The Hindutva challenge to the historiography of India

'History’ as the past truly was and ‘history’ as the representation of the past can often, or rather invariably, be at variance. No representation of history can ever capture the complexity of all that happened in the past. Therefore, various civilisations have seen the rise of a large variety of writing about the past. These range from hagiographies, mythical accounts of heroes, fantasised depictions of conflicts, vaguely remembered memoirs of large migrations and natural calamities, as well as well-reasoned reproduction of facts, events, lives, regimes and transitions in a given people’s past.

It was precisely due to the gap between the past and its many representations that a scientific method was proposed for history writing in the 19th century. This post-Hegelian understanding of history (as a discipline) is firmly based on the law of causality and veracity. Since then, a sensible history is expected to say “x happened because of y circumstances” and also provide evidence drawn from archaeology, texts, archives or testimonies.

Departure from either of these principles makes it a ‘wrong’ history, a tendentious representation and a willful twisting of the past for gains in the present. Of course, while the method has clarity, it is not always that all periods in the past can be well-explained. This is simply because history (as the past) does not take shape in order to be written about in future. For several periods, there may not be enough documentation, evidence, testimony or archive available for a historian’s use. Those periods become enigmas for future historians, and worse still, they provide room for pushing in myth, legends and imagined ‘facts’ as ‘history’.

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During the early part of the 20th century, when movements for forming new nations by countering colonialism were gaining strength, wild interpretations of the past or the imagined past gained a greater currency. A lot of literature in Indian languages started drawing from myths for plots and characters. But at the same time, some new historical narratives were proposed to support ideologies, some for enhancing equality and freedom, others for justifying inequalities and social division.

Dr B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) was an interpretation of ancient history that analysed the social evils in India. V D Savarkar’s essay, The Essentials of Hinduism (1923), and book Bharatiya Itihasatil Saha Soneri Pane (The six golden pages in India’s history) written in his last years, sought to eulogise the ‘sanatana’ tradition. In the book, Savarkar portrays Buddhism as an obstruction to the progress of Hinduism. In the essay and the book, he depicts the Mughal empire as an undesirable episode in history. He argues that Aurangzeb and Tipu, despite being born of ‘Indian’ mothers, had to be seen as ‘foreigners’ and not ‘loyal’ to India. It is common knowledge that Savarkar considered Mahatma Gandhi with scorn throughout his life, and was placed in the dock in relation to Gandhi’s assassination.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) move to purge history texts of some historical accounts has its roots in the historiography proposed by Savarkar. The argument that this is to ‘purify’ the history of the colonial impact and the works of ‘leftist historians’ is just a convenient argument to cover up the agenda of institutionalising the Hindutva historiography proposed by Savarkar.

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Since Savarkar’s times, an immense body of scholarly works on India’s pre-history, proto-history, ancient history, medieval history and modern history has been published by scholars, not just from India but also from all other continents. Were one to go to any well-stacked library, one could easily find thousands of books on all the areas mentioned above. Given such an enormous wealth of scholarly works on history, the question to be debated now is not if the Hindutva view of history is scientific or not. The question is whether the move will succeed in making any dent in the view of Indian history that universities all over the world have evolved through scholarship over the last two centuries.

Knowledge foundation

The Asiatic Society was founded on January 15, 1784, to study every aspect of the history, religion, languages, culture, society, flora and fauna of what was known at that time as ‘the Orient’. Later, similar institutions inspired by it were founded, such as the Royal Asiatic Society in London, the Asiatic Society of Bombay in India, and others in West Asia. Scholars engaged in the work proposed by the Asiatic Society produced a body of studies and translations that became the knowledge foundation for the 19th-century interpretations of Asiatic civilisations.

Inspired by this, several colonial scholars took interest in archaeology and history, and brought to light various archaeological deposits, providing the modern world an entry into the ancient civilisations of Asia. Scholars from Asian countries turned to these areas of inquiry during the 19th century and advanced the work of the Orientalists by bringing their knowledge of local languages. From the second half of the 19th century, some illustrious institutions of Indology or oriental studies such as the Baroda Institute for Oriental Studies, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Deccan College and L D Institute of Indology were set up. They contributed to furthering knowledge about ancient texts.

Dharmananda Kosambi revived the study of Pali, and as a result, institutes of study for Pali and Prakrit were set up in West Bengal, Rajasthan and Karnataka. Dravidian studies emerged with the ‘Dravidian Language Family’ hypothesis proposed in 1816 by F Ellis. Other illustrious European scholars who contributed to this branch of Asian Studies include Robert Caldwell and Ferdinand Kittel during the 19th century and Thomas Burrow, M B Emeneau and Kamil Zvelebil during the 20th century.

There is a long line of Indian scholars who stepped in and further developed the field. Important among them are T R Sesha Iyengar and P T Srinivas Iyengar born in the 19th century. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Irawati Karve, H D Sankalia, Harivallabh Bhayani, B H Krishnamoorthy, Iravatham Mahadevan and S Settar were the most illustrious among those who did their work in the second half of the 20th century.

Throughout the 20th century, the national boundaries of most Asian countries have changed. The narratives of the past and the present of none of these countries can be complete if constructed in isolation from the comprehensive picture. For instance, a knowledge of India cannot be complete unless it is seen in the context of the country’s historical links with other countries, from Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in the West, to China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia in the North and Indonesia, Thailand and Japan in the East. In short, with the entire stretch of Asia. In the last few decades, genetics has contributed much to establishing the routes of prehistoric humans from Africa to Asia and beyond. Archaeology, today, has advanced non-invasive methods to investigate geological ocean-bed traces of human activities.

Yet, the current worrisome context of an agenda-bound and aggressive rewriting of history makes it necessary to reassert that the interpretation of the past cannot be made fodder for any vindictive political ideology. During the 20th century, the world faced a holocaust because pseudo-history was used to sway the emotions of the masses and generate scorn and hatred. A repeat of that experience is unaffordable for humanity in times when the technologies of destruction have moved many grades higher. Hopefully, the discipline of history is so rich now in its knowledge of the past that Hindutva’s speculative historiography, though imposed upon learners through the NCERT, can hardly make a dent in it.

(The author is Honourary Senior Fellow, Asiatic Society of Mumbai and Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor, NCBS-TIFR, Bengaluru)