THE PAST AS PRESENT 2 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF NATION-BUILDING

 2. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF

NATION-BUILDING

By ROMILA THAPAR in THE PAST AS PRESENT

MEANING OF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES IN CONTEXT OF PRESENT    

                       Historical perspectives are frequently perceived from the standpoint of the present. A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard. Today these voices are being heard in louder tones with an insistence that their histories be included. 

PERSPECTIVE OF INDIAN PAST

                      Perspectives on the Indian past have earlier tended to be given monolithic forms: an unchanging caste society; an economy totally conditioned by whether or not the state was owner of the land, and a religion—Hinduism, the modern understanding of which has run parallel to that of the Semitic religions. Some of these perceptions have to be reconsidered.

ORIGIN OF NATION STATES IN EUROPE

                    The concept of a nation and the coming into being of the nation-state is a development of modern times. The concept had its roots in medieval European communities and grew to importance only from the late eighteenth century, accompanied as it was by an expansion of economic opportunities, by the notion of liberal institutions, by an emphasis on legal forms, and by the growth of a culture of nationalism reflecting the emergence of a middle-class.

                    The idea of the nation-state was itself a product of a particular historical moment. There is, therefore, a historical lag between the condition prior to the nation-state and its emergence. In part our present problems arise from our inability to comprehend the nature of this lag. 

                   It could be suggested that the coming of a renaissance might act as a bridge. If we are to use the analogy of the European Renaissance then it is questionable whether in fact there was a renaissance in India in the nineteenth century. Quite apart from the fact that the catalyst came from outside and not from within Indian society, the major ideological contribution of the European Renaissance, the notion of Humanism which pervaded the approach to every aspect of life, drew from a rejection of the dominance of the Church even though this rejection sought legitimacy by going back to what were interpreted as the institutions of Greco-Roman civilization, prior to and antithetical to, the Christian Church. 

INDIAN NATION STATE  BUILDING

(1) MONOLITHIC VIEW

                         In India we are now seeking legitimacy from the past in attempts to build institutions that would be conducive to the powers of a Church should there have been a Church in India. For instance, by insisting on the historical existence of communities defined solely by an overarching religious identity, we endorse the potential of an ecclesiastical infrastructure even where it did not exist before. The idea that the religious community was a basic identity of Indian society was fostered in the nineteenth century. By accepting it we have moved a long distance away from the presuppositions of a renaissance. The nineteenth century Indian ‘renaissance’ broadly accepted the European Orientalist view of the early Indian past which was derived largely from Brahmanical textual sources, and which conceded to a large extent the correctness of the colonial comprehension of our past. Even nationalist historians made only a few attempts to replace the paradigm constructed by European Orientalist scholarship, a paradigm conditioned by paucity of evidence but equally by European intellectual preconceptions within a colonial framework. 

(2) ALTERNATIVE VIEW

                                A radically new understanding of our past demands not only the questioning of these preconceptions and this framework, but also the inclusion of perspectives of Indian sources other than the Brahmanical and those of the elite. This juxtaposition will also place all the sources in a more realistic historical context. Such changes are evident at some levels of focused scholarship but have perhaps not percolated to the perceptions of the past by the general intelligentsia.

                             The European Renaissance was also a rebirth of learning, where the established modes, methodologies and content of learning were scrutinized and reconsidered. Many were discarded.    

WHY IS ALTERNATIVE VIEW OPPOSED? HINDU VS MUSLIM ATTITUDES OF PRITINITY                        

                              Our educational system in the nineteenth century was based on colonial modes that have been continued since. Indian society, in its broad context, has also become somewhat suspicious of the freedom of intellectual analyses, which the conservative establishment prefers to disown in order to cover up its disagreement or even at times its ignorance. In some circles of radical populist opinion it is described as the activity of the ‘elite’. Yet there have been, in a quiet way, many attempts on the part of Indian scholars since the 1960s to change the paradigms. But individual activity cannot generate a movement and ideas do not get disseminated sufficiently enough to act as catalysts. 

                          If a respect for analytical intellectual activity is an urgent need, so too is the clearing of institutional obstructions to new ideas. This would require a frontal opposition to the bureaucratic structure of many institutions, a confrontation that becomes complicated by the fact that the state that is the patron of these institutions would prefer to maintain the obstructions as a form of control. If we are to create conditions which could lead to a Renaissance we have to open up learning in the true sense: the ability to maintain a sustained, questioning dialogue on all issues, irrespective of the heavy hand of stultifying patrons. Judging by the institutions established so far, the change to corporates financing educational institutions, will not result in a substantial difference, since the trajectory remains the same. What needs probing is why this diversity of religious expression coloured with both Islamic and Hindu ideas and practices is now in many instances giving way to a recognizably fundamentalist way of thinking and acting. In the case of Islamic fundamentalism, the ideology that propels this has been traced back to the eighteenth century Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia that worked towards codifying the diversity of Islam into a single system. While suggesting that it was distancing itself from orthodoxy, it was in fact moulding fundamentalism. Some Sufis were disapproved of as part of the generally anti-Persian and pro- Arab religious stance, and women were back to being confined. There was as in all such movements the constant refrain of returning to the Golden Age, in this case of the Caliphate. The offspring of this movement in India are a number of groups competing in being the most orthodox, among which are the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Ahl-i-Hadith and the Tablighi Jammat. Their visible presence and popularity is recent and parallels that of Hindutva, as does much of their activity in organizing religious fundamentalism. They started to be visible and demanding, with events related to the Babri Masjid and the subsequent riots. They have a perch in political parties geared to using Islam for political demands and mobilization. The narrative echoes that of Hindutva—of ‘hurt sentiments’, attempts to reactivate places of worship that have been declared protected monuments—in this case mosques, refusing to consider changing the Muslim Personal Law in favour of a revised and uniform civil code with better gender justice, banning films and books, making sure that the history taught in madrassahs is largely the glorification of Islam, and where possible controlling prime property whether directly or indirectly.

INDIAN RENAISSANCE--RISE OF INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS- RELIGIOUS ROOTS 

The Renaissance was also associated with a social crisis involving the identity of new social groups becoming dominant. In Europe it was the centrality of an urban society. In nineteenth century India the emergence of the middle class required new forms of expression, but was partially thwarted by its ties to upper caste origins. Today’s middle class is drawn from a wider spectrum, consequently the effects of a social change are greater. The alienation implicit in modernization is sought to be assuaged by the creation of a past and of ideologies that legitimize the present. There has been, for example, too great a weightage on emphasizing the process of civilization in Indian society as a one- way process of aspiring towards Brahmanical culture. That Brahmanism itself has often had to accommodate itself to non-Brahmanical culture, in its extensive public role, and that even the constituents of what we know of some Hindu practice and ritual today incorporate elements from non-caste groups, is evident in various religious sects; and that there is some internalization of influences from other religions such as Islam and Christianity, are all features that are evident but are downplayed. Yet the very label ‘Hindu’ for the religion is of Greco-Iranian Islamic origin and European usage. 

                      Parallel to this, those who seek to define Islamic culture see only its Arab and Persian roots, and fail to incorporate the reality of the Indianness of Islam in India. Islam borrowed a past from the Judaeo-Christian tradition to which it added its own past, and this combination in turn had an interface with a Puranic past. An example of this is Shah Muni’s Sanskrit text, the Siddhanta-Bodh, which discusses the possible closeness in concept of terms such as nabi and avatara, Narayana and Allah, the Shastras and the Qur’an. This is not so evident in the practice of Islam amongupper-caste Muslims, but is prevalent among the larger population of those labelled Muslim in the subcontinent who belong to a variety of castes and sects.The Khojas, Bohras, Meos, Navayats, Mapillas and many others have their origins in this kind of Indian Islam no matter what the degree of Islamization may be in the present. The history of every religion in India requires a shift of paradigm if its origins and evolution are to be understood with accuracy and sensitivity.

INDIAN RENAISSANCE --IMPORTANCE OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Given the projection in recent times of religious identities as central to social and political action, there is now a greater turning to religiosity and ritual. Rituals are resurrected or invented, insisting that they go back to the past. Such resurrections are seldom motivated by reasons of religious sensibility and where rituals are concerned they can be equally a demonstration of affluence as they have frequently been in the past. 

                       Public demonstrations of ritual convey  many messages: 

      they lay claim to tradition and therefore to culture, 

      their performers claim piety, and the wealth implicit in the more dramatic among the rituals underlines economic status. 

RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES, SOCIAL CHANGE AND NEED OF DISCUSSION 

Societies in the course of their history negotiate relations with what they perceive as the supernatural which they occasionally convert into deities. These take the form of religious beliefs. The religions of Indian civilization are no exception. Social alienation and crises at various points of historical change lead to the invention of new rituals that are nevertheless said to be traditional. 

ANALYSIS OF RELIGION TO ASCERTAIN IT'S ROLE AND PURPOSE

                      The over-emphasis on ritual is also an attempt to compensate for the social change that often creates a distance from rituals practiced in earlier times. But the situation in India is further compounded by the pressure of political negotiation that is conducted in tandem with religious identities as in the argument supporting the existence of majority and minority communities defined by religious identities. To then maintain that every aspect of religion is sacrosanct and that nothing can be said or written about it, virtually amounts to a form of political blackmail. If religion is to play a political role as it does in the concept of religious majority and minority communities, then it must be subjected to the same analyses as all political ideologies and behaviour.

Religion as an ideology needs to be analyzed in all its dimensions, for, unless its political, social and economic dimensions are openly discussed, even if it is claimed that such discussion hurts sensibilities, there can be no real move away from dogma to humanism. Any renaissance or rebirth assumes a critical assessment of the past and such an assessment is still small and of a recent vintage in our society. In this connection it could well be asked whether there is really a tyranny of a bygone age or whether we are deliberately cultivating this idea as an excuse to avoid thinking through to their logical conclusion, the implications of the kinds of change envisaged in what we regard today as our ideals, such as secularism and democracy.

                  If the roots of a nation lie in its earlier communities then the nature of these communities has to be examined. A continuous historical process in India tied to that of social function was the creation of castes. Caste as the dominant organizational structure of Indian society was not the rigid, frozen system that we have been made to believe at least at the upper levels. It evolved over time,

changed with reference to historical changes and adjusted to these. What was constant was the theoretical and ideological framework which it carried and which enabled the upper strata to control the rest. The structure of this social organization was closely related to a variety of factors: adaptation to the environment, control over technology, access to economic resources, patterns of kinship and marriage, and validation through ideology. The primacy of

 : each of these could vary in specific situations. To stop at moral judgement on whether caste was good or evil is insufficient, as the assessment has to go much further and examine why this form of discrimination/organization was chosen. 

INEQUALITY AND CASTE

                            Early societies generally thought of human inequality as normal. Our problem is that we coupled social and economic inequality with birth and the notion of pollution, and thus segregated a section of our people into being treated as unable ever to change their place in society.

 The problem then is one of integrating groups that have been part of history but have been excluded from history. The enormous ideological emphasis on hierarchy presupposes a tension with those further down the scale probably because there had to be vigilance over who was recruited to higher levels, as well as the continuing subservience of the lower ones. There was also tension with those outside the caste organization some of whom constituted what we today call ‘the tribal peoples’. These were non-caste clans who, through being conquered or through induction, were either excluded as untouchables or else were slotted into the caste hierarchy at the lowest level or more often, were treated as beyond the social pale. Those reduced to untouchability joined others also designated as such, for reasons, it is said, of occupational practice. The intention was to have a permanent supply of labour, unable to change its status, given the universal practice among all formal religions in India to regard them as polluting. The taking on of a caste identity by a non-caste group was a way of denying their past and their own identity. Today the insistence is not on a caste identity but on the acceptance of what I have called Syndicated Hinduism, defined through new forms and beliefs by various Hindu organizations of recent times.

CONVERSION AS A TOOL

                          The ritual of conversion was invented for Hinduism in the nineteenth century, in imitation of religions that allowed converting. It was convenient for converting tribals—as it still is—who as non-caste groups could be inducted into caste society and could thus swell the numbers of those counted as ‘Hindus’. The

conversion to neo-Buddhism as an alternative strategy has not been of much help, for neo-Buddhists like neo-Hindus, lose out on the swings what they gain on the roundabouts; consequently many prefer to call themselves Scheduled Caste Buddhists. 

POLICY OF RESERVATION

                          A policy of reservation, although it may seem to suggest a temporary solution, in fact reinforces distinctions. It might eventually have to be discarded for more effective solutions involving a restructuring of the distribution of wealth, of the accessibility to welfare needs such as education and health, and of enforcing social justice, all of which might expunge caste regulations.

CONTINUATION CASTE EVEN AFTER CONVERSION AND FORMATION OF NEW CASTES

                           Irrespective of changing dynasties and activities at the elite levels of society, this confrontation between caste and non-caste and the process of caste formation was historically a constant factor. Even religions that recruited across caste, such as Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity, tended to conform to Jati regulations in marriage and retain caste identities of occupation. Some new religious sects ended up becoming castes, such as the Lingayats.

                         The pull of social organization was greater than ideological expression. Identity by religion, cutting across caste, region and language, has become something of a fantasy for pre-modern times.These communities were defined by geographical location, by language, by clusters of religious sects that tended to follow the contours of jati groupings. Networks of jatis were meshed into customary law and local practice. Caste and the communities that it fostered was therefore one of the systems that conditioned our civilization. 

A uniform, homogenous, monolithic religious community was alien to this ethos. The attempt to break away from caste perhaps encouraged the notion of a religious identity as a larger unit of organization. This has left us today with the continuing inequity of caste and social hierarchies as well as the growing obsession with varieties of religious ‘sensitivities’.

CASTE-RELIGION & NATION BUILDING

To replace caste by religion does not help the process of nation-building. But since we have entered this latter condition, possibly an opposition to both as essential identities might help in attempting a new system of social organization. In such a system the existing association of rights or an absence of rights, relating either to caste or to religious community, will have to be addressed in the context of entitlements and obligations of citizenship. The reality of caste, therefore, has to be seen in terms of the factors responsible for its continuance in a specific area. Why should it still be necessary that Dalits, low castes and tribals, provide the labour? The measure of change in a caste-based society should be gauged by these realities and not by the occasional Dalit minister. In the case of what have been called Scheduled Tribes, such a change could be introduced with greater facility if there is a will to do so.

■ HISTORY AS NATION BUILDING AND ROLE OF HISTORIAN

Since history is an essential component of nation-building, the question often discussed in recent times is whether a nation can have many versions of history. How an event is seen can vary according to the perspective of the viewer and the purpose for which it is being viewed. But historians do hold that every claim to history has to be vetted according to the methods now used to test the veracity of historical information. What this implies is that there could be a difference between the claims to historicity and the reason why they are being made, and that the historian therefore, in the course of assessing the claims, should explain why they are being made. Anti-colonial nationalism produced a history that largely referred to the past of groups that had been active in the national movement and were therefore thought to constitute the nation. But since then other social groups of lesser

 status have been demanding that their history be written and incorporated into national history. The demand is held to be legitimate by the fact that such groups now have status and a voice. A different argument is also made that these groups have higher claims to being indigenous than the many elite groups that make these claims but are known to be migrants from elsewhere. Even if the migration may date back some centuries, they are still viewed as alien in an effort to exclude them.

The demand and the writing of the history of those whose status has improved is of course not a new phenomenon. It has been known from the time when records began to be kept. Aspirations to a higher caste status and the benefit it brought led to attempts to legitimize a higher status. One of the ways of doing so was to get a history written claiming the changed status as going back

to respected origins. The frequency of claims to kshatriya status in Indian history is a case in point.

If today Dalits are demanding that Dalit history be written, the demand is legitimate along with those asking for the histories of other castes and sects. These histories however have to be integrated into the context of the larger society so that the relationships between groups can be represented since their identity is hinged to the context. The history of any social group cannot be a stand-alone history as this would be unnatural. The major problem with such historical reconstruction is the paucity of sources from such groups for early periods of history. Texts composed by Dalit authors are quite late. So for the early periods we have to draw out information from texts that refer to such groups only marginally or indirectly. Even oral history can only be used for the modern period or just before when oral traditions were composed and remembered.

HISTORY AND MYHTHOLOGY IN NATION BUILDING

What leads to problems is when the mythology associated with the history is

claimed as history. The mythology has also to be subjected to the same critical analysis as the narrative of all else that is claimed as history—as is the case now with the history of any group whether elite or non-elite. The mythology cannot be taken as history but it can be analyzed to indicate the social assumptions on which it is based and why it is incorporated into what is described as history. When in earlier times a dynasty traced its origin back to the Moon-god as ancestor, earlier historians merely dismissed it; but today we ask the question as to why this claim is being made. Was it a way to ensure that the family would be thereby regarded as belonging to the prestigious Chandravamsha or Lunar Lineage? (Such claims would in any case have to be proved by other sources of information.)

 Claims to history, irrespective of who they come from have to be critically assessed and the real reason for the claim has to be ascertained. Frequently, these are not so much attempts at writing history as of asserting mobility and status by inventing a history to support it. It meets with the same fate as all such attempts from the past, that if it is to be taken as history it has to be carefully evaluated both to test its veracity and perhaps more so to understand why it was composed. The historian no longer claims to be discovering ‘the Truth’. The most we can do is suggest a plausible reconstruction of what happened in the past in order to understand an event and thereby provide an explanation. Claims to status also imply that notions of identity go into the making of

history. Identities have to be created, as they are not inborn. Here the historian has to trace the history of the creation of an identity and then see how the created concept plays a historical role. This is in some ways parallel to the role of memory in history. Memory is also constituted, and more so, collective memory,

that is so often introduced into historical thinking. The memory of victimization, for example, has to be passed on from generation to generation for it to become a memory and obviously it changes in the process of being passed on. Alternatively, a memory is deliberately constructed, often around an event or around the ideas propagated by a person, as for example in chronicles or in biographies. The historian examines the construction, the point at which it is put together, and why and how it has been continued, used at various times forpurposes that may even be different from the original construction. The historiantherefore cannot deny that these constructions of a believed history will beconstantly made but the historian has to demonstrate that they are invented andhas to explain how and why they have been so constructed.Social hierarchy was not divorced from economic stratification as it still isnot. Changing economic patterns were tied into the degree to which economicresources were exploited. Land has generally been taken as a measure of thesources of income. But the intensity of its utilization varied according to timesand regions. This can be judged in part by the change in policy, where earliergovernments skimmed off the revenue in many areas, to later administrationsthat intensified the source of revenue from land to support a larger number ofkingdoms with an increasing pressure on those who were the producers ofrevenue. Interestingly, the forms of peasant protest also change from referencesto peasant migrations being the main form in earlier times, to what have beendescribed as peasant revolts, or peasants supporting rebellious samantas(intermediaries), being recorded from the early second millennium AD. Anincrease in revenue also came from bringing forested areas or waste land under cultivation, often encroaching on the territories of ‘tribal groups’ living in theforests. The nexus of revenue collection involved not only the state and thecultivator but an increasing range of intermediaries as well. The politics of thelatter was often the immediate reason for the need to increase revenue. Control over land as exercised by the intermediaries became the crux of the agrarian economy and the dominant factor of caste in rural areas, a situation that has not altered as much as it should have by now. Agriculture was not the sole or main resource in all areas. Networks of exchange became more permanent in settled areas and in many regions trade was significant to the economy. Periods of intensive urbanization accompanied the wider networks of trade and in some areas the urban economy was a constant eature. Historically the Indian trader has played the role of middleman par excellence in various channels of Asian trade. It would seem that Indian traders were not necessarily the initiators of commerce on a large scale, but having entered a system of exchange, soon began to play a controlling role. The aggressive thrust of the Indian middleman has been a recognized aspect of the Indian presence in many places. The mercantile community was a social area where the theoretical hierarchies of caste as envisaged in Brahmanical ideology were often upset, for trade was regarded as low in Brahmanical reckoning, whereas traders were frequently wealthy. They tended in early times to patronize non-Brahmanical religions that accorded them a high status, irrespective of Brahmanical hierarchies. It is not for nothing that the traders and financiers in Buddhist texts are referred to as setthis, rom the Sanskrit, sreshthin, meaning ‘the best’. Urban centres and trading activities had a parallel hierarchy in terms of the control and production of raw material and manufactured items. Economic activities had a lateral spread in that over time larger areas came under cultivation or were included in networks of production and exchange. The pace of development varied from region to region as it did in the context of changing technologies. This variation had political implications. Equally significant was the impact of economic change on caste hierarchy and organization, not to mention financial underpinnings of political activity. Economic categories in the maneuvering of social status would therefore not be alien to the historical experience of Indian society. Politics was relatively an open field in early India. Despite the injunctions of the shastras that kingship should belong to the kshatriya caste, the status of even some major dynasties has been controversial. The Mauryas are shudras in the brahmanical Puranas but kshatriyas in the Buddhist and Jaina texts. The Mauryan kings having patronized the heterodox sects had to be downgraded in brahmanical reckoning and possibly for the same reason were upgraded in Buddhist texts. In later times, others who were of obscure origin, went to suspiciously elaborate and obvious lengths to have themselves proclaimed kshatriyas. The fact that politics was relatively open, gave access to the possibilities of participation in power to larger numbers than is generally assumed. Latching onto power therefore is not a new phenomenon. But the entry of people of obscure origin did not change the political system, since their claims conformed to the continuance of the system. In theory it remained the same, but in practice there were discrepancies. Nevertheless politics did not have absolute primacy. What is new in our times is the primacy given to politicians and to political activities and the latitude to abuse power. This latter was cautioned against no doubt not entirely successfully and methods were suggested to contain it. There were at least two groups that could freely comment on the abuse of power and were only occasionally forbidden to do so. These were groups other than factions among the elite, participants in power and the usual contenders for power. One group was that of the bards (the sutas), the caste that legitimized the authority of the king by maintaining his genealogy—crucial to claims of appropriate origins. They had the right to accuse the king of having misused his power and could either do a dharna at the threshold of his court, or commit ritual suicide to force home the point. As they had given legitimacy to the people in power they also had the right to oppose them should they think that power had been wrongly used. We may well ask as to who are the actual legitimizers of power today and whether they exercise their function as critics of the abuse of power? The other group was the much larger and more amorphous one drawn from many castes and who followed any among a range of ideologies and belief- systems, namely, the renouncers. These were the mendicants, monks, sadhus, Faqirs, Sufis and such like. Some were pillars of the establishment and their centres were the foci of loyalty to political power and social authority. Others having opted out of social obligations, and opposed to religious orthodoxy, were the quintessential dissenters. Those in political authority often feared them for they commanded immense respect, and their criticism was heard and was believed to be impartial. They were respected by society because they had renounced power (although there probably were, as there are today, some, who used this as a front to be close to those in power and thereby wield it), and this enabled them to activate opposition where they thought it necessary. Such opposition was not revolutionary in context and was frequently not even confrontational. Sometimes it was neutralized by being appropriated by those against whom it was directed. Nevertheless it nurtured the yeast of dissent. The existence of autonomous individuals free to criticize was once a landmark of our civilization. Today they are becoming an endangered species. And autonomous individuals are crucial to the stabilizing of a society. A nation cannot be built on a single identity nor is it feasible to collate diverse identities of religion, caste, language and so on, and hope for something to emerge. A nation as a state is a new historical experience and therefore requires a new identity. Ideally, this would be the identity of the Indian citizen constructed on the assumption that all citizens are equal before the law with the same rights and obligations. The theoretical basis for this exists in our Constitution, but it has to be put into effect.

           3.   OF HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES 

The mid-twentieth century was a dramatic turning point in the histories of the countries of South Asia. It was the time of liberation from colonial rule that in many ways had unravelled the earlier past and left us somewhat bewildered about the future. There was the intoxication of freedom—the release from being a colony—but there was also the apprehension of having to define the nationstate that subsequently emerged. All of us in South Asia, not to mention other ex-colonies, have faced the same questions of how to define ourselves as citizens of a new nation and of course, the question of identity or identities. We in India thought the answer was simple—it was the single identity of being Indian. But the reality on the ground has turned it into a complex question without a simple answer because even a single identity can subsume others. The utopias that we wished for have retreated in the face of identities in conflict. Let me clarify that I am not using the word ‘identity’ with reference to the individual self, but rather as it is used currently to refer to how a collective of people or a community labels itself. And further, I am concerned with those identities where the label claims to have an accepted historical and cultural origin. I would like to assess the validity of this connection by re-examining these historical claims.

An identity has a genealogy and knowing it would help us understand why it came into existence. History, as we were taught in school and even later, was a representation of the past based on information that had been put together by colonial scholarship. But when identities relevant to the present claimed roots in the past it became necessary for us historians to unpack the past. In this process of unpacking one realized that the past registers changes that could alter its representation. The past does not remain static. In examining the construction of the past that we had inherited from colonial scholarship it was further seen that aspects of nationalist thinking had borrowed from this colonial legacy. Nationalism, also born from a historical condition, builds itself of necessity on a single, focused identity that aspires to be inclusive of the entire society. But it can sometimes be more limited when it represents elite or majoritarian groups seeking dominance. Inclusiveness is problematic since every society since early times has overlooked the need for equality and has registered the dominance of some and the subordination of others. Inequality is thus predictable and results in multiple identities competing for visibility. Yet the wish for an egalitarian society or one relatively so has been an essential feature in envisioning future utopias. In our present post-colonial times in South Asia, the multiple identities of the period before nationalism begin to surface but do so in a changed historical context. Each demands priority for its single identity, treated as exclusive, and this becomes an agency for mobilization.

The multiplicity and inclusiveness of earlier times is set aside. In claiming legitimacy from the past that past itself is converted into an assemblage of what is most desired in the present. Among our current identities in South Asia the more prominent ones go back to colonial times and were usually constructed with links to pre-modern history. Examples of this are identities of race, language, caste, tribe, and religion. Economic poverty and inequality was aggravated as part of the colonial heritage of large segments of the population. Interestingly these were issues widely discussed in Europe in the nineteenth century. They became the prisms through which Europe viewed the past of South Asia. The history of the colony was of prime concern in order to understand its alien culture, to govern its strange peoples and to exploit its wealth. Some of this concern resulted in path-breaking work on deciphering scripts, revealing tangible history through excavations and investigating language through philology—analyzing its linguistic components. 

But at the same time it was argued that there was an absence of historical writing in South Asian cultures. Therefore, a history had to be constructed for the region by colonial scholars and this they proceeded to do. The subsequent nationalist historians tended to accept the positive assessments in this construction but rejected the negative. However, what were missing were alternate explanations where there was disagreement with the colonial construction. Let me turn to some identities that emerged from these studies and are now being questioned in current historical work. Among the more prevalent identities has been that of being Aryan. The notion of an Aryan race has held the stage for almost two centuries. It was rooted in philology and in the Indian context it focused on Sanskrit, thereby discovering its affinity with Old Iranian and some early European languages. An ancestral language was reconstructed and called Indo-European, its South Asian component being Indo-Aryan. As far as language analysis went this was a useful initial exercise. But it did not rest there. It was then argued that all those who spoke the same language belonged to the same race. What was started as a statement about language, came to be applied to race as well, resulting in the virtual equation of race and language. This simplified classification since languages were easily differentiated.

 It is obvious to us now that the equation of language with race has no validity. Race, if at all it exists, is a biological entity entailing birth within a specified group, whereas language is a cultural entity and can be used by anyone belonging to any group. The late nineteenth century in Europe was the high point of the new ‘race science’ as it was called. Its generalizations were adopted without adequate verification. Insisting on a hierarchy among races predictably placed the speakers of IndoEuropean languages at the top. It was ancestral to the European languages. The Aryan or Indo-Aryan language was named after those who called themselves aryas in the Vedas. They were described as speaking Sanskrit and belonging to the Aryan race, although no mention is made of race in the texts. As such they were differentiated from the non-Sanskrit speaking dasas and mlecchas, but we are not told what languages they spoke. These were not racial identities but were language labels and cultural identities. 

However, the confusion once introduced, continued. Even Max Mueller who warned against mixing language with race contributed to the confusion. For example, he described the eminent intellectual, Ram Mohun Roy, as belonging to the Bengali race. Soon every language group of the subcontinent became a race—Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and so on. Among these, importance was given to the speakers of Dravidian. The notion of two separate Aryan and Dravidian racial identities had no basis in history but became axiomatic wherever local populations were believed to have descended from one of the two. There was talk then—and it hasn’t stopped even today—of India as the homeland of the pristine Aryan, an idea supported by movements like the Theosophists eulogizing Vedic culture and prescribing a return to it, and by some leading members of the Arya Samaj with whom the Theosophists were closely associated for a while. The homeland was located by some in Tibet and by others in the borderlands to the west of the Indus in what is today northern Pakistan. The origins of the Dravidian race were traced back imaginatively to the mythical continent of Lemuria where Tamil culture was said to have had its locus. Among the linchpins in these discussions was the colourful Theosophist, Madame Blavatsky, who enthralled both Indians and Sri Lankans. Each of the two so-called races made exaggerated claims to having founded world civilization. But unfortunately, the antagonisms that grew out of such contested but virtually make-believe origins have been the burning embers for a variety of largely political ignitions.

 Other identities also came to be subsumed under the label of race. There continue to be references to Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh races not to mention Pathan, Punjabi, Maratha, Bengali and what have you, races. This is a misuse of the term, particularly now that the very concept of race has been questioned. Nevertheless although the term is virtually meaningless, it can be thrown around to create misleading identities. Let’s look at what the texts tell us about arya. The earliest record of IndoAryan is the language of the Rigveda, thought to date to about 1400 BC. The geographical background of the composition is limited to Seistan in Afghanistan, the northwestern borderlands, and extending into Punjab and Haryana up to the Doab and northern Rajasthan. There is no knowledge of other parts of the subcontinent. This is quite unlike the preceding Harappa Culture that incorporated not only Northwestern India but Gujarat (which became the base for an active maritime trade), down to northern Maharashtra and even parts of the Gulf as in Oman where Harappan settlements have been found in the copper ore areas. A few centuries later the core area of the Indo-Aryan language had shifted from northwestern India to the western Ganga plain and then further east with references to an eastward migration. By the Christian era it was familiar to all of northern India and spreading south. The language underwent change, travelling into new areas and being used by a variety of people, not to mention the normal linguistic change that occurs in a language over many generations. Two points are worth noticing. Existing populations in northern India were using other languages when the speakers of Indo-Aryan composed their corpus. A text of about the seventh century BC, the Shatapatha Brahmana, makes fun of those who could not pronounce Sanskrit correctly and replaced the ‘r’ sound with the ‘l’ sound. Because they could not speak the language correctly they are called mleccha or barbarians. Language was the demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Secondly, Sanskrit was more often the language of Vedic ritual and was spoken by brahmanas and the learned few. The majority of the people spoke a variety of Prakrits, which were dialects of a more simple language that was akin to Sanskrit, sometimes referred to as vernaculars. The edicts of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka of the third century BC, that are found virtually all over the subcontinent, are written in variants of Prakrit and not in Sanskrit. Interestingly, the replacement of ‘r’ by ‘l’ is also characteristic of those Ashokan inscriptions that are located in the middle Ganga plain in the heart of the Mauryan Empire. The word raja is rendered as laja. Such changes are likely because of the presence of other languages that contributed to the making of Prakrits. 

           Even the language of a dominant group tends to soak up some linguistic elements from populations whose languages are different. And from a strictly brahmanical perspective these were all impure mleccha peoples! 

So who were the Aryans? This question has troubled historians. Whoever they were they constituted part of a mixed population. There were recognizable cultural differences between the aryas, dasas, mlecchas and such like. Some fragmentary texts show similarities with the Rigveda but they are from outside India—from northeast Iran and from northern Syria. Contact with India from Iran and the Oxus plain dates to either the late Harappan or post-Harappan times in the second millennium BC, when these seem to have been parallel cultures. In about 1380 BC there is a fragment of a treaty from Syria with the names of deities that sound Indo-Aryan. There are other similarities with names in the Iranian Avesta but with a distinct reversal of values, attributes and some linguistic sounds. For example, the devas and asuras—deities and demons—of the Vedas are the daivas and ahuras of the Avesta, but here they are the demons and deities, the meaning being reversed. The ‘s’ sound of Indo-Aryan becomes the ‘h’ sound in old Iranian, hence asura is ahura. Did the three groups come from the same area and in branching off develop differences of language and culture? If so, the area that has contacts with each of these three regions is the Oxus plain. There is no evidence of a migration from India to Syria or vice versa. What complicates the argument is that languages are not static. They change with social change and especially with the assimilation of new groups. Language specialists have known for some time that there are Dravidian linguistic elements in Vedic Sanskrit, and now it is being said that there may even be Munda linguistic elements. If this is so then the linguistic analysis of these languages becomes even more important to historical investigation, since it suggests mixed cultures. The focus of the study will have to shift from examining imagined races to analyzing the nature and composition of what we call the culture of the speakers of Indo-Aryan. The connotation of the term arya is ambiguous because it changes through history. In the Rigveda the composers of the hymns describe themselves as aryas and by definition, the honourable ones. Opposed to the arya is the dasa, connoting all that the arya is not. The dasa is unable to speak the Aryan language, worships alien deities, and is associated with evil and darkness. Above all the dasa is enviably wealthy and therefore is subjected to raids by the arya. But a few centuries later the emphasis in the definition changed. Now the aryas were more frequently those who commanded respect in society irrespective of their ethnic origins or the language they spoke. Arya was used as an all-purpose honorific. Buddhist and Jaina monks were addressed as arya or ayya by their lay-followers, despite the fact that they came from various castes including those ranked low by the brahmanas. Buddhist texts also use arya as meaning the best, the highest, the most noble and therefore as an epithet for the teachings of the Buddha, (e.g. arya satya), which of course were disapproved of by the brahmanas. The word is not used in any racist sense. As a mark of respect, arya was frequently attached to terms for parents and grandparents. Sons of royalty and well-to-do families are referred to as aryaputra, the son of an arya, as a virtual title. Even the rakshasa Ravana is called thus by his wife. This in part accounts for another turn in the meaning of the word.

 This time the reference is linked to the classification of Indian society into four varnas or castes in the social codes, the Dharmashastras. Arya is used with reference to particular varnas as a mark of status. By the early centuries AD the word arya referred specifically to those of the three upper castes (brahmana, kshatriya, vaishya) in these codes. The fourth caste of shudras in the Dharmashastras was generally that of non-aryas. It states that all those not included in the three upper castes were to be treated as non-aryas, irrespective of the language they speak. Language is no longer a marker of the arya. Even more interesting is the reference to children born of mixed arya and non-arya parents and the problem of defining their status. There were many permutations and combinations. The children of an arya father and a non-arya mother had arya status. Evidently, such marriages were frequent enough to demand attention from the authors of the social codes. Caste rules would have to be adjusted when new groups were incorporated requiring a new definition of arya in caste terms. For the historian then, the identity of ‘Aryan’ changes radically from a supposed race to language, to status, to caste. This is not surprising because identities do change with historical change. Therefore there is also a change in the choice of identities and in the definition of an identity.

 But colonial scholarship treated them as static. The arya was defined for all time in terms of its meaning in the Rigveda and then too the meaning was mistaken and taken as race. It was argued that each caste was a separate race and that this was the most effective way of segregating races. Herbert Risley went around measuring cephalic index and nasal width in order to prove the racial equation. This was perhaps a forerunner of the attempt to prove segregation by ascertaining the genetic pattern of the four castes. The normative codes describing the four castes were earlier taken at face value and thought to be descriptions of how society actually functioned even if such a scheme seemed much too rigid. Historical records naturally show obvious discrepancies.

 Each caste has its own hierarchy, allowing some flexibility and sometimes providing a mechanism for incorporating those regarded as low born into the lower levels of the top castes. This may explain why some brahmanas are either specifically excluded from or else limited to, participating in certain rituals. For example, there are stringent rules governing which brahmanas can or cannot participate in the shraddha rituals commemorating ancestors. Why this was so is not always clear. Or there is the curious reference in the Kaushitaki Brahmana to the dasi-putra brahmana, literally the brahman who is the son of a non-arya, dasa woman. The term is something of an oxymoron. Such persons were initially treated with contempt, but when they demonstrated their supernatural power they were welcomed as brahmanas. 

The second caste, that of kshatriyas was the one that was supposed to provide the dynasties. However, political activities were relatively open and persons of other castes bid for power as well. As we have seen in the previous essay, the Mauryas appear to be included among the shudra dynasties in brahmanical literature perhaps because they patronized heterodox sects such as the Buddhist and Jaina. Some dynasties of obscure origin supported their claim to being kshatriyas by having genealogies fabricated for them linking them to ancient lineages, such as the Suryavamsha (the Solar Lineage) and the family of Rama, or the Chandravamsha (the Lunar Lineage) and the descendants of Puru. Such claims became quite fashionable after the sixth century AD when mention is made in the Puranas of the making of what are called ‘new kshatriyas’. 

It was presumed that the pattern of the four castes was uniform in the subcontinent. But in fact it differed from region to region and various occupational castes were often prominent. Thus in the Punjab the dominant caste has not been that of brahmanas but of khatris or traders. In medieval times they had problems with the peasant castes aspiring to high status. Dominant castes may formally claim a higher caste status but in fact their dominance came and comes from land and wealth. An on-going debate among historians of south India concerns the dominant caste of brahmanas in relation to the powerful vellalas, landed gentry, at various times.

 Colonial scholars saw the connection between caste and religion but this did not lead to the recognition that religions in South Asia followed a pattern distinctly different from the Judeo-Christian; not that they failed to observe distinct, monolithic identities at all social levels. They are better viewed as juxtaposed sects that formed a mosaic. Harmony or discord between them, both of which feature in early texts, referred to sects and communities rather than to an overarching religious identity of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Christian. There were conflicts but these were less frequent, were localized, were on a smaller scale and were easier to resolve. As we know, another difference was that all religions—indigenous or immigrant—internalized caste.

Those who converted to religions promising social equality ended up carrying the baggage of caste with them. An entire village might convert, as for example in recent years when Dalits converted to the neo-Buddhism advocated by Ambedkar, (nevertheless caste hierarchies continued to be observed). Every religion in India has its Dalits and OBCs (Other Backward Castes). The litmus test of the centrality of caste shows up in having to conform to the caste rules of marriage circles. This means having to follow the rules of which groups can intermarry and which cannot. The rules are still generally observed. The essential requirement in this was to ensure control over women. This is made brutally clear in the decisions of the khap panchayats of Haryana to murder the young women who do not observe the caste rules of whom they may or may not marry. Or take the case of Islam where Muslim society was also fragmented. The Muslims claiming ancestry from west Asia are of a higher caste than the local converts. Despite both being Muslims there is still a distinction in caste. The ranking of castes according to occupation is also observed as it is in all religions in India. Muslims who came from elsewhere and settled in South Asia and married into local communities adapted local belief to Islam. Local custom and practice could take precedence over the Islamic law of Shar’ia, which in itself often accommodated such custom. Such communities would have had problems with a monolithic Islam. At the lowest level were the Dalit Muslims, who like their Hindu counterparts continued to be treated as polluting and were often denied burial in the graveyards of high-caste Muslims. Similarly, places of worship built and managed by Mazhabi Sikhs who are regarded as untouchables tend to be avoided by upper-caste Sikhs. Technically, once reservation is conceded to the Dalit it should be open to all Dalits of every religion. Converting Dalits into a separate community where they could only marry among themselves meant that they were Dalits by birth and remained so all through life. Using them in the meanest occupations and declaring them thereby physically polluting to the senses, was a mechanism of ensuring a permanent supply of subordinated labour. Because they were believed to be polluting, they could live only in their section of the village. This was the most efficient ghettoization of large communities. What continues to remain unclear to the historian is why particular groups were degraded in this manner at various times in history; or why religions that claim to be inclusive of all, and supposedly treat all humans as equal, nevertheless exclude some groups as untouchable? This is surely an instance of the social structure encompassing religion. Religion rarely fights for the equality of all in material life. For obvious reasons neither the brahmanical codes nor the construction of caste in the nineteenth century captured the reality in the functioning of castes on the ground.

This is also applicable to the way religion was projected as an identity. The construction of religious identities emerged from the textual bias of Orientalist scholarship. Since the texts were in Sanskrit and Arabic scholars were tutored by the brahmanas and the mullahs. The brahmanas highlighted the Vedas and the Dharmashastras, the others highlighted the Qur’an, the Hadith and the Shar’ia. There was little discussion of other texts or other religious groups that questioned these. Buddhism and Jainism were treated as sub-sects of Hinduism as they still are by many. Popular religion was part of the oral tradition or was recorded in languages that were not considered on par with Sanskrit such as Prakrit, or Tamil and other regional languages. That religious practices did not always follow the texts was barely noticed. It has been said of Hinduism that its essentials lie in orthopraxy—the practice of rituals, and not in orthodoxy—the theological beliefs. For the majority, observances were primary. Colonial scholarship regarded the recording of religious practices as the domain of the ethnographers and the authors of district gazetteers. 

There was little recognition of the fact that in complex societies there are multiple voices and they all have to be listened to. From the colonial perspective Hinduism and Islam were two separate monolithic religions and all Hindus and Muslims observed the rules of their respective text-based religions. This may have been applicable to sections of the elite, such as court circles and heads of religious institutions. However, for the vast majority of people religion was an open-ended experience—a mixing, merging, overlapping, borrowing or rejecting of forms and ideas beyond the formal labels. Religion for the larger population lay in forms of personal devotion, in the worship of the spirits within trees and mountains, nagas, yakshis and ancillary deities of local cult shrines, in listening to the words of the bhikkhus and the Nayannars and Alvars, the Bhakti and Sufi teachers, to the stories retold from the epics and the Puranas, and to the conversations of those who congregated around gurus, faqirs, pirs, and other ‘holy men’, agreeing or disagreeing on the essentials of understanding the purpose of life and the meaning of death. 

There were the grand temples, mosques and churches to be visited for prayers, except that temples were not open to all. Ritual and belief because they mixed caste practices and the norms of one’s sect, differed among communities that we now refer to as Hindu. These differences need detailed study in the histories of religion in India. Religions in South Asia were generally flexible enough to allow people to worship in each other’s sacred places when there was a wish to do so and if they were allowed to. My first experience of religion was when I was visiting my grandmother at the age of four. She was a devout worshipper of Vishnu, yet she took me one morning to the grave of a locally venerated Muslim holy man, a pir, and taught me how to offer flowers and seek blessings in my own way. The imprint has remained. The essence of religion concerns the worshipper, her relationship with the world around her from which her belief may come and her personal relationship with the supernatural. Today in South Asia, we unnecessarily insist on impermeable boundaries. It is perhaps as well to remember that what came to be called ‘Hindu’ was the label for all that was placed together beneath an umbrella, and that which came to be called Hinduism in colonial times. The religion of Hinduism, or these many Hindu religions, as some would say, can be better described as a mosaic of sectarian belief and worship rather than a single system with a linear history. Ashoka when he speaks of what we would call religion refers to the brahmanas and the shramans (Buddhists and Jainas), as does that famed Greek visitor of the time, Megasthenes. The same is suggested by Al-Biruni as late as the eleventh century AD. Apparently it would seem that people identified themselves by their sects. As we know ‘Hindu’ was first used in Arabic, but initially as a geographical term and referred to the people living across the Indus river in alHind. It was taken from the Old Iranian and Indo-Aryan, Sindhu, and the Indos of the Greeks’ name for the Indus river. It was only from about the fourteenth century or so that ‘Hindu’ took on a religious connotation to refer to those that were not Muslim. This brought the mosaic of sects under one awning. But the term Hinduism as suggestive of a uniform system of belief became current in colonial times. Strictly speaking, the single identity also seems inappropriate for Muslims who by now had fragmented into many sects and communities, differentiated by the imprint of local culture and a degree of concession to it.

Similarly, Buddhism too became variegated over time, ranging from Theravada to the complexities of Ge-lugs-pa in Tibet. In the case of Muslims, Buddhists, Jainas, the fact that they were religions founded by historical persons gave them a different pattern of evolution. This pattern has some parallels not with the entirety of Hinduism but with some of its sects that had their beginnings with historical founders. 

The history of religion in South Asia was not the same as that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The nineteenth-century perception of religion in India moved it from its earlier relative fluidity at the popular level into a defined pattern with indelible boundaries. This facilitated its mobilization on a large scale as and when required, as has been apparent in recent times. Having projected two monolithic religions as the major religious contribution of the Indian past, the census data was added in. There followed the theory of the majority religion of Hinduism creating a majority community and the minority religion of Islam creating a minority community—the largest and most prominent among a number of minority communities, and each was given a specific religious identity. It was then erroneously argued that the separation of the two communities Hindu and Muslim was rooted in history. Mobilizing majority and minority communities by religion led inevitably to the politics of communalism. Counting numbers and giving them religious labels was unheard of prior to the nineteenth century. 

Religion became the causative factor in the interpretation of history. But religious identities have varied and changed within the same religion over time, and from one social segment to another. Periodization based on religion as the sole criterion of historical activity is a negation of history. Discarded by historians, it remains central to the creed of extreme religious nationalists, Hindu and Muslim and others, still drawing legitimation from colonial theories. Colonial scholars argued that the Hindus and Muslims belonged to two entirely separate cultures with little in common; and that the relationship was antagonistic. History became the foundation of establishing a Hindu and a Muslim identity, but the nature of religion in the subcontinent was misunderstood. It was not these identities alone that brought about the subsequent fractures in the subcontinent but they were used to legitimize the political mobilizations that led to the break-up. The pattern is almost a blueprint for colonial policy in other parts of the world as well. Turning to yet another but different colonial reading of the South Asian past there was an insistence that poverty had been endemic to South Asia. It was attributed to the political system of Oriental Despotism said to characterize premodern Asia and which left little alternative. In contesting this view Indian opinion argued that poverty was recent and resulted from wealth being drained away to fuel British industry. We seem to have come full circle. 

The globalized market economy has been described as a form of neo-colonialism. The wealth produced in the developing world goes to enrich the national corporates feeding into multinational corporations. It cannot therefore stem the increasing impoverishment of the developing world. Let me consider two identities associated with poverty that were not created by colonial writing but were reiterated by the colonial perspective. These were the Dalits and the forest dwelling tribes—both dating back to more than two millennia. The two were classified by colonial administration as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Colonial scholarship generally ignored the first but the second was reinforced through insisting on the dichotomy between the civilized and the primitive. The British Census differentiated between tribe and caste but for Indian ethnography there was more of a continuum from tribe to caste, some tribes evolving into castes. What then has been the identity of these forest tribes? In historical records they were the mleccha, the primitive ‘Other’, the alternate to the civilized. A brahmanical myth of origin makes this clear. It tells of Vena, the ruler who having stopped performing brahmanical rituals was killed by the brahmanas. But a ruler was necessary. So they churned the left thigh of Vena and a short, ugly, dark man with bloodshot eyes emerged and they called him Nishad. He was banished to the forest and was associated with the Pulinda, Shabara, Bhilla and other forest dwellers, and also the rakshasas, the demons. This formulaic description of such people is repeated in most Sanskrit texts. They then churned the right arm of the dead Vena and up sprang a handsome young man whom they named Prithu. Significantly, he was the one who introduced settled agriculture and animal breeding and observed all the rituals. And the earth in gratitude took his name as Prithivi. This is a stereotypical story that occurs in many Asian cultures. The myth colours other texts. The forest dwellers are said to be hostile and to attack the armies that march through their forests. This was a classic case of the settlement encroaching on the forest and resenting the forest dwellers who resisted such encroachment. Very occasionally the encroachment resulted in a reversal of identity. The king could give a person a huge grant of forested land and the grantee would establish himself in the area, perhaps marry into the tribal chief’s family and gradually build up an independent base. Such a royal family would need a carefully crafted genealogy claiming royal status, as is evident from the genealogies of the Raj Gonds and the Nagabansis of central India. With an increase in lands granted by kings in the period after about AD 1000, the encroachments became more common. Slowly, the tribal peoples began losing their land, their forests and rivers, their animal and mineral wealth. In medieval times traders were attracted by this wealth and set up the monetary market with inevitably, money-lending. Acquisition of tribal land by the British administration requiring vast amounts of timber for the railways and other forest products associated with forested areas, such as metals and minerals, further reduced the rights. The latest predators are corporates demanding huge areas for both mining and timber. They claim to be introducing the benefits of civilization but the identity of the forest dwellers remains that of the ‘Primitive Other’. The past for them is not a shared history but a remembered exploitation carried out by the representatives of civilization. These tribes are now among the most impoverished peoples in the subcontinent. The permanence of poverty has been assumed and until recently has raised little alarm. But poverty was not what the forest tribes were identified with in earlier times. Where forest produce was available to them and where land could be used for shifting cultivation, life had a different quality. The forest was contrasted with the settlement as an alternative way of life, with its own cultural values that were sometimes even romanticized. Today both groups have forced themselves into the consciousness of the societies where they are present. Dalits associated with Hinduism are receiving some benefits from reservations in educational institutions and state employment. Other Dalits are quite rightly demanding the same benefits. Predictably, the resentment of the upper castes is expressed in outbursts of violence against the Dalits. Private militias of the upper castes think nothing of going to a Dalit village and slaughtering Dalits knowing that they will escape punishment, as happens periodically in various parts of India. The rights of the forest tribes having been reduced to a minimum—they are now caught in a condition of continuous violence. The Naxals or Maoists claiming to speak for the tribes are battling it out with government administration in the forest habitats as well as with corporates introducing their own ways of undermining the welfare of the forest people. Caught in this crossfire, it is the tribal people whose lives are devastated. I have been trying to question some of the identities with which we live and which some regard as historically valid. I have tried to argue that those identities that condition our lives in South Asia should be re-assessed to ascertain their validity. There is a need for recognizing that they may not be rooted in history but in other extraneous factors. And we have to remember that when history changes, identities also have to change. If the premises of the identity are no longer viable, can we continue to use the same label? Such monitoring involves a dialogue among historians and scholars but also and importantly, between them and citizens. This would not merely be an exercise in historical research but would help us understand why an identity was initially constructed and how it was subsequently used, and why it may have become not only redundant but also perilous. Ostensibly, it may relate to race or religion, or whatever, but implicitly may be connected with other intentions such as access to power or aspirations to status. Is the identity then a mask to hide disparities, disaffections, inequities, encouraging a deviation from facing actuality? An identity is not created accidentally nor is it altogether innocent of intention. Analyses of identities are pertinent also to the extensive and vocal South Asian diaspora. Nationals settled in distant lands often nurture identities that may well be historically untenable and outdated in the culture of the home country. But they are a source of solace to the migrant in an alien culture and underline a claim to connectedness. Such identities frequently deny the essential plurality of South Asian civilization and the intersections within it. The replacement of these identities becomes a problem of trans-nationalism. Beyond this we might consider what the premise should be if we are to encourage the emergence of other identities given that the context of our times is not what it was a century or two ago. A nation needs identities that are broad, inclusive and that support its essential requirements of democracy, secularity, equality, rights to the institutions of welfare and to social justice. If we continue to make identities of colonial origin a part of our thinking they will continue to be the quicksand that prevents us from even aspiring to, leave alone reaching, the utopias we had once visualized. 4 IN DEFENCE OF HISTORY From 1999 to 2004, when a BJP government was in power, there were repeated attempts to silence historians. Similar happenings could occur again. To comprehend these events requires an understanding of why it is necessary to defend history as written by historians, as also the recognition of a past that is analytical and open to critical enquiry. The historians who were verbally assaulted and physically threatened were the ones that had taken this turn in writing history in the previous decades. Their studies incorporated historical enquiry and were pointers to new ways of extending that enquiry. They widened and sharpened the intellectual foundations of the discipline of history and enriched the understanding of the Indian past. Some among those who were opposed to these historians were also mocking the discipline of history, unable to grasp the change that the discipline had undergone. Indian history in the 1960s and 70s moved from being largely a body of information on dynasties and a recital of glorious deeds to a broad based study of social and economic forms in the past. In this there was a focus on patterns of the economy, on forms of social organization, on religious movements, and on cultural articulations. The multiple cultures of India were explored in terms of how they contributed to the making of Indian civilization, or as some historians might prefer, ‘Indian civilizations’. Therefore, many aspects of this multiplicity and its varying forms—from that of forest dwellers, jhum cultivators,

     4 IN DEFENCE OF HISTORY 

ATTEMPTS TO DILUTE HISTORY AS A DISCIPLINE OF KNIWLEDGE

From 1999 to 2004, when a BJP government was in power, there were repeated attempts to silence historians. Similar happenings could occur again. To comprehend these events requires an understanding of why it is necessary to defend history as written by historians, as also the recognition of a past that is analytical and open to critical enquiry. The historians who were verbally assaulted and physically threatened were the ones that had taken this turn in writing history in the previous decades. Their studies incorporated historical enquiry and were pointers to new ways of extending that enquiry. They widened and sharpened the intellectual foundations of the discipline of history and enriched the understanding of the Indian past. Some among those who were opposed to these historians were also mocking the discipline of history, unable to grasp the change that the discipline had undergone. 

CHANGES IN UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY

Indian history in the 1960s and 70s moved from being largely a body of information on dynasties and a recital of glorious deeds to a broad based study of social and economic forms in the past. In this there was a focus on patterns of the economy, on forms of social organization, on religious movements, and on cultural articulations. The multiple cultures of India were explored in terms of how they contributed to the making of Indian civilization, or as some historians might prefer, ‘Indian civilizations’. Therefore, many aspects of this multiplicity and its varying forms—from that of forest dwellers, jhum cultivators, pastoralists, peasants, artisans, to that of merchants, aristocracies and specialists of ritual and belief—all found a place in the mosaic that was gradually being constructed. Identities were not singular but plural and the most meaningful studies were of situations where identities overlapped. Ten years ago Indian history was moving towards what some scholars have described as almost a historical renaissance. The writing of Indian historians, ranging over many opinions and interpretations, were read and studied in the world of historical scholarship, not only in India but wherever there was an interest in comparative history. Historical interpretations at this time and in many parts of the world used methods of historical analyses that were derived from a range of theories that attempted to explain and interpret the past. As we’ve seen, these included schools of interdisciplinary research such as the French Annales School, varieties of structuralism, of Marxism, Weberian concepts, and diverse other theories and there was writing on what was called ‘the return of grand theory’. Lively debates on the Marxist interpretation of history, for example, led to the rejection of the Asiatic Mode of Production as proposed by Marx, and instead focused on other aspects such as whether a Marxist method of analysis could be used and if so, how it would be defined. In the period after the ending of the Cold War in the late twentieth century the interest in dialectics as a philosophical form and historical materialism as a way of understanding history began to be explored more freely. There was no single uniform reading of Marxism among Marxists, so there were many stimulating discussions on social and economic history. In the study of feudalism by Indian historians, for example, one trigger may have been the Feudal Mode of Production as developed by Marx, but the ideas of historians other than Marxists, such as Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and Henri Pirenne, were also central to these discussions. The intention was not to apply theories without questioning them, but to use comparative history to ask searching questions. If those who constitute both the political leadership as well as the rank and file of political parties today, took the trouble to read, they might begin to understand that serious historical interpretation is not just a game of adopting this or that ‘…ism’, but of attempting to use a method of analysis in interpreting the past. Gone are the days that one could talk intelligently about history to a Nehru or a Maulana Azad. They are not made like that any more.

POOR EDUCATION SYSTEM AND UNERSTANDING OF HISTORY

 (i) The equally serious problem is that owing to our faulty educational system in which school education has become something of a joke, there is a yawning gap between those advancing knowledge and the general public. There is no category of intellectual middle-men or women who can communicate the happenings at the cutting edge of knowledge in a sufficiently popular and reliable form so that those who are not specialists can at least follow what is happening. 

(ii) Consequently, there is no problem for illiterate ideas to be spread among the public, to convince them that the myths and fantasies about earlier times, were in fact realities. Stories are spun about the past and sold as history with little attempt at teaching people how to tell a fantasy from real life.

ENQUIRY AS A TOOL OF UNDERSTANDING FOR UNDERSTANDIN HISTORY

(1)ABOUT CASTE-- Some of the more obvious examples of historical debates relate to the question of how to investigate the reality of the past. The changing history of caste in Indian society was being studied in detail to ascertain social change and explain social disparities. It was also being viewed in a comparative sense with other systems of social organization such as those dominated by the master– slave nexus as in the Greco-Roman world, or feudal lords and serfs of the medieval European world, or the more easily recognizable class-based societies of recent centuries. Historians were asking the same questions that the Buddha had asked when told about Greek society: why do some societies have caste and others have a two-fold division of master and slave. These were questions that were concerned primarily with trying to comprehend caste as a system of organizing society before making value-judgements about it.

(ii) ABOUT GENDER ETC-- New themes came under the purview of historical investigation. Gender history focused on women, not merely as additional players but as primary and diverse players at varying levels of society and their role in the genesis of some social forms began to be studied. Systems of knowledge came to be examined in terms of their influence on society and their function rather than restricting their history to merely repeating the obvious—that these were great advances in knowledge. 

KNOWLEDGE AND ITS APPLICABILITY

The pursuit of knowledge for itself is acceptable, but to examine its application in society and the results thereof is even more necessary. 

(i) The formation and definition of a range of Indian cultures came to include the formulations of culture from communities other than elite groups and this widened the base of social history.

 (ii) It also influenced the extensive study of religious movements other than the well-known ones, their beliefs and rituals and their audiences. 

(iii) An interest in the history of the environment suggested fresh hypotheses about the rise and decline of urban centres or the impact of hydraulic changes or deforestation on settlements of various kinds. 

ATTEMPTS TO SCUTTLE INTELLECTUAL UNDERSTANDING

An attempt was made through government actions to terminate this intellectual efflorescence. The blight that began in the 1990s culminated in around 2000 in an enforced effort to clamp down on the process of exploring ideas. It reached the point where a systematic attempt was made to denigrate the independent intellectual and to undermine a historical understanding of our society and its past. This attempt took a variety of forms. Sometimes it took the form of political actions, later it resorted to intervening in and closing institutions connected to academic research, and thereafter it focused on censoring books and textbooks. Each action was orchestrated to a single aim. The political action that initiated this blight was the tearing down of the Babri Masjid in 1992. This was an attempt to insist that a single culture and a single identity—a Hindu identity, defined not by Hindus in general but by those indulging in the destruction of the Masjid—defined Indian culture. From the earlier acceptance by Hindu culture to allow variants to co-exist, the attempt now was to pick up and weave a narrow, limited, exclusive strand and define that as Hindu. Destroying the Babri Masjid was a violent, aggressive act of destruction claiming to glorify Hinduism but was a far cry from representing civilized Hindu values. What happened to ‘Hindu tolerance’ and the fact that Hindus in the past rarely went around destroying mosques? This activity is of recent vintage. Implicit in this act of destruction was the theory that it drew its legitimacy from history, that it was avenging the destruction of the temple at Somanatha by Mahmud of Ghazni, and thereby setting right a wrong of history, even if it was doing so after a thousand years. This fallacious idea that the past can be changed through destroying the surviving heritage from the earlier time was of course an attack on the idea of history: for an axiom of history is that the past cannot be changed, but that if we intelligently understand the past, then the present and the future can be better directed. The destruction of the heritage of a society, as also happened in the case of the Taliban destroying the images of the Buddha at Bamiyan, was the subordination of past history to the imperatives of contemporary politics. The claim that the past could be annulled was actually a crass attempt to redefine people, their culture and their history. 

COLLECTIVE MEMMORY

(i) PUPOSE----The effort in these instances was to create a nation moulded not by all-inclusive national aspirations as of the earlier anticolonial kind, but instead by a narrow category labelled as ‘nationalism’ although it identified with a particular version of a single religion. This made it easier to impose an ideology of the sort that facilitated political mobilization and access to power of one community and excluded all others.

History was being made a handmaiden to this process. Once such a process comes into being it can be used to construct what is projected as a collective memory. Collective memories are not innate and naturally prevalent at birth. They are consciously constructed at particular historical moments for particular historical purposes. As we all know from parallel political movements that have used history in this fashion, such as in Europe in the 1930s, the notion of a collective memory encourages simplistic explanations, single agendas even for explanations of happenings in the past, and preferably a replacing of historical fact with mythology. Collective memory can be a historical or even anti-historical and is therefore a convenient tool for spreading fallacies. To call a particular mindset, or an attitude to the past, as a ‘collective memory’ requires a meticulous investigation of what is being presented as such to justify the description, and the reason why it has been constructed and has an appeal. The Hindutva approach to history for example, ignores all other histories and schools of interpretation contrary to it. They are all dismissed as Leftist or ‘Marxist’ or its equivalent. They are then replaced with a reconstruction of the past, based on dubious evidence and arguments, and which differs from the accepted mainstream history. 

RELIGIOUS PARTITION OF INDIAN HISTORY

Hindutva history draws directly from and derives its legitimacy from nineteenth-century colonial history. It draws its themes from that and the arguments are still stuck in the ideas of those times. As we’ve seen, the periodization of Indian history maintained by James Mill divides Indian history into the Hindu, Muslim and British periods. Mill’s argument and that of many other colonial historians was that the Hindus and Muslims formed two distinct communities and that they were perpetually in conflict. This idea then contributed to the notion of the two nations—the Hindu and the Muslim— identified by religion, culminating in the creation of Pakistan. This has been taken over by the Hindutva ideology in which the enmity of Hindu and Muslim is foundational. It is argued that Hindu civilization suffered because of Muslim rulers who oppressed the Hindus. This view is propagated despite the fact that some of the most creative forms of Hinduism such as Bhakti —the religion of devotional worship, and now the most widely practiced form of Hinduism—evolved in South India but became prevalent in North India notwithstanding Islam and sometimes with Muslim participants. That Mill’s version of Indian history has been discarded on the basis of the history written in the last fifty years makes not the slightest difference to the Hindutva insistence on supporting the two-nation theory. 

    CONVERSION THEORY-SOCIAL PRIVILEGES - CASTE

A major contention is that Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. This view is based on the claims of the court chroniclers of various sultanates who keep announcing the conversion of a fantasy figure of fifty thousand Hindus. Some conversions may well have been under pressure. Others such as wellplaced families, as for instance of some Rajputs, more frequently converted for reasons of social and political expediency, or else made marriage alliances without converting. Shahjehan for instance had a Rajput mother and Rajput paternal grandmother, which gives him a substantial Rajput identity. There was a time when the Rajputs were thought to have come from Central Asia, although this theory has few supporters now. In the general mélange of the Indian population it is difficult to identify those who are foreign. The characteristics of being foreign were not the same as now. But the majority of conversions were by caste—jati. These would have been voluntary and in the expectation that Islam held out a better deal of social equality than Hinduism. If large numbers of Hindus converted then the majority of Muslims were indigenous Hindus and cannot be regarded as alien. There are many contradictions in dubbing all Muslims and Christians as foreigners, apart from the fact that the definition of foreigner was not the same in those days. There was of course no guarantee that the expectation in converting would be met and less so where a caste ranking was not terminated with conversion, as was generally the case. But what is of interest is that where a caste converted, it normally retained its rules of marriage, custom and some rituals and continued to have professional relationships with Hindu castes of its equivalence or in its social vicinity. When weavers in some north Indian towns such as Chanderi converted to Islam, they continued their earlier relationship with Hindu textile merchants. Prior to their conversion they were anyway regarded as low caste and the traders maintained a social distance, and this distance remained as before even after conversion. That every religion in India has a category of Dalits and the distancing is maintained in each, shows that conversion to an egalitarian religion was not the answer to social inequality. The social code based on jati was more powerful than religion. The issue of conversion that was once a matter of historical debate became a political weapon that proponents of Hindutva used to threaten Muslims and Christians with. Historians have shown repeatedly that conversions did not create a monolithic, uniform community. Those who called themselves Islamic had immense variations in the practice of their religion. The Islam of the Arabs, Turks, Persians was not identical. The basic divide between the Sunni and Shi’a has continued throughout history, as also between Khojas, Bohras, Meos, Navayats and Mappilas, to name just a few.

      cultural richness due to conversion

These variations enriched the culture of each community and endowed them with distinct identities of language, region and custom, identities that frequently intersected with those of other groups in the area. The hostilities that surfaced were more frequently within the sect. In trying to understand the history of communities, whether Hindu, Muslim or any other, there are many distinctive forms that give multiple identities to such groups. These have evolved from a long process of social negotiation— some of it contentious and some of it convivial. These identities cannot be negated as in the Hindutva interpretations that sweep them all into a single religious community. Conversion resulted from a variety of reasons and these varied according to caste, occupation and region. These need to be historically investigated. Such an investigation has urgency because in India today, both in Islam as in Hinduism there is a wish to forge a new monolithic identity in pursuit of political ambitions.

ISLAMIZATION AND TEMPLE  DESTRUCTION 

The process of what has been called Islamization—which some may see as a polite term for fundamentalism—is taking place in many communities. Is this a counter-point to the Hindutva now calling the shots in many Hindu communities? Another aspect of the relations between Hindus and Muslims in the ideology of Hindutva focuses on the Muslim destruction of temples in the past. This is not denied by historians, who try and place such actions in historical perspective. The Hindutva count takes it up to 3008 but a historian’s reckoning does not push it beyond 80. The exaggeration of the former speaks for itself. This was not the only activity of Muslim rulers and temple destruction has to be juxtaposed with other undertakings that were constructive and not destructive. Nor were temples destroyed out of religious animosity alone. Aurangzeb has now been converted into the icon of the Muslim destroyer of temples. Yet, there are innumerable firmans that record his substantial donations to temples and to brahmanas, as has been listed and discussed by K.K. Datta in his study, Some Firmans, Sanads and Parwanas. There is no record that states that any brahmana refused to receive a grant of land or money from a ruler who was destroying Hindu temples. One would expect this from self-respecting brahmanas if there was such a ground swell of resentment against him as is depicted in some modern writing. After all the brahmanas were the custodians of temples. This is also related to the question of what we chose to recall from the past and reiterate, and what we chose to forget. The broader question is why were some temples destroyed and others conserved by the same ruler. Destroying a temple was a demonstration of power on the part of invaders, irrespective of whether they were Muslim or Hindu. We choose to forget that there were Hindu kings who destroyed temples, either willfully as did Harshadeva and other kings of Kashmir in order to acquire the wealth of the temples, or as in the case of the victorious Paramara raja who destroyed temples built by the defeated Chaulukya, as part of a campaign. In terms of numbers, Muslim rulers damaged more temples than did Hindu rulers, but the more important question is why temples became a target even where the rulers were Hindu. My purpose in drawing attention to this is not to add up the scores, but to argue that temple destruction was not merely an act of religious hostility. Temples were places of ritual space and had a religious identity. But temples were also statements of power and were surrogate political institutions representing royalty. They were depositories of wealth and institutions financing trade and other economic enterprises. The investments of religious institutions in economic enterprise are not a recent activity but go back to the activities of those that administered the Buddhist monasteries. The temples assumed the same role when they had the wherewithal to invest. Temples also maintained social demarcations by allowing in some castes but excluding others. The cultural nucleus of at least the elite groups of a region often focused on the activities of the temple. They were, in effect, institutions with both a political and economic authority. Temple destruction and its aftermath, therefore calls for historical explanations of a wide-ranging kind. It cannot be made the justification for destroying or threatening to destroy, mosques and churches in the present day and building temples on the debris. ■ 

WHO WAS In order to assert the superiority and antiquity of the Hindu community as the indigenous and earliest inhabitants of India, the theory of Aryan identity is being revived but in a curious way. The ‘Aryans’ are said to be the foundation of Indian civilization therefore they have to be proved to be indigenous as well as the earliest people to give form to the civilization. Therefore they are now being equated with the authors of the Indus civilization. This contradicts the opinion of the majority of scholars who have argued that the Indus Civilization was preAryan and non-Aryan. It also had very little in common with Vedic culture. It was a mercantile culture focusing on its many cities and artisanal production and trade, whereas the Vedic corpus depicts a cattle-keeping society with some agricultural activity but unfamiliar with urban culture. The Vedic corpus is rich in its depiction of an agro-pastoral culture, but this is in no way the same as the urban sophistication of the Indus cities. 

The idea of the Aryan foundations of Indian civilization is an entirely nonIndian theory curiously fostered by two distinctive groups of people, European and American. As mentioned previously, one was the German scholar Max Mueller who drew on the work of European philologists seeking the roots of Indo-European languages that he combined with the fashionable (and now discarded) theories of race propounded in nineteenth-century Europe. He argued for a superior Aryan race that came into northwestern India, invaded and settled in the area from where the Aryans spread to other parts of the subcontinent. The second group was that of the Theosophists, the American, Henry Steel Olcott, associated with Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century and lived partly in India to propagate Theosophy and her other ideas. 

They were the first to argue, as do the Hindutva ideologues now, that the Aryans of India were not only indigenous but were the fountainhead of world civilization, and that all the achievements of human society had their origins in India and travelled out from India. Vedic Sanskrit, it was claimed, was the mother language of all languages, thus reversing the argument of Sanskrit being descended from Indo-European. The Theosophical Society had very close relations with the Arya Samaj for a few years. The thesis of Aryans being indigenous has at least two other angles to it relevant to contemporary politics. The idea may unite all the caste Hindus as being of the same ancestry and descended from the Aryans, but it excludes the Dravidian speakers and Dalits. A recent attempt to get round the first problem is the garbled attempt to argue that the Dravidian language belongs to the same linguistic group as Indo-Aryan. This is linguistically untenable. The proponents of Hindutva will surely have to think of something a little more credible. The second problem is that they run counter to the view of Jyotiba Phule and the Dalits of his time who maintained that the Aryans were alien outsiders who, as brahmanas, invaded and oppressed the lower castes of Indian society. The Hindutva argument has now shifted to saying that the authors of the Rigveda were the builders of the Harappan cities. They also maintain that only Hindus can legitimately call themselves indigenous since Muslims and Christians are foreigners, their religion having originated outside the territory of British India, the territory that they equate with the ancient Bharatavarsha. Perhaps one of the ways to get round this problem would be to quickly convert the Dalits and the adivasis into caste Hindus—they can then all be Aryans together. The intention of Hindutva history is to support the vision of its founding fathers—Savarkar and Golwalkar—and to attribute the beginnings of Indian history to what they called the indigenous Aryans. This contradicts the existing archaeological and linguistic evidence of the Indo-Aryan speakers. This theory ignores all the other societies, some of which were speaking Dravidian and Munda, of which languages there are traces in Vedic Sanskrit. It refrains from defining what is an Aryan because obviously any definition would lead to many complications given the range of exceptions that would arise. It ignores the argument, now generally agreed to, that the concept of Aryan is not an exclusive, racial identity, but refers primarily to the language, Indo-Aryan and to the culture of a group recognizable by linguistic and ritual features, reflecting a merging of varied groups including migrants from the Indo-Iranian borderlands and the Oxus plain; and that the meaning and evolution of the term changed with its historical usage. The linguistic and cultural connections between those in northeastern Iran and in west Asia, are a component of the study of the Vedic language and archaeology, but we are so blinkered to anything outside north India, that we consult neither the scholarship on the Avesta in Iran, nor that on west Asia of this period. Desperate attempts are being made to prove that the Vedic people and the Harappans were identical. Reading the Harappan pictograms as Indo-Aryan has failed. As mentioned earlier, the reading of archaeological evidence is forced to the extent that a damaged seal showing a Harappan unicorn was manipulated on the computer to make it look like the hind quarters of a horse, in order to link it with the horses of the Vedic sacrificial ritual of the ashvamedha. The fraud was exposed in Frontline. Contrary to the evidence so far excavated, which points to the origins of the Indus Civilization being located at sites in Baluchistan and the northwest, the attempt is to locate it on the banks of what some identify as the Sarasvati river. This would allow it to be called the Sarasvati Civilization, further evoking a Vedic source. 

A history having been invented, the next question is how it is to be implemented? This happens at two levels. One is that of projecting this history through research institutions and the other is through the school curriculum. This was what was attempted in 2002 through a campaign that had involved the agencies of the Human Resource Development Ministry directly concerned with history such as the ICHR (Indian Council for Historical Research), and the NCERT (National Council for Education, Research and Training). These interventions by the Ministry were politicized by statements to the effect that, earlier, these institutions were under the control of Left-wing academics so now it was the turn of the Right-wing academics to take charge. If the debate was going to be formulated in terms of leftist and rightist historians then each time the party in power changed, the curriculum and the syllabus and the topics for research, would also have to change. However, history is not a shuttlecock that can be driven back and forth in accordance with the views of governments. It also means that since procedures are not being observed, not only the curriculum but also the research programmes will change. Excuse after excuse was made to prevent the publication of certain volumes of documents already in the press, as part of the project entitled, ‘Towards Freedom’. It was first said that they had not been properly edited, then that there were no indexes, and that they would have to be cleared by yet another committee although they had already been cleared. It was rumoured that the real reason was to prevent the publication of these documents as some showed the Hindu Mahasabha as less hostile to the British, the possibility of which has been discussed by those who have historical knowledge about the period. Obviously, none of this should have been allowed to happen. Procedures of functioning as they were laid down and followed earlier, should have continued to be followed. The professional training in a discipline should have been respected and it should have been mandatory that professionally trained people were appointed to the agencies that determine education. The other action relating to institutions during this period was of course even more high-handed. It took the form of arbitrarily shutting down institutions of research as and when the government wished to do so. An example of this was the sudden closing of the Kerala Council of Historical Research six months after it was founded. This was particularly unacceptable given the fact that there was a growing interest in regional history and the historians working on Kerala had been active in developing research activities. This decision was reversed through a judgment of the court. Again, the BJP in Madhya Pradesh attacked the scientific programmes of Eklavya, an educational NGO that produces schoollevel books on the sciences and social sciences. For all its claims to endorsing secularism, the Congress Party in practice, was sympathetic to the Sangh Parivar in this instance. If such attacks are allowed to become a pattern it will be disastrous for research and for a secular investment in Indian society. Given that there are attempts to substitute mainstream history with propaganda, it is all the more necessary to have independent bodies to counteract the hegemony of the propaganda. To argue that Marxist historians when placed in charge of institutions bring about a hijacking of history to Left-wing ideology is a view resulting from an unfamiliarity with Indian historical research of the last fifty years. The most wide-ranging debate on pre-modern Indian history has been the debate on whether or not there had been feudalism in India. D.D. Kosambi’s understanding of feudalism was a serious attempt in the 1950s to apply Marx’s idea of the feudal mode to a certain period of Indian history, and yet he deviated from the model of the strictly Marxist mode. Some others used the model to varying degrees and introduced diverse forms. The major critiques of the feudal mode were initiated by Marxist historians and were later added to by non-Marxists. What resulted from this debate has been the exploration of many areas of Indian history in terms of the nature of the state, polity, economy and religion that have yielded new insights into our past. What colonial historians referred to as the post-Gupta ‘dark age’ is now well-lit through recent research. It has also provoked an interest in more detailed studies of regional history, which in turn have honed the focus on national history. The confrontation among historians today is not between ‘leftist and rightist’ historians, nor is it about establishing a Marxist view of history, as is crudely stated by some, but over the right to debate interpretations of history. There cannot be a single, definitive, official history. If some of us feel that Hindutva history is less history and more mythology we should have the right to say so, without being personally abused, being called ‘anti-national’, ‘academic terrorists worse than the cross-border variety’ and ‘perverts’, and being threatened with arrest and with being physically put down. Indeed, a leading Hindutva ideologue, Arun Shourie, even sarcastically said we ‘eminent historians’ all had hymens that were so thick that we thought that we had retained our virginity even when we published signed articles in publications of the Left. Apart from the sheer crassness and vulgarity of this statement, if men cannot have hymens, even figuratively speaking, presumably his remark was directed at women historians. In the final analysis, history is an intellectual enterprise and does have an intellectual dimension in its understanding of the past, however much the Hindutva ideology may try and erase that and replace it with cheap jibes. Basic to changing the Hindutva interpretation of history is the attempt to give a single definition to Indian culture, the roots of which are said to lie in Vedic foundations. This annuls the reality of Indian society being constituted of multiple cultures, in dialogue with each other. It ignores even the variant relations that have existed throughout Indian history between dominant and subordinate cultures. This sensitivity is particularly important today in forging cultural identities that are subcontinental, but at the same time incorporate the articulations of the region. Knowledge does not consist of a body of information to be memorized and passed on. That is the concept of education in the sishu mandirs and madrassas and such like. A modern education demands questioning, skepticism and an ability to think independently and to link information. What then should we think of as the process of ensuring a transition of knowledge that is independent and draws on critical inquiry. It would seem that no dialogue is possible with government agencies. We have therefore to think of alternate strategies. At one level one would have to work towards establishing councils of historical research in the various states so that regional histories can be treated in a seriously professional manner and not be reduced to being dependent on the patronage of politicians and bureaucrats allergic to the social sciences. The range of sources means that statements about the past have to draw from a multiplicity of records and if they contradict each other this may be the source of a new illumination about authorship and audience. At another level it would be required of independent historians to be more involved in the teaching of history in schools, to help in drawing up a viable syllabus based on both professional expertise and pedagogy. This would not be an innovation as there are groups that have been doing just this; in some cases their textbooks have been used very effectively in state schools as well as private schools. The example of the Eklavya group comes to mind. Their work will have to be revived and continued despite the assault on them. Ideally, the NCERT itself should be an autonomous organization, independently financed and not part of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The same could be said of the ICHR. These organizations are now half a century old and quite capable of standing on their own and being run by members of the profession. This would allow them to play a far more effective role in advancing the discipline. And if they fall by the wayside they will have to pick themselves up and start again. They can coordinate various activities that require coordination, such as vetting textbooks and ensuring quality in every institution that calls itself a school, giving opportunities to school children to visit historical sites or become familiar with historical records, and even more importantly providing workshops for school teachers so that they can be acquainted with new research and generally make history accessible to those who teach it in schools. In some ways the most serious challenge is the threat to close down discussion since it is an attempt to close the mind. Fortunately, it was not possible for the then government in 2002 to do so. But the attempts having been made once could be tried again. This is not a matter that concerns history alone, as it is a frontal attack on knowledge. As professionals engaged in its furtherance, it seems to me that we have no choice but to oppose it. The world has moved on since the nineteenth century and we have come to value independent thinking. There are enough historians in this country who will continue to write independently. There will be enough historical concerns growing out of the multiple cultural aspects of our society to ensure that the Indian mind is never closed.

 5 WRITING HISTORY TEXTBOOKS: A MEMOIR

 I wrote two textbooks on Indian history for Middle School, one on Ancient Indian History for Class VI (age group 11-13) and one on Medieval Indian History for Class VII (age group 13-14). The books were used for about forty years and were revised a couple of times. They have been replaced by other textbooks in the last few years. The story of how these books came to be written and why they were replaced touches on much that is happening to history textbooks in many parts of the world and is tied to political changes. I would like to relate the story in the context of India and in the form of a personal memoir. ■ My first acquaintance with history textbooks for schools came about when UNESCO asked me in 1961 if I would do a review of a sample of textbooks used in the teaching of history in various schools in the Union Territory of Delhi. I had never thought of such an idea before and it interested me, so I agreed. The sample consisted of about twenty books if I remember correctly and I submitted the report fairly soon. I was appalled by the information contained in these books, with their adherence to outdated ideas and to colonial views of the Indian past, a totally banal narrative and predictable illustrations of a poor quality. I was thanked for the review and for the moment heard no further. The review it seems coincided with a committee on history textbooks appointed by the government under the Chairmanship of Dr Tarachand. The Editorial Board consisted of the most eminent historians of that time: Professors Nilakanta Sastri, Mohammad Habib, and P.C. Gupta. The Ministry had established the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), as part of being generally alerted to the problems of school education in India. One of its functions was to commission the writing of textbooks for school. Mr M.C. Chagla, the then Minister, a thoughtful lawyer with a liberal bent of mind, was concerned that textbooks in history should not recite myths but be secular and rational explanations of the past. It was presumably thought that if the books were to have some quality they would have to be written by, or at least supervised by, academics of recognition in the subject. Among the committee were included three senior historians from Calcutta and Delhi universities: Professor R.C. Majumdar who had written extensively on all periods of Indian history, Professor Bisheshwar Prasad who was an historian of Modern India and Dr Dasaratha Sharma whose field was ancient Indian history. Subsequently, R.C. Majumdar was made chairman of the Editorial Board and he invited me to join it, but I declined as I had just started writing the first textbook in the NCERT series. It was decided to start with Class VI and a book on Ancient India. Quite how my name came up as a possible author is unclear to me. My initial reaction was that I wished to continue my research and not spend time on writing a textbook, and furthermore that I had no interest or expertise in writing for children. My only venture in this field was a small book of stories for children, Indian Tales, and this was hardly a qualification for writing a school textbook. However, I was eventually persuaded to do so by some of my colleagues at Delhi University where I was then teaching, who argued that this was a national cause and as such I should agree. I would like to emphasize that even though India had become independent a long time ago (in 1947) the notion of a national cause was very strong in many of us. My generation had been imprinted with the nationalism of the forties and early fifties. Its essential characteristic was the enthusiasm that we were involved in the building of a new nation. We could therefore move away from conventions so as to encourage the implanting of new ideas. It was from this perspective that I agreed to write a textbook for Middle School. The syllabus that had been worked out had two concerns: that the child should envision the ancient past as more than just the recital of conventional ‘glories’ and become acquainted with some of the multiple facets of life and action; and that it must be heavy with information rather than explanation. I enjoyed exploring the first but had problems with the second. But the syllabus remained the skeleton of the book. My own research was based on a critical re-examination of the nationalist interpretation of history, emerging out of a critique of the colonial view of ancient Indian history. The colonial view had been faulted on many grounds, but the nationalist interpretation was also by now being regarded as somewhat ambivalent in relation to certain themes. There had been a hesitancy to analyze the inequities of caste, or the varied treatment of women, or the degree to which the social articulation of religions shaped societies. Whereas colonial views of the recent past were critiqued, nationalist interpretation was hesitant in critiquing the ancient Hindu past or the Islamic past which were as much in need of critical analysis as the modern. Pre-modern history had to be a narrative of greatness and glory on the whole, with little reference to that which could be prised apart and viewed without preconceptions. The second problem was that of the amount of information a textbook should contain. There was a listing in the direction of putting in more, the argument being that at least some of the information would stick. The decision as to what could be omitted as not so relevant became a source of contention with the committee. I would try out my chapters on the age group for which they were intended and some found them heavy going and too stuffed with ‘facts’, which I had to then make more accessible. Arguing with a committee was not easy and there were many occasions when I wished that there had been some schoolteachers on the committee rather than only high-powered historians. Nevertheless one kept trying and slowly the chapters began to take shape. Unfortunately, by then this committee of rather elderly historians began to lose its enthusiasm for the project, which in any case had not been a matter of great prestige or of central interest to its members. There was a quiet whiff of disdain at being involved with school textbooks, especially since they were otherwise involved in major publications of multi-volume projects, such as ‘The History and Culture of the Indian People’ and ‘The Role of the Indian Armed Forces in World War II’. So my textbook which had been written and approved of by the Committee, rather drifted along without getting anywhere owing to the inactivity of the same Committee. To get the project moving the ministry decided that a more active committee was required and therefore replaced the old committee with a new one. The new Editorial Board as it was called consisted of Sarvepalli Gopal as the Chief Editor, and as editors had Nurul Hasan from Aligarh University, Satish Chandra from Rajasthan University and myself, with S.K. Maitra as Secretary. The textbook project leapt into life and the first book went to press. This was Ancient India written for Class VI, and published in 1966. In 1968 I revised it on the basis of reactions from teachers and historians and further discussions in the Editorial Board. The textbook for Class VII on Medieval India was published in 1967. In the 1970s the Editorial Board commissioned further books for highschool level. These were Ram Sharan Sharma’s Ancient India, Satish Chandra’s Medieval India, Bipan Chandra’s Modern India and the third book for Middle School, India and the World by Arjun Dev and Indrani Dev. The High School books were substantial in size and involved extended discussion. This entire set of textbooks constituted what I shall call the NCERT Textbooks (Set 1), since there were two further sets to follow. There was a certain sense of excitement in being able to provide the kind of history that we thought contributed to the Indian child’s understanding of our past. We were distancing our history from that written under imperial auspices— the writing of historians such as Vincent Smith, Thompson and Garret, and Rawlinson, or even their Indian counterparts. For Vincent Smith, Indian history led up to the inevitability of the British Empire that brought the pax Britannica to India. The model was the Roman Empire that Britain was said to be emulating. The heroes were kings and the sign of triumph was victory in campaigns. The historian set the pace of how events moved and separated the heroes from the villains. In ancient history a major focus had been the glorifying of the coming of the Aryans and Aryan civilization, a theme that was underlined by Indian nationalist historians as well. Medieval history meant reiterating the division between Hindu and Muslim communities and referring to them as the two nations of India. Orientalist scholarship from the eighteenth century onwards, when it searched for histories of the ancient past in Sanskrit literature, found only one and that too of a limited kind, the Rajatarangini, a twelfth-century history of Kashmir. This was in part because they were looking for Enlightenment type histories. They were largely scholars in the colonial administration, such as William Jones and H.H. Wilson, who saw their role as having to discover the Indian past given that they believed there was an absence of historical writing in India. This knowledge was to enable them to understand the colony that they were governing. Incidentally, they also claimed to be bringing historical knowledge to the Indian over whom they ruled and who had lacked this knowledge from his own tradition. They were primarily interested in codifying and translating the texts that their brahmana informants told them were the most important. These were in the main, the Vedas—providing information on the origins of Hinduism and the Dharmashastras—texts concerning the social codes and therefore focused on rules of caste and social obligations. The codification of the texts bore the imprint of European systems of classification and the translations were naturally conditioned by the intellectual and social ambience of attitudes to the Orient. These texts were regarded as containing first order knowledge about the Indian past and even Buddhist texts were not given the same importance. Access to these Sanskrit texts led to the conviction that religion was the foundational factor in Indian civilization. Where Orientalist scholars had a positive image of ancient India, it tended to be that of a golden age directed by a concern for spirituality and social harmony. In the nineteenth century those who called themselves liberals and positivists, contested this understanding of the Indian past. James Mill and T.B. Macaulay for instance, representing what might be called the liberal-progressive view of those times, were critical of the Indian past and advocated legal measures to restructure Indian society. Some of their criticism was also meant as an aside on current British society. We have observed in earlier essays that Mill was the first author who in writing the history of British India, divided it into periods that were identified by the religions of the dynasties: the initial Hindu civilization was succeeded by a Muslim civilization and then by a British period. This periodization became axiomatic until recent times. Mill also gave currency to the idea of Oriental Despotism, that Asian societies had been ruled by despots and were static societies not undergoing any change throughout their history. By the late nineteenth century there was a firm imperial control over India. The colonial power had succeeded in subordinating revolts of soldiers and peasants and was slowly beginning to face the emergence of nationalism from the nascent middle-class. Historical writing was necessary to contest this nationalism. It was argued that Indians had always been subordinated by alien powers and the history of India was thus a recital of invasions. Further, that the most persistent of these invaders were Muslims who settled and ruled in India giving rise to a powerful Muslim community. This inaugurated the undiminished strife between the Muslim and Hindu communities, strife that had been temporarily brought under control by the arrival of British power. Nationalist historical writing reacted to all this, agreeing with some but disagreeing with much. A key function of nationalist history was to establish an Indian identity. This had to draw on the unity and uniformity of India throughout history. Attention to a common culture became axiomatic and this inevitably meant a historical discourse about the upper castes and the aristocracy. It was believed that these were the groups that made history. The new textbooks tried to draw attention to other groups of supposedly lesser status that also contributed to history but this was a less popular aspect of the books. Possibly the idea was not emphasized with sufficient examples. For nationalist history the ancient past was particularly useful in constructing identities as it invariably is in all nationalist history. The sources are almost exclusively from elite groups, the period is so remote that much can be said that is imagined but cannot be questioned for lack of detailed evidence. Consequently, golden ages abound and nationalist historians took their cue from some of the Orientalist scholarship. The obsession with the Hindu golden age was such that for some the Muslim period was contrasted as one of decline, to the extent that this allowed the British to conquer India. Anti-colonial nationalism does not always obstruct other more specific nationalisms, some of which become central to the creation of nation states. Religious and ethnic nationalisms have been frequent since the twentieth century. In the Indian situation, given the kind of history projected by colonial authors and up to a point endorsed by some nationalist historians, there was the emergence of what have been called Hindu and Muslim nationalisms—also of course entwined with the politics of the twentieth century in India. Hindu and Muslim nationalisms each argued for different pasts: the ancient past was Hindu and the medieval past was dominated by Muslim dynasties. Ancient and medieval became areas of controversy and the site of ideological struggles in defining a national history. This difference led to the notion that these religious communities constituted two separate nations and the ensuing history was used to justify the creation of two separate nation-states. Religious nationalism takes an extreme form in communal historical writing. Pakistan is projected as a Muslim nation-state in such histories. At home, many historians are opposing political attempts to project India as a Hindu state. The other theme prominent in the Hindu communal view of the past was the insistence on the Aryan foundation of Indian culture, a view that still prevails. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was held that the Aryan language came from across the Indo-Iranian borderlands, there is today no concession to this view among the Hindu religious nationalists. As we have seen, their claim is that the Aryans were indigenous to India, were the authors of the earliest Indian civilization—that of the cities of the Indus and the northwest—and that wherever there was a language akin to Indo-Aryan it came through Aryan out-migration from India. In 1969, members of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee wanted the textbook on Ancient India to state categorically that ‘the Aryans’ were indigenous to India—a demand that was rejected by the Editorial Board and by me as the author. At most scholars might argue that Aryan culture, if it can be recognized as that, is an evolved culture with multiple inputs from a variety of sources, some coming with migrants from the borderlands and some from those settled in the plains of the northwest of the subcontinent. With Indian independence in 1947 came an increased interest in questions relating to the economic and social evolution of Indian society. Inevitably there was a turning to historians for information on the nature of traditional economies and social structures, and the histories of communities and castes. Historians were activated in ways different from before. There was less focus on political and dynastic history and more on social and economic history that in turn affected the discussion of historical causation. Broadening the explanations for historical change introduced many new sources and the evidence they provided enriched the scope of historical causality. And just as inevitably, pre-modern history was drawn into the circuit of the social sciences. The study of ancient India shifted from being a subject within the fold of Indology to gradually becoming a discipline of the Social Sciences. This was a major shift away from golden ages, oriental despots and religious periodization to investigating a different set of themes that had to do with economic resources, the forms of social organization, the articulation of religion and art as aspects of social perceptions, and above all to tracking the major points of historical change in a history of three millennia. In writing about Indian achievements an attempt was made to explain the interaction of various factors and how they contributed to diverse outcomes. This shift is irksome to those who argue for a mono-causal, religion-derived cultural uniformity. The history of ‘the nation’ also became a focus. Was the nation a creation of the colonial experience? Or did it emerge from factors related to modernization such as the coming of industrialization and capitalism as well as the need for a democratic and secular society? The issue was not just of building a nation which required a common history, memory and culture but also of explaining the nature of the societies and economies of the past that contributed towards the sense of a shared past. Because of a dependence on textual sources the perspective was from the elite cultures of the past. What some referred to as the ‘living prehistory’ of India—the cultures of the forest tribes—or that of the lower castes, received less visibility. At the same time it is necessary to recognize that the definition of the nation was largely in terms of the aspirations of what were referred to as the dominant castes and classes. For some, the ‘one-ness’ of the nation lay in the syncretistic thought and action of diverse groups that fused in the idea of the nation. For others it was what was described as India’s composite culture that assumed diverse social and religious units in harmonious co-existence, each giving space to the other. For yet others, the definition of one-ness was in being Hindu and this was to be protected against Muslim rule. A history of the nation needed a central perspective. Colonial and nationalist histories had been written with the Ganga valley as the epicentre. But with the growth of interest in regional history this was becoming problematic. The image of the one-ness of the nation had also to face the demands of regional histories. The provinces of British Indian administration, whose boundaries had been arbitrarily imposed, gave way to the creation of linguistic states with more realistic boundaries based on language. This intensified regional identity since linguistic states worked their history through their own language sources as well as through manifestations of regional culture in archaeological antiquities. On two occasions it was said that my textbooks in emphasizing the nation had not done justice to regional personalities. There was a demand for a separate chapter on Guru Nanak, whose teachings had been the foundation for Sikhism, for the books used in the Punjab; and similarly one on Shivaji the Maratha for books used in Maharashtra. On both occasions the Board felt that if the states wished to make the change it could not be stopped, even if it resulted in an imbalance in terms of the national perspective. Furthermore, since the books were intended as model textbooks they could only be a guide and could not be imposed. But it was agreed that permission from the NCERT would be required for making changes. I insisted that copyright was invested in the author and if changes were made my name as the author of the book should be deleted. The balance between the nation and the region was a delicate one and more so when the historian was writing on a period when the nation did not exist. For such periods it was a question of dominant and subordinate states, but subordination became a sensitive matter in itself. What has now become problematic is the dominance of the identity of the region, over the smaller subcultures, which was earlier hidden by the national culture. The historical change became more marked in the 1960s and 70s when Marxist historical writing encouraged a paradigm shift as did the input from other social sciences. The debates on Modes of Production among academic historians had the fallout effect of releasing more information resulting in further interpretations of social and economic history. Whether or not one participated in the debate, historical research introduced questions of state formation, the role of agriculture, the extension of trade and the degree to which changes were made by religious movements or were reflected in art and literature. Historical interest had moved towards another dimension, irrespective of whether or not it conformed to Marxist models. The debate was largely among those who worked on the post-Gupta period from about the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, what is now called the early medieval period to distinguish it from the medieval period, the latter basically being once again the period of Muslim rule. This definition of the medieval period resembles the value-loaded categories of the earlier paradigm and is therefore not very helpful. The use of the label ‘medieval’ echoes the periodization of European history. As a forerunner of the medieval, the label of early medieval says little about either. The post-Gupta period had earlier been described as ‘the dark age’ of small kingdoms as against the previous ‘[the] golden ages’ of large empires. In intellectual terms the darkness was dispelled because of the debate that brought to the fore the history of new kingdoms, their economies and governance and the role of local courts in defining culture. Such historians as were bogged down, by the Hindu-Muslim divide of medieval times —both early and late—rarely participated in this debate. For them the finer issues of the formation of states, or local cultures were of little importance. For the earlier period the breakthrough came from extensive archaeological excavations. The major sites of the Indus Civilization, such as the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were located in Pakistan. There was therefore a concerted effort to discover similar sites on the Indian side of the border and the effort met with astonishing success. The Harappa culture was far more widespread in the northern and western parts of the subcontinent than had been assumed earlier. This interest spurred on the determination to find the archaeological equivalent of the Aryan culture, a determination that continues undiminished. Such a discovery is of course not possible in the absence of a decipherable script since Aryan is essentially a language label. But all this activity gave a centrality to archaeological data and therefore to the inclusion of material culture in historical interpretation. The colonial construction of early Indian history in concepts such as Oriental Despotism, periodization by religion, an insistence on Indian society being static and castes being races or frozen social entities, and the widespread existence of isolated, self-sufficient village communities, were the generalizations that were being systematically unwound in the new ways of investigating history. Some concepts that nationalist historiography had appropriated from colonial views, such as ‘golden ages’ and ‘dark ages’, were also axed in this new history. These were the historical debates current in the 1960s and more so in the 1970s when the NCERT Textbooks (Set 1) were being read in schools run by the central government. Appreciation for the books lay in their more expansive vision of history, the recognition that the information they presented was reliable evidence and not wishful thinking, and that there was logic to the way in which the narrative was set out. Possibly this was part of the reason for the later criticism that they were not as user friendly for children as they could have been. Critical reactions to their contents came from Hindu and Sikh religious organizations that felt that their respective religions and religious teachers had not been glorified. Certain religio-political organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj claimed that a statement made in the book ‘went counter to the religious sentiments of the Hindu nationality’ (whatever this may mean). In Ancient India, I explained that the ancient Aryans venerated the cow but like cattle-herders elsewhere, ate its flesh on ritual occasions or when honouring a guest. R.S. Sharma had made a similar statement in his textbook. The protest against this statement emanated from the Hindu political mobilization around the demand for cow protection and a ban on beef, since it was argued that not eating beef was axiomatic to Hinduism. A lengthy article in a leading newspaper argued that there was no mention of the eating of beef in ancient Sanskrit sources. I countered by quoting from texts that are unambiguous on this matter, and from excavation reports such as the Shatapatha Brahmana (3.1.2.21) and the excavation report of B.B. Lal on the site of Hastinapur, in Ancient India 1954-55, Nos. 10 and 11. The argument then turned to the question of whether it was moral to tell children that beef was once eaten by the Hindus and later forbidden. I was told off for questioning orthodox opinion and encouraging young minds to do likewise. Objections were also raised to another statement in the textbook that the shudras, the lower castes, were not always treated well. This was of course a reflection on the upper castes. But since social inequality was not a major issue in those days this comment did not lead to major objections. Similarly, an organization of the Sikhs wanted me to reformulate what I had said about the founding and early history of the Sikh religion, to bring it into conformity with its own view. These were changes I could not agree to since they changed the historical accuracy of what was being stated in the textbook. It is worth pointing out that the objections came from religious organizations and later from political parties and not from historians. In 1975 Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency that closed down free discussion. She was voted out of power in 1977 and the Janata Government—a mixed bag of parties—was elected with Morarji Desai as Prime Minister. It was expected to be a reasonably liberal government, but as it turned out was so dominated by the feuds of party factions and by issues of Hindu religious nationalism that it did not last its full term. But it did manage to fire the first governmental salvo against the NCERT Textbooks (Set 1). Morarji Desai supported and forwarded an anonymous note to the Education Minister, asking that these history textbooks be banned as they were anti-Indian and antinational in content and prejudicial to the study of history. The note was leaked to the press and when we as the authors heard of it we decided that it should be publicly debated. We argued for the legitimacy of independent interpretations, emphasizing the proviso that they be based on reliable evidence and logically feasible explanations. The issues that were raised by our critics were routine and predictable: why was there a mention of beef-eating; why was it not said that the Aryans were indigenous to India; where was the necessity to mention the disabilities of the lower castes; why did we not consistently depict Muslim rulers as oppressors and tyrants, and so on. For three years from 1977 to 1980 the usual Sunday papers carried articles for and against the textbooks and the issues raised. I hoped that the public debate would demonstrate that history is not just a body of facts that is packaged and handed on without change from generation to generation; but that history involves interpreting evidence, and that the evidence had grown and the methods of interpreting it had changed and become more precise and analytical as compared to earlier times. We heard that in November 1977 a committee of reputable historians had been asked to examine the textbooks. They apparently approved of the books and their consensus was that the books should continue to be prescribed. Subsequent to this, some ‘liberal’ intellectuals began to criticize us heavily, focusing on one point. They maintained that writing textbooks for a state agency like the NCERT was an act of connivance with the state in the first place, therefore there was no justification in our now complaining that the books were being banned. Ironically, those who took this position were working for statefunded research institutes. At any rate nothing was done before the government fell. The joke that did the rounds of Delhi was that no action was taken to ban the books because there were many thousand copies that had already been printed and were stacked in the NCERT stores, and that the Audits and Accounts Department of the Government of India objected to them being trashed! The issues raised by the controversy made one fully aware of the growing tension between two groups. One was that of the political parties and the organizations appropriating and claiming to represent nationalism, but obviously of the religious majority, a claim that was becoming an electoral plank. Some historians and archaeologists were sympathetic to this view. The claim was used to target the other group of professional historians who were not making concessions to the political requirements of religious nationalism. The earlier notion that anyone and everyone could claim to be writing history was being questioned by the work of the latter. This was particularly so in the writing of ancient history where it was becoming even clearer that some technical expertise in reading excavation reports, epigraphy, numismatics and textual criticism was a prerequisite to being a historian. As the author of a textbook I felt that I had the responsibility of helping to educate a generation to think differently and in new ways about the subject. Yet I was aware that this was subjecting me to political assault. One had to debate with oneself and with one’s colleagues as to the implications of this. On the issue of beef-eating, for instance, we were aware that apart from the historical importance of making the statement, it would raise political issues that had to be countered. What was made apparent was that writing a textbook was not just an academic exercise. Ancient history in particular had a primary role in the formulation of conservative identity and it vision of Indian society—even if the formulation was based on questionable ‘history’. The same was true of other religious nationalisms that were seeking a political edge by reformulating history in a specific way. Those of us nurtured on the earlier anti-colonial nationalist tradition, as the members of the Editorial Board had been, had no hesitation in contesting a communalism that used only religion as a political foundation. The more sensitive question, it seemed to us, was to contest nationalism in its guise of making concessions to religious communalism. Occasional strands of communal thinking had had a presence in some aspects of the nationalist view of ancient Indian history, and this presence became more evident as it was played out in the politics of the late twentieth century. Towards the latter part of the 1970s the structure of school education was reorganized. The books that had been written or were being written for High School in the earlier system had to now be adjusted to the new curriculum. A new Editorial Board was created with Satish Chandra as chairman; R.S. Sharma, M.G.S. Narayanan, Barun De, Sumit Sarkar and S.H. Khan as members; and Arjun Dev as Convener. This board saw the High School textbooks to completion and publication. They were viewed as a continuation of those written for Middle School and therefore part of what I have called Set 1. The books were revised again in the late 1980s and continued in use. We had a respite of fifteen years and then the attack started up again. This time it came from a collective of Hindu right-wing nationalist organizations labelled the Sangh Parivar. It propagated its version of Indian history encapsulated in the ideology of Hindutva. (I have discussed this at some length in the previous chapter.) It came into its own successfully when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies were elected to form the government of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 1999. Hindutva history claims a uniform, monolithic Hindu identity for Indian civilization, often defined as Aryan, which makes it upper caste. The multiple variant and lesser cultures are either ignored or at best marginalized. From this perspective the NCERT textbooks that we had written were unacceptable and we were described as anti-Hindu, anti-Indian, traitors to the nation who were propagating perverted views that distorted the truth. Ministers of the BJP government frequently voiced these statements in Parliament—presumably so that they could abuse us and yet claim Parliamentary privilege. This assault on us—from virulent abuse to death threats—continues to embellish a number of websites on the Internet, largely controlled by wealthy Indians settled in the First World. The attempt to proscribe the books did not succeed, so passages from them were literally and laboriously blacked out in each copy before these were sold in the market. This was followed by a more efficient idea, that of deleting such passages before printing the book. The next step was the decision to replace books and there was a frenzied writing of new textbooks in record time. The NCERT, now under the control of the NDA government, commissioned new books conforming to the Hindutva version of history, and constituting the NCERT Textbooks (Set 2), some of which were prescribed just prior to the fall of the BJP/NDA government. This was only one move among many others to terminate history as a social science and convert it into a catechism. The attitude was not one of discussing variant interpretations of history but instead terminating all other views barring those that conformed to the Hindutva version. The BJP/NDA Government fell in 2004 and one consequence was that their NCERT Textbooks (Set 2), have since been replaced. The new government, with its core from the Congress Party and somewhat less committed to religious nationalism than the BJP, decided on a completely fresh set of textbooks, NCERT Textbooks (Set 3). However, since textbooks cannot be written in a hurry, the Set 1 textbooks were used again for the interim period. When Set 3 was ready then all earlier textbooks of Sets 1 and 2 were discontinued. Rather ironically, acrimonious criticism of the Set 1 textbooks, and arguments against their being brought back even for a short period, came from some ‘liberal’ historians. They did not denounce the contents of the books so much as their authors for being ‘statist’, in the same way as they had denounced us three decades previously. We were ‘statist’ because we agreed to write the books for a state agency and because we wrote them from a nationalist perspective. This echoed what had been said in 1977 almost as if there was no new way of critiquing the books. Having been previously called antinational it was difficult to juxtapose this with now being accused of having a nationalist perspective. The historians who are authors of NCERT Textbooks (Set 3) have not yet been dubbed as ‘statist’! The NCERT Textbooks (Set 1) were seen by some as an attempt to standardize history. This is a comment that may not be easy to sustain. They were intended as model textbooks and states were free to modify them as they did in some cases. They were prescribed largely in schools run by the central government and these formed hardly ten per cent of the total number of schools. Nevertheless, the textbooks these schools use carry some influence in other broad-based teaching. Schools established by a variety of ‘cultural’ and religious organizations, use entirely different textbooks and some that even run riot with the subject, teaching what is hardly recognizable as history. In such schools the NCERT books are used for answering examination questions (if the school is linked to particular examination boards), but the students are told that the real history is in the fantasy textbooks. Textbooks such as mine that had been used for forty years would inevitably have had to be replaced by newer ones more representative of another generation of historical thinking. But there is a pedagogical problem that needs urgent attention. When my textbooks were prescribed in the 1960s, schoolteachers found them different from the books they had been using. The shift away from conventional dynastic history and the introduction of comments on dominant and subordinate castes, on patterns of landownership and the use of labour, on the difference between barter and markets, on monuments not just as structures in a landscape but institutions of community life, were quite different from narratives limited to kings, courts, campaigns, territorial control and administration. We were trying to show historical interconnections in the making of a society. The concept of the society was however unitary and I, for one, felt that introducing multiplicity at an elementary stage might be confusing for the student. Two generations of teachers taught these books, and after they were swapped, teachers had to move to teaching NCERT Textbooks Set 3. This required a far greater input into teacher training than the government or the NCERT was perhaps prepared to invest in. India has immense technical resources which state educational bodies seem reluctant to use. Yet no government should be afraid of an educated public. There could be an enlightened change in the comprehension of history by teachers and students alike if additional teaching were to be done imaginatively through radio and TV. This was worked out in some detail more than ten years ago by a group of educationists. As a member of the then Prasar Bharati Board I had submitted recommendations for the implementation of such programmes on TV and radio as part of an education channel. But not surprisingly, no interest was shown in the idea, neither by the HRD Ministry nor by Prasar Bharati. An even more fundamental change is necessary if textbooks of quality are to survive. This narrative about the NCERT textbooks has a recurring refrain: textbooks change each time the government changes. The pattern will continue unless the legal status of the NCERT in its production of textbooks is changed. In 2005, I wrote in the newspapers arguing that we have to make bodies such as the NCERT autonomous and give them statutory status so that irrespective of a change in government they would still be able to retain textbooks of quality. But the idea fell on deaf ears. Admittedly it will be a hard fight against governments determined not to do so but at least legal support might help. If this is not done then we shall have a chameleon-like educational system that will change its colour with each change of government. The student will never know whether to state in the exam that 2+2 = 4 or whether 2+2 = 5, and may end up having to say that it could be either, depending on the political party in power. Ancient history in particular has a special significance for contemporary times especially in developing societies. In part, this is because so much of the ancient past is still perceptible even if not immediately so. But more importantly identities, as also the heritage linked to nationalism, still hinge on the interpretation of early history. In any broader understanding of the present it helps to be informed about the past, and even more so, the remote past. That is where myths have found comfortable berths and where a well-grounded critical history has most to contribute in offering connections that are exploratory and provisional rather than mandator

 6  GLIMPSES OF A POSSIBLE HISTORY FROM BELOW: EARLY INDIA

The nineteenth century was the age of the grand edifices of historical explanation and theoretical construction. While some of these edifices still stand firm, others are tottering. Even those that still stand often require repair and renovation, sometimes of a structural kind, in the light of new knowledge and fresh theories. The refining of concepts and theories therefore becomes a necessary part of the historical exercise and is particularly incumbent on those who, as conscientious historians, use theoretical frameworks to formulate their initial hypotheses.

Among the early sub-periods, Vedic society has been described as tribal. The term ‘tribal’, which we have all used in the past, has rightly come in for some questioning. Whatever precision it may once have had seems to have become blurred, so perhaps we need either to redefine it or to use more exact terms for societies that we have so far described as tribal. 

In its precise meaning, ‘tribe’ refers to a community of people claiming descent from a common ancestor. In its application, however, it has been used to cover a variety of social and economic forms, not to mention racial and biological identities: and this tends to confuse the original meaning. 

Even as a convention it has lost much of its precision. The more recently preferred term, lineage, narrows the focus. Although the economic range remains, lineage does emphasize succession and descent with the implication that these are decisive in determining social status and control over economic resources. It also helps differentiate between chiefships—where lineage is a significant identity, and kingship—where power is concentrated and evokes a larger number of impersonal sanctions.

 The concept of vamsha (succession) carries a meaning similar to lineage and is central to Vedic society with its emphasis on succession even as a simulated lineage. Thus vamsha is used to mean a descent group among the rajanyas or kshatriyas, but is also used in the list of Upanishadic teachers where succession refers not to birth but to the passing on of knowledge.

Lineage becomes important in the structure of each varna, defined by permitted rules of marriage and kinship and by ranking in an order of status, the control over resources being implicit. The emergence of the four varnas is thus closely allied to the essentials of a society based on the central identity of lineage.

                In a stratified society the reinforcing of status is necessary. But where there is no recognized private property in land, and no effective state, such reinforcing has to be done by sanctions that often take a ritual or religious form. In the absence of taxation as a system of control in the Vedic period, sacrificial ritual functioned as the occasion for renewing the status of the yajamana, the patron who orders the sacrifice. Apart from its religious and social role, sacrificial ritual also had an economic function. It was the occasion when wealth that had been channeled to the yajamana was distributed by him in the form of gifts to the brahmana priests, and these strengthened their social rank and ensured them wealth. The ritual served to restrict the distribution of wealth to the brahmanas and the kshatriyas but at the same time prevented a substantial accumulation of wealth by either, for whatever came in the form of gifts and prestations from the lesser clans, the vish, to the ruling clans, the kshatriyas, was largely consumed in the ritual and only the remainder gifted to the brahmanas. Generosity being important to the office of the chief, wealth was not hoarded. This is a form of the economy of gift- exchange although the exchange is uneven: the priest receives the tangible gift whereas the patron can only claim the intangibility of status and spiritual merit on the completion of the ritual. The display, consumption and distribution of wealth at the major rituals such as the rajasuya and the ashvamedha, was in turn a stimulus to production, for the ritual was also seen as a communication with and sanction from the supernatural. Embedded in the sacrificial ritual therefore were important facets of the economy. This may be a partial explanation of why a major change in the state system accompanied by a peasant economy occurred initially in the mid-first millennium BC not in the western Ganga valley but in the adjoining area of the middle Ganga valley. This change was occasioned, not only by an increase in economic production and a greater social disparity but also by the fact that the prestation economy—of making gift offerings to a patron usually associated with a lineage-based society—became more and more marginal in the latter region, and in some areas was altogether absent.

Some scholars regard the term ‘peasant economy’ as an imprecise concept. However, it is of some use as a measurement of change. The label of ‘peasant’ has been applied to a variety of categories, some of which are dissimilar. The use of a single word as a portmanteau description confuses the categories and therefore a differentiation is necessary. Eric Wolf defines peasants as transferring their surplus to a ruler which surplus is then used to support the lifestyle of the ruler and the elite.’ This definition seems to me inadequate, for the important point is not merely the existence of a surplus but the mechanism by which it is transferred, and it is to this that I would relate the emergence of a peasant economy. That the recognition of an incipient peasant economy in various parts of India is significant to the study of social history hardly needs stressing since concomitant with this is also the establishing of particular kinds of state systems, variant forms of jatis and new religious and cultural idioms in the area. For the early period of Indian history the term peasant has been used to translate both the Rigvedic vish as well as the gahapati (this roughly translated as ‘peasant’ but more of this later) of Pali sources. But some distinction is called for. The Vedic vish was primarily a member of a clan although this did not preclude him from being a cultivator as well. The transferring of surpluses, in this case the voluntary prestations of the vish to the kshatriya, points to a stratified rather than an egalitarian society and the simile in the Veda of the kshatriya eating the vish like the deer eats the grain, would indicate greater pressures for larger gifts, prestations, offerings.

                But, the transfer was not invariably through an enforced system of taxation. In the absence of private ownership of land, the relationship of the vish to the kshatriya would have been less contrapuntal, with little need of an enforced collection of the surplus. The context of the references in the Vedas to bali, bhaga and shulka (the offering, the share, the value), terms used in later periods for taxes, suggest that at this time they were voluntary and random, although the randomness gradually changed to required offerings particularly at sacrificial rituals. However, the three major prerequisites governing a system of taxation—a contracted amount, collected at stipulated periods, by persons designated as tax collectors—are absent in the Vedic texts. The recognition of these prerequisites in the post-Vedic period and the collection of taxes from the cultivators by the State would seem decisive in registering the change from cultivators to peasants in which the existence of an economy based on peasant agriculture becomes clear.

The introduction of taxation presupposes the impersonal authority of the State and some degree of alienation of the cultivator from the authority to whom the surplus is given, unlike in the lineage-based society where gifts were given more informally although directly. Taxation reduced the quantity of gifts and became the more substantial part of what was taken from the peasant, but these prestations were not terminated. The sanction of the religious ritual becomes more marginal and that of the state more central, the change occurring gradually over time. The formation of the state is therefore tied into this change. For the cultivator

the change to land becoming property or a legal entity—whether his or of

someone else—and the pressures on cultivation, have to do not only with

subsistence but also with a provision for ensuring a surplus. This highlights the

difference between appropriation in the earlier system and exploitation in the

latter.

The Vedic vish was more a generalized label under which herding, cultivation

and minimal crafts adequate to a household were included. Such groups were

germane to the later peasant household. In effect, because the relationship with

the dominant kshatriyas was based on gifts rather than on taxes, these cultivators

would seem part of a lineage society in which their subservience to a dominant

group arose more out of the exigencies of kinship or the ordering of clans than

out of exploited labour, although the latter can be seen to increase in time.

A gradual mutation becomes evident from the frequent references in the Pali

sources to the gahapati. The existence of the gahapati focuses more sharply on

the presence of what might be called a peasant economy. But to translate

gahapati as peasant is to provide a mere slice of its total meaning. Derived from

grihapati, the head of the household, the gahapati included a range of meanings

such as the wealthy mahashala brahmanas addressed as gahapatis by the Buddha,

who had received as donations extensive, tax-free, arable land and is also used

for those who paid taxes—the wealthy landowners who cultivated their large

farms with the help of slaves and hired labourers (dasa-bhritaka).

Those at the lower end of the scale who either owned small plots of land or

were professional ploughmen are more often referred to as the kassakas, from

the Sanskrit word for cultivators, karshaka. The Arthashastra mentions tenants

as upavasa and also refers to another category, the shudra cultivators settled by

the state on cultivable or waste land on a different system of tenure from the

aforesaid: as also the range of cultivators employed on the state farms supervised

by the overseers of agriculture, the sitadhyaksha.

Gahapati, therefore, is perhaps better translated as a landowner who would

generally pay taxes to the state except when the land which he owned was a

religious benefice. The ownership of land and the payment of taxes demarcates

this period of the mid-first millennium BC as one in which a peasant economy

emerged. Traces of the lineage-based society continued in the marking of status

by varna and the performance, although by now of less economic significance,

of the sacrificial rituals.

That the gahapati was not even just a landowner but more a man of means is

supported by the fact that it was from the ranks of the gahapatis that there

emerged the setthis or the financiers. The two terms are often associated in the

literature of the period and this is further attested in the votive inscriptions

recording donations to the Buddhist sangha at stupa sites in central India and the

western and eastern Deccan from the late first millennium BC. Gahapati fathers

have setthi sons as well as the other way round. It would seem that gahapati

status was acquired through the practice of any respectable profession that

provided a decent income, although the most frequent references are to

landownership and commerce.

This is not to suggest that trade originated with the landowning groups but

rather that the commercialization of exchange was probably tied to the

emergence of the gahapati. In examining the origins of trade it is necessary to

define more clearly the nature of the exchange involved. Broadly, there are some

recognizable forms of exchange that can either develop into commercialized

exchange or supplement it. There is evidence of luxury goods exchanged by

ruling groups as a part of gift-exchange. Marriage alliances between kshatriya

families involved an exchange of gifts. Thus, when Bharata visits his maternal

Kekeya kinsmen, he returns with a variety of gifts, including horses. This is not

an exchange based on need but is a channel through which status and kinship is

confirmed. It may in addition lead to other forms of exchange.

The major royal sacrifices required tributes and gifts to be brought to the

yajamana which he then distributed at the end of the ritual. The description of

the rajasuya of Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata provides an interesting inventory

of valued items. Sacrificial rituals involved the gifting of cattle and possibly

some gold. Boastful poets added to this horses, chariots, and on occasion, dasis

(slave women), given to them by the victorious cattle-raiders whose prowess the

poets had praised. These gifts became part of a distribution and exchange of

wealth which in lineage-based societies formed the salient part of the wealth of

those who ruled, whereas in the change to an economy based on peasant

agriculture, they were merely a part of the wealth accumulated by the ruling

families and the more wealthy gahapatis.

Less spectacular but more essential was another form of exchange—that of

raw materials and commodities brought by itinerant groups such as smiths and

pastoralists. It has been argued that the itinerant metal-smiths formed a network

of connections between villages. Metal, particularly iron and iron objects were

items of regular trade. The role of pastoralists in forms of exchange and in

trading circuits is now gaining attention, particularly of those groups that had a

regular pattern of transhumance—moving from pastures at lower elevation to

those higher up in summer and returning in winter. Transactions that accompany

this circuit have been described as a vertical economy. Exchange through

sources of itinerant professionals was probably the starting point of the beat of

pedlars that remains a continuing feature of one level of exchange in India.

Yet another category is what might be called exchange between one

settlement and the next. This is a useful basis for plotting the gradual diffusion of

an item as for example, the better quality varieties of pottery in archaeological

evidence. The distribution of the Northern Black Polished Ware—a luxury

ceramic—is an indicator of places in contact with each other. Such an exchange

provides evidence not only on local trade but also on the geographical reach of

intra-regional contacts. Some of these settlements may then have come to play

the role of local markets, the equivalent perhaps of what the Pali texts refer to as

the nigama. These in turn are likely to have been the nuclei of urban growth as in

the case of towns such as Rajagriha and Sravasti in the middle Ganga plain.

Distinct from all these is the familiar picture of trade which dominates the

scene in the post-Mauryan period. This is the commercial exchange between two

or more centres processing and producing commodities specifically destined for

trade. The organization of this more complex form involved a hierarchy of

producers and traders some of whom were sedentary while others were carriers

of the items traded but of a different order from pedlars and pastoralists. The

picture of commercialized exchange emerges from Buddhist texts. Some monks

were also involved in brade. The Arthashastra regards it as a legitimate source

of revenue for the State. The question then arose of the degree of State

interference and control that would be conducive to increasing the finances of

the State.

The major artefact in this trade (other than the commodities) was coined

metallic money, providing evidence of the degree of complexity and the extent

of such trade and trading circuits. These early coins in some instances were

issued by the nigama and in other cases may have been issued by local

authorities or possibly by ruling families. In the post-Mauryan period dynastic

issues gained currency, a clear pointer to the importance of commercialized

exchange. However, even in this period local issues remained in circulation

suggesting multiple levels of exchange.

Given these commercial activities, the control of trade routes becomes a

significant factor in political policy and military annexations. Recent analyses of

activities along the Silk Route linking China to the eastern Mediterranean via

Central Asia have revealed a variety of levels of exchange. These ranged from

gift-exchange to sophisticated emporia, in the context of political relations

between tribal groups and established centres of political power, suggesting

ways in which the complicated question of trade, often treated as a uniform

monolith by historians of early India, may now be investigated. The Roman

trade with India, as is clear from both commodities and the function of money,

also spans a similar range. Diverse forms of exchange within a larger trading

system suggest the coexistence of various economic levels within that system

and sharpen the social contours of the groups involved.

Analyzing trade also requires locating those involved in these exchanges in

the social hierarchy of the time. In the production of goods for exchange,

artisans, whether individuals or in guilds, had relationships with merchants and

financiers that were as diverse in form as the various categories of relationships

and tenancies between cultivators and landowners. The role of the shilpin

(artisan) and the shreni (guild) is quite distinct from the setthi. Their presence

registers a change in the nature of the trade as does the differentiation between

categories of professionals, such as the vanija (merchant), setthi (financier and

merchant), and the sarthavaha, (caravaneer).

When commercialized exchange becomes active it introduces a substantial

change. The investment required for elaborate trade had to be provided by a

well-endowed group able to invest its surplus in risk-taking ventures. The

obvious category was the gahapati who could fall back on land if the venture

failed. That it turned out to be highly successful is clear from the fact that not

only did the setthis emerge from the ranks of the gahapatis, but, by the post-

Mauryan period, had an independent identity as financiers and gradually

superceded the gahapatis.

As a result of the wealth they accumulated the setthis came to be powerful,

for some of them were known to be financiers of kings and obtained in return

rights to collect revenue, perhaps the prototype of what was later to become the

regular form of emoluments to administrative officers. On the manifestations of

trade, Buddhist and Jaina sources together with epigraphic and archaeological

evidence provide a useful counterpoint to the conventional Dharmashastra

literature of this period.

The link between agriculture and commerce is important for understanding

the changes in the subsequent period. The opulence of those involved in

commerce was poured into the adornment of religious monuments, monasteries

and images and in the conspicuous consumption that is associated with the

wealthier town-dwellers of these times. This tends to obscure the agrarian scene

where one notices less of wealthy landowners and large estates and more of

those with small holdings.

Small plots of land could be purchased and donated to religious beneficiaries

and it seems unlikely, as has been argued, that such sales were restricted to

religious donations. Small holdings together with the alienation of land could

point to some degree of impoverishment among peasants. References to debt

bondage (ahitaka, atmavikreta), as a regular if not frequent category of slavery,

as well as the increasing references to vishti (forced labour or a labour tax),

suggest a different rural scene from that of the preceding period. Oppressive

taxation—referred to as pain-causing taxation—is mentioned as an evil.

This mutation was endemic to the evident change in the post-Gupta period.

Where trade flourished, the resources of the urban centres and the trade routes

bouyed up the system: but this period points to a declining trade in some areas.

Internal commercialized trade requires the ballast of agrarian settlements and

where lineage-based societies could be converted into peasant economies, the

agrarian support to trade would be strengthened.

Earlier networks of exchange had permitted an easier coexistence with

lineage-based societies. Their resources, generally raw materials such as

elephants, timber and gemstones could, as items of exchange, be easily tapped

by traders through barter and direct exchange without disturbing the social

structure to any appreciable degree. On the other hand, because of the

requirement of land and labour, state systems more heavily dependent on a

peasant economy had to absorb these societies and convert them into peasant

economies in order to extract the benefits.

Where trade declined or where new states were established, the need to

develop the agrarian economy became necessary. The granting of land appears to

have been the mechanism adopted for extending areas under cultivation. The

reasons for this change in the post-Gupta period need more detailed

investigation, particularly at a regional level. In the very useful work done so far,

substantial data has surfaced. What is now required is a sifting and classifying of

the data to provide more precise answers and to evoke fresh questions.

The kind of data required is that which would provide information on basic

questions relating to agrarian relations. A comparative regional view would be

useful. Grants could be classified in terms of type and area, the nature of the land

and soil, the crops grown, local irrigation, degrees of ownership and tenancy, and

who provided labour. A worm’s eye view of agriculture could be better handled

through inter-disciplinary research. Historians could work with soil specialists

and hydrologists. The absence of field studies is unfortunate. Although it has

entered into some discussions of archaeological sites it is absent among

historians. An increase in data of the technical kind can assist the quality of

theoretical analyses. Many of these questions could involve extrapolating from

existing records but the more valuable input would come from fieldwork in the

area under study. It is not for nothing that R.H. Tawney, who wrote on the

economic history of Europe, is believed to have said that the first essential of

research into agrarian history is a stout pair of boots.

At another level, the analyses of the titles of grantees and changes therein

might provide clues. The question of whether the peasantry was free hinges not

only on the technical and legal definitions but also requires a discussion of the

actual status of the peasant. Rights, obligations and dues of the grantees vis-à-vis

the peasants would need to be tabulated in detail. These would provide some

indications of the essentials of the prevailing system.

It is curious that there is little resort to the policy recommended by the

Arthashastra of establishing colonies of cultivators on land owned by the state,

so as to extend agriculture and thereby increase the revenue. Was the state

unable to do so because it lacked the administrative infrastructure, or was it

because it did not have the power to implement such a policy? Or had the

economy changed to the point of discouraging the feasibility of such a policy?

Instead, the state increased the grants of land to religious beneficiaries and later,

but to a lesser extent, to administrative officers in lieu of a salary. This points to

a need for an evaluation of the nature of the states of this period with the

possibility that their formation and structure were different from the previous

ones.

Was this type of state attempting to restructure the economy to a greater

extent than the previous ones that may have been more concerned with revenue

collecting—judging by the model advocated by Kautilya? Did the system of

granting land predominate (perhaps initially) in areas where lineage-based

societies were prevalent so as to facilitate their conversion to a peasant economy

and where lineage could also be used for economic control? More than varna

identities, jati identities would have acted as a bridge to a peasant economy and

ameliorated the rupture with the lineage system. Elements of lineage have often

continued even in some areas where peasant agriculture became the norm.

Religious benefices were on the pattern of earlier grants and were not strictly

an innovation except that now grants were made increasingly to brahmanas and

ostensibly in return for legitimizing the dynasty and for the donor acquiring

religious merit. These were the stated reasons for the grant but were not

sufficient reasons. Grants of this nature, as has been pointed out, were a channel

of acculturation. They could also be used as foci of political loyalty.

If the grants were made initially from state-owned lands, they amounted to a

renouncing of revenue. If the state was unable to administer the extension of

agriculture, was the system of grants also introduced to encourage settlements in

new areas where the grant was of waste land, or alternatively, of cultivated lands

to stabilize the peasantry and induce increased production? Given the fact that

slaves were not used in any quantitative degree in agricultural production at this

time, was the system of grants an attempt at converting the peasantry into a

stable productive force through various mechanisms of subordination and a

chain of intermediaries?

Interestingly, the term gahapati/grihapati drops out of currency, for the system

had changed and terms incorporating raja, samanta and bhogin, become

frequent. Samanta had originally been the word used for a neighbour. The

meaning now changed and it referred to a grantee who had received land.

Bhogin was the one who enjoyed the produce of the land. The recipients of land

grants had the right to receive a range of taxes and dues previously collected by

the state and were soon given administrative and (some) judicial powers. This

permitted them to act us a ‘backup’ administration where the grant was in settled

areas and to introduce the system where new settlements were being established.

It may in origin have been a fiscal measure but in effect became the means of

controlling the peasantry.

The apparent increase in debt bondage and the fear of peasant migration

would point to this being one of the functions of the large-scale grants. That the

possibility of peasant migration to alleviate discontent was being slowly stifled

is suggested by the fact of peasants possibly taking to revolt from the early

second millennium onwards. A rise in brigandage may well have occurred in this

period judging by the increase in hero-stones in some areas. These were

memorials to local heroes who had died defending the village and its cattle. A

qualitative change occurs when the state begins to grant villages or substantial

acreages of land already under cultivation: a change that reflects both on the

economy and on the nature of the state.

The need to fetter the peasantry would seem an evident departure from the

earlier system and this in turn introduced a change in the relationship between

the cultivator and the land now riveted in legalities and liabilities, with tax or

rent no longer being the sole criterion of a peasant economy. The karshaka of

this period found himself in a different situation from the kassaka of earlier

times. The term ‘peasant’ therefore cannot have a blanket usage or meaning

since the variations within it have to be distinguished.

The secular grantees were part of an hierarchical system in which they

mirrored the court at the local level. This is evident from their attempts to imitate

the courtly style as depicted in the art and literature of the time. Grants of land to

the brahmanas as the major religious grantees rehabilitated them to a position of

authority and their anguished invocation of Kalki as a millennial figure became

less urgent. The codes of caste were, seemingly at least, not being overturned as

vigorously as had been feared in earlier times. It is more likely that the forms

were outwardly adhered to and the matter seemed to end at that point, without

too much investigation into the mobility of jatis.

A new religious ideology gained popularity. It focused on the icon and the

temple and asserted an assimilative quality involving the cults and rituals of

Puranic Hinduism and the genesis of the Bhakti tradition. Ideological

assimilation is called for when there is a need to knit together socially diverse

groups. It is also crucial when there is an increase in the distancing between such

groups as well as the power of some over others and the economic disparity

between them.

The significance of these new cults and sects may lie in part in the focus on

loyalty to a deity that has parallels to the loyalty of peasants and others to an

overlord. But it would be worth examining the rudiments of each sect in its

regional dimension, its groping towards a jati status and the use of an ostensibly

cultural and religious idiom to express a new social identity. Were these also

mechanisms for legitimizing territorial identities, drawing on sacred geography

and pilgrimage routes, with the temple as the focal point?

The devotees were emphasizing what they perceived to be their equal status

as devotees in the eyes of the deity. Can this be viewed as the assertion of those

lower down the social scale in favour of a more egalitarian society? But its

significance grows when the social background to this belief is one of increasing

disparity. Movements of dissent that acquired religious legitimacy and form were

often gradually accommodated and their radical content slowly diluted. The

move away from community participation in a ritual to a personalized and

private worship encourages the notion of individual freedom, even if it is only at

the ideological level. The Vedic sacrificial ritual was a gathering of the clan,

whereas forms of worship like Bhakti can be entirely based on how the

individual sees his or her relationship with the deity.

In the justifiable emphasis on social and economic history there has been too

frequently neglect among historians of the analysis of ideology. To study

ideology without its historical context is to practice historical hydroponics, for

ideas and beliefs strike roots in the humus of historical reality. To restrict the

study of a society to its narrowly social and economic forms alone is to see it in

a limited two-dimensional profile. The interaction of society and ideology takes

a varied pattern and to insist always on the primacy of the one over the other is

to deny the richness of a full-bodied historical explanation.

Ideas are sometimes analyzed as a response to social pressures and needs.

This is particularly pertinent for those dealing with social history. Some of the

more important literature (of the times) is suffused with a theoretical

representation of society even in symbolic or ideational forms. Meanings very

often do not stem from just the vocabulary but require familiarity with the

cultural context of the word. Examples of this would be the levels of meaning in

words such a varna and jati as they travel through time in texts such as the

Dharmashastras. The ideological layers in the latter as codes of behaviour have

to be peeled away in order to obtain a better comprehension of their ordering of

society.

Central to any concern with ideology in the ancient past is the critique of

religious thought, as distinct from religious practice or the organization of

religious institutions. Some analyses of the Upanishads for instance, can provide

an interesting example of this. One of the major strands in Upanishadic thought

is said to be a secret doctrine known only to a few kshatriyas who teach it to

select, trusted brahmanas. Even the most learned among the latter, the mahashala

mahashrotriya are described as going to the kshatriyas for instruction. This does

rather reverse the code but it seems not to have mattered in this context. The

doctrine they discuss involves the idea of the soul, the atman and its ultimate

merging with the universal soul, the brahman as well as metempsychosis and the

transmigration of the soul: in fact a fundamental doctrine of this age which was

to have far-reaching consequences on Indian society.

That it should have been secret and originally associated with the kshatriyas

raises many questions, some of which have been discussed by scholars. It is true

that the brahmanas and the kshatriyas were both members of the ‘leisured

classes’ in Vedic society and could therefore indulge in idealistic philosophy and

discourse on the niceties of life after death. But this is only a partial answer and

much more remains to be explained. Was the ritual of sacrifice so deeply

imprinted on the brahmana mind and so necessary to the profession at this point,

that it required non-brahmanas to introduce alternatives to moksha, the liberation

of the soul from rebirth, other than the sacrificial ritual? The adoption of

meditation and theories of transmigration had the advantage of releasing the

kshatriyas from the pressures of a prestation economy, permitting them to

accumulate wealth, which in turn gave them access to power and leisure.

Alternatively, was the accumulation of these already present in the fringe

areas described as the mleccha-desha (impure lands) in Vedic texts, where the

sacrificial rituals for various reasons had become less important? Thus Janaka of

Mithila, Ashvapati Kaikeya and Ajatashatru of Kashi could reflect on alternative

ways to moksha, other than the ritual of sacrifice. This also places a different

emphasis on the function of the kshatriya who had now ceased to be primarily a

cattle-raiding, warrior chief.

These are not the only kinds of connections relevant to a history of the period.

Upper and lower caste groups treated as monolithic, belie social reality. The

tensions within these should also be noticed where the evidence suggests this.

The competition for status between brahmanas and kshatriyas and the separation

of their functions, although retaining their mutual dependence, is symbolized in

the sacrificial ritual that becomes a key articulation of the relationship. The new

beliefs discussed in the Upanishads reversed up to a point the sacrificial ritual, in

that they required neither priests nor deities but only self-discipline and

meditation. At another level, the transmigrating of the soul through the natural

elements and plants to its ultimate rebirth carries an echo of shamanism which

may have remained popular outside priestly ritual.

There is in the new belief the first element of a shift from the clan to the

individual in as much as the sacrificial ritual involves the clan and its wealth, but

meditation and self-discipline, in opposition to the clan, involves only the

individual. It symbolizes the breaking away of the individual from the clan. It

also introduces an element of anomie that becomes more apparent in the later

development of these beliefs by various sects. These reflections were seminal to

what became a major direction in Indian thought and action, the opting out of the

individual from society, where renunciation is a method of self-discovery, but

can also carry a message of dissent.

That the new ideas were attributed to the kshatriyas and yet included in a

brahmanical text was probably because for the brahmanas to author a doctrine

openly questioning the sacrificial ritual would, at this stage, have been an

anomaly. However for kshatriyas wanting to be released from expending their

wealth in yajanas, an alternate to the sacrificial ritual was a potentially important

departure. That the doctrine stimulated philosophical discussion would in itself

have required that it be recorded. Additionally, since some teachings of the

heterodox reflected aspects of this doctrine, by setting it out as an important part

of the Vedic corpus, it could be claimed that even the heterodox had ultimately

to uphold aspects of the Vedic tradition. Such an argument is made many

centuries later, in modern times. This assumes that the Upanishadic doctrine

preceded the heterodox teachings, but it may have been the reverse.

This was to become yet another technique by which orthodox theory in

subsequent centuries sought to disguise ideas contradicting its own position. The

Buddha not only democratized the doctrine but also nurtured the idea of karma

and samsara, actions in this life determining the quality of rebirth in the next, a

generally held belief that explained social inequities. For him the link was

through consciousness as he denied the existence of the soul. But his negation of

the soul (atman) introduces a contradiction of the doctrine as visualized in the

Upanishads. Such contradictions were current at that time. The positing of a

thesis and an anti-thesis prior to arriving at a possible synthesis, became a

characteristic feature of philosophical debate and was reflected both in empirical

disciplines such as grammar as well as in more abstract analysis.

The relating of ideology to historical reality, as historians are now doing, can

result not only in new ways of examining an historical situation and be used to

extend or modify the analysis from other sources, but can also help in

confirming the reality as derived from other sources.

Such a study, incorporating elements of the deconstruction of both material

culture and ideas, would sharpen the awareness of concepts and theoretical

frameworks. Historical explanation then becomes an enterprise in which the

nuances and refinements of concepts and theories are a constant necessity, not

only because of the availability of fresh evidence from new sources but also

because of greater precision in our understanding of the categories which we use

to analyze these sources.

 cultural nationalists

 If we limit history to the recitation of facts it remains somewhat distanced and unconnected to our lives in the present. One of the areas where this link between the past and the present needs investigation is that of religion in the past and now. Earlier, modern historians had limited the history of religion to studying what the sacred texts of each religion say, and to information on how the religion was organized. But the significant aspect from a historical perspective is also to ascertain what this organization grew out of and how it impinged on society. This has been a recent subject of study. When one begins to think about the relationship of religion and society in these terms then one also begins to see how crucial the analysis of this link to the assessment of society as a whole is. The significance is even more noticeable in the way religion is used in present times in various forms of nationalism. The changes in the discipline of history were making it intellectually far more stimulating and nuanced than before. Other demands came to be made on the knowledge of historians. But apart from this, history—more than the other human sciences—was essential to political ideologies that appeal to the past for legitimacy. This it does because the identity of a society in modern times draws on its perceptions of history, and this is particularly marked in the experience of nationalism. The questioning of colonial and nationalist interpretations has also to do with the historical change brought about in the process of modernization, in which we have been and are currently, participating. The crucial fact of the change is that the survival of a nation is dependant on its preferably being a secular democracy, a mutation that is ultimately inevitable, irrespective of how many decades it may take. Among the dramatic changes is the emergence of capitalism (which it was once thought could be bypassed), accompanied by industrialization. The nature of these changes could differ through the experience of the market economy, neo-liberalism and globalization, but change there has to be. This unsettles existing social norms and structures in variant ways in different societies, an aspect that should be treated as the logical counterpart to modernization brought by capitalism. What is open to us is to avoid the brutalities of the change. For this we have to focus on enhancing the potential of the more humane aspects of this mutation, a focus that is often deliberately set aside. We allow the brutalities to overtake us and thereby annul what could be the more creative aspirations. I am assuming that it may be possible to have a substantial change in the political economy without brutalities. The relevance of the questions posed is bound to affect the social sciences. The coming of nationalism in India, as an activity opposed to colonial rule and moving towards the expulsion of the colonial power, led inevitably to inducting history as foundational to the ideology. At first this was to be just the intellectual ammunition needed to give an inclusive identity to nationalism, but parallel to it were the identities of religious communities with a political agenda that often corroded nationalist ideology and surfaced as communalisms. Identity Nationalism implies the coalescing of smaller groups into a larger inclusive identity that incorporates the lesser ones. The coalescing includes that of the territories of the smaller groups. It refers itself back to a shared history of all those that constitute the nation. The Indian national movement was based on these ideas. It broke when religion was given priority, splitting the groups that had earlier come together, resulting in the division of the territory and ultimately the denial of a shared history, all of which reversed the constituents of nationalism. Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced. History is thought to provide past identities and in the process history comes to be contested. Often enough we are imposing present identities onto the past. Those that select a single identity from the past—be it religion, caste, language or whatever—and then project it as their take on national identity are in fact negating nationalism. Identity politics, where one identity is chosen, is often associated with extremism of a kind that harbours fundamentalism and destroys the more positive changes expected of secular democratic nationalism. Historical change brings various communities into prominence and democratically by ensuring that all citizens have equal rights, and none is considered as a primary citizen with special rights. The manipulation of history to legitimize community identity becomes essential to communalism demanding special rights, the more so when it dominates politics. The contestation is between historians trying to defend history from communal manipulation and those insisting on ideologies that support fundamentalist versions of the past. The history that has raised the maximum controversy in this context is that of pre-modern India and particularly that of the early period.

 Nationalism 

Eric Hobsbawm encapsulates the link between history and nationalism when he states that historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts! All nationalisms require and search for utopias from the past and the more remote periods of history are chosen, partly because there is less detailed evidence on such periods and therefore it is possible to fan tasize more freely about them. Except that these days we historians, with our new methodologies, tend to disallow the fantasy and run into problems with the fantasy-makers. Political ideologies focusing in particular on what they call ‘cultural nationalism’—and this is common to many societies apart from the Indian— blatantly exploit history. In India there have been and continue to be a variety of ideologies that claim to be forms of nationalism. These include the avowedly secular inclusive Indian national movement against colonialism, whose secular credentials by and large held, although occasionally they were somewhat opaque. But this more secular Indian nationalism seems to be slowly receding, being overtaken by various religious nationalisms such as the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh—incorporating varieties of fundamentalism. The objection to applying the label of nationalism to what may be viewed as these ‘lesser breeds without the law’ is well taken.Nationalism is secular and the term should refer only to the one Indian nationalism. But the lesser ones have grown, nourished on the theory sponsored by colonial thinking that the religion of a community was and has always been, its identity, and that this qualified it to be called a nation. Politicians such as V.D. Savarkar and M.A. Jinnah, toeing in their later years the line of British colonial policy, regularly referred to the two nations of the Hindus and the Muslims. Religious communal organizations have appropriated the label of nationalisms—thus the references to Hindu, Muslim and Sikh nationalisms. Strictly these are not nationalisms but fundamentalist religious identities. They are now referred to as nationalisms since that is the term they claim, even though it does not apply. Both Hindu and Muslim communalists had their organizational bases in the 1920s such as the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. Despite it being in essence anti-nationalist, the two-nation theory is now effectively not questioned, if anything it is once again being endorsed by some political parties.

 Communalisms 

Communal Nationalism

The nationalism of a religious community is not Indian nationalism, irrespective of which community it may refer to. This argument was made in the 1940s and quite correctly against ‘Muslim nationalists’, but seventy years later a man proclaiming himself to be a ‘Hindu nationalist’ is taken as synonymous with an Indian nationalist. When nationalism is reduced to identity politics and priority is given to a religious community, then it follows that the history sought will be a history that focuses on the particular religious community that is being projected as that of the primary citizen. So Hindu nationalism/communalism refers itself back to the pre-Islamic period and claims an unbroken continuity from Harappan times, tracing its origins to the golden age of the early past when Hinduism is said to have been dominant. Questioning this theory is not welcomed and those that do so are dismissed as ‘Marxists’, intended as a form of abuse (!), or else targeted with the most crass denunciation. The golden age, it is maintained, was terminated by ‘the Muslim invasions’ followed by a period of tyrannical Muslim rulers whose actions are portrayed in brutal terms.

                Muslim nationalism/communalism, familiar in Pakistan, traces the origin of its history (subsequent to the Indus Civilization)to Mohammad bin Qasim’s campaigns in Sind in the eighth century AD, and the history prior to this is seen as largely irrelevant. Some historians in Pakistan disagree with this position, but the focus remains mostly on the history of the subcontinent under Islamic rulers. Muslim rule is praised as having benefitted India. And so the story goes on and on.

            Some Sikh nationalists wanted the history of the Punjab to start with Guru Nanak. The attempt at an exclusive focus on Shivaji in Maharashtra derives from a similar kind of sentiment. 

Religious organizations the world over have never been averse to playing politics, accessing and controlling power and setting themselves up as parallel governing structures. The Catholic-Protestant conflicts in Europe are an obvious example. This has also been known to the history of religions in India, although until recently historians have tended not to examine this aspect of organized religion, possibly because the conflicts were not on the same scale as those of the European. Now the scale has become more apparent what with political parties organizing communal riots, destroying mosques and banning books that do not conform to the views of religious conservatism. Any threat to the control of religion is proclaimed as a threat to the religion itself. No distinction is made between the religion of an individual and the political use of religious organizations. Yet this distinction is crucial to any society. An individual has the right to her belief and her way of worshipping a deity of her choice, provided this does not harm anyone else in that society. This of course is the ideal although it may not always work in such a harmonious manner. Some forms of worship can cause conflicts. Religion encourages community worship that bonds the worshippers and perhaps serves psychological needs. Some aspects of religion can be humane and conducive to the well-being of everyone but these tend to receive lip service from the majority. Sometimes it is fear of the unknown that creates a God, or alternately the awe of the universe that is overwhelming. Mystery is perceived by the individual and can be articulated in religious poetry and music.

ORGANIZED RELIGION AND COMMUNALISM

         Organized religion, however, is different from the religion of the individual. Religious organizations may begin with the finest values but many succumb to other pressures and turn into tyrannical bodies. When this happens religion moves away from its root purposes and turns into an organization encouraging hatred and violence and opposing the initial values with which it had itself started. The defence of such a religion then requires an ‘enemy’, generally chosen from within society although it can be external to it—the Sunni fundamentalists attack the Shi’as, supporters of Hindutva organized by the Sangh Parivar attack Christians and Muslims. Human rights, social welfare or social justice are not the concerns of such religious organizations. Welfare relates only to their followers, if at all. Justice is subjected to observing the code of the religion. Belief and ritual get subsumed into religiosity. 

All this becomes an area of contention against secularism, that neither denies nor rejects religion, but insists on the priority of social ethics based on equal and universal human rights, and social justice based on uniform civil laws. Religion is not required for these values to prevail.

Religiosity 

Religiosity, often described as excessive religiousness, is of course different from religion. The end purpose of religiosity is seldom worship per se, but is more often the means of demonstrating wealth and power. Religiosity binds the gullible with superstitions and ensnares them with the false promises of fake gurus thriving on media attention and magnanimous donations. Those who have faith and seek genuine teachers are frequently left by the wayside. One has only to see what Hindutva and the Sangh Parivar have done to Hinduism, what the Taliban and the mullahs have done to Islam, what the supporters of Khalistan have done to Sikhism, and what the Goa Inquisition did to local catholic Christians, to realize the change. The secular critique is not of religion as such, but of those who exploit religious faith for political and other gain. 

RELIGION AND POWER

The history of a religion therefore, is not limited to what the texts may say. Many religious texts incorporate the same values of moral behavior, tolerance and discouraging violence. Historically, new religions emerge when there are ideological differences that result in social conflict and the new religion attempts to douse the embers. The problem comes when the religion is associated with those in power, for then, religion also becomes a party to political competition or to moral corruption where it prevails. The historian therefore has to constantly place both the texts and the activities of a religion, in the context of what is happening in the society to which they refer. The relationship between a religion and its social activities may not always be complimentary to the religion. And when this is exposed, the religious organization tries to stifle the views of those that do so, as we have witnessed in recent decades. 

Religious ‘nationalisms and Cultural nationalists 

Some religious ‘nationalisms’ resort to the euphemism of calling themselves cultural nationalists, arguing that their organization is neither religious nor political but cultural. The implication is that ‘culture’ is neutral and apolitical. This makes no sense, as culture relates itself to social groups and their selfexpression. The statement is in any case denied by such nationalisms generally being the pivot of those political parties that are based on religious identities. This identity is defined by the social strata whose cultures are being appropriated by the particular organization Culture also has an identity defined by whose culture is being appropriated by the particular organization.

An obvious example is the RSS, the ideological propagator of Hindutva. One of its leaders, B.S. Moonje, stated that its organization was modelled on the Italian Fascisti, which together with Mussolini, had greatly impressed him. Its continuous stepping into political waters could hardly hide its political intentions. These are now amply clear in its role as the pivot of the BJP. Such ‘cultural nationalisms’ oriented to religious identities have had a long innings.

 Another manifestation of cultural nationalism comes from the Indian diaspora that uses various Internet websites run by certain NRI organizations to mobilize opinion and spread ‘the message’. There is an element of pathos in their clinging to what they believe is the idea of India, even if it is passé. This is strongly coloured by the religious nationalisms of the home country, be they Hindu, Muslim or Sikh and these religious nationalisms are in turn reinforced by the belief and the substantial financial contributions that come from abroad. It is projected as their claim to a culture superior to that of the host countries where they have settled. Alienated as they are from the host culture the image of a utopian past of the homeland is evoked, even if it is an out-of-date one. The enemy however is not the host country—which it dare not be since the concerned NRIs are living there—but those in the home country who oppose the politics of religious fundamentalism. The material success of such NRIs makes them the role model for those of the Indian middle class aspiring to success in the home country, and their ideology is also imbibed by their Indian counterparts. The intention is to redefine the particular religion to make it less flexible and to define civilization in religious terms. The concept of Indian civilization was equated by some European Orientalists with things Hindu and its definition lay in the Hindu religion and the Sanskrit language, and the territorial boundaries of British India, all inherited from colonial scholarship. The concept was not questioned nor was it argued that Indian culture consisted of many strands not just the one. The strikingly unique feature of the plurality of cultures in India, that distinguished Indian civilization, went unheeded in the desperate attempt to identify a single culture and give it priority.

Civilizations and Relogiousity

 Today historians recognize that the hallmark of a civilization is not its rigid boundaries but its porosity, and that civilizations can only thrive when there is an inter-connectedness between them that enhances the communication of ideas and practices. That is perhaps one reason why for historians the concept of civilization is something quite else than what was meant by the term in the nineteenth century. The fundamentalist versions of religions mock the idea of religion. For instance, Hindutva replaces the freedom of individual belief by conformity to a uniform belief and practice. Its organization and ideology has suggested the influence of the Semitic religions. It also encourages the community’s competition in religiosity by constant reference to what it constructs as the Hindu tradition. The sensitivity and fluidity of worship in some aspects of Hinduism as prevalent especially among the lesser castes, are brushed aside. Premodern Hinduism had its warts—big and small—as do all religions, but its subtleties were richer than what is now being thrust on its believers. Hindutva is in many ways the antithesis of Hinduism, and aims to create a society that is narrow, bigoted and inward looking, in which the co-existence with those that differ, such as the minority communities of various kinds, is becoming increasingly impossible, as demonstrated by the frequency of communal riots. These inevitably lead to the ghettoization of the targeted community, as has happened subsequent to such riots, and the exclusion of such communities from living in an integrated society, as happened in Gujarat after the communal riots of 2002. Ghettoization, as one knows from the European experience, has the potential of facilitating barbaric solutions, and does solve the problems of differences in patterns of living.

RELIGION AND THE SECULARIZING OF INDIAN SOCIETY

Religion in the Indian subcontinent was, and is, a different experience from that of Europe and elsewhere. But it was redefined by colonial scholarship so as to make it comprehensible to those who saw it from a Judeo-Christian perspective. This definition was not averse to Indian scholars and to those who gave form to the socio-religious reform movements of the nineteenth century. This definition now prevails among its influential practitioners and observers. If anything it has been taken even further in making it resemble the Semitic religions. However, it does not explain the earlier practice of religion nor the presence of the variety of religions in India.

SECULARISM AND SECULARIZATION IN INDIA  

Secularism, that constitutes the second theme, has been variously defined. Since most Indian religions lack a Church the question of Church and State relations would not apply. However, this does not mean that secularism has no role in India. As we have noted earlier in this book, the definition prevalent in India, is that secularism means the co-existence of all religions irrespective of their status. As an extension of this idea it is said that secularism, since it excludes divine sanction, is alien to Indian civilization, the assumption being that everything in Indian civilization requires divine sanction.

             MEANING OF  SECULARISM AND SECULARIZATION 

I would like initially to suggest that a distinction be made between secularism and the secularizing of a society. I see secularism as an ideology whose concern is with secularizing society, and although it accepts the presence of religion this presence does not receive priority. It is distinct from religion, but not opposed to it, since its concern is with the rights and obligations of the individual in the context of multiple social relationships, in other words of the individual as citizen. The secularizing of a society moves towards giving a new direction to the identity of a citizen.

             HOW SECULARIZATION BE ACHIEVED 

As ideology, secularism neither has an organizational base, nor can it be politically imposed. It has to evolve from rights to citizens and changes in society and its laws appropriate to these. This requires a readjustment of the social control exercised by various traditional authorities, which includes religious authorities.

 

Nevertheless, secularism does challenge religious fundamentalism, in as much as the latter attempts to re-assert membership of a formal religion as the sole identity of the citizen. Religious fundamentalism is primarily a political condition that wears the authoritarian cover of a religion, and can only be terminated by ending the political inducement it offers and by undermining its claim to being the unquestioning authority over all codes.

The secularizing of society suggests a process of graduated change that endorses the kinds of values that may lead to a secular society, but the process may or may not be deliberately directed towards this. Secularizing society requires the state and civil society to ensure that social ethics assume both the equality of all its citizens and their welfare. This requires that codes be sanctioned not by religious authority, but by a civil authority. This authority would have primacy over the registration of birth, marriage and death, although religious rites could certainly be performed if so wished; and the laws governing inheritance would be part of the universal civil code. Social justice in particular would not come under any religious jurisdiction. This would extend to schemes of social welfare—such as education, employment and health—initiated by the state. In short, it should be possible for any Indian to exercise his/her rights as a citizen without seeking the sanction of any religious identity.   (FOR EXAMPLE) Both the Hindu Code Bill and the Muslim Personal law and such like, would have to be replaced by a uniform, universally applicable civil law having jurisdiction over marriage and inheritance, and ensuring gender justice.

If the interface with religion is important to secularism then the more pertinent question is whether the religion’s concerned can accommodate themselves to the secularizing of Indian society. Although it is anachronistic to look for ideas similar to secularism in pre-modern societies, it could be helpful to locate elements in traditional religions and thought that would be conducive to a secularizing process. What emerges from such an investigation is that religious sanction was not invariably required to establish social laws since there were exceptions and there were differences in customary practice. Furthermore, the priority given to civil law in contemporary times is one of the major characteristics of a modern society. To that extent it does involve a new way of looking at the relationship between law and society.

              RELIGIONS AND CASTES IN INDIA 

         Definitions of Indian religions in the last couple of centuries have generally assumed that the prototype of the Semitic religions would apply. This is particularly problematic for religions indigenous to India. In addition, it is problematic in terms of how religion is practiced in the subcontinent. The primary religious identity in pre-modern times was that of the religious sect. rather than that of formal singular religion. There is a complex history of varieties of accommodation or of contestation among the various sects that also shape the forms they take. They are not therefore, self-contained entities and have not been so in popular practice. The public articulation of religion is related to social institutions. Consequently, one aspect of religion in India is the degree to which the institution of caste as the basic organization of Indian society, structures religion.

                 Every religion reflects an acceptance of caste in differing degree. Some Hindu sects are obsessive about caste others are more flexible. Islam and Sikhism have denied it in theory but conform to much of it in practice, particularly in rules of marriage and of inheritance of property. Caste implies diverse customary codes of identification, and these often differentiate the practice of religion even within the same formal religious identity. Some religious sects formulated and furthered caste organization and some opposed it in various ways. Many rituals were practiced only by particular castes in particular locations. A section of people, now referred to as Other Backward Caste Hindus (OBC) and of course the Dalits, were not permitted to worship in the sanctum of Hindu temples. Even now, some temples deny them entry. Their beliefs and practices have inevitably differed fr om those of upper-caste Hindus, although attempts are being made in recent times to iron out differences and present uniformity. Recruiting tribal groups into Hindu society in Gujarat at the time of the Godhra genocide in 2002, by various agencies of Hindutva, was not just religious conversion as they could be used politically. Hinduism is perhaps better seen as a mosaic of religious sects rather than a single uniform religion along the lines of a monotheistic Judeo-Christian type of   religion. Sectarian differentiation can arise as a break-away from an established practice of a religion. Equally often there has been the assertion of a higher status by a caste accompanied by a change in religious practices imitating those of the higher castes. As has often been said, it is not the belief system that has to be uniform within each caste but rather the practice of the ritual, therefore, orthopraxy is more important than orthodoxy.

Religious sects in India have distinct identities. Some that have been included within the umbrella label of Hinduism are nevertheless at varying distances in belief and practice from each other. There are other practices and identities in the other religions of India such as in Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism and neo- Buddhism, each with a different take on religion and on secularism. Most of these have their forms of fundamentalism as well—be it Hindu, Islamic or Sikh. Their institutions establish their agendas vis-à-vis both state and society, and they use a religious identity for political mobilization as and when they need to.

 

           SECULARIZATION BY TRADITIONAL

                                  MEANS 

                

                 SOCIAL ETHICS AND RELIGIONS

   1.  The process of secularizing society can draw on traditional ways in which social relationships were articulated. Central to the values that governed most societies was the concept of social ethics. The definition varied, as for example, between Brahmanism and Buddhism. The Bhagvad Gita, for example, would not, on any account, have been the message of the Buddha. Whatever the message of the Gita, the fact that it had to be endorsed by a vision of the divine, would disqualify it as appropriate to secularism. One wonders where social ethics went when bodily pollution became a reason for casting out certain social groups and reducing them to servitude. As a contrast to this, and essential to the meaning of secular, would be social ethics focusing on social equality and human well-being, but without claiming divine sanction.

   2.  The insistence on viewing  secularism as the reverse image of religion has detracted from its origins linked to modernity and to nationalism, to its articulation in the nation-state, and more directly to democratic values. Secularism and democracy are intrinsically interwoven. In theory, nationalism redefines social codes to make them inclusive and universal. To that extent it opposes exclusive religious identities, except where nationalism itself endorses a religious identity. However, this is not a characteristic only of modern times. There were occasions in the earlier past when social ethics presuming the equality of all, had primacy in debates on social codes and some of these did not seek a divine mandate. If such an ethic endorsed social values broadly of a kind underlying the secularizing of society, then this would suggest, not a secular society in early times, but a potentially proto-secular presence in a culture. It may not always have been present in practice but could be referred to as a principal. This might be useful when drawing upon a tradition.

               SOURCES OF SECULAR OR PROTO SECULAR IDEOLOGIES 

This proto-secular presence in India, as it might be called, did not come from the text-bound, established formal religions of Vedic Brahmanism, Puranic Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, but from ideologies that were distanced from these formal religions or were even opposed to them.

      ALTERNATIVE RELIGIONS -- Shramanic sects

 

            This presence asserted an alternative structure of social ethics where caste distinctions were initially at least irrelevant to religious ritual and were not a primary value. Such ideologies had a substantial following and included Buddhists, Jainas, and a range of diverse free-thinking sects. These have been swept into the general category of Hinduism but need to be distinguished very clearly. They represent a gradation ranging from opposition to distancing and for a variety of reasons. These have constituted a substratum that was distinct from the formal religions and have been present since the earliest times to now. This substratum has been articulate and popular with large numbers of people, but is not given its due recognition because in our times they do not constitute formal religion. Instead they are often arbitrarily and as a fragment, fitted into one or other of the formal religions.

                  For example, early Buddhism had a substantial following and there was much in Indian culture that has been imprinted with it. Patronage came in part from royalty but more from householders—small-scale land owners and merchants. For almost a thousand years its presence was almost hegemonic. By the late first millennium AD, Buddhist centres in India had dwindled to a few pockets, or else had been so transmuted that the initial teaching had moved into the shadows. Brahmanism as the hegemonic religion replaced Buddhism. The Puranas, refer to the shramanas as mahamoha, those who delude people with their erroneous teaching. This was despite the fact that some Puranic sects grew out of an interface between the two.

               The centrality of its interpretation of social ethics was pre-eminent in early Buddhism. The emphasis was on the relationship between the individual and society, and on ethical equality, not endorsing the Brahmanical rules of caste as a divinely ordained inequality.

                       Brahmanical varna-ashrama-dharma Vs Buddhist ethic

           

              However, the Shramanic sects did not attempt to eliminate caste from society. The Brahmanical varna-ashrama-dharma, the caste ordering of society, insisted on a hierarchy of status and identity in a system of castes and this determined social behaviour and obligations. The hierarchy of social status was controlled through rules of marriage and social obligations and the specificity of rituals. Divine sanction was the source of legitimation. The observance of caste regulations is so insistent in brahmanical texts that obviously there must have been violations else the insistence would not have been necessary.

 

           The Buddhist ethic to the contrary, envisaged social behaviour as being determined by ethical norms conducive to universal well-being, irrespective of caste and divine sanction. Even though subsequent to his death the Buddha was deified and deities were incorporated in Buddhism, nevertheless the understanding of the social ethic remained a constant factor. My concern here is not with the discussion on the liberation of the individual from rebirth, but with the ethic governing the relationship between the individual and society. The two are not disconnected.

Living according to the precepts of the middle way may not be enough to preclude rebirth but would ensure a better rebirth than otherwise. The existence of deity was not central to the discussion of social behaviour. The kernel of the Buddha’s teaching drew on causality to explain the human condition and proposed the practice of the middle way as a partial solution. There was no immortal soul therefore impermanence was pervasive. The Buddhist dhamma was the universal ethic of family and community privileging non-violence, tolerance and respect for the individual. These values applied equally to all since they assumed the equality of all and the inter-connection of all sentient beings. The ethic was encapsulated in conduct towards various social categories such as parents, friends, teachers and those for whom the individual worked and those who worked for the individual.

             The explanation in Buddhist sources of how political authority and the state came about reflects the same concerns. The utopian beginnings of human society gradually gave way to a dystopia. This was caused by the emergence of families as discrete social units and by their claims to private property. It eventually became necessary for people to elect one among them to ensure protection from mutual greed and to enforce the laws that were applicable to all. The mutual interdependence of temporal and spiritual power is rejected by the early Buddhist tradition. In later centuries the Buddhist Order, the Sangha, negotiated with those that wielded political power to establish its own authority. This was not the equivalent of a Church since it was technically the community of Buddhist monks, with no intervention of deity. The upholding of dhamma was said to be the most important duty of the ruler and even of the universal monarch—the chakravartin. An attempt was made at propagating some of these ideas by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka but at the level of imperial polity it did not survive his reign in any direct way. Nevertheless, it has been viewed as a threat to the Brahmanical vision of society. The appeal of the Buddhist ethic was maximally to the householder, perhaps the most effective patron of Buddhism. Equality was assumed since wealth was acquired through labour, effort and righteous means. The ruler had to provide sustenance for the poor apart from ensuring good administration and general prosperity. It is also significant that Buddhism and Jainism acknowledged the right of women to become nuns. This was not absolute freedom but at least it permitted a way of life alternate to the conventional one. The frequency of donations at Buddhist places of worship, by nuns and by women donors, often on behalf of their families, would suggest that they had more freedom than just the choice of joining the Order.

               Buddhism, even when patronized by rulers did not establish a new social order. But it provided an alternate ideology to the Brahmanical order and thus indirectly legitimized many non-brahmanical and often lower caste movements that preached an ethic similar to the Buddhist. Some among these movements gained sanction for this ethic through the intervention of deity, but there were others that made no reference to deity. The questioning of deity particularly in context of social ethics was not limited to the Buddha. Such views persisted as parallel schools of thought among sects well into later times. 

                                           CHANGES IN HINDUISM AND RISE OF NEW SECTS        

                                                    By the first millennium AD                        

                Many ancient texts referring to and describing the religions of India mention two categories: the Brahmanic and the Shramanic. The latter, mainly Buddhism and Jainism, subsumed other non-Brahmanical groups. The Brahmanical religion underwent much change. Vedic Brahmanism constituted the orthodoxy. Its focus was the elaborate sacrificial ritual lasting sometimes up to a couple of years and conducted by a hierarchy of brahmana priests. By the first millennium AD, although it was still venerated, it began to be superseded by the popular religion described by modern scholars as Puranic Hinduism. The major gods and rituals changed—with Indra and Agni giving way to Shiva and Vishnu—and the innovation of worshipping icons in shrines and temples. It was a competitor of the Shramanic religion and its flexibility allowed it to absorb a variety of myths and practices of various groups of people. The resulting multiplicity of sects encouraged the osmosis of ideas and practices but discourged the notion of an over-arching religion recognizable as a uniform belief system. New sects emerged. Migrant sects from elsewhere such as the Sufis who trickled in from Persia in the early centuries of the second millennium AD, gave rise to further sects in India. The dialogue between Sufi and Bhakti teaching was reflected in many of the religious trends in this period. Some sects had been and were renunciatory, others evolved into new castes often asserting a higher status than previously.

                                             Period after the thirteenth century

                      The period after the thirteenth century saw a scatter of religious teachers—the gurus and the pirs—who had the largest followings of mixed Hindu, Muslim and other groups, up until the last century. These teachers cut across caste and formal religions. There emerged a distinctive Guru-Pir tradition in Indian religion, unfortunately not given the attention it deserves because much of its teaching was oral and it attracted the non-elite person in the main. The impact of this tradition is evident on all the formal religions even when they opposed these teachings. The message they endorsed was that of social equality rather than caste hierarchies, and a concern for the human condition—the message that appealed to those who saw themselves as the subordinated but not the defeated. The renouncer in Indian society as a figure of moral authority reaching beyond a single religious identity also has a bearing on social ethics. Mysticism apart, many more renouncers were concerned with the mainsprings of society and how these could be directed towards the welfare of its constituents at all levels. This moral authority lay not only in challenging deity—as in the many myths of ascetics threatening to overthrow a god or gods fearing the power of the ascetic—but also in legitimating political and social protest.

                          INTERFACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND                                       SECULARISM

 

 

                     Gandhi’s adoption of the symbols of asceticism was not just an individual quirk. He was using, consciously or subconsciously, the continuation of a long tradition of linking moral authority, as distinct from religious authority, with protest. I have tried to argue that religion in pre-colonial India had, and in some ways continues to have, a different structure and trajectory from religion elsewhere, both in form and in relation to society. Therefore, as a prelude to the interface between religion and secularism, we have to re-examine our definitions of religions in India.

                                                COLONIAL VIEW OF INDIAN RELIGION 

                 The current debate on secularism is not a radical departure from some ideologies of pre-modern Indian society, but the emphases and mechanisms are naturally different. The definition of religion in India has been partial, based as it has been largely only on the study of the belief systems and ritual practices as described in the texts used by the dominant castes and elite groups. This was further strengthened in the colonial projection of Indian religions as monolithic, static, uniform entities, virtually unconnected to any social context. The colonial state recognized only the formal religions of what it called Hinduism and of Islam and contoured them in keeping with its own perspectives on Indian religion. Colonial ethnography collected data on the supporters of the Guru-Pir religious articulation in the Gazetteers and Censuses. There was also data available in the regional languages. Yet, ironically, the distinctive identity of such groups was not recognized. They were marginalized and excluded from the construction of Indian religion. Their articulation was both oral and textual but not always written in the language of the cultural mainstream. The notion of monolithic religions of the majority and the minority communities tended to shuffle everyone into monolithic identity slots. With the coming of nationalism there was a turning to these identities especially when drawing upon tradition and cultural heritage.

 

                        NATIONAL MOVEMENT AND RELIFIOUS NATIONALISM

             Secular nationalism in the anti- colonial struggle was followed closely by Hindu and Muslim nationalisms. These were less concerned with confronting colonial power and more with confronting the other religious nationalism. They were seminal to the current communalism which apart from its political agenda, has no place for religious articulation that cannot be firmly located in one of the two monoliths. Battles over places of worship frequently occur often accompanied by violence. These are places where earlier adherents of all kinds of religious sects would worship together, and where religious identities had been ambiguous and blurred. Muslim ‘nationalism’ succeeded in establishing a state—Pakistan. Hindu nationalism is anxious to make India into a Hindu state, which so far has been evaded. Religious nationalism is not so distant from religious fundamentalism and is therefore hostile to secularism.

                            HINDU RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM AS HINDUTVA 

 

               Interestingly, Hindu nationalism has reformulated Hinduism and calls it Hindutva. I have referred to this elsewhere as Syndicated Hinduism.

 

1. This has been called an attempt to ‘semitize Hinduism’ by giving it a format and organization that approximates the Judeo-Christian. Doubtless the rationale is the belief that a religion organized in this way is more effective for modern political mobilization.

 

2. The search for a historical founder has not met with success, there never having been one.

 

3. The authority of a single sacred text is being sought but meets the same problem. Congregational worship has been introduced to create a sense of community.

 

4. There have been attempts to establish an ecclesiastical organization as a surrogate Church, to dictate the beliefs and laws of the religion.

 

5. Multiple deities weaken the claim that a monotheistic God is embedded in the worship of one out of many deities. A monotheistic God implies a different understanding of the role of deity than one among a number of deities.

 

6. Further, to boost nationalism, the enemy of the nation has to be targeted and the choice for this can be the Muslim or the Christian. This was made only too apparent in the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the assault on Christians in Odisha and other areas.

 

7. Islamic fundamentalism provides a gnawing parallel often used to justify retaliation by other religious fundamentalisms. 

 

8. The noticeable increase in religiosity is in part due to the changed condition of society where we now are part of the market economy required of current globalization. 

                                            There is a visible expansion of the middle class with a greater competition among people to join it. Those that succeed improve their material life and need to exhibit their success through lavish spending on religiosity among other things; those that do not succeed, feel the insecurity of having competed and lost and turn to religion for solace.

 

 9.   Globalization increases insecurity and reverses the economic system with which people were earlier familiar. Providing rational solutions get dismissed when the mood is to propagate irrationality and superstition. It is noticeable as to how many otherwise urbane middle-class men go around with red mouli threads and black threads tied to their wrists, and wear cheap rings set with monga or other ‘auspicious’ gemstones, to ensure their success and well-being.

                  PROBLEMS FOR SECULARIZATION IN INDIA

 

         1.Secularism in India faces the fundamentalism of various religions— Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam. These are movements that wish to retain control over the institutions of society and force an observance of religious laws rather than civil law. The control extends to denying lower castes access to social justice on more than one occasion. This opposes secular values.

 

                   2. Secularism in India has to contend with religious institutions and caste dominated ones, which up to a point are a manifestation of religions attempting to control society.

  

                3.  It also has to contend with a rather weak attempt by the state to ensure human rights and social justice for lower castes, Dalits and women, such rights if strongly backed would reinforce secularism, since secularism has the same aspirations.

  

                   But the effort should not stop with just a demonstration of upward mobility by a few through the internalization of upper caste religion and culture ways. On a larger scale it has preferred conversion to what is being called neo-Buddhism. It can be viewed as part of a continuous tradition although it has to be kept from becoming a historical anachronism.

              In conclusion I would like to reiterate three points :

 

1. if religion is to be treated as a counterpoint to secularism then the form of the religious articulation that is being contested has to be defined for each society. In formulating the meaning of secularism for the present, ideologies from the past that might assist in this formulation could be drawn upon.

 

2. And since secularism as an ideology is associated with the nation-state it becomes part of the emergent institutions of this historical change.

 

3. Inevitably secularizing society requires defining citizenship through creating a new identity, an identity based on essential human rights being equally and justly available to all citizens..

 DEBATE  AN INTRODUCTION

                         COLONIAL APPROACH TO INDIAN                                                                HISTORY

                                     Invented Theories

One of the principal statements of the colonial understanding of Indian society was that of describing it as a static society that underwent no change whatsoever, throughout its history. A static society meant that the description of society would remain the same for long periods. Therefore the Hindu period could well last for two if not three thousand years without change. It also meant that early Indian society had no consciousness of history since an awareness of history requires recognition of historical change. Historians influenced by anti-colonial nationalism, contested some colonial interpretations, but these views were not among them. Two theories from among those propounded by colonial scholarship were continued unchallenged by the successor historians of the early twentieth century. Both have been run threadbare and have been rejected by later historians, but remain resilient in the identity politics of today. One was the equating of the identity politics of religious communities with nationalisms as has been discussed above. The other was the projection of the Aryan race and its culture as the author of Indian civilization and therefore foundational to its creation. As we’ve seen, this theory was influential through the writings of Friedrich Max Mueller, the Sanskrit scholar, and at the popular level through its propagation by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, the Theosophist. Max Mueller maintained that the Aryans came from Central Asia but Olcott insisted that they were indigenous, and were the cradle of Indian civilization which they took to other parts of the world. This view does not reflect indigenous scholarship, as is claimed by those that support it today. Based on this theory it is argued that the

superior cultures of the past have an Aryan authorship; hence the need to insist that the Harappans were Aryans, irrespective of whether or not the evidence supports the argument. If Aryanism was the foundation of Indian civilization it had to be indigenous, that is, it had to originate within the boundaries of British

India or else it would count as alien—as indeed it was so declared by Jyotiba Phule, an early social reformer of nineteenth century Maharashtra. Needless to say Phule is not a hot favourite in Hindutva circles. And furthermore, there is now a need for the latter to insist on Aryan being indigenous in order to associate Hinduism with the earliest beginnings, despite the definition of ‘Aryan’ having mutated from Vedic times to the later centuries, as indeed also in historical thinking over the last two centuries. ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ used as terms for peoples confuses language and race since these are language labels, and should correctly be used as, ‘Aryan-speaking people’ and ‘Dravidian- speaking people’.

                                                                 Secularism

                                                   Indian definition and its limitations

The Partition of India in 1947 enhanced the support for nationalism based on the religious identities of communities. The rhetoric of secular anti-colonial nationalism was to the fore, but as we examine it now, there were weaknesses in the formulation of secularism that were not recognized at the time. 

(1) Absence of Right based approach

This was in part because the generally accepted Indian definition of secularism, as we haveseen, skirted the requirements of a secular society and was in essence not focused on democracy and social justice. In India, secularism was defined as the co-existence of all religions. That religions have an unequal status and that some are more equal than others—are in effect socially dominant and therefore endorse inequality—was ignored in this definition. 

(2) Concept of majority -minority

Furthermore, the concept of majority and minority communities defined as religious their numbers with arrived at from Censuses held since 1872, contradicts the idea of a secular society. The argument requiring models from the past invariably refer to Ashoka the Mauryan emperor and Akbar the Mughal emperor, without considering whether what they propagated was actually a secular society, or whether their insistence on religions having to co-exist arose from the requirements of imperial systems governing a society of multiple religions and plural cultures. Whereas the co-existence of religions was an admirable aspiration for those times, it remains insufficient in today’s world that demands equal rights for all citizens. 

WHAT WOULD BE A SECULAR INDIA

A secular society would be one in which the identity would be that of the Indian citizen and the function of religious communities would be confined to matters of religion and segregated from state functions. A secular India would not entertain Hindu/Muslim/Sikh nationalists as being equivalent to Indian nationalists since the very definition is not the same.

MOBILIZATION OF HINDUS INTO HINDUTVA

The need for the political mobilization of the Hindus required the re-organization of Hinduism as a religion fit for such mobilization. This introduced the centrality of converting Hinduism into Hindutva. Needless to say not all Hindus need to conform to the beliefs of Hindutva, nor do they, but it is an effective way of organizing a religious front to oppose other religious groups or even secular ones, as has been done again and again in the last half century.

RISE OF HATRED BASED PLOTICS AND SENTIMENT POLITICS

 This is a period that has seen violent contestations between Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Christians. This does not add up to the co- existence of all religions in a secular society. Such contestations are sometimes sparked by claims to what could well be property disputes but are presented to the public as claims relating to the particular religion, valid for both historical and present times. The questioning of these claims is seen as an affront to the religion making them. In the case of Hinduism, the more dramatic occasions have been in relation to Rama as a deity and the Ramayana as a sacred text. In the case of Muslims it is often linked to the symbols of being Muslim and of opposition to what is said in the Qur’an. When secular historians attempt an analysis of a religious text with a dispassionate inquiry as is required of historians, they are abused, and accused of hurting the sentiments of those that believe the text to be sacred. It should be understood that the world of the historian working on religious texts and that of the believer for whom the texts are sacred, are two distinctly different worlds and should not be confused. The latter cannot deny space to the former. All texts have to undergo such inquiries in the course of their being used as historical evidence. On the one hand the historicity of the religion is reiterated and on the other the historical analyses of the foundational texts are objected to. This has brought into focus the entire plethora of hurt sentiments by a variety of political groups claiming to be defenders of the various religions.

Interpretation of Texts

Some of the articles in this book discuss the manner in which religious ‘nationalisms’ interpret or object to certain historical texts. Items are picked out from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—to be used for political mobilization; or there is a particular projection of an event such as the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni on the temple of Somanatha/Somnath. The dates of the epics have been contested since a long time and the more conservative attempt has been to take them back to remote antiquity. Historians try to date the core of each epic by relating it to the kind of society it represents as known from other sources, and the segments added on are investigated in terms of the society they depict or the artifacts they mention. It is thought that since evidence for them is lacking in earlier periods, signet rings were probably unknown to India prior to the coming of the Indo-Greeks at the turn of the Christian era. Would the reference to the signet ring in the Ramayana date to this period, as was suggested by the archaeologist H.D. Sankalia? Epics are initially rooted in oral traditions and at a later date converted to written form. This may possibly have coincided with the oral being closely related to societies where the system of clans prevailed and caste was less prominent, to the written becoming part of the royal courts in kingdoms that emerged when the clan society was in decline. The two processes could have covered a sizeable period of time. Indian epics however, had a third dimension. Starting as popular narratives of clans and heroes they acquired a sacred character when Rama and Krishna became avataras of Vishnu. Their initial powerful impact as epic literature gave way to a different kind of impact a sacred texts. The insertions into the texts have been much commented upon. The chief editor of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, V.S. Sukthankar, has demarcated the earlier ‘narrative’ component in the story from the ‘didactic’ infusions. However, for those who regard these as the texts of their faith, for them naturally, the entire epic is seamless. Re-editing by various poets is a familiar activity common to virtually all epics. The Greek epics of Homer were not immune to this. Segments are either allowed to fade out or alternatively new ones are added in. Something as simple as a qualifying adjective can result in a different emphasis on a nuanced statement. The metre of the verse has to be correct and this can act as something of a control, unless the addition is in itself an entire segment. Therefore, it becomes difficult to ascertain a specific time for the entire enterprise. Generally a range of dates is suggested such as 400 BC to AD 400. But not all scholars accept this, some arguing for a shorter period around the turn of the Christian era. In the last century both the epics have been subjected to critical editions, where a comparison of all the different recensions—of which there are a large number—helps define the core epic. The Ramayana, perhaps because it was shorter with a more compact story, lent itself early to a political role. It is a simple story in which the demarcation of good and evil is projected in an open way. The hero/deity Rama is, in comparison with Krishna, a gentle, casual person, barring his harsh treatment of

Sita. The story was reflected with variations in many versions that differed from the one of Valmiki—especially the Buddhist and the Jaina versions, not to mention other later ones in the regional languages. The Jatakas for instance are a valuable narrative collection from the Buddhist Pali oral tradition whose value is

enhanced by their seeming to be used as a source of stories by poets and others in the writing of narrative texts in Sanskrit.

Ancient Texts and Politics Repeated attempts are now being made to establish the authenticity of only the Valmiki version, denying the others. The TV presentation of three decades ago went a long way to establish the Valmiki version with little said about other versions. We seem not to recognize that one of the admirable achievements of Indian civilization has been the acceptance of the juxtaposition of variants. Life is not governed therefore by an either/or choice in everything. There is always something else—the variant. Perhaps this is due to the absence of Satan, which apart from excluding the notion of original sin, disallows a perpetual duality. Can good and evil be seen as contingent? The familiarizing of people with other versions and explaining why they were composed, are in present times dismissed by claiming that alternate versions of the story other than that of Valmiki, hurt Hindu sentiment. What also gets dismissed thereby is that this was a narrative that travelled not only all over the Indian subcontinent, but also all over Asia. It was adapted to local cultural patterns wherever it went, adding both to the richness of the original narrative and to the narratives of the host culture. The dismissal of this aspect of the text denies to the Indian of today any awareness of the potentiality that this text held in the past. The most blatant use of the Ramayana for politics and vote-garnering was the movement launched to destroy the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992, claiming that it was located at the exact place where Rama was born. There is of course no historical evidence to support this claim, or for that matter even the historicity of Rama, although the benefit of doubt is often given in the latter case. This uncertainty stands in sharp contrast to the pillar locating the birth place of the Buddha erected subsequently by Ashoka Maurya, or the references to Jesus Christ in the works of Roman and Jewish historians of the first century AD, or even the near contemporary historical records of Muhammad. Religions rooted in the lives of historical figures involve histories in a different way, as compared to the worship of imagined religious figures, which although equally efficacious in religious terms, may not require historicity. Another attempt was made more recently to use the Ramayana to create a political controversy. This was over the Ramasetu/Ramasethu, or the so-called bridge or causeway linking Dhanushkodi to Sri Lanka between the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Straits, and supposedly built by his monkey allies under orders from Rama. The controversy brought out the irrelevance of actual location and chronology to the believer, and its central importance to the historian. That the name Lanka for the present-day Sri Lanka was not in use until the early centuries AD, is telling evidence on the date of the Ramayana, if Lanka is to be identified with modern Sri Lanka. The description in the text of how the causeway was constructed is hardly conducive to accepting its feasibility. The politicians of Hindu ‘nationalism’ insisted that they would not allow a channel to be excavated through the rocks under the sea to allow an easy passage to shipping which otherwise has to circumvent southern Sri Lanka to reach the east coast of India. The supposed ‘setu’ was said to be a national heritage associated with a deity. That may explain why it has no visibility! Looking Afresh at Somanatha An example of a different kind is illustrated in the treatment of the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni on the temple of Somanatha. This does not involve a contradiction between faith and history and none of the texts that provide the evidence are sacred texts. Here the issue is one of using a historical event for promoting a contemporary political ideology. The exploitation of history is only too obvious but is of a somewhat different kind from that which used the Ramayana story. From the historian’s perspective this piece of historical investigation that involved a variety of texts emanating from various kinds of persons, also showed how perceptions of and interests in, an event can differ, and that this difference has also to be examined by the historian. Colonial historians initially wrote an account of Mahmud’s raid on the Somanatha temple. Subsequently Indian historians continued with the same narrative without further questioning the sources. The argument was that the raid had created a trauma in the Hindu community in relation to the Muslim and planted the seed of a permanent, increasing hostility and intense aggression between Hindus and Muslims that never died down. This reading was based on the chroniclers of the Delhi and Deccan Sultanates who in giving their version of the event had to exaggerate not only the triumphal aspect of the raid itself but also the ensuing aftermath of the victory of Islam. That the descriptions of the raid in these chronicles contradicted each other apart from being exaggerated, seems not to have bothered the chroniclers nor the historians of modern times. That other sources on the history of Somanatha—such as lengthy inscriptions in Sanskrit, Jaina chronicles of the history of the Chaulukyas of Gujarat, popular compositions of northern India that referred to Mahmud—were not consulted by historians was because they were conditioned to end the Hindu period at AD 1000 and switch to the Muslim period after that, which meant that sources in Sanskrit were only associated with the Hindu period and the Muslim period meant reading only the sources in Persian, Arabic and Turkish because, as we’ve seen, James Mill’s periodization has remained ingrained in the study of Indian history. Had historians read as sources the post-Mahmud Sanskrit inscriptions or the Jaina chronicles also in Sanskrit, they would have realized that the religious authorities of Somanatha, far from suffering a trauma were involved in profitable commerce with Arab and Persian Muslim traders. These sources also suggest that at that time religious hostility was not between Hindu and Muslim, but lay in the competition for royal patronage between the Shaiva brahmana chief priest of the temple and the Jaina minister of the Caulukya king. The Islamic intervention in the temple in the form of building a small dome in one place dates to a later time when the temple itself was in a dilapidated condition. On the question of the collective memory of the Hindu trauma, this is mentioned for the first time not in any Indian text but in a debate in the House of Commons in 1843, when the British Parliament was debating Lord Ellenborough’s Proclamation of the Gates. References were made in the debate as to how traumatic the raid must have been for the Hindus. This idea, it would seem, was picked up by K.M. Munshi of the Indian National Congress who encouraged its becoming a political slogan in the mid-twentieth century, encapsulating the collective memory of the Hindu trauma. The story of course continues into our times with the tearing down of the Babri Masjid being justified as avenging the raid on Somanatha, albeit, a thousand years later. This illustrates a contemporary political use of an event from the past. For the historian there is also the other dimension in this construction, namely, the viability of the concept of a collective memory. If it is viable then how are such memories constructed over time? Memories are individually remembered and, as we all know, a memory can be imprecise and ambiguous. Collective memories have to be deliberately constructed by a group of people consciously referring back to a particular event and remembering it in a particular way. Such constructions have a specific time and place and initiators. Obviously in any raid there are clashes and violence as there must have been in this raid, but this experience did not qualify for it to be called a long-lasting, unabating Hindu trauma. Reformulating Religions With all this emphasis on religious extremisms and the political exploitation of religion, one has to ask another historical question. In what ways did the formulation of religions undergo change in order to accommodate the religion to modern-day politics, very different from the politics of earlier times? It would introduce a change in the end purpose of religion. The attempts to inject issues of faith and belief as legitimate components of history would naturally distort history. What is noticeable is the presence now of extremism in the larger space of all Indian religions. Historical changes affect the structure and functioning of religion and religious organizations. Disjuncture breaks continuities as with colonialism and that brought changes in the various religions. Thus Islam, now declared a minority religion, had to adjust to a changed status. This was less applicable among those Muslims of the middle and lower castes whose belief and ritual were already mixed, reflecting their location and those among whom they lived. Examples of these come from many parts of the subcontinent. Ancestry in a trading community as was the case with many, gave them a different take on their religious and social identity. Others claimed links with various Sufi sects that also traversed a range of relations of closeness to or distance from, orthodox Islam. Upper caste Muslims felt the change. Anxious to demonstrate power they chose the path of using religion as an agency of political negotiation, not disapproved of by the colonial power. The pattern echoes something of the past where the lower castes tended to merge but some of the elite differentiated themselves from both the lower castes and from other religions. If there is a greater acceptance of Hindutva as representing Hinduism among Hindus, there is also more Islamization among Muslims with a conscious statement of Muslim identity, and the same has happened among the Sikhs. Religious extremism comes to the fore in moments of conflict, but its residue remains, even if somewhat opaque at times. We have witnessed the demonstration of all the extremist forms of these religions in the politics of recent times. Is the rise of fundamentalism in more than one religion in India a reaction to the initial one as it is frequently explained, or is it a move towards the political ambition of all communities identifying themselves by religion? The political use of religion requires its reformulation so as to make it viable for political mobilization. Such reformulations, whether Hindutva or Islamization, make belief and practice more inflexible, and as such are a curb on the freedom and justice of the many. The fundamentalist form is best accommodated to dictatorships and what may euphemistically be called ‘controlled democracies’. The change is perhaps easier to recognize with references to the Hindu community. In earlier times the statement of identity was linked more to caste and sect—although the two were not always distinct—than to an over-arching religion. Hinduism, as it came to be called in the colonial period, had been used in the past for political mobilization but only in segments taking the form of sects, and then too for a limited and often localized social outreach. The single label that incorporated caste and sect gave it a wide-ranging universality that facilitated its use for mass mobilization. Where a historical founder is lacking, as in Hinduism, it becomes advantageous to argue for the historicity of the human incarnations of deity and to bring together the different sects as being the manifestation of one universal deity. There were many sects and many sacred texts, so a single one was sought —often the Bhagvad Gita—with its message of doing one’s caste duty as the fundamental ethic. The absence of a Church and ecclesiastical authority has been partially met by Councils of Dharmacharyas and heads of religious organizations. The structure of Christianity suggested a model. And indeed many centuries earlier there had been attempts to adopt the organizations of monastic orders similar to those of the Buddhists and Jainas to better propagate the religion. The two public agencies that could help inculcate meaningful social values that might result in a more caring society and politics are of course education and the media. The content of what it taught in schools and colleges, with rare exceptions, is generally abysmal. Yet it does not take much for there to be an intelligent interest in the school curriculum by educationists preferably in conversation with parents. This would be particularly important in issues pertaining to human rights and social justice. Many of these issues are relevant to the foundations and the self-perceptions of a nation and, as such, permeate all of life. The response to these ideas is related to how we educate the next generation. The present-day focus on community identities centred on religion has diverted attention from the fundamental notion of inequality that has governed our history, namely, that those societies regarded as beyond the pale, had a permanently low status and were treated as inferior beings, what we today refer to as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. They were excluded from caste thereby allowing them their own social codes. But the justification of the exclusion was by declaring them to be physically polluting or beyond the bounds of civilized society. This converted them into permanent servitors of caste society, living on its edges or in isolation. They have had to force their presence onto the Indian middle-class consciousness, either as the Dalits have done through demanding concessions in the educational system and government jobs, or as with the tribal people unable to withstand Naxalite pressures on their home ground. Caste society has only itself to blame for the current civil strife. A dilute democracy heavily flavoured with corruption, can do little and the bravado of claiming to shoot the revolutionaries backfires before even the first shot is fired. We often forget that the raising of questions or of evaluating the potential of unconventional views, is in itself, conducive to fresh thinking and to that extent, educative. We are supposed to be teaching ways of reasoning and not catechism. The objection to and putting down of alternative views usually comes from groups with fundamentalist religious commitments and political affiliations and aspirations, who use the occasion to demonstrate their muscle power. This has been on the increase in the last twenty years with the frequency in banning books, some of which are on university reading-lists. A recent example of this was the removal of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the many versions of the Ramayana story, from the History syllabus in Delhi University. The decision was taken by the Academic Council presided over by the Vice-Chancellor. This has precedents in the earlier attack on history via the NCERT textbooks by a BJP government and the more recent ‘editing’ of Social Studies/Politics textbooks by the UPA II government over the issue of political cartoons. It becomes all the more necessary to have an autonomous NCERT beyond the clutches of government that has the power to vet all textbooks used in various schools. At least the less qualified books can be commented upon even if they are not removed, so that parents know when their children are being taught from substandard textbooks and thereby being short-changed. The removal of Ramanujan’s essay is a reflection, however, on the academic professional and his/her bending or not, to the demands of those that administer and govern. Instances of encroachments on academic freedom are not new but in the years soon after independence they were less frequent. The politics of religion and caste raise the spectre of hurt sentiments which it is claimed can be allayed by banning books, defacing paintings and statues, censoring films, vandalizing libraries, abusing and harming in various ways those individuals that expose these claims or disagree with fundamentalist positions, and destroying whatever else one chooses to. The frequency, the violence and the abuse that goes with it has increased, and the root of the problem receives little attention. The space for liberal values has shrunk enormously and those who take even mildly independent positions tend to be harassed especially at the hands of state governments of every political party. Some of the latter try and maintain a façade of not being dictatorial, others openly bare their teeth. The media could play a more effective role as the platform for debate, a role it is reluctant to perform. Newspapers which once commented extensively on various activities are now more given to entertainment and commercial advertising. Admittedly this is what brings in the finances, but why should it require the dumbing down of intelligent commentary on the Indian world? The visual media, initially described by some as ‘the idiot box’, has perhaps risen above the description but is now obsessed with the one-byte pattern. Discussions more often than not are shouting matches where the more loud-voiced panelists and anchors reduce the rest to almost being spectators; the loud ones usually have little to say of substance. For those that have something to say, there is not enough time to develop an idea. Evening after evening the circus goes on and one waits for a weekly programme that may be more informative and might raise thought-provoking questions. The focus is on political personalities. Others who also exist are tucked away into non-prime time moments or the equivalent of half-a-byte. To assume that the audience has a low IQ and cannot concentrate on a subject for more than a few minutes which is basic to many programmes, is insulting but objections to this assumption are not voiced. When the ‘Maoist menace’ was at its height, various experts from the capital gave their views. It would have been more to the point to have had people from the tribal groups speaking about their problem of being caught between the state and its opponents. Or when there was an objection to allowing mining in the Niyamgiri area should there not have been a discussion between those actually objecting and those wishing to encroach? It would be salutary for the Indian middle class to know that there are many Indians who do not share their culture, and to understand why they do not; and that they are not just the left-overs from history but that they have their own viable cultures that they value, and that other Indians have to respect these cultures as they do their own. And that they cannot just be swept into the mainstream, they have to be persuaded to join in as equal members. Or there was the more recent absurdity of the Archaeological Survey of India, a professional body of archaeologists, digging for gold at the command of its authority, at a location determined by the dream of a godman. This was surely the occasion for some relevant discussion on the difference between legitimate archaeology and hunting for hidden treasure. TV channels could have dispensed with the incoherent shouting of disciples of the godman. Instead they could have picked up the interest in archaeology to explain how excavations are done and its relation to history and society, instead of the endless interviews with the disciple of the godman. Single bytes can add up to an indigestible meal, but perhaps not for the corporates who own the media. But the matter goes beyond education and media to the larger concerns of society. The construction of a social ethic is foundational and the discussion on such an ethic goes back many centuries. There was basic contention between the Brahmanical and the Buddhist definitions of a social ethic. Whereas the former projected it as a concern of the individual in the context of conforming to a structured caste society, the latter saw it as pertinent to the relationship between individuals and in their lives with each other, irrespective of sect or caste. The social ethic is an important aspect of governance as we know from the edicts of Ashoka Maurya to other statements of later times. In some instances religion and caste are accepted but are marginal because the ethic applies to all of humanity irrespective of these identities. In other cases there is specific concern for certain castes and sects that receive lavish grants of land, but little is said about the rest of society. Today we can try and choose the ethic that ensures the welfare of societ