New Delhi: History is changing. And, on cue, the Indian Council of Historical Research has got a facelift too. A saffron-coloured one, to be specific. And it is hard not to notice when you enter the member secretary Umesh Ashok Kadam’s office. An accent wall is painted bright saffron. A bust of V.D. Savarkar sits in front of the wall, and beside it is a smaller photograph of M.S. Golwalkar, RSS’ second and most influential sarsanghchalak. Some of the blinds and the rooms outside the library are also saffron. And then there’s Kadam, with his lilac blazer that stands out against his orange wall.
“These are the colours of the Marathas, the Rajputs,” proclaims Kadam, eyes shining. He is also gleaming with pride about their latest project — a Delhi exhibition on medieval India and unexplored dynasties.
ICHR researched, curated and mounted it in a record three weeks’ time.
“We haven’t been able to represent the pride of India. Our archives, and libraries are a creation of the colonial world,” says the council’s latest member secretary.
And almost every room is awash with that pride. In the personal secretaries’ room, Savarkar greets you again. This time he emerges in portrait form. PM Narendra Modi smiles from a calendar in a corner. The personal secretaries are engaged in a discussion about the placement of a photograph of Goddess Saraswati.
Apart from the ongoing exhibition, among their flagship research projects are a dictionary of forgotten martyrs, a Savarkar seminar, an Indian history compendium and a book on how India is the mother of democracy and one on the handover decade of 1937 to 1947.
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Hindu dynasty push
History and historiography are hot-button issues in India. Especially so, after the BJP came to power in 2014. There has been a move to decolonise history books, reduce the outsized emphasis on Mughal rule and unearth stories of Hindu kingdoms from across the country. The Modi government’s biggest peeve is that the way history was written left out many significant events.
ICHR’s latest exhibition ‘Glory of Medieval India: Manifestation of The Unexplored Indian Dynasties 8th – 18th century’ was conceptualised to fill some of these perceived gaps. Held at Delhi’s Sahitya Akademi from 30 January to 6 February, it was inaugurated by the Minister of State for External Affairs, Rajkumar Ranjan Singh.
49 dynasties were on display, each had its own exhibit. In three weeks, the vastness, the complexity of India’s dynasties was compressed into a few blurbs. The text is simple and minimal, accompanied by photographs of artefacts, inscriptions and an especially drawn-up map that depicts the length and breadth of each dynasty’s rule. ICHR aims to take it to schools across the country.
The exhibition showcased the Marathas, Cholas, Pratiharas, Yadavs, Kakatiyas, and the Vijayanagar Empire. No Muslim ruler was featured.
“Those people [Muslims] came from the Middle East and didn’t have a direct connection with Indian culture. Islam and Christianity came to India during the Medieval Period and uprooted civilisation and destroyed the knowledge system,” Kadam has previously said.
“There has been a lot of focus on the Mughals,” a visitor says on the exhibition’s opening day, nodding in agreement.
Historians say otherwise.
Amar Farooqui, who taught history at Delhi University for over 30 years, dismisses the notion that the Mughals were celebrated in history textbooks. Mughal and Medieval Indian historian Irfan Habib did a lot of work that critiqued the Mughals, he notes.
He also disputes that the present scholarship ignored the dynasties of the medieval period. “Look at the work of B.D. Chattopadhyaya, M.B. Sahu, and even R.S. Sharma. They did enormous research on regional history and looked at it through a variety of prisms,” says Farooqui.
What really irks Farooqui though is the seeming lack of research by the ICHR. “There is no such thing as instant research, done by making a couple of assertions. It is hard work,” he says, referring to their recent work.
Kadam says that historical research was previously confined to certain institutions: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), JNU and Delhi University. According to him, this began in 1965 and it is a wrong that is being righted now, in more ways than one. He is himself a PhD from JNU.
The idea behind the exhibition was to showcase “the Indian psyche in the best sense”, focusing on resistance against foreign invaders, Kadam says.
The entire country was involved in the anti-Mughal resistance, he declares. He is currently researching the 17-year battle waged against Aurangzeb by the Marathas.
The writing of history used to be “trend-based” – it was fashionable to write about the Mughals, he claims, adding that the Marathas and other “unexplored” dynasties have been undermined, leading to the creation of “separatist tendencies”.
“The Ahoms ruled for 600 years, the Mughals for 150” — says Kadam pointing towards the relative obscurity of the Ahoms.
Ahom general Lachit Borphukhan is high on the central Union government’s priority list. Last year, his 400th birth anniversary saw a two-day celebration in Delhi. Borphukan “successfully halted the ever-expanding ambitions of the Mughals under Aurangzeb” and “inflicted a crushing and humiliating defeat,” reads the brief.
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India: The Mother of Democracy
One of the jewels of the revival project is the book, India: The Mother of Democracy, edited by chairman ICHR Raghuvendra Tanwar and Kadam. It posits that democracy has existed in India since the 4th century. “Greeks understood Indian systems, the art of governance,” states Kadam, implying that Greeks, popularly credited as the pioneers of democracy, picked it up from India.
It is divided into six sections and has 30 essays, beginning with the Harappan Civilisation. It was launched by Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan at the Constitution Club in Delhi on Constitution Day last year.
Its concept note refers to khaps and panchayats as examples of democratic rule. The crux of its argument is that India contained a number of self-sustaining systems of governance that enabled village communities “to remain unaffected by and large by the changing kingdoms/empires particularly those of invaders hostile to Hindu culture.”
This narrative reimagines ancient Indian society. “There was no concentration on prestige of birth, influence of wealth and political office that made social organisations autocratic and aristocratic, in contrast to Greek,” it further states.
The book received Modi’s stamp of approval, finding mention in his radio show, Mann Ki Baat.
The historians ThePrint spoke to were not as concerned with the veracity of the book but questioned ICHR’s claim that they have unearthed previously unknown facets of history through regional sources.
The consensus was that it is not the grandiose excavation it is being marketed as.
K.P. Jayaswal had done similar work, claimed one historian. Jayaswal’s work on self-governing republics in ancient India was published in 1911.
“Wanting to reclaim history is a typical nationalist idea. There is a need to make it more critical, to engage with the contradictions. But the method of writing history isn’t changing,” said Pradyumna Jairam, a history researcher who currently teaches at SOAS University of London.
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Reimagining Savarkar
Another historical figure that the ICHR is aggressively trying to reinvent in the public eye is Savarkar. This is not exclusive to ICHR though, as seen from the biographies of the figure that have sprung up in the past few years.
On entering the ICHR building on Feroz Shah Road, you are greeted by a glass bookshelf. One of the books that capture your attention is A Collection of Photographs portraying Swatantra Veer Damodar Savarkar’s Life and Struggle. It was published by Kumar Ratnam, a previous member secretary.
Another book about the Right-wing icon is being edited by Kadam, Dismantling Casteism: Lessons from Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva. Kadam tweeted that it will be released later this month at the International book fair in Delhi.
The council’s upcoming seminar, from 26 February to 28 February is also about the man — ‘Veer Damodaran Savarkar and Subhash Chandra Bose: Freedom Movements and Indian Nationalism.’
This is not the first such seminar. In October 2021, ICHR held an event in Ratnagiri, where Savarkar was jailed. The seminar had three primary talking points — the idea of the Hindu Dharma, the efflorescence of Hindutva and the culture of the Hindu Rashtra, and caste, colonialism and orthodoxy.
Dictionary of martyrs
A section of historians says that ICHR is actively rewriting history.
A recent incident surrounds one of ICHR’s flagship publications, Dictionary of Martyrs of India’s freedom struggle. The dictionary claims to list all the people martyred from 1857 to 1947. Biographical sketches of 20,000 martyrs have found space in the five volumes of the book.
The book was launched in 2019 by Modi. But in 2021, a three-member committee of ICHR submitted a report to remove, and subsequently removed, 387 names from the 5th volume, which charts the martyrs of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The names were of the rebels who lost their lives in the Moplah rebellion of 1921.
In August 1921, the Moplahs, a community of Muslims from the Malabar, a region in modern-day North Kerala started a resistance against the British and the upper Caste Hindus who had been put in charge of the feudal system. The rebellion turned violent. The death toll is disputed but generally estimated to be over 10,000. A statement by Lord Curzon in the British Parliament put the number of Hindu deaths at 1,000 and estimated that the British killed 2,500 Moplahs. In 1971, the Kerala government recognised those who took part in the rebellion as freedom fighters.
“The Moplahs have been removed due to their culpability in the deaths of Hindus,” claims a former ICHR member.
C.I. Issac, an ICHR member and part of the committee that submitted the report had earlier said that the removal was initiated because “all the Moplah outrages were communal” and “against Hindu society”. The committee also claimed that the rebellion was an attempt to establish a “caliphate”.
Towards freedom
In the 1970s, the British Government commissioned a series of 12 books, The Transfer of Power that disregarded the Indian freedom struggle and projected the transition as a smooth process.
In response, a number of historians in India conceptualised a 10-volume project called ‘Towards Freedom’ in the 1970s. It was to be a documentation of the decade leading up to 1947. ICHR was entrusted with its publishing; the first two volumes came out in 1997. Gyanendra Pandey, Bipin Chandra, Basudev Chatterji, Sumit Sarkar, Mushirul Hasan, KM Panikkar, Sucheta Mahajan, Arjun Dev and Bimal Prasad were among the historians tasked with editing the different volumes.
But in 2017, the final three parts, which made up the tenth volume, were scrapped.
The former ICHR member who had worked on the Dictionary of Martyrs suspects it was because the final volume, edited by late historian Arjun Dev, included documents that depicted the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS unfavourably. Dev held the same view.
ICHR’s publishing catalogue, which has not been updated since 2016, lists only nine volumes of the book. The final volume remains prepped and ready for publication, but it seems unlikely that it will be anytime soon.
The nine published volumes are nowhere to be seen in the ICHR ’s store, located at the back of the building.
Kadam called the final volume selective. “There was no mention of Savarkar, no mention of Aurobindo, no mention of Bhagat Singh. Do you think Gandhi was the first one to go to Champaran? Obviously the locals went there first,” he says with a smile.
Education
Research undertaken by ICHR is repurposed and now even conceptualised for schools and colleges. Last November, at an event organised in collaboration with ICHR and RSS- subsidiary Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana in Bihar, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said the Union government is working on books to “bring the true picture of India to the world.” Last year Kadam announced one such book, Comprehensive History of India, a set of 12-14 volumes. The first one is due to be published in March.
“It will have fewer sections on Islam while portions on the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Puranas will increase,” said Kadam.
But, these ideas cannot simply be transmitted to the entire country as education at the state-level is looked over by state boards and not the NCERT.
“Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Karnataka, Haryana – everyone writes their own texts. Maharashtra writes about the Marathas. Tamil Nadu prioritises the Dravidian Movement,” said Jairam, who has a PhD in the politics and history of history textbook writing in India.
ICHR past and future
In the first year of the Modi government, Y. Sudershan Rao was appointed ICHR chairperson.
“Sudarshan Rao was pro-BJP, but he was relatively non-interfering (in terms of appointments, projects, etc). Grants were still given to universities like AMU,” said the former ICHR member. Those who have observed the council over the years say that there is a dramatic difference between the ICHR of today and the ICHR of yesteryears. The tenor of the institution has changed.
In the institution’s former avatar life, it housed Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Muzaffar Alam, Sumit Sarkar, and was a hub for historians, many of whom were Marxists. The former member rattled off a list of publications helmed by ICHR — Dictionary of Archaeology, 10 volumes on the role of the state legislature, 10 on the labour movement.
Habib, Thapar and Chandra were also part of a 21-member advisory committee of the Indian Historical Review, a peer-reviewed journal that is published by ICHR. The committee was dissolved in 2015 and a new committee with only ICHR members was formed.
Kadam savours this change, the ousting of India’s biggest historical names. He beams as he enters the library. “When the Marxists were here, the place was so dingy. There were rats everywhere. We’re doing cleaning and they’re calling it saffronisation,” he says with pride.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)