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New
Delhi, 02 September 2002
History, especially
military history should not be distorted even if partisan politics
of the Government in power demand it. Heroes must be honoured and
glorified. To learn for the future one has to look into the past.
The Government, which certainly has ambitions to use propaganda to
the hilt to win votes by wooing the Hindu majority, in what is
commonly called Hindutva culture, may be guilty of distorting
history.
In a small way IDC
perceives that recent military history is also being ignored by the
Government. Kargil Day was not celebrated this year, nor its heroes
honoured –– for reasons which are hard to fathom. History must
be recalled honestly so that the nation does not repeat its
mistakes.
History of the
Vanquished
By
Mohan Guruswamy
In his last days Napoleon
Bonaparte, Britain’s prisoner on the remote island of St. Helena
(1815–21) and slowly being poisoned with arsenic wrote to his son
Francois, by his second wife the Austrian princess Marie Louise,
exhorting him to study history “for that is the only
truth!”
After Napoleon died Marie
Louise answering the call of duty married the Duke of Parma while
Francois the titular king of Rome lived in Vienna. One does not know
how much history Francois studied in his twenty one years, but if
one were to go by what was written about his father in Europe soon
after Waterloo, he would have discovered that written history is the
version of the victor and far from the whole truth. History
invariably is written and rewritten to serve the political and
ideological cause of the ruling elites. No wonder Winston Churchill
said: “Gentlemen, history will be kind to us –– we will write
it!”
Take Indian history as is
being taught in our schools today, it is the history of the
vanquished. It is mostly a chronological scroll down of events in
the Indo-Gangetic plain. The textbooks start with the Indus Valley
civilization and after that remain largely focused on the
consecutive onslaughts and occupations of India from the northwest.
Like the Aryans, Greeks, Bactrians, Huns, Afghans, Persians, Arabs,
Uzbeks, Mongols and Turks, not necessarily in that order, all of
whom entered through its northwest and stayed to leave their
respective imprimaturs on India. The other part of the story covers
the European era and India’s freedom struggle, which is mainly the
story of the Indian National Congress. These invasions,
subjugations, prolonged residence and assimilation broadly
constitute the history of India, whoever it is written by and for,
that is imparted to us.
As
a young student in a Catholic school, in recently independent India,
the first history lessons imparted to me told that story,
particularly the period of the last occupation by the British,
somewhat differently. According to this, British rule was a most
benign and beneficial period for Indians. This could even be true
for social reforms like the abolition of sati and the building of
great canal systems and railways happened during this period. The
unification of India into one great political entity also happened
in this period. Above all, southern India came under Delhi’s
imperial rule for the first time.
On
the converse side today’s heroes like Tipu Sultan were cruel and
callous tyrants, and what happened in 1857 was a most perfidious
mutiny in which English women and children were raped and murdered
by rampaging hordes of mutinous soldiers and freebooters. In 1957
the centennial celebrations of the First Indian War of Independence
happened and I suddenly discovered that what my history textbook was
having me believe was wrong. And I was relieved to know that Tipu
Sultan, though a trifle harsh on Hindus, was not a bad fellow at
all. Now after Sanjay Khan’s TV serial he is a true secularist and
a motley bunch from Calcutta claiming to be his descendents are
hoping to turn their accident of birth into hard cash. But the
rewriting of history apparently doesn’t stop and we are soon going
to have the Murli Manohar Joshi version and who can tell if Tipu
will not revert to his villainous status?
This
latest attempted version of history and additions to science
syllabus of subjects like astrology, numerology and gemology, is now
being challenged in the Supreme Court by the well-known social
activist Aruna Roy and others. One wonders whether we will have to
wait as long as we have done for a verdict on what came first in
Ayodhya, the temple or the mosque? Meanwhile the “ocular
distortion” (LK Advani’s words) has been removed and the nation
presented with a fait accompli. It could very well be that a similar
fait accompli in the form of new textbooks will be staged while the
Supreme Court’s great wisdom and collective intellect ponderously
moves towards a verdict.
Whatever
be the version of history that emerges, Murli Manohar Joshi’s or
that of Romilla Thapar, Irfan Habib and others, what will still
remain is a history focused on the people of the Indo-Gangetic
plain. And that is my real grouse. Take for instance the two volumes
of The History of India by Percival Spear and Romilla Thapar. Of the
twenty-four chapters, twenty-one are about the peoples who, either
lived in or kept conquering the Indo-Gangetic plain. South Indian
history that is fairly distinct and certainly more glorious than the
tale of defeat after defeat in northern India gets only three
chapters. And mind you the Deccan region now accounts for almost
forty percent of India’s population. Little is told about regions
like Orissa and Bengal while Assam hardly figures. Of course as can
be expected, there is not very much written about the original and
autonomous pre-Aryan and pre-Dravidian people. Even today our
indigenous people account for about 12% of the population and are
concentrated in specific regions. The creation of separate states in
these areas in the northeast and central India is recognition of
this fact.
If
Spear and Thapar are reticent about acknowledging the role of other
regions in shaping modern India, AL Basham and SAA Rizvi in their
two volume effort “The Wonder That Was India” have even less
time and space for other regions and their contribution to the
composite culture and the multi-dimensional character of the Indian
nation. Rizvi’s volume covering the period 1200–1500 AD is so
single-minded that it is entirely devoted to the Muslim rule over
parts of India. Quite clearly if Indian society has to be inclusive,
all its various peoples must share a common perspective of the past.
This is not so at present and hence, to my mind at least; the
history textbooks need to be rewritten.
What
then needs to be debated is what should this history be, for facts
cannot be altered and much as Sardar Advani may like to do so, Babur
cannot be wished away. The Communists are past masters at
airbrushing out people and rewriting history to suit each regime.
Official photographs of the collective leadership immediately after
the demise of Lenin, as Stalin kept consolidating his control, saw
the progressive elimination of historical figures from history. No
Trotsky, no Zinoviev, no Martov, no anybody who Stalin did away
with. Similarly in China few would now hear about Lin-Piao who Mao
anointed as his successor.
The
written history of India is quite ethnocentric and focused mainly on
Manu’s Aryavarta, which by the ancient lawgivers own description
did not extend south of the Vindhya’s. Beyond the pale of
Aryavarta was the land of the non-people and the legends of the
Indo-Gangetic plains fully reflect these primitive attitudes. Of
course times have changed and if the indigenous people of southern
India are no longer described as beings further up the evolution
chain than Indo-Aryan homo-sapiens, as the Ramayana has shown them
to be, it must be seen as a triumph of common sense. Now is the time
for the physicist Murli Manohar Joshi to conclude that if Rama is a
fact and the Ramayana his history, then as paleontologist’s will
let him know anthropoids like Hanuman and Sugriva could have no role
in Rama’s evolution from a dispossessed prince to a great king.
But
will common sense triumph over Joshi’s genetic memory? Unlikely,
for from what one hears; the made-to-order history that is being
written has the Aryans and Dravidians, both, as indigenous people if
not one and the same. This will then leave us wondering why Brauhi,
a language still spoken by certain tribes in Baluchistan, is
considered by philologists to be a Dravidian language? What about
the work of linguists world over who trace all modern Indo-European
languages to one proto-language now called the Nostratic language
with its origins in Central Asia? Can all this be wished away?
This northern bias
manifests itself in several ways, sometimes with great economic
consequences. The tourism industry in India is mostly about Delhi,
Agra and Jaipur. True the stupendous beauty of the Taj Mahal is a
great magnet that draws tourists into India from all over the world.
But the profligacy’s of the Mughals and the collaborationist
kingdoms of Rajasthan cannot be India’s only attractions without
the almost exclusive promotion of these by the government and the
tourism trade.
So much so that the past
that can still been seen in places of great historical importance
like Badami, Vijayanagar, Belur and Halebid in Karnataka, Warangal
in Andhra Pradesh and Kanchipuram, Madurai and Tanjore in Tamil Nadu
do not have half decent facilities to encourage tourism. Even
Bijapur with its great Gol Gumbaz and gigantic mosque does not have
a half decent hotel or any worthwhile facilities for tourists. If
the battles of Panipat are important in the history of northern
India, the battle of Talikota determined the final fate of the great
Vijayanagar kingdom with the defeat of its powerful army by the
forces of the Muslim confederacy. There is not even a marker at
Talikota suggesting a battlefield consecrated with so much blood and
so much valor. The great Mughal army commanded by Raja Jaisingh was
decisively defeated in a great naval battle on the vast Bramhaputra
at Saraighat by the Asom forces of Lachit Barphukan. Let alone a
marker at Saraighat even Lachit Barphukan does not figure in our
written history.
So
by all means rewrite our history. That task is long overdue. But the
question is whether Pandit Murli Manohar Joshi, the one time
physicist, will get it right and keep his mumbo-jumbo out of it? It
is doubtful.
Till
then written Indian history will remain just what it is, the history
of the vanquished.
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