On Inventing The Past - Part I

I’ve been going through Amartya Sen’s book The Argumentative Indian in a leisurely fashion. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier posting, it isn’t exactly bed-time reading, at least, not unless you’re insomniac. But Mr Sen has gently cut through the layers of indolence and indifference that characterize the educated urban middle-class - that’s right, I mean you and me, and what this indifference is causing in the country. I felt some of the portions deserve wider exposure, and hence the breach of copyright here… hoping of course that the intentions justify the action.

Excerpt from the book The Argumentative Indian, by Amartya Sen.

History is an active field of intellectual engagement for the Hindutva movement, and parts of that movement have been very involved in the rewriting of history. Even though it is not surprising, given the nature of the Hindutva creed, that Indian history must play some part in the arguments presented by the movement, it is still worth enquiring precisely why these issues are taken to be so central, as a result of which Indian history has become such a battleground. What is its specific relevance in contemporary Indian politics, and why is Hindutva politics so keen on redescribing the past? I would argue that the answer lies in two specific features of contemporary Hindu politics.

The first is the need for the Hindutva movement to keep together its diverse components and to generate fresh loyalty from potential recruits. The Hindutva movement reaps considerable strategic benefit from the variety of styles and modes of operation that the diversity of organizations within the Parivar allows. As a modern political party in a multi-party functioning democracy, the BJP itself is committed to parliamentary rule, and does, by and large, listen to the views of others. But it can, at the same time, draw on support - sometimes violent support - from other members of the Hindutva family who can stray from the BJP’s cultivated urbanity and provide a harsher force. The ‘two nations’ theory, which - it must be emphasized - is not a part of the BJP doctrine, is championed quite crudely by several sections of the Parivar.

The solidarity of the diverse members of the Sangh Parivar is greatly helped by taking a united view of India’s history as essentially a ‘Hindu civilization’ (it is convenient for them that even a cultural theorist like Samuel Huntington has described India in exactly those terms, as was discussed earlier). The rewriting of Indian history in line with the message of Hindutva is extremely important for the cohesion of different elements in the Sangh Parivar. They can differ on political means and tactics - varying from soft-spoken advocacy to hard-headed violence - but still agree on a grand Hindu vision of India.

The second reason for focusing on India’s past is the large support for the Hindutva movement that comes from the Indian diaspora abroad, particularly in North America and Europe, for whom it is quite important to be able to retain their general Indian nationalist attachment while embracing any other loyalty they may be persuaded to have (such as Hindutva). The two can be harnessed together by a narrowly Hinduized view of Indian history, which fosters the congruence of Hindu identity with a more general Indian identity.

The rewriting of Indian history serves the dual purpose of playing a role in providing a common basis for the diverse membership of the Sangh Parivar, and of helping to get fresh recruits to Hindu political activism, especially from the diaspora. It has thus become a major priority in the politics of Hindutva in contemporary India. Following the electoral victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging ‘appropriate’ rewritings of Indian history. Even though this adventure of inventing a past is no longer ‘official’ (because of the defeat of the BJP-led coalition in the general elections in the spring of 2004), that highly charged episode is still worth recollecting both because of what it tells us about the abuse of temporal power and also because of the light it throws on the intellectual underpinnings of the Hindutva movement.

The rapidly reorganized National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The ‘reorganization’ of NCERT was accompanied by an ‘overhaul’ of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda being chosen for both, mainly in line with the priority of the Hindutva movement.

The speed of the attempted textbook revision had to be so fast that the newly reconstituted NCERT evidently had some difficulty in finding historians to do this task who would be both reasonably distinguished and adequately compliant. In the early school textbooks that emanated from the NCERT, there was not only the predictable sectarian bias in the direction of the politics of ‘Hindutva’, but also numerous factual mistakes of a fairly straightforward kind. School children were to be taught, in one of the textbooks, that Madagascar was ‘an island in the Arabian sea’ and that Lancashire had been ‘a fast-growing industrial town’. A newly devised history of India in the new textbooks prepared by the Government of India received sharp criticism in the media and in public discussions that followed. The reviews in the major newspapers were almost uniformly disparaging. ‘Bloomers galore in NCERT texts’, was the news headline in the Hindustan Times.

The BJP-led NCERT admitted some factual errors and promised to correct them (Madagascar, it was promised, would be returned to the Indian ocean). But there was no assurance on correcting the political slant imposed through selective omissions and chosen emphases to play up the Hindutva view of India. That, of course, belongs to the heart of the attempt to rewrite Indian history. The Hindu, a leading daily, put the gravity of the problem in perspective when it pointed to ‘the havoc that indifferent scholarship combined with a distorting ideology could cause in school education’.

Indeed, in addition to the plethora of innocuous confusions and silly mistakes, there were also serious omissions and lapses in the government-sponsored Indian history. For example, one of the textbooks that was meant to teach Indian school children about the events surrounding India’s independence failed to mention the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political fanatic who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) - an omission of very considerable moment. More generally, the accounts given in these textbooks of the fight for India’s independence were powerfully prejudiced in the direction of the politics of Hindutva.

Many Indians felt greatly alarmed at that time that the Hindutva movement would stop at nothing short of alienating India from its own past through their control over schools and textbooks. There was certainly a good case (based both on respect for history and on treasuring the inclusive character of Indian society) for taking the threat seriously, and the need to be alive to these issues remains strong today. There are many outstanding historians in India and they clearly have a protective role to play here; this is best done if the defence of history comes from a genuine commitment to history, not just from political opposition to the Hindutva view. As it happens, many well established and respected Indian historians did question, with reasoned justification, the accuracy and authenticity of the claims made by the Hindutva ideologues.