A historic bias

Mumbai: There is one advantage that less educated people have over the highly educated. It is that they are more likely to have open minds. But there is always the danger that the open mind can actually be an empty mind. Human resource development minister Smriti Irani has requested us not to judge her by her meagre education but by her performance. We must agree to do that. But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s agenda is to rewrite Indian history and complete the project begun by the astrology believing physics professor from Allahabad University, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi.

Historical revisionism is the process of rewriting history to correct “misinterpretations” or for an ideological purpose. Plato wrote that: “those who tell stories also hold the power.” The corollary to this is that those who hold power inevitably want to re-interpret old stories.

British scholars, who seemed genuinely interested in how this country evolved, wrote most of modern India’s history. Indian rulers were generally more concerned with their own periods. Most did not leave historical records nor did they treasure them. Charles Allen in his book, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, writes about how the story of India’s greatest emperor and his dramatic life had to be “prised out from the crevices of the past.” Amazing isn’t it to realise that till about two centuries ago Ashoka, now so central to our understanding of our perception of ourselves, was lost to our consciousness? It was people like the ICS officer James Prinsep who deciphered Brahmi and re-introduced Ashoka to us.

As a young student in a Catholic school, in recently Independent India, the first history lessons imparted to me  was about the British. We were taught that the rule was a most benign and beneficial period for Indians. This could even be true for social reforms like the abolition of sati and the building of great canal systems and railways happened during this period. The unification of India into one great political entity also happened in this period. Above all, southern India came under Delhi’s imperial rule for the first time.

But in 1957, when the centennial celebrations of the First Indian War of Independence were held, I discovered that what my history textbook would have me believe was wrong.
This historical revisionism was legitimate as it set out to correct the narrative by looking at the same events
with a different perspective.

It is difficult to be entirely objective when writing history. But when history is rewritten without being subject to the rigours of academic and scientific discipline, it is nothing short of charlatanism.
In recent years, the Sangh Parivar historians have been seeking to revise history to suit some of their ideological peculiarities. Their intellectuals are collectively at work to debunk the Aryan invasion theories, which have been amply evidenced by linguists, archaeologists and, of late, by geneticists. Their theory is that Aryans migrated from India.

A 2009 study carried out by David Reich, a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups, found that all populations in India showed evidence of a genetic mixing of two ancestral groups — the Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are related to central Asians, middle easterners, Caucasians  and Europeans; and the Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent. The researchers, by measuring the lengths of the segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes, were able to obtain precise estimates of when this population mixture occurred. It started 4,200 years ago — the Indus Valley civilisation was waning then, and huge migrations were occurring across north India, which might have caused the inter-marrying.

Clearly, there were people here, but they were not Aryans. It runs counter to the long cherished Sangh Parivar notions of who we really are.
Whatever be the version of history that emerges, Murli Manohar Joshi’s or that of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and others, what will still remain is a history focused on the people of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
And that is my real grouse. Take, for instance, the two volumes of The History of India by Percival Spear and Romila Thapar. Of the 24 chapters 21 are about people who  either lived in or kept conquering the Indo-Gangetic plain.

South Indian history that is fairly distinct and certainly more glorious than the tales of defeat after defeat in northern India gets only three chapters. And mind you the Deccan region now accounts for almost 40 per cent of India’s population.

Little is told about regions like Orissa and Bengal while Assam hardly figures. Of course, as can be expected there is not very much written about the original and autochthonous pre-Aryan and pre-Dravidian people. Even today our indigenous people account for about 12 per cent of the population and are concentrated in specific regions.

If Spear and Thapar are reticent about acknowledging the role of other regions in shaping modern India, A.L. Basham and S.A.A. Rizvi in their two volume effort, The Wonder That Was India, have even less time and space for other regions and their contribution to the composite culture and the multi-dimensional character of the Indian nation. Rizvi’s volume covering the period 1200-1500 AD is so single-minded that it is entirely devoted to the Muslim rule over parts of India.

Quite clearly if Indian society has to be inclusive, all its various peoples must share a common perspective of the past. This is not so at present and hence, to my mind at least, the history textbooks need to be rewritten.
But the question is whether Ms Irani has an open mind to get it right and keep the ideological clap-trap out of it? I doubt it, and fear that the hoped for open mind will only be an empty mind.

The writer held senior positions in government and industry, and is a policy analyst studying economic and security issues