Author:
Publication: Sangh Sandesh
Date: January-February 2002
URL: www.hss-uk.org
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.)
