Why is the Bharatiya Janata Party so afraid of history? It
might have been supposed that history should have been
attractive for a party which is so rooted in the past as to
have an ideological mooring that is almost antediluvian.
But then there is a difference between mythology and
history and while legend is the stuff in which the party
revels, the BJP obviously shies away from an actual
engagement with the past.
The fact that the BJP-led coalition has packed the Indian
Council of Historical Research with its fellow travellers is
not the only indication of this. That act can be attributed, as
indeed it has been by one of the Sangh parivar's most
articulate apologists writing in a weekly newsmagazine, as
mere replacement of the Congress jobbery with the Sangh's
jobbery. Every regime does throw some crumbs to its
intellectual rationalisers even as the political practitioners
feast on the loaves and fishes of office. Academics of this
variety, in fact, thrive only on patronage.
And yet there is a certain desperate illiberality in the
behaviour of the present regime in this regard. While the
Congress party itself and other governments belonging to
what has been called the "Congress system" undoubtedly
patronised those whom they considered to be their "own",
they also sought to accommodate, if not even co-opt, at
least some others who were seen as heterodox. Thus, both
the Sangh parivar's favourite archaeologists and historians
also battened under the Congress dispensation in
organisations such as the Archaeological Survey of India
and even the Indian Council of Historical Research. It is, of
course, not surprising that many of the same people who
had no problem earlier serving "pseudo-secular" regimes
should today seek favours as part of the Sangh parivar's
nomenclature. We, live in cynical times and eternal
opportunism is the mode of securing this life if not also the
afterlife!
What is interesting is the attitude of the BJP's allies, both of
the periodically petulant and forever fawning varieties, to
the Sangh parivar's monopolisation of patronage in the
field of culture generally, history in particular. The
AIADMK and the Akali Dal, the Haryana Vikas Party and
the Telugu Desam Party, Mamata and Samata, all appear to
have no say in the packing of posts by the BJP. Specifically,
academic positions, those whose occupants can play
significant roles in shaping official culture, are being
cornered by the BJP alone while the allies busy themselves
bickering about ministerial positions.
At the same time, the BJP is trying to use two tactics. On
the one side is the Sushma Swaraj stratagem to get rid of
inconvenient individuals as, for instance, through her anti-
Gill Bill. On the other side is the Murli Manohar Joshi
manoeuvre to install loyal courtiers in other offices of
cultural significance. Culture is an important element in the
Sangh parivar's strategy and when it comes to deciding who
is to man culture, the National Agenda for Governance
(NAG) is only an irritant that can be ignored. The allies
should be content with getting their seats allotted on the
low table; it is not for them to determine the cultural bill of
fare nor even waiters who are deputed to serve the
intellectual repast.
Unfortunately for the Sangh parivar, however, the matter of
hegemonising culture even of the formal kind is not as
simple as that of merely the selection of its watchdogs.
History, in particular, is a complex matter and mere
appointment of academic bureaucrats cannot either
mythologise it or trivialise it to the Sangh's parivar's
satisfaction.
History is too important a matter for that and even the
solemnity of historians cannot take away its essential
liveliness. In the first place, it is necessary to affirm that
solemnity is not necessary for history; indeed the best
history must recognise temporal and spatial incongruities,
must realise that there are oddities of perception, errors of
parallax caused by hindsight. Secondly, history must nor be
seen as merely a matter of the past: The annals and
antiquities are useful only inasmuch as they can be made to
relate to the present. Thirdly, history is in essence the study
of the future, and, like other types of futurology, it can only
be approximate in its predictions, particularly since human
agency can never be totally predictable.
It is these aspects of history that cause debates among
historians. In the last thirty years, many new issues have
been added to the debate on historiography and the most
radical of these has been the challenge of post-modernism.
There has in fact been a denial, by Roland Barthes among.
others, that the past has an independent existence at all.
Such writers argue that it is only the representation of the
past by historians that is the reality of the past. Indeed what
is being reconstructed is essentially a series of "texts" and
"discourses'. Jacques Derrida and his acolytes took this line
of argument further by stating that indeed there is nothing
outside "language". This "all is 'text'" view undermined the
empirical basis of history. Michel Foucault, Yet another
major influence on the debates among historians, argued
that the past consists of patternless events and it is the
historian who imposes a narrative order over these. The
nature of the order naturally depends on the prevailing,
even hegemonic, discourse of the time and, therefore,
history-writing is clearly linked to the discourse of power.
There is little to suggest that the ideologues of the Sangh
parivar, even the most sophisticated among them, those
who have in their time also contributed to Subaltern
Studies, are consistent followers of Barthes or Derrida or
Foucault. What is apparent, however, is that even they,
instinctively or otherwise, accept the idea that history-
writing is an aspect of power. And, since, for the present at
least, the political formation to which they have pledged
their intellectual resources is majorly into power play, they
rationalise its view of history.
The problem is that the Sangh parivar as a whole neither
has, nor can possibly have, a consistent view of history,
Gathered within its folds are some of those devoted
practitioners of empiricism in extremis: Archaeologists.
For them, producing evidence of a broken pillar here, the,
fragment of an inscription there, potsherds and human
artefacts from beneath the earth of Ayodhya, evidence that
is historically verifiable or not, is as significant as it is for
the leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to assert
that faith is more important than the tolls of dusty old
diggers. The two together only produce a particularly
pathetic specimen of cynicism; pseudo scientificism
combined with sheer bigotry. And yet, history-writing of
one sort or the other must be a part of their discourse of
power, they must fill the bodies of historians with their own
(or owned) people even as they accord greater sanction to
mythology than to history.
However, those who take history, with all its glorious
uncertainties seriously, must grasp the truth, which
ironically has been acknowledged by one of the Sangh
parivar's embarrassed apologist who claims greater
sophistication than the vandals of the Bajrang Dal, that
"history is a study of man and his blundering evolution".
The significant word is "evolution". Monkey gods may have
their place in mythology but human history is too important
and complex to be left to be monkeyed about by bigots,
zealots and office-mongers.