THE PAST AS PRESENT 4 IN DEFENCE OF HISTORY

     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.