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
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