THE PAST AS PRESENT 3. OF HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES

           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,