English novelist George Orwell had said “who controls the past controls the future.” This could not have been more germane than in the legacy wars and the live battlefield that Indian historiography routinely becomes. A subject that we all grew up loathing as kids forced to learn by rote, becomes, we realise in our growing up years, such an important discipline, which gives us a sense of identity, holding a mirror to us. All our contemporary debates seem to hover around historical themes and characters, accompanied by vigorous contestation and sharp polarisation of views that come into play each time we talk about the long, tempestuous history of our country.
The whys and hows of Marxist distortion of our history [is a subject that] I think has been done to death, and if we are really serious about this problem, we need to move beyond demonising them and search for actual solutions and scholarly, well-researched counter-narratives. History is, after all, a clash of several narratives and opens the space for differing viewpoints. However, I will dwell briefly on some of these distortions as I see them, but also spend some time towards the end suggesting solutions.
What is ‘Leftist historiography?’
It must be admitted though that the Hindus have really not paid attention or understood the gravity or importance of the discipline, and how much it shapes our idea of ourselves or informs us about contemporary debates.
We have conveniently outsourced the historiography of our country to the larger ideological cohort that is broadly classified as ‘Leftist historiography’, which is anchored mainly in Marxist historiography and leftist ideology, with a few borrowings from postmodernism, the Annales School, postcolonial, and subaltern studies.
But right from the times of Hegel, called the father of the idea of the modern West, which looked at the universalism of the West and all of history being driven by a system of causation—of the West being the hallowed objective to which, through evolutionary stages, other civilisations progress towards—there are some common features in the larger rubric of Western academic theories, right from Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Kant, Nietzsche, Bourdieu, and others.
The dialectic has always been about a thesis and an anti-thesis that clash to produce a synthesis; conflict, violence, and destruction are, therefore, desirable for progress.
Marx adopted the Hegel model to make it an economic or materialistic factor-driven. Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, spoke of cultural hegemony of the elites and the counter-hegemony that demolished old structures of thinking. Frustrated with classical Marxism, the Frankfurt School in Germany during the Second World War advocated the use of popular culture, media, and art, along with a takeover of social institutions. Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory in 1937 spoke of all truth being relative and nothing absolute. It expanded the scope of cultural warfare. One had to constantly look for hidden biases and structures of oppression that needed to be first deconstructed and then dismantled. This theory is at the centre point of all liberal arts education. This soon transitioned into critical race theory. The Brahmin was identified as the oppressor in the Indian context, and all attempts [were] made to deconstruct and dismantle it. We noticed such terminologies even in that infamous gathering of quacks called ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’, where it was surmised that Hinduism and Hindutva being the same, to dismantle Hindutva, Hinduism itself needs to be eradicated. Quite similar to the shrill rhetoric of some of the petty politicians in India too.
Rajiv Malhotra has written extensively about these academic theories and models and what they mean to India, to academia, and their hegemonic hold. A ‘woke’ is someone who has been awakened to these structures of social injustice, and through activism and other means, seeks to dismantle it. So, the guiding factors that determine the social sciences, and thereby history, even in the Indian context, remain the same. Hence, the distortions that need to be brought about have to help fulfil these larger objectives with which the theories have been constructed.
Reclaiming India’s history
An Indian child’s first brush with the story of her country is through her textbooks where she is introduced to the history of her own country as though she is being told the story of some other land. While the job of history or historians is not to generate pride or jingoism, it is also not to denigrate our own culture and past, to be perennially apologetic about it and feel a spectacular disconnect from our roots, which is unparalleled in any country of the world. Negation of India’s civilisational greatness becomes almost a fashion statement.
Denial of the very idea of India or its existence is another feature. We are told that but for the British stitching together these disparate, warring groups of squabbling provinces, we would never have been a nation. A nation-state might be determined by well-defined boundaries and codified laws that keep changing over time. But a nation is a deeper concept. It is not determined by laws and borders, but by the emotional connect and commonalities of a shared living. In this, we have a long civilisational continuity over centuries with some astonishing convergences through the millennia.
But instead of viewing this civilisational continuity of India, especially of the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions that emanated here, Leftist historiography denies these and sets up conflicts between them, most often with little or no evidence. Along with this, there is a near-complete erasure of India’s traditional knowledge systems in every field—philosophical, linguistic, literary, scientific, medical, technological, or artistic—and a general underemphasis of India’s important contributions to other cultures and civilisations, as a faithful inheritor of colonial historiography.
The story of India is told as that of her invaders and from their perspective, and we have never reclaimed it. So, it appears that our history is a laundry list of invasions, battles that we kept losing, with little emphasis on the strong resistance we put up or the battles we won. If we are the only pre-Bronze Age civilisations that are still surviving, there must have been some battles that our ancestors won too? These are obviously negated or totally downplayed.
The history of India also seems like a history of Delhi with the most obscure and bigoted dynasties ruling there, like the Khiljis or Lodis or Tughlaqs, whose contribution to this civilisation was near zilch, getting incommensurate coverage, as against the stories from vast swathes of India, especially the south and northeast. The empires of Vijayanagara or Cholas, Rashtrakutas, Satavahanas, Pallavas, Chalukyas, Ahoms, and several dynasties and peoples make only a cursory or very little presence when compared to their importance in India’s civilisational history. Bharat needs to reclaim her story from Delhi.
Popular Indian historiography also refuses to acknowledge, or negates, the darker periods of Indian history, especially the Islamic conquests, even as contemporary records of court historians gloat on large-scale Hindu genocides and the destruction of temples and universities.
But the edifice of national unity or social cohesion cannot rest on the false and shaky foundations of whitewashed history. Doing so is an intellectual crime because it subordinates the truth to political compulsions. And hence we keep seeing the repeated convulsions, be it in Ayodhya or now in Kashi and Mathura, in the renaming of towns and streets and in the turf war that history has become—only because we never made peace with our past or told it honestly, without being politically correct. De-hyphenating today’s communities from these barbarians and invaders, not holding any of the communities today responsible for these acts and, conversely, also not making them valorise these bigots as their role models is an important need of the hour.
The Hindu-ness of our freedom movement too has been grossly underplayed and negated. Right from the invocation of Hindavi Swarajya by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the 17th century to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s explicit invocation of the nation as a Mother Goddess, this drawing from Hindu iconography has been a part of the imagination of Indian nationalism. We find echoes of similar views in the writings of Sri Aurobindo, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Vivekananda, and Veer Savarkar. Pictures of revolutionary nationalists taking oath on the Gita reveal that these iconographies were inextricably connected. Cow protection was such a vital element of Gandhi’s political agenda.
We are presented with a very linear and simplistic narrative of the Indian freedom struggle, dominated by a single ideological stance, which vastly underplays the phenomenal influence of armed resistance and the role of revolutionaries, right from the 1857 War of Independence to eventually the heroics of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army and the Naval Mutiny of 1946 that actually brought India her freedom. In the 75th year of our independence, a dispassionate assessment of these multiple strands and protagonists of our epic struggle for liberation is vital.
Also Read: Babri, Saraswati, Aryans – There are rival Indian histories now and campuses are the warzone
Time to act, not talk or lament
While all well-meaning nationalists might lament the lack of initiative from the government, when it comes to course-correction of our history, a small baby step that I have taken in this regard is the establishment of a private, non-profit, apolitical, and non-governmental organisation called the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research (FIHCR).
We are dedicated to the cause of research and documentation in historical themes that have contemporary relevance and on various aspects of our country’s long history—political, social, economic, and cultural—without shying away from addressing the numerous landmines and uncomfortable truths that confront us.
In India, you can be called an expert of ancient India without knowing a word of Sanskrit or Pali or Prakrit or Sen Tamizh, or any of the languages of that time; of medieval India without knowing any Persian or Arabic. It is quite a unique wonder only possible in this country. While someone like me, as a modern historian, might take lifetimes to study Vedic Sanskrit, where every word can have multiple meanings in context, nothing stops me from collaborating with experts of those languages to go to the primary source, the original texts, to decode them for the purposes of answering research questions.
These theme-based projects are envisioned by FIHCR as multidisciplinary and involve groups consisting of historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, numismatists, linguists, philosophers, geneticists, philologists, and so on. Under the advice and guidance of eminent scholars, these groups would be ‘incubated’ within relevant academic institutions and universities and involve experts in their fields to critically investigate the findings and come around a broad consensus.
The outcomes would be journals, peer-reviewed papers, academic publications, popular books, and widespread dissemination of the findings through social and mass media platforms. The Foundation will also give out periodic fellowships to foster research and publication amongst interested scholars.
I am not saying that this will solve all the issues and problems. But a first baby step had to be taken somewhere, and if this works successfully, I am sure many more such options can mushroom. The bottom line, however, needs to be an honest appraisal based on factual information, documents, and data that is accessed through these multiple lenses of many disciplines. Mumbo-jumbo and rhetoric that gets passed off as historiography is hugely detrimental to what is a very legitimate and recognised nationalistic school of Indian historiography.
American philosopher and writer George Santayana said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I cannot stress with enough sense of alarm and urgency that I wish to induce to all of you — the need to own and reclaim our own (Indian) past and how it is understood and told through our (Indian) lenses, rather than outsource it to outsiders and their brown sepoys and then sit and lament endlessly about distortion. The time now is for action, not for talks and laments.
This is an edited version of a talk, ‘The hows and whys of Marxist distortion of Indian history’, delivered by Vikram Sampath on 25 November at the World Hindu Congress in Bangkok. Sampath is a historian, author of eight acclaimed books and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK.