It may seem odd that a budget session of Parliament should concern itself with matters as distant as history. What’s done is done and there’s no fiscal gain in excavations of the past. Yet, so long as India is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which used history as a catapult to power, with an agitation for a temple to replace a mosque in Ayodhya as its focus, medieval times will likely stay in political contention. Under opposition scrutiny is the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), our official fount of findings on the subject. “No, Sir. The ICHR, Delhi, has not launched any project to rewrite history,” averred Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the House this week. It was a written reply to a question raised by K. Subbarayan of the Communist Party of India. Unsatisfied, Manish Tewari of the Congress sought to highlight a “contradiction” with ICHR’s own statements and distinguish between an update and a revision of the national narrative. “In this method,” said Tewari of an agenda-driven approach, “anybody who has tried to rewrite history, from Bismarck onwards till Zia-ul-Haq, has failed.”
In his insistence that the ICHR’s remit was only to fill in gaps, Pradhan described India as having “passed through subjugation in different periods during the last 1,100-1,200 years” and argued that kingdoms notable for contributions to the country’s “culture, civilization and identity” had to be included in studies. As any student of the BJP’s social ideology can attest, this encodes a part of the Hindutva project to firmly place a majoritarian lens on India’s past, as taught and passed along to posterity. Only details of the Centre’s undertaking will reveal if this is more than a re-balance of coverage away from Mughal to Hindu rulers, which could yet pass factual muster, or something inclined to cast a millennium of Muslim presence (and rule) in the subcontinent as a story of conflict, with syncretic evidence overlooked for synthetic tools of majority mobilization. Two factors fan suspicions of the latter. The first is a particular focus on a specific phase, even though India’s scarcity of written records that can be cross-checked is much worse for prior periods. The second is a political incentive for the BJP, given its electoral returns from campaigns evoking India’s majority faith in a context of ‘the other’. In the Ayodhya case, while the Supreme Court awarded the site for a temple, it was on the basis of a “preponderance of probabilities” that weighed in favour of longer Hindu occupation over the centuries, overall. It found no proof of a temple under the 1992-demolished Babri mosque’s ruins, but historical reality had ceased to matter in the dynamics of this dispute. The 2019 judicial ruling was hailed as prudent for its peace potential, but the precedent it set places an onus now on academia to ensure that quests for truth do not get squashed by pathologies of politics as we move on. Even if a blurry relativist view of times past may aid reconciliation in a few instances, what students study must qualify as true knowledge. Epistemologically okay, i.e.
As it is, our self-obsessed history often falls short of Ivy League expectations of awareness, with the creative buzz of Europe’s exposure to diverse minds by medieval-era globalization, for example, given short-shrift even by liberal Indian lessons. For India to assume the role of a global guide or guru, we mustn’t let our grasp of history go off on an ideological tangent. Or get weaponized for votes. The ICHR must duly exercise its academic autonomy.
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