“History is ours to play with – ours now!”
∼ Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous organisation set up by the government of India and responsible for designing school curriculums and textbooks, is again at the centre of a controversy. It has recently introduced a new textbook for history with “rationalised content” for higher secondary students. It has dropped the chapters on the Mughals for Class XII apart from various other cuts, with the logic of “reducing the content load on students, in view of covid-19”. The council mentioned that the students had already read about the Mughals in Class VII, and avoiding an overlap of content is also one of the purposes of rationalisation.
History is an important “issue” because it goes beyond the confines of academia and everyone has an opinion on it. It helps in creating identities. Identities which are often contested and imagined. The relationship between history and nationalism is like – as Eric Hobsbawm would have put it – “what poppy is to an opium addict”; it serves a purpose. What we are today has its roots in history and that is why history as a discipline is always on the radar of political regimes. In India, as lay people we do not read enough and often imbibe hearsay, WhatsApp forwards and political speeches as history and condemn historians for their “prejudice” in attempting to write academic histories.
History has a dual purpose. The first is to understand how societies have evolved over the centuries. It reveals the story of who we are, where we come from and where we are headed. The other purpose it serves is legitimacy. It also shows how every majoritarian force had to face opposition from people, even in democratic societies; how powerful protests emerged. Political regimes the world over have always used history to assert their legitimacy. If we look back in history, Hitler’s Germany, communist Soviet Union, and regimes in Pakistan and many other countries have used history to assert power over their respective citizens. Contrary to popular belief, history doesn’t teach us lessons.
History is often misunderstood to be dead and gone, but the history that historians study is never dead. It reveals much more about the future than about the past and serves as a tool to comprehend the present. Professor Romila Thapar once said: “It is a strange paradox that a historian, who is concerned professionally with the past, plays a crucial role in the future of the society she is studying. The historian’s interest lies in trying to understand the emergence and evolution of a society in a historical perspective, where the term society includes every aspect of a people’s life.”
Modern history writing in India emerged with the attempt of Britons at understanding Indian history. In 1817, James Mill authored a book titled The History of British India. He periodised history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. From there, history writing evolved to the nationalist period, in which scholars like RC Majumdar, MG Ranade, VK Rajwade and KP Jayaswal focused on glorifying India’s ancient past as opposed to the colonial view of the “uncivilised”. After Independence, the history was reinterpreted by historians who were professionally involved in the writing of History and understood history in terms of accommodating various historical and societal changes, like change in the mode of production, and moved to acquire a secular form. Later, schools like Dalit, subaltern and tribal historiography also influenced our understanding of the past and made the discipline a more inclusive space. History never remains static; it is ever changing. Rewriting history is natural and essential. With every new interpretation or evidence, history changes.
There is no surprise in the fact that Mughals find scant mention in the Class XII history textbook, considering that one of the members of the 25-member expert panel that supervised the textbook revisions had, on an earlier occasion, made this public statement: “Those people (Muslims) came from the Middle East and didn’t have direct connect with Indian culture.” And it is not uncommon for different political regimes to have different perspectives on history and to try to influence the historical narrative in the curriculum.
The French historian Marc Bloch said: “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.”
The recent controversy over NCERT books forced me to think about the difference between the past, history and memory. The past is almost natural but history and memory are constructed. Would the removal of chapters on the Mughals erase them from history? A simple answer to that is “no”. But it would erase the context of a lot of things from memory.
The details of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the 2002 Gujarat riots, the contributions made by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the fact that J&K’s accession was based on the promise of autonomy have all been “censored” from history and political science textbooks and some of these were not even notified. To this, the NCERT has said, “Minor changes do not need to be notified, because they are regular in nature.”
History should be understood in its totality, that is, with its context. Totality should not be confused with the “entirety” of the past, which is virtually impossible to achieve.
In a society where pure sciences have been given primacy over social sciences, it is difficult to explain how the process of history writing works. It does not happen on social media or news channels. On the contrary, history writing is a much more rigorous exercise undertaken by people who are trained to interpret the past. The image of the past is the historian’s contribution to the future (Thapar). The writing of history should not be left to the whims and fancies of politicians or a political ideology. If any political regime anywhere in the world wishes to create a legacy, then it must remember what Dr B.R. Ambedkar said, “They cannot make history who forget history.”
In What is History?, E.H. Carr mentions how the Jews and the Christians introduced a teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose but at the expense of losing its secular character. The attainment of the goal of history would automatically mean the end of history; history itself became a theodicy. This was the medieval view of history.
We suffer from historical myopia. We want to think that the discussion is limited to the NCERT books but in reality, the question is, are we moving towards a medieval understanding of history or do we aspire to develop a modern and critical understanding of the past?
Eshan Sharma is the founder of one of India’s leading history collectives – Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative. He tweets @iameshansharma_.