‘Speaking of History’ by Romila Thapar and Namit Arora: How history is written, and gets distorted

It is indeed a paradox that Indians are obsessed with history and historical questions and yet completely oblivious to how that history is written. In other words, there is a complete lack of awareness about something called historical method. As a result, there is often no attempt to distinguish history based on procedures of enquiry from history based on hearsay, prejudice, sheer will power and political motives.

An awareness of historical method should enable us to choose valid and genuine history from its fake versions. This crucial concern is at the centre of ‘Speaking of History’. It consists of a series of conversations between Romila Thapar, one of our most distinguished historians, and Namit Arora, originally a technocrat settled in America, who has for the last three decades trained himself into becoming an accomplished scholar of Indian history.

Over the last six decades, Romila Thapar has contributed to the writing of Indian history in innumerable ways. She has played a leading role in liberating Indian history from Euro-centric blinkers and facilitated an understanding of Indian history on its own terms, without, of course, regressing into any Indian exceptionalism. She has also put on the ledger the contemporary relevance of the pre-modern period of Indian history.

History is not simply an awareness of the past, or a dialogue between two historians. It is deeply connected with our present.

The many layers of our past live with us in multiple ways and how we understand that past also shapes the way we live in the present. That being the case, it is very important that correct and valid history reaches the students and citizens at large. Societies which look at their past with shame, guilt, anger or excessive jingoistic pride only end up damaging their present.

The history that is written by professional historians is one based on reliable sources, which have to be analysed and interpreted with the help of a rigorous historical method. Professional historians do not treat their conclusion as fixed and final, but rather as tentative and provisional. These conclusions can be revised by the discovery of new sources, perspectives and approaches. This field of professional history-writing has of late been countered and challenged by fictional accounts of the past, based on prejudices and political motives.

History is also being used as a legitimising device to support the identity politics and identitarian claims of the present. Past cannot change, but the way it is looked at can always change. If it is (mis)used as an instrument to promote identity politics, it will only damage the society in the long run. This indeed is a worrying trend and has been discussed at length by both Thapar and Arora.

This misuse of history is, however, not new and its roots go back to the ways in which the British understood Indian society and wrote its history. The British looked at religion as the primary unit of division in the Indian society and saw it as fundamentally divided between Hindus and Muslims. They also classified different phases of Indian history on the basis of the religion of the rulers. Thus, the ancient period was portrayed as Hindu and the medieval period as Muslim.

They also looked at Muslims and Hindus as two different and mutually antagonistic nations. The British completely overlooked the field of cultural and literary history in which many examples of dialogue, mutual borrowing and syncretism could be found.

The Indian historians responded by criticising this approach of reducing a historical period only to the religion of the rulers and not looking at the multiple dialogues and social relationships among the people. They produced histories not just of conquests but of the social, cultural and literary developments during the ancient and medieval periods of Indian history. In other words, the Indian historians did much to rescue Indian history from the British colonial blinkers.

Quite unfortunately, the blinkered and motivated colonial history is being revived by the proponents of political Hinduism, now in control of important academic institutions in the country. Strangely, the interests of British colonial rulers and of the stakeholders of identity politics today have converged. As a result, the discredited and obsolete projection of Indian history, which had been relegated to the dustbins by Indian historians, is now being resurrected.

Both the colonial rulers of the past and communalists of today have a vested interest in portraying Muslims and Hindus as antagonistic communities, at loggerheads with each other since medieval times.

The book recognises that the same mindset and perspective is at work in erasing, or minimising, the medieval period of Indian history from school textbooks in particular and Indian history in general. Once erased from school textbooks, it will also gradually get erased from social memory of the past. As against this, Romila Thapar has emphasised that both the ancient and medieval periods have to be understood for migrations of people, trade and manufacturing, state of agricultural production, growth of towns, art and architecture, languages and literature, and Bhakti and Sufi movements with their ideologies of egalitarianism and harmony.

In other words, there is so much more to the history of a period than the religion of the rulers and the imaginary fights between Hindus and Muslims.

The conversations of the book thus have a double focus. First, they warn us against the widespread tendency to distort history to create a largely false narrative about India’s past, and the great harm such distortions will do to India’s present and future. Second, the conversations identify the thematic matrix for a proper understanding of Indian history, such as the cultural dialogues, gender relations, religious practices, knowledge systems, trade and manufacturing, etc.

The purpose of history writing should be to enlighten us about the past in a holistic manner, not to place it at the service of negative, divisive and fissiparous politics.

— The reviewer is a visiting faculty at BML Munjal University, Manesar