(Dr. Gautam Sen, London School of
Economics & Political Science,Member Indo-UK Roundtable.)
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