Getting India’s history right

It is time to stop raising generations on a diet of victimhood

T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a great read but is it a credible record of the Arab uprising against the Ottomans? The Arab historian Aziz al-Azmeh was scathing in his denunciation of Lawrence, holding that his was a work of fiction. But that is not the way many others recalled it over the years.

Except for those nursing an acute sense of victimhood, Shashi Tharoor’s engaging polemic, An Era of Darkness, is not a serious, objective work of historical scholarship. While the British rule of India had its rotten side, it had a redeeming one as well. As Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh had the courage to acknowledge this in his widely publicised July 2005 speech at Oxford University — all without one whit downplaying the harmful aspects of British rule. That is a balanced perspective.

The best of our historians tie themselves in knots toeing a nationalistic line, however unintentional that might be. A widely acclaimed book, India’s Struggle for Independence, by Bipan Chandra and some of India’s best regarded historians, is a case in point. Partition is seen as the outcome of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s intransigence and the Congress’s inability to carry the subcontinent’s Muslims along. The latter point is Bipan Chandra’s view too. But any historian claiming to be objective would also have highlighted Abul Kalam Azad’s objection to Partition on the grounds that it would reduce, intentionally perhaps, the Muslims from a politically powerful quarter of the population to a less significant and vulnerable minority in free India. Developments since then have proved him right.

The mass killings and forced migration of millions caused by Partition was entirely foreseeable, especially in the light of the extreme violence that accompanied Jinnah’s ‘Direct Action Day,’ a year before. Then why couldn’t independence have been delayed to ensure a less cataclysmic separation? This is rarely discussed anywhere, and never in our schools, where most Indians have their last brush with history, reinforcing life-long prejudices.

It is time we stopped raising generations on a diet of victimhood while at the same time hoping to make peace with those of our neighbours we feel most threatened by. With the evidence now available, we should accept that, far from being victims, we share historical responsibility for our difficult relations with Pakistan and our border dispute with China. As the largest country in the subcontinent, and its principal economic driver, India has a great stake in getting its history right, for lasting peace to follow.

In his perceptive essay, ‘The Decline of Historical Thinking’ in a recent issue of the New Yorker, Eric Alterman observed, “A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans and jingos.” How true of today’s India!

The writer has taught public policy and contemporary history at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

Source: The Hindu, 12/02/2019

The impact of World War I on India

The war linked India to global events in profound ways with far-reaching consequences

On the morning of 26 September, 1914, the Castilia and the Mongara sailed into Marseilles. On board the British India Company ships was the Lahore Division of the British India Corps. An article in The Times, published on 2 October that year, described the scene as the units disembarked and marched up the boulevards leading away from the port amid gathered crowds: “Women presented the troops with cigarette and fruits and girls presented flowers and pinned them to tunics and turbans. The enthusiasm reached fever heat when the Ghurkhas struck up the ‘Marseillaise’... Many of the younger natives leapt… in the air waiving the Union Jack and Tricolour.”

The French had reason to be enthusiastic. When the Lahore Division and the Meerut Division entered World War I, they were the first Indian soldiers ever to take part in a war in Europe. By the time they sailed out from Marseilles 14 months later, they and their compatriots—138,608 Indians in all—had helped blunt Germany’s Schlieffen Plan. Formulated by German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905-06, the Plan envisaged a short war—a quick, decisive invasion and defeat of France via Belgium, forestalling the attritional war that would allow the superior strength of the probable Allied powers to be deployed. When hostilities kicked off, the British Expeditionary Force in France was a small, if seasoned, fighting force. Reinforcing it was essential; thus the deployment of the two Indian divisions. With the 100th anniversary of the Armistice last Sunday, and the inauguration of monuments to Indian soldiers in France, it is a contribution worth remembering.

The broader impact of the war on India suffers from a similar lack of attention, save perhaps for the political consequences—the surge of nationalism and rise of mass civil disobedience when the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms’ failed to deliver on the expectation of home rule that had led to popular support for the British war effort. For instance, what of the army that had fought on the Western Front, and in East Africa, Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles campaign? Used as a border pacification and defence force in peacetime, it was not structured for the kind of warfighting it had to endure. Its equipment was a generation old as a matter of policy, as David Olusoga has pointed out in The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire. Poor strategic planning by the British didn’t help. The slaughter was immense—whether in France or during the disastrous attempt to push beyond Basra to Baghdad. This had two consequences.

First, soldiers writing home warned others not to join up. As the war dragged on, casualties mounted and recruitment methods grew more coercive, resentment grew. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Punjab—which supplied a large proportion of the troops thanks to the British martial races theory—turned into an epicentre of nationalism after the war. Second, post-war military reforms to transform the Indian army into a modern force started a process that accelerated with the onset of World War II. By 1946, the Indian military was a potent enough force that the prospect of its rebellion, triggered by the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny that year, was a major contributor to the British decision to fold.

The war brought about socioeconomic changes as well. Oliver Vanden Eynde of the Paris School of Economics has “used information from census records to estimate the impact of military recruitment during the First World War in Punjab on the literacy rates”. He found that “between 1911 and 1921, literacy rates (as well as the number of literate individuals) increased significantly in heavily recruited communities. This effect is strongest for men of military age, which is consistent with the hypothesis that soldiers learned to read and write on their foreign campaigns.” The archived letters and diaries of Indian soldiers who served in Western Europe raise another question: did exposure to different societal and cultural norms, such as the role of women in society, contribute in any measure to societal progress in regions that saw heavy recruitment?

There is, of course, the economic impact of the war on India. A war economy is by definition a distorted one. The logic of empire exaggerated this. Requisitioning of food supplies, particularly cereals, led to rampant food inflation. Exports of cash crops like jute suffered due to the loss of the European market. Meanwhile, rising military demand for jute products compensated for the decline in civilian demand with jute mills in Bengal establishing monopolies; skewed income distribution grew even more so, shifting from jute farmers to capital. And as Amiya Kumar Bagchi has noted in “Indian Economy and Society during World War One”, the drain on the Indian economy in the form of cash, kind and loans to the British government came to about 367 million pounds.

That said, there were upsides as well. Domestic manufacturing sectors such as cotton benefited from the decline in British goods that had dominated the pre-war market. The steel sector—so crucial after independence—benefited as well. For instance, the ailing Tata steel mills were handed a lifeline in the form of a contract to supply rails to the Mesopotamian campaign. British investment was rerouted to the UK, creating opportunities for Indian capital. In short, the war economy boosted Indian capitalism in some ways at least.

The Indian national movement, and the country’s socio-economic development did not take place in isolation. World War I linked India to global events in profound ways with far-reaching consequences. It is history worth remembering.

Source: Mintepaper, 16/11/2018

A history we must confront

From the World Wars to Partition, there is a need to fill in the big gaps in Indian history textbooks

Two days ago, I watched my children being introduced to a parcel of their history — a tightly bundled up piece of the past that is difficult to confront. They were watching a Doctor Who episode on Partition called ‘Demons of the Punjab’. My son has just turned nine, roughly the age that my father was when Viceroy Mountbatten announced the results of Cyril Radcliffe’s red pen slashing through the map of imperial India. With that announcement, both my parents lost their ancestral homes, but they were the lucky ones for their nuclear families happened to be on the right side of that cartographical red line. Some of their extended family were not so fortunate.

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I watched my nine- and almost-11-year-olds grapple with the senseless violence that was hinted at, but mercifully not shown. As the protagonists of this television series travel back to August 1947, the lead character, the Doctor, says to Yas, whose history they are exploring, “It’s not just the country that gets divided. Tens of millions of people about to be displaced. More than a million about to die.” Coming as it did at the end of the ceremonies to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day that marked the end of World War I, we were reflecting on the blood that has been spilled for our freedom, but I know I will have trouble helping them work through what they saw before going to bed that evening. As one character, a Hindu farmer living on land divided by the Radcliffe Line, says: “We’ve lived together for decades, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. And now we’re being told our differences are more important than what unites us.” He is shot by his brother for marrying his neighbour and childhood sweetheart, a Muslim.

From the poppies of remembrance to the frenzied blood of communal hatred, that one day was emotionally draining. India, too, observed the centenary of the Armistice. It is finally acknowledging a part of its history that it has had an uneasy relationship with. For too long, India’s contributions in the two World Wars have been ignored. After all, India sent more than a million troops to fight for freedom in the Great War: at least 74,187, by one count, made the ultimate sacrifice. Indian soldiers fought and died in German East Africa and mainland Europe. ‘Vipers’ entered the Punjabi lexicon, without us honouring the soil at Ypres that soaked up Indian blood. Two decades later, almost two and a half million Indian soldiers would serve again in another bloody global conflagration. Indians fought with great bravery and distinction in north Africa, continental Europe, south and southeast Asia. Though this was not a war of India’s choosing, we sometimes forget that the war came into our country through the northeast. Some of the deaths of the Second World War were of Indian solders defending Indian soil. To ignore their deaths because this was not ‘our’ war would be a grave dishonour. We are finally rectifying what has been a gap in our observance of the contributions in blood and treasure that India has made in the two World Wars.

History in school

I never studied these wars in school. We studied ancient Indian history, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, etc. Back on the subcontinent, we worked our way up to the 20th century, and then to the freedom movement, eliding the Great War. We spent more time on the Khilafat movement without actually studying the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and using the Second World War as a prop for the last push towards Independence. Yes, the Quit India Movement was vital, but we cannot continue to allow the sacrifices of India’s soldiers to be merely supporting structures in our history. Surely, we can honour both.

Of course we did not study Partition in school. As a nation, we have chosen to look away from the horror of the savagery we visited on one another in the name of religion. Yes, the British played their part with ruthless efficiency in their policy of divide and rule, assiduously visited on the nation as they consolidated their hold after 1857. But the knives and bullets and the hands that wielded them and other weapons were our own. That is the conversation I will have to have with my children tomorrow. That is my history that we must confront.

Priyanjali Malik is a London-based independent researcher focussing on politics and nuclear security in South Asia

Source: The Hindu, 13/11/2018

Why history matters so much

Its importance in shaping our political ethos is undiminished, but the subject has no place in the competitive education culture

Why is history such an important school subject? And why does it not receive the importance it deserves? These two were among the major questions debated at a conference recently held in Kolkata. A brief answer to the second question is that history cannot compete with science subjects in the market that shapes and controls education today. Yet, history is an important subject because it moulds the outlook of the younger generation. By turning the past into a narrative, history creates a public ethos and influences culture. From architecture to film, and from ancient India to Partition, the Kolkata conference, organised by the History for Peace initiative of the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, covered a broad canvas to trace the complex relationship between history and culture.

I can think of few other gatherings where school teachers got a chance to discuss their classroom experience with scholars of history and culture. The outcome was a richer understanding of the constraints that a poorly functioning system of education places on a society’s capacity to cope with its present difficulties and imagine sustainable solutions.

Debates over texts

The history syllabus and textbooks have been at the heart of a deep political controversy in India. India is not alone in this respect. No country in the world is immune to debates about the past and how it should be presented to school children. To take just two instances, America’s discomfort with Hiroshima and Britain’s discomfort with Gandhi continue to be reflected in their school syllabi.

The main reason why portrayal of the past in school textbooks arouses controversy is that a publicly shared past imparts a collective memory and identity. Textbooks are viewed as officially approved documents — even if they are privately produced and have no official sanction — and are therefore believed to be associated with state power. Significantly, they do shape the perceptions of the young because children are impressionable. Children introduced to a certain version of the past at school acquire a disposition which can be politically mobilised in the future.

Debates over school textbooks seldom take into account the significance of curricular design and the preparation of a syllabus. When criticising poor quality textbooks, people do not recognise that the problem may be at the level of syllabus and curriculum. Similarly, when good textbooks are appreciated, people seldom realise the effort required in redesigning the curriculum and syllabus.

The new history textbooks brought out by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) from 2006 onwards are a case in point. They have survived the change of government. One reason for their longevity is their professional quality. They have no single authors. Teams of eminent historians worked through deliberation and dialogue, first drafting a new syllabus and then the text itself. They represent the spirit of the National Curriculum Framework, 2005, which is still in place, which gives precedence to inquiry through direct exposure to evidence. The textbooks based on it do not narrate a long story. Instead, they enable children to explore different, often divergent, themes, such as lives of peasants and women, architectural styles, etc. Archival material is cited as evidence, and debates among historians are highlighted to demonstrate the difficulties of interpreting evidence.

Problem of perception

These books mark a major step forward in the teaching of history, but older ways of teaching and conventional textbooks have persisted. As a presentation at the Kolkata conference pointed out, the history teacher at school is often someone who has not studied history or enjoyed it. So, despite a shift in historiography, old problems continue to affect the system. One of these is the perception that history is all about wars, kings and dates. Another is the tenacity of dividing India’s past into three long chunks: ancient, medieval and modern. These categories flatten out the complexity and richness of India’s history, wasting the opportunity of studying it with the aim of arousing curiosity and imparting tools of inquiry. The examination system also reinforces flat perceptions by asking questions that are best answered with the help of guidebooks. The 2005 curricular revolution has made little impact on this wider scene.

In most States, the use of history to build collective memory and identity continues. Assam-like situations suggest that education is not perceived as a means of resolving a problem. The fear that incoming migrants would push the regional language into minority status or hurt the State’s cultural identity shows how poor the State’s trust in education is.

On the contrary, schools are actively engaged in creating a delusion of an ongoing collective ‘self’ which thrives on a monolithic ‘other’. Teachers of social sciences work in an atmosphere of relentless regimentation of children’s bodies, thoughts and emotions. Fear pervades life at school, taking many forms. It forms the core of the intensely competitive environment that our schools, including the most reputed ones, love to sustain. In that environment, the teacher’s attempt to make children reflective and sensitive to details gets drowned in the din of everyday life.

The importance of history

Schooling adds a dimension to culture that we do not quite understand. As public institutions, schools carry many burdens the society is not always aware of. Government schools cope with bureaucratic norms and private schools cope with parental pressure to maintain heightened competition. The natural sciences bear the brunt of this pressure. For the growing middle class, including the vast multitude of first-generation educated, science and mathematics represent the golden route to high income jobs in medicine and engineering, including information technology. The social sciences and humanities do not figure in this landscape, yet they also suffer the consequences of the command that the entrance test culture wields over schools.

Although history has no place in the competitive culture of education, its importance in shaping the larger political ethos of the country remains undiminished. Children depend on adults to learn about the past, and that is what makes history the most challenging school subject. Ironically, poorly taught history matters even more than well-taught history, simply because when history does not arouse curiosity or impart the tools of analysis, it creates an emotional barrier for further inquiry.

Krishna Kumar is a former director of the NCERT

Source: The Hindu, 24/08/2018

Mohenjodaro ‘Dancing Girl’ is Parvati, claims ICHR journal

The author claims that the Dancing Girl is Parvati because “where there is Shiva, there should be Shakti”.

The iconic ‘Dancing Girl’ of Mohenjodaro is Goddess Parvati, further proof that people of the Indus Valley Civilisation worshipped Shiva, claims a new research paper published in Itihaas, the Hindi journal of the Indian Council of Historical Research.

The research paper, titled ‘Vedic Sabhyata Ka Puratatva (Archaeology of Vedic Civilisation)’, authored by Thakur Prasad Verma, a retired professor of Banaras Hindu University, makes a case for the Vedic identity of the Indus Valley Civilisation and reiterates the longstanding claim of Right-leaning historians that Shiva was worshipped by the inhabitants of this civilisation. Verma’s interpretation of the Dancing Girl, dating around 2500 BC, as a Hindu goddess – the first such claim – is in line with this argument.

The research paper goes on to say that several artefacts excavated from Mohenjodaro point to Shiva worship in those times. According to Verma, the famous ‘Seal 420’, a seal of a horned figure sitting in yogic posture and surrounded by animals, is strong evidence of Shiva worship. The identity of the figure in the seal has often been the subject of debates. While archaeologist John Marshall in 1931 saw a “prototype of Siva” in this figure, historians have later differed with this interpretation and some have even suggested the figure is of a woman.

Further, to prove Shiva worship in the Indus Valley Civilisation, Verma states that the trefoil pattern seen on the shawl of the ‘Priest King’, another iconic sculpture excavated from Mohenjodaro, is sign that the king was the follower of a Hindu god. The trefoil pattern, he says, resembles the Vilva or Bilva leaves that are used to worship Shiva today.

The author then goes on to claim that the Dancing Girl is Parvati because “where there is Shiva, there should be Shakti”, a manifestation of the Goddess, though “till date, no one has identified any idol or statue of Parvati in Harappan Civilisation”.

Historian and Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Supriya Verma said this was the first time anyone had said the Dancing Girl could be Parvati. “Till date, no archaeologist has ever interpreted the ‘Dancing Girl’ as a goddess, let alone Parvati. This particular artefact has always been seen as the sculpture of a young girl. It is difficult to say anything more than that. The elaborate terracotta female figurines were described by Marshall as mother goddesses, although he categorised some of the other terracotta female figurines as either toys or as being associated with magic,” Verma said in an email to The Indian Express.

The latest edition of ‘Itihaas’ was released last month. This is the first edition of the journal published during ICHR chairman YS Rao’s tenure. Historian Sachidanand Sahai is the chief editor of the journal.

Source: The Indian Express, 26-12-2016

Historian and truth-teller

Jadunath Sarkar has not got his due as he was attacked by both Left and Right.

Sitting in Jadunath Sarkar’s home city of Kolkata as I write this piece, I recall when I browsed through his works in my father’s eclectic and vast personal library. Navigating modern, medieval and ancient (early Indian) history it was and is fascinating to see how regional and national histories have evolved, the former often received short shrift in our desire to evolve a uniform, conformist national narrative.

December 10 is Sarkar’s 176th birth anniversary. It is worth recalling through two historical figures — Shivaji and Aurangzeb — how Sarkar’s monumental work was, in a sense, sidelined or some would say even marginalised. What did Jadunath Sarkar say about Shivaji’s coronation and his diversity-driven governance? And how would Indian rulers of today react? Why is his monumental work on Aurangzeb dissatisfying to the Left, constructing as it does a comparative narrative between that ruler’s reign and the more inclusive Akbar’s?

In my research on his work, used extensively in schools and training workshops, I have asked two questions: Was Shivaji himself a victim of the evils of caste, and was he not in every sense an inclusive and plural ruler as some of the Mughals were too? Here are some of the answers from books by Jadunath Sarkar. One of the oldest authorities on the Marathas, with two meticulously researched books on Shivaji, the historian has dealt with the tricky issue of how caste affected Shivaji’s acceptance as a formal (anointed by Brahmins) ruler despite his successful military campaigns and massive popularity.

He writes: “A deep study of Maratha society, indeed of society throughout India, reveals some facts which it is considered patriotism to ignore. We realise that the greatest obstacles to Shivaji’s success were not Mughals or Adil Shahis, Siddis or Feringis, but his own countrymen… Shivaji was not contented with all his conquests of territory and vaults full of looted treasure, so long as he was not recognised as a Kshatriya entitled to wear the sacred thread and to have the Vedic hymns chanted at his domestic rites. The Brahmans alone could give him such a recognition, and though they swallowed the sacred thread they boggled at the Vedokta! The result was a rupture. Whichever side had the rights of the case, one thing is certain, namely, that this internally torn community had not the sine qua non of a nation.”

No wonder truth-telling is not a favourite activity of the extreme right. Those who march today under Shivaji’s name, brandishing the bright saffron flag of an illusive and exclusivist nationalist past, would like us to forget the practical pluralism that guided Shivaji’s governance. Here’s what Sarkar says of Shivaji’s religious toleration and equal treatment of all subjects in House of Shivaji: “The letter which he wrote to Aurangzeb, protesting against the imposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus, is a masterpiece of clear logic, calm persuasion, and political wisdom. Though he was himself a devout Hindu, he could recognise true sanctity in a Musalman, and therefore he endowed a Muhammadan holy man named Baba Yaqut with land and money and installed him at Keleshi. All creeds had equal opportunities in his service and he employed a Muslim secretary named Qazi Haidar, who, after Shivaji’s death, went over to Delhi and rose to be chief justice of the Mughal Empire.”

If Sarkar’s rendering of Shivaji pricks the Hindu right, his voluminous work on the Mughals and especially Aurangzeb, has made him the unfair target of some Left and “Marxist” historians.

Sarkar wrote at the end of his vast five-volume study of Aurangzeb: “Aurangzeb did not attempt such an ideal [of nation-making], even though his subjects formed a very composite population.and he had no European rivals hungrily watching to destroy his kingdom. On the contrary, he deliberately undid the beginnings of a national and rational policy which Akbar had set on foot.” Akbar had successfully converted “a military monarchy into a national state”. Aurangzeb failed precisely on this score. Whereas the “liberal Akbar, the self-indulgent Jahangir, and the cultured Shah Jahan had welcomed Shias in their camps and courts and given them the highest offices”, the “orthodox Aurangzeb.barely tolerated them as a necessary evil”. The latter’s conflict with the Rajputs and “the hated poll-tax (jaziya)” lent Shivaji the aura of a Hindu “national” leader in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Shivaji or Akbar, Aurangzeb or Babur, it is strange and telling how we pick, and exclude, those aspects from the figures of the past that do not suit our own perceived contemporary realities.

It is when we as a society and people, are able calmly and confidently to appreciate the works of scholars — whatever side of the ideological spectrum we may place them — on the objective merit of their work, that a truly modern consciousness could be born. Sarkar, once the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, historian of India from the 17th to the 18th century, a moving force behind the Indian Historical Records Commission, and the forerunner of the National Archives of India, is undoubtedly one such person.

The writer is a civil rights activist, educationist and journalist

Source: Indian Express, 10-12-2016

Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood figure’

Scholar Audrey Truschke says we should not make the error of attributing Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry

In an email interview, Audrey Truschke, Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, shares withAnuradha Raman the experiences of writing her book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, to be published in February 2016, and argues forcefully in favour of acknowledging diversity in India.

The present Bharatiya Janata Party government believes Mughals are not part of India’s history. Your book is about how Sanskrit, sought to be made mainstream by the government, flourished under the Mughals. How do we reconcile the two?

We don’t reconcile the two perspectives. Rather, we ask two key questions. One, who is on firmer historical ground in their claims? Two, what are the political reasons for the BJP wanting to erase the Mughals (or at least most of the Mughals) from India’s past? The bulk of my work concerns the honest excavation of history. The Mughals are a significant part of Indian history, and Sanskrit is a significant part of the story of the Mughal empire. Those facts may be inconvenient for the BJP and others, but as a historian I do not temper my investigation of the past in deference to present-day concerns. However, I realise that history matters in the present, perhaps especially in modern South Asia. One present-day implication of my work is to point up the flimsy basis of the BJP’s version of India’s past.

In an ironical way, as the present government fights to push Sanskrit into mainstream discourse, your work concentrates on the Mughals, whom the BJP dislikes, and their engagement with Sanskrit.

The BJP only wants a certain version of Sanskrit in the mainstream. They no doubt love Kalidasa, but I cannot imagine the BJP endorsing students to read the Sanskrit accounts of the Mughals written by Jains in the 16th and 17th centuries. India has a great treasure in its Sanskrit tradition, but that treasure is not only classical poetry and the Indian epics, but also the immense diversity of Sanskrit literature.

Who were the Mughal rulers under whom there was active exchange of Sanskrit and Persian ideas, in your account?

Sanskrit flourished in the royal Mughal court primarily under three emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. However, we should not make the error of attributing Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry. Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood historical figure who has suffered perhaps more than any of the other Mughal rulers from present-day biases. There are two main reasons why Sanskrit ceased to be a major part of Mughal imperial life during Aurangzeb’s rule. One, during the 17th century, Sanskrit was slowly giving way to Hindi. This was a wider literary shift in the subcontinent, and even under Shah Jahan we begin to see imperial attention directed towards Hindi-language intellectuals at the expense of Sanskrit. Aurangzeb’s reign simply happen to coincide with the waning of Sanskrit and the rise of literary Hindi.

Second, as most Indians know, Aurangzeb beat out Dara Shikoh for the Mughal throne. Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a series of cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s and 1650s. Thus, from Aurangzeb’s perspective, breaking Mughal ties with the Sanskrit cultural world was a way to distinguish his idioms of rule from those of the previous heir apparent. In short, Aurangzeb decided to move away from what little remained of the Mughal interest in Sanskrit as a political decision, rather than as a cultural or religious judgment.

As a side note, let me clarify that while Akbar inaugurated Mughal engagements with Sanskrit, he did so for slightly different reasons than many people think. Akbar’s reputation is that he was open-minded and tolerant, almost a protosecular figure. This can be a misleading characterisation. Akbar was interested in Sanskrit for its political valence in his empire, not as some personal religious quest. Akbar also had no qualms about harshly judging perspectives that he viewed as beyond the pale. A good example is that he questioned Jain thinkers about whether they were monotheists because to be otherwise would mean being evicted from the Mughal court (Jains assured him that they believed in God).

What was the interaction between the Mughal elites and Brahmin Hindus and Jain religious groups like?

Brahmans, for example, assisted with Mughal translations of Sanskrit texts into Persian. The method was that Brahmans would read the Sanskrit text, verbally translate it into Hindi (their shared language with the Mughals), and then the Mughals would write down the translation in Persian. Jains and Brahmans alike assisted the Mughals with astrology. Brahmans cast Sanskrit-based horoscopes for the Mughal royal family. On at least one occasion, Jains performed a ceremony to counteract an astrological curse on Jahangir’s newborn daughter. My forthcoming book, Culture of Encounters, devotes an entire chapter to reconstructing the social history of links between Mughal elites and Brahmans/Jains.

You argue that the ideology underpinning violence — such as what took place in the 2002 pogrom, in which more than 1,000 Muslims died, or the current intolerance towards them — erases Mughal history and writes religious conflicts into Indian history where there was none, thereby justifying modern religious intolerance. Is it correct to then deduce that there was no religious conflict in the court of the Mughals?

No. First, there was plenty of violence in Mughal India. Violence and conflict are enduring features of the human experience and I would never suggest otherwise. Even under Akbar, violence was commonplace. A far trickier question, however, is, how much Mughal-led violence was religious-based or motivated by religious conflicts? Generally, the Mughals acted violently towards political foes (whether they were Rajput, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise was irrelevant). It is very difficult for many modern people to accept that violence in pre-modern India was rarely religiously motivated. In this sense, pre-colonial India looked very different than pre-modern Europe, for example. But we lack historical evidence that the Mughals attacked religious foes. On the contrary, some scholars have even suggested that modern “Western” ideas about religious toleration were, in part, inspired by what early European travellers witnessed in the Mughal Empire.

That said, there were limited instances when the Mughals persecuted specific individuals over religious differences. A good example is that Akbar sent a few of the Muslim ulama on hajj to Mecca, which meant that they were effectively exiled from the court. Some of these ulama were murdered on their way out of India.

Is there a problem with a Marxist interpretation of history as is being argued now by the BJP government?

Marxist history is limiting, in my opinion. This strain of thought tends to emphasise social class and economic factors in determining historical trajectories. Modern historians have a much wider range of approaches at their disposal that better situate us to understand other aspects of the past.

Mughal history is such a contentious part of history in the Hindu nationalist imagination. How do you propose to shed light, and create space for a scholarly engagement with the period? It also comes at a time when there is a wave of revisionism in India.

My approach is that of a historian. I seek primary sources from numerous languages and archives, read deeply in secondary scholarship, and attempt to reconstruct the most accurate vision of pre-colonial India possible. My work has plenty of present-day implications, but those come secondary and explicitly after the serious historical work. This approach is unappealing to many in modern India (and across the world). It is painstaking, requires specialist knowledge, can be slow, and often leads to nuanced conclusions. But there are also plenty of people, non-academics, who view what is going on in modern India with scepticism. For those who want it, my work offers a historically sound foundation for challenging modern political efforts to revise the past.

What are the dangers of rewriting history?

So far as the dangers of rewriting history and subscribing to narrow interpretations of specific texts, there are many risks. One is that we risk rising intolerance going forward, something already witnessed on both popular and elite levels in 21st century India. Another risk is that we cheapen the past. India has a glorious history and one of the richest literary inheritances of any place on earth — it would be unfortunate to constrict our minds to the point where we can no longer appreciate these treasures.

You argue that “a more divisive interpretation of the relationship between the Mughals and Hindus actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947”, a legacy that the present Modi government appears to have inherited. But while the British positioned themselves as neutral saviours, who will emerge as the neutral saviours now?

In the BJP vision, I believe that the new saviour is the BJP itself and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups that will restore India to its proper, true nature as a land for Hindus. This is an appealing ideology for many people, which is part of what makes it so dangerous. I maintain that India’s greatness is found in its astonishing diversity, not some invented, anachronistic, monolithic Hindu past. Part of the sad irony of the BJP’s emphasis on rewriting Indian history is precisely that India has a deep and compelling history, which so many seem intent to ignore.

ndanu@ thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Aurangzeb, Audrey Truschke, Mughals, Indian history

Was Rana Pratap great, or just heroic?

Akshaya Mukul

New Delhi:





Politics Puts History Under Stress

History is under great stress these days with not a single week passing when a new narrative of past events and individuals is not being introduced. Latest is from home minister Rajnath Singh regretting that Rajput warrior Maharana Pratap has not got the same respect as Akbar despite putting up a great resistance against him.Singh's angst was immediately noticed with the Haryana government issuing public advertisement remembering the Rajput warrior. In this attempt to canonize Pratap, reputed accounts have taken a back seat and emotions are running high.
`Veer Vinod' based on Me war Records is one historical account that is taken seriously by professional historians.Writers of `Veer Vinod' knew both Persian and Sanskrit and the text does refer to Rana Pratap as a heroic figure.Somehow, that account does not put him on the same pedestal as Akbar, who had a panIndian presence.
Eminent historian Irfan Habib says, “This controversy was first created by Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava in the 1940s when as a biographer of Akbar he said both Shivaji and Rana Pratap were great figures.“ He says even Colonel Todd, the author of `Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan' also called him heroic. “No one denies he was not heroic.Even his opponents admit it.But that is it,“ Habib says, adding that one reason for Pratap's lack of stature was internal conflicts of Rajput principalities like the Mewar House and Jaipur House. For instance, Man Singh was on Akbar's side and part of Jaipur House. Under Man Singh Akbar's army crossed Indus.
Habib says this is an attempt to re-invent history and remembers former NCERT director raising Rana Pratap debate during Vajpayee's time too. However, Sardindu Mukherji, member of the ICHR and vocal among right wing historians, has his own narrative which he blames India's “progressive left for distorting history“.“They are jihad friendly ,“ he says, adding that history of Hindu resistance has not been recognized and therefore Rana Pratap has been relegated, what he claims, to the margins. Mukherji also does not think too much of the fact that Rajput generals were at the helm of Akbar's army and dismisses them as “co-option of few defeated people“.To an analogy that Rana Pratap was like Arvind Kejriwal whose ability as a campaigner is limited to Delhi, Mukherji says, “National reach has to be balanced against national resurgence.“ He also says, without citing any source, that Akbar called himself a `ghazhi', one who kills unbelievers in jihad.
Delhi University historian Seema Alavi finds the comparison between Pratap and Akbar disconcerting. “I feel historical figures are being invoked for political gains,“ she says, adding that based on a set of documents any historical figure can be projected in a certain way . “A larger context is built through inter-textual and inter-disciplinary research. One cannot talk about any historical figure through one archive,“ she explains.
Farhat Hasan, another DU professor, is more direct and says there is very little evidence to back the claim that Rana Pratap was as big as Akbar. “It is an attempt to communalise history , distort history, appropriate history to promote right-wing ideology's divisive agenda,“ he says, adding that “heroes are created only through fabrication“ in which bazaar gossip becomes historical narrative.

Cambridge univ historian Christopher Bayly dead

Srijana Das





With the death of Cambridge University historian Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, 70, who suffered a huge heart attack in Chicago, the world has lost a top historian who unearthed the roots of Indian nationalism.“Chris was one of the greatest historians of India,“ says Shahid Amin. Bayly's path-breaking research analysed how often overlooked players, from peasants to merchants, moneylenders, mofussil gentry, politicians and spies, contributed to the making of modern India.Themes analysed by Bayly radically reshaped understandings of India's past -and remain deeply relevant today . “Studying Allahabad's intricate local politics, he captured two schools of nationalism -Madan Mo han Malaviya's Hindu kind and Motilal Nehru's Western sort. From analysing sherwanis and other sartorial styles in the Indian imagination to procuring the entire run of a newspaper edited by Malviya for the National Archives, Bayly's contribution to India was immense,“ Amin remarks.
Bayly's work was pioneering in linking local histories to the national -and global. Ramachandra Guha comments, “Chris Bayly was a historian who constantly asked new questions. His work explained important continuities across time for instance, he showed links between Mughal, British and post-colonial styles of intelligencegathering. He showed 18th century India as creative and enterprising, not in apathetic Mughal decline. Forever excited about new sources, he wrote about the first wave of globalization to impact the world.“
Amin says Bayly's sweep broke across cantankerous ideological divides that could narrow historians' vision. “At a time when history is understood to be very `national', Chris Bayly's work was admired across the world. We became friends in 1973,“ Amin recounts. “He wasn't a typical Oxbridge don. He was very open-minded, very excited by things around him, deeply committed to teaching a vast numbers of students who looked up to him.“

Rats not responsible for ‘Black Death’ in medieval Europe: study

A study has revealed that black rats, considered to be behind the outbreaks of bubonic plague or the infamous “Black Death” which wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages, may not have been to blame for numerous outbreaks.

The study, “Climate-driven introduction of the Black Death and successive plague reintroductions into Europe” has been published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), according to a report in the BBC.

The scientists who authored the study believe that the culprit instead was the Giant Gerbil, another rodent species, as well as climate change.

“If we're right, we'll have to rewrite that part of history,” the report quoted Nils Christian Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, as saying.

Stenseth and his colleagues compared tree-ring records from Europe with 7,711 historical plague outbreaks to see if the weather conditions would have been optimum for a rat-driven outbreak.

He said: "For this, you would need warm summers, with not too much precipitation. Dry but not too dry. And we have looked at the broad spectrum of climatic indices, and there is no relationship between the appearance of plague and the weather."

Instead, the team believes that specific weather conditions in Asia may have caused the giant gerbil to thrive. And this then later led to epidemics in Europe.

"We show that wherever there were good conditions for gerbils and fleas in central Asia, some years later the bacteria shows up in harbour cities in Europe and then spreads across the continent," Stenseth added.

He said that a wet spring followed by a warm summer would cause gerbil numbers to boom.

"Such conditions are good for gerbils. It means a high gerbil population across huge areas and that is good for the plague," he added.

The fleas, which also do well in these conditions, would then jump to domestic animals or to humans.

And because this was a period when trade between the East and West was at a peak, the plague was most likely brought to Europe along the Silk Road, Stenseth explained.

Nov 14 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Jawaharlal Nehru: Tribute or Elegy?





Champion of national, institutionalised modernity

A contest is on to claim the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, whose daughter and grandson also became prime ministers. The rival claimants are keen on appropriation, for the purpose of denying the other possession. But of real value is the substance of his legacy , which partisan distortion no less than outright ignorance has obfuscated. A rabid socialist-atheist who, apart from begetting a dynasty , smothered India's spiritual soul as well as the economy -this is how the opponents of the Nehruvian idea of India as a plural democracy where people of all faiths can live in harmony and dignity wish to portray him. Nothing could be farther from the truth.Nehru was a builder of institutions, in politics, administration, education, science and the economy . Don't spare me, he told Shankar, the cartoonist, setting a democratic standard for the attitude towards dissent that his epigones in the prime ministerial chair have not lived up to.
He set up the Planning Commission, where the finest economists of Euro pe and the US brainstormed, rather than determined sectoral allocations.
He initiated India's space and atomic programmes, set up the Indian Insti tutes of Technology (IITs) along with the state sector steel plants, dams and machine tool factories that many graduates of these IITs mock gratuitously , without appreciating that their time coordinates made these public enterprises the building blocks of India's economic muscle. He set up term-lending financial institutions -IFCI, ICICI and IDBI -to transfer the public's savings to Indian capitalists, who also were given the benefit of a protected market and demand from purchasing power generated by public investment in infrastructure. Capitalist is as capitalist does.
Nehru's own party men have focused on his milestones than on the direction of the journey the nation needed to undertake, to redeem its tryst with destiny in full. In adapting Nehru's vision to contemporary challenges, they have been timid. This has made space for the opponents of his idea of India to lay claim to his mantle.

Nov 12 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Nehru vs Patel vs Ambedkar

Sagarika Ghose





Political contests over historical figures do a disservice to their legacy

Jawaharlal Nehru's 125th birth anniversary nears and the tug of war over history has begun.Nehru is our family property , shouts Congress. Nehru neglected Patel, yells BJP.Blasphemy to compare Narendra Modi to Indira Gandhi, says Congress. Indira Gandhi personified Indian nationalism above all else, says BJP. Vivekananda was the icon of Hindu nationalism, asserts BJP. Ambedkar belongs entirely to us, asserts BSP. Shivaji is the exclusive monopoly of Shiv Sena, and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh the preferred political symbols for those who want to attack Congress.
As India celebrates the Nehru quasquicentennial this week, the question arises, why are modern India's heroes all drawn from the freedom struggle or even earlier? The only heroes a globalising India seems to possess are those from the freedom era. Also, in the process of `remembering' these figures and trapping them in contemporary politics, are we in fact destroying everything they stood for?
Historical figures provide legitimacy to politicians. Congress has harnessed pre-Independence stalwarts to the cause of the Gandhi family . A party ossified by dynasty and paralysed by high command culture still believes it carries a halo because of its monopoly rights over the freedom struggle.
BJP and Sangh Parivar at first lacked mainstream political icons, instead drawing margdarshaks from religion and mythology. But now that BJP straddles the political centre stage it seeks to capture Congress's `neglected icons' to confer on itself the moral and ethical legitimacy of the founding fathers. A reinvented identity has created an ancestral longing for a political heritage more immediate than the Ramayana. Thus BJP and Sangh have hit upon Patel as their messiah of the moment, given that RSS sarsanghchalaks Golwalkar and Hegdewar are not known to have played a stellar role in the national movement. Bahujan Samaj Party has attempted a similar monopoly over Ambedkar.Ambedkar's highly modernist vision has been entirely buried by the usurpation of the entire Ambedkarite lexicon by BSP. Ambedkar detested idolatry and hero-worship. Yet BSP has made Ambedkar into a demigod, dotting the UP landscape with his statues. Indian citizens have paid a price. Caged as a `Dalit icon', many have no idea about Ambedkar the modern Indian committed to annihilating caste and social orthodoxy .
The Modi government has decided to `out-statue' the statue culture of BSP and take idolatry to the soaring heights of a 240 metres tall statue of Patel. Instead of statues, why not commission a series of independent scholarly works into Patel's life and thought? Instead of Congress naming close to 500 schemes after Nehru-Gandhi family, why not support independent writings and scholarship on Nehru's legacy?
But history is now competitive politics. So harnessed is history to party politics that any complex understanding of the past is attacked as vociferously as a political opponent. James Laine's book on Shivaji is not seen as book of history but as an anti-NCP-Shiv Sena document; Romila Thapar is not a doyenne of history, she becomes a political `enemy' of the Hindu rashtra; A K Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas cannot be studied in Delhi University because it conflicts with ABVP's notion of the Ramayana. In the process, future citizens are not allowed to access varied readings of the past because the history class is turning them into political activists.
The tussle between Nehru and Sar dar is now like an electoral contest, complete with competitive advertisements and sloganeering. Yet as Neerja Singh demonstrates in her book Agreement Within Differences, they were lifelong allies who may have had differences in opinion, but they were hardly `rivals'.
For Modi, invoking Patel is a means to establish his credentials as an assertive nationalist, the He-man who talks tough on national security. For Sonia Gandhi, Nehru is a shield to stave off challenges to the embattled dynasty. The run for unity event on Patel's birth anniversary was not exactly a mass event, rather a wellchoreographed political exercise designed to confer Patel's aura on a PM who until recently had claimed Golwalkar as his inspiration, the Golwalkar-led RSS having been banned by Patel after the Mahatma's assassination. But historical facts are expendable in the race to capture ancestors. Congress wears the Nehru jacket but would Nehru have approved of the high command culture or of the Emergency?
It's time to reclaim history from politicians and make it bipartisan. Netas are rampaging over history because India's historians ­ except a few like Romila Thapar and Ramachandra Guha ­ are not committed to writing accessible popular history. The teledons, or TV academics, in other countries ­ Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson or Mary Beard ­ have emerged from their cloisters to bring in newer audiences to their academic enquiries.
But in India we have a plethora of politics over Nehru but hardly any accessible account of his political journey. We have Ambedkar statues but no widely disseminated works on his modern vision; we are about to get a Patel statue but as a figure tied to a party ideology .Political warfare over icons does immense disservice to their legacy .
Nehru's 125th birth anniversary celebrations have already been marked by competitive Congress-BJP committees.Instead of war by committees, why not create a bipartisan platform that is able to evoke Nehru not as a Congress politician but as a modernist and democrat who probably would have encouraged a genuine debate on his life and work.

Sep 30 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Aryan Migration Theory may Soon Become History

Ritika Chopra

New Delhi





DU's Sanskrit dept kickstarts project to prove Aryans were not foreigners

Delhi University's Sanskrit department has thrown its weight behind a project that could possibly rewrite history to fit the Sangh Parivar's view of India's past -a move that's likely to gain political colour considering the resounding victory of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party in the general election.Here's what most history books tell us -first there was the Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in places such as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Then, around 3,500 years ago, this went into decline as the Aryan nomadic tribes crossed the mountains and entered India. But the Hindu nationalist narrative, as espoused by the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates, disputes what they call a European-imposed narrative. They say the Aryans were an indigenous people -not migrants.
The project was announced last week by Delhi University's Sanskrit department in the presence of OP Kohli -a BJP leader recently appointed Gujarat governor -and vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh at an event marking 60 years of Sanskrit research.Sanskrit department head Ramesh Bharadwaj strongly denied that this was an attempt to validate a particular party line and that he was only interested in putting forward a convincing academic argument. Singh for his part has come under intense criticism for implementing a four-degree undergraduate programme that's been withdrawn after the new government was formed.
The project is unlikely to find the support of the university's history department. “This is a meaningless debate. We all now know that the entire human race can trace its ancestry back to Africa. So how does it matter whether Aryans were indigenous to our country or were outsiders? There are far more serious issues of archaeological and scientific research that need to addressed in our country ,“ said Nayanjot Lahiri, a professor of archaeology in the history department at Delhi University .
There's no evidence to back the claim, said renowned historian DN Jha, who specialises in ancient and medieval Indian history .
“This debate is not new, but I can say that at present there is no scientific evidence to prove that IndoAryans were indigenous to our subcontinent. But since the political ambience in the country has changed, there will be many such attempts to prove this,“ said Jha, who used to be a Delhi University professor. “I have no comment to offer except that a serious historian will only dismiss such research.Moreover, the Sanskrit department of Delhi University is not at all competent to go into such questions.“
The idea is to disprove the Aryan migration theory , proposed by German linguist and Sanskrit scholar Max Mueller, using scientific facts.
“There are two schools of thought as far as the origin of the IndoAryans is concerned. We want to collate archaeological and new scientific evidence along with the Sanskrit department's own research of ancient manuscripts and texts to prove that Indian culture was not a foreign import,“ said Bharadwaj, who argued that the opposite was true. “In fact, the Aryans belonged to he subcontinent and migrated rom here and influenced cultures abroad,“ he said.
The last NDA government had made an attempt to disprove the Aryan migration theory by chang ng the history textbooks in 2004, he year in which it lost the general election. Human resource development ministry officials declined to comment on the matter.
The Sanskrit department will soon seek the help of YS Rao, recently appointed head of the Indian Council of Historical Research ICHR) by the BJP government, to collate historical evidence. Rao did not respond to ET's calls and emails. Rao is a controversial figure, having once written in support of the caste system besides blaming Muslim rule for India's social ills.His stand on a strongly divisive issue was made clear by his support or the contention that the Babri Masjid was built on the site of a emple.Nationalistic scholars have argued that there are several linguistic, archaeological, literary and, more recently , genetic pieces of evidence to support the belief that Aryans originated in the Indian subcontinent. The issue was one of he most hotly contested debates in Western and Indian academic circles throughout the 1990s.
Bharadwaj pointed to the pattern of similarities between ancient Sanskrit words and ancient words n classical Western languages as one of the linguistic examples of Indian influence on cultures abroad.He also cited similarities between he architecture and culture of the ndus Valley Civilization and Mesopotamian Civilisation, the latter considered the cradle of civiliza ion in the West.
As for genetic evidence, a study published by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad said that the origin of genetic diversity found in South Asia is much older than 3,500 years, when the Indo-Aryans were said to have begun migrating to India. The study had appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2011. “Many phonetic laws of French language are the same as he one formulated by ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini. The German language is also similar to Sanskrit. So when there is so much evidence in favour of our view, then here must be an effort to bring some finality to this debate. Why should we continue teaching the European theory to our children?“ Bharadwaj said.
According to Bharadwaj, the Sanskrit department will start holding workshops with different scholars n January next year in pursuit of ts project.