Historian's past
ABOUT a decade ago Ashis Nandy wrote of "History's Forgotten Doubles", in which he invoked the many ahistorical ways in which people labour to make sense of their pasts and futures. His argument was that historically oriented societies yearn for remembrance and certitude and can only imagine the past singularly, through the prism of secular progress. The contrast is societies where myths are an important way of reading the past. Nandy suggested that in such societies the possibilities of plural reconstructions and of principled forgetfulness, which provide more creative and ethical resources for living in the present and shaping the future, are inherent. This, in his opinion, required both a critique of the idea of History and a significant re-reading of the Indian pasts. Since each ahistorical culture is so in its own unique style.
More recently, Partha Chatterjee has written on the theme of `History and the Present' wherein he locates Nandy's `anti-modernist provocation' among a range of global critiques about history that have emerged since the 1970s. The plea once again is for an interrogation of the idea of History and also for a reflection on the professionalisation of history writing in India. It is through professionalisation that academic history has sought to legitimise its view of the past as the most authentic, and banish to the margins the many possible ways in which the narratives of the past are organised within and outside History.
Vinay Lal's The History of History responds both to Nandy's provocation and Chatterjee's plea for a history of History in India. Two sets of observations underwrite this book — the amazing centrality of historians and the historicist discourse in the dispute around Babri Masjid and the unusual respect accorded to the Subaltern Studies in universities of the West. Lal sets out to unpack both these developments through a long-range view of the development of the historical profession in India: from the colonial period to the cyber age and the production of (Hindutva) histories on the Net. The burden of his arguments is to outline the public life of the discipline and not the developments within the discipline itself. This gives the book its focus but also limits it in important ways. There are, in Lal's view, two major kinds of histories — the communalist (or Hindutva) and the secular/left — both of which fail to take myths, memories, popular culture, folk tales etc. into account and are arguably uncomfortable with the mythic structure of Indian civilisation. The critique, especially as regards the secular historians, is that though conversant with the canons of western philosophy, they have failed to develop an engagement with the interpretative traditions of epics and Puranas, the framework provided by Kautilya, the hermeneutics of devotional poetry or the philosophical exegesis of Nagarjuna.
This places the secular historian in the paradoxical situation of high public visibility but complete ineffectiveness in addressing the equally historicist, but politically disabling, history of the Hindutva kind. In contrast, Lal refers us to Ramchandra Gandhi's Sita's Kitchen, as an alternative approach to the past that provides a different moral landscape through which to navigate the minefield of the Ayodhya dispute, and presumably other such conflicts.
In what is a fairly schematic account, not only is the guilt of the scientific/secular historian too easily pronounced — although there are a number of historians whom Lal critiques whose work engages with myths, popular memories and non-archival sources — but also a rather limited invocation of an alternative framework. What is an insight in Nandy's essay is invoked as a formula in Lal's book-length study. No clues are offered as to how the mythic gets constituted and indeed how it can be interpreted. This is certainly a well-documented study, as the vast survey of the colonial and postcolonial literature on the subject and the plethora of footnotes to each chapter suggest. Nonetheless, it fails, both as an account of the career of history and as an alternative way of writing Indian pasts. It remains, ironically for a book of this ambition, a rather conventional historical account, with some insights, some fresh perspectives and a lot of recycling of familiar debates from Indian history.
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, Vinay Lal, OUP, 2003, p. xi+309, Rs. 650.
AWADHENDRA SHARAN
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