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print versionEconomic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLIX No. 32, August 09, 2014
Editorials : The Reign of Non-History
Do the attacks on the discipline of History presage worse days ahead?
The appointment of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao as the new chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) may have been disappointing, but surely not unexpected. It has been widely reported in the mainstream media that Y S Rao’s opinions on historical matters align very closely with the world view of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other Hindutva ideologues. These views include a celebration of the caste system and an assertion that epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are exact expositions of events as they happened while also being compendia of “Indian†morality. His corpus of work as a historian, on the other hand, remains largely unpublished and unknown. It is evident that the new ICHR head has been appointed to push the Hindutva version of history and institutionalise it as much as possible.
The discipline of History has been the first to be attacked by religious right-wingers in India because a consciousness of history and a historical memory have been the biggest obstacles to the project of religious nationalism in our part of the world. The destruction of the discipline of History is central to the political project of religious nationalism but it is defended as an alternate, nationalist, version of history. We have seen the consequences of such attacks on History in neighbouring Pakistan where Muslim nationalists and fundamentalists have destroyed the discipline with state backing. Their Hindutva cousins in India attempted to do something similar during the first National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime with the support of the then Human Resource Development Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi. That attempt was only a partial success; partly because of the unexpected end to NDA rule, and also because, over the past century or so, the discipline of History in India has developed roots deep enough to weather a storm or two.
However, it would be a mistake to be sanguine about the ability of the discipline to remain immune to renewed attacks. Despite all the advancements in the academic practice of the discipline, historians have been far less able and willing to reach out to a wider audience in sustained public engagements about the past and the present. This is not to suggest that historians have confined themselves to their proverbial “ivory towers†. Yet the popular narratives of history and thus the “historical consciousness†of people have remained hostage to what can perhaps only be described by a neologism: non-history, which could be defined as a narrative of the past which subverts the basic methodological rules and epistemological claims of History as a discipline.
While some historians have, periodically, agonised and written about the inability of the discipline to become “popular†, there has never been a successful attempt to change this. The ICHR and the Indian History Congress – the oldest institutions of the discipline in the country – have failed to engage in a battle with non-history and push back its boundaries. Rather, they have been unsuccessful in even defending the discipline in the few islands where it is still practised – the university departments and research institutions. An endemic lack of funds for research or for the preservation and development of archives, the widespread prevalence of nepotistic appointments and academic mediocrity, lack of enough good journals for publishing research, combined with the unavailability of employment (other than in administrative services) for History graduates have all hollowed out the discipline from inside. Instead of historians engaging with and confronting non-history, the present situation is one where History as a discipline is not practised in most History departments of Indian universities and archives remain open only to the “gnawing criticism of the rats†.
There are, however, some who have argued that what this RSS-dominated NDA government is doing is merely a mirror of what the “Marxists†have done previously. This is not only incorrect as both institutions have allowed historians of different persuasions to practise their scholarship, but also unfair as it clubs serious historians with a range of views, often conflicting, with the proponents of non-history. As Romila Thapar has pointed out, “Marxist†in this context has come to mean anyone who adheres to the basic methodological rules and epistemological claims of the discipline, not actually those who work with Marxist tools. The critique of ICHR can well be that it did not do enough to build up History as a discipline, but it cannot be that one set of “historians†is repeating what another set did. What is being proposed under the new dispensation is not just a reordering of the ideological and political moorings of History as a discipline in India, rather it seems to be a first step towards abolishing History as a modern, academic discipline and replacing it with Hindu fundamentalist dogma. A negation of history is after all the first, and foundational, step towards negating India as a modern, secular democracy.
