The perils of blanking out historical facts

IN Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster tells us that the statement ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The queen died and no one knew why, till it was discovered that she died of grief at the death of the king, is a plot with mystery in it. There is no link between the first two sentences unless we find out that it was grief at the king’s death that caused her own death. Otherwise, we might have concluded that the queen died because she mourned the death of a friend, a lover or a pet dog. What is important are the links between propositions in any field of academic endeavour. Otherwise, we are left with a series of propositions without anything to hold them together, meaningless ‘jibber-jabber’ as a judge says in TV series Boston Legal.

The job of education is to cultivate a spirit of enquiry into what these links may be in the mind of a student. It is this spirit that develops their cognitive faculties, that encourages their quest for the holy grail — for the links that connect a series of dots in history. It is precisely the development of critical thinking, of the need to ask ‘why’, of a never-ending search for coherence, and of recognition that we want to know more, that makes for intelligent and knowledgeable human beings. It is this very aspect of pedagogy that ‘rationalised’ NCERT textbooks sideline. These books do not want children to connect the dots. History in these textbooks will remain a series of meaningless statements. The assumption that schoolchildren rely on textbooks and not Wikipedia is, of course, hallucinatory.

Still, it is sad that the NCERT does not want to let future generations know why Mahatma Gandhi was killed. We know who killed him, Nathuram Godse, but we do not know for certain why he did it. Was Godse a pathological killer or a maniac on the move, students might wonder. Students will never be told, in schools at least, that Gandhi and Godse represented two faces of Indian nationalism, that of ahimsa and that of violence, that of commitment to a plural India and narrow nationalism, that of sacrifice and that of sacrificing others, and that of tolerance and intolerance. They will never be taught that when the frail body of Gandhi was brought down mercilessly, a giant tree fell and crushed the hope that post-Independence India will ever be free of bigotry. And this is called rationalisation!

This, of course, begs the question — what is the relationship between history-telling and events that it unfolds before our collective gaze? There is, of course, the simple matter of truth — history should depict the truth. The problem is that the historian as a storyteller often tells us just enough to fit the conqueror’s narrative; that is his depiction of things that happened. His approach to history is invariably from the perspective of the present, a presentist conception of history. For victors, the past is necessary because it legitimises the present. In the battle to win people’s hearts and minds, the past becomes a plaything in their hands. What then is the truth?

Let us return to Gandhi, who fought a lifelong battle to search for the truth. Even though he was convinced that truth was essential for non-violence because ignorance leads to violence, Gandhi accepted that human beings cannot ever know what the truth is. The truth espoused by Raja Harishchandra, who renounced every possession to pursue truth, was not the same as the truth of Husayn, who sacrificed his life at Karbala. These two truths are equally true but they may or may not be our truth. Beyond them stretches absolute truth which is total and all-embracing. But it is indescribable. We must, therefore, be content with believing what we know while we continue to struggle along with others for further knowledge of what truth is. Every truth is a partial manifestation of the absolute; therefore, we cannot dismiss others on grounds of incomplete knowledge. We are as incomplete as they are. We are equals insofar as we wend a careful way between our incomplete knowledge and moral judgment about what is right.

In the emotion-laden and irrational world of today when history has been turned upside down, when the present cannot be opened up to inspection and critique in the name of being ‘anti-national’, when religious events have become a cause for mind-numbing fear that people are going to be harmed and killed, it is important to teach our students the right way to live. It is to live with the recognition that all of us are incomplete without the other.

What Gandhi lived and died for is of importance, because he strove to inculcate this recognition in the people. That is why he is a man who transcends time and strides across space. Let us not do this to Gandhi who lived as he wanted others to live. He died as he lived, with the name of God on his lips. Given his philosophy, he may well have said as Christ had said on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Do not reduce his death to just one event in history.