Luis Dias
This lockdown allowed many of us to re-examine the contents of our dusty bookshelves. Too often, one buys books but doesn’t get to read them right then, and then they languish for years until an opportunity arises.
I rediscovered ‘The Past and Prejudice’, a compilation of the Sardar Patel Memorial lecture series delivered by the renowned Indian historian Romila Thapar on All India Radio in 1972. A cash memo now serving as a bookmark reminds me that I bought it in 2009, for the princely sum of one rupee fifty paise (yes, really).
Another book I found was ‘A Social History of the Deccan 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives’ by Richard M Eaton, which I seem to have bought in 2013, with a kind handwritten dedication from him to me on the first page.
Both Thapar and Eaton are familiar to history students and enthusiasts here and worldwide for their academic rigour and their numerous objectively written books on various aspects of Indian history. Both of them are eminently readable and extremely approachable in my own personal experience.
Reading and re-reading these books, and listening to a YouTube discussion with Eaton in July 2020 as part of the Karwaan Online History festival Season 2 provided much food for thought, especially in light of the recent storm in a xícara de chá over the Goa Inquisition in our print and social media.
As a student of history in school, I (unfortunately like many history teachers and professors even today,) thought of history as a chronology of dates, dry facts and figures more to be memorised than anything else. This battle was fought on this battlefield in this territory by these two warring factions, and this was what they were fighting about. It lent itself very well to “fill in the blank” question papers. If the warring sides were from two different faiths, of course they must have been enemies on account of that; what else could it have been? If one or even a handful of sources described an event, whether written contemporaneously or even much later, of course it happened and it played out just that way. It’s right there in black and white in the history books, isn’t it?
Thankfully the teaching of, and the scholarly approach to history, whether in our part of the world or anywhere else, have changed hugely, even if popular misperceptions and stereotypes haven’t altered as much.
I think the lectures by Ángela Barreto Xavier a few years ago really opened my eyes to the extent that modern historians are re-examining previously held ‘truisms’, upon which huge edifices of scholarly work may have been built, and many of those edifices are coming tumbling down, not unlike the statue-toppling spree currently occurring around the world. When one analyses a document or an account of the past written by someone it’s worth asking ourselves, who wrote it, for whom, when, and why, instead of just accepting everything as a given. If other evidence corroborates what has been stated, or it gets triangulated by several others (and not just from those with a similar agenda or background to the first), then one could tentatively say it is probably true. But then again, new evidence could come to light that calls an earlier assumption into question, and a true student of history should accept this, and constantly be on the look-out for this. This is important, because our understanding of the past influences very much our present and our future.
In the very first few lines of her first lecture in ‘The Past and Prejudice’: Thapar says: “It is a strange paradox that the historian, who is concerned professionally with the past, plays a crucial role, in the future of the society he is studying… In his handling of the evidence from the past, he is often influenced by his own contemporary setting. Historical interpretation can therefore become a two-way process—where the needs of the present are read into the past, and where the image of the past is sought to be imposed upon the present. The image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future. For this image can be used by his contemporaries for political myth-making. Such political projections of a society seek intellectual justification from the theories of historians and other social scientists.”
“But over the years, with changing methods of investigation, the discipline of history has been made more precise and more analytical. New evidence and fresh interpretations enable us to reassess the past in more realistic terms and proceed in new directions. Historians, too, have become, as it were, self-conscious, both about the nature of the evidence and about the social and political function which historical writing has played in the past. Now, more than ever, the historian, without compromising his social integrity, has much to contribute to society.”
I found Eaton making similar observations in the Karwaan online YouTube discussion. Although it dealt primarily dealt with his book ‘Sufis of Bijapur 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India’, many observations made by him during the discussion can be extrapolated to our approach to history in general, whether as a research scholar of history, or a student or enthusiast.
For example, he said: “The more you study history, the more you realise: We think we are studying the past. What we are actually studying is the present. The present is what determines and kind of dictates what the past was…”
Towards the end of the interview, Eaton makes these interesting points: “What distinguishes a more mature and sophisticated historian from a beginner”, is the acknowledgement that “the past is always unstable. This is disturbing for students who would like the past to be all nice and tidy, wrapped up in a bow: ‘Here’s your past. This is what happened. It’s all very simple. We all agree, we all know, it’s very clear.’ But that’s not true.”
“The past is always constructed, always disputed, always changing, always a dialogue between our day and the distant past. And that is why the study of history is so endlessly fascinating. We›re always debating not just among ourselves, but also with other historians of the past, who lived in their present-day. Their present-day is very different from our present-day, and both of these present-days are, of course, hugely different from the moment that we’re all trying to study.”
“Perhaps more so than anywhere else, in India, you can’t get away from the past….Everyone tries to ‘control’ the past. And that obviously gets us into politics, and that’s when history becomes really really really contested. «
We in Goa can’t get away from our past either. Nor should we shrink from it, ignore it or be embarrassed or intimidated by it. But we should be ready to accept new evidence and fresh interpretations of the past instead of continuing to fall back on ‘the usual suspects’ of sources blindly and without question. The maxim “Question everything” has been ascribed to everyone from Euripides to Einstein. Whoever said it first, it’s still good advice.
