“The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.”
EH Carr, What Is History
The trouble with those behind the revision of the NCERT textbooks is that they care little about history. Their primary anxiety seems to be to cull out the facts embarrassing to the political establishment and gloss over them, if not amend, and if that does not do the job, simply delete them.
The current exercise of effacing history includes key areas of our past. The intent is clear as daylight. It seeks to dismantle historical facts upon which the very foundation of the idea of India as a syncretic civilization stands. The attempt is to hide the efforts of the tallest leader of the Indian Independence movement who consistently and successfully secured Hindu Muslim unity. The RSS being banned after the Gandhi assassination has also been a source of embarrassment for long.
Leaving Gaps In History
But what is even more alarming is the erasure of protest movements in achieving social goals. Let us take the example of the temple entry movement. Or for that matter the current and ongoing movement against caste discrimination being practised in Indian Christianity and Indian Islam. By eradicating it from the textbooks, will the history or contemporary events be obliterated from the collective psyche of the depressed classes of this country?
Or will this erasure itself form part of the collective memory of those classes? Will these classes thereby bear a grudge of denying them their own history? Nations cannot be built in this fashion. Nations are built on resolutions of conflicts, not by force but by reasoning, debates and accommodation. For this there has to be verifiable history and correct recording of contemporaneous facts.
You cannot whitewash history or contemporary facts by merely altering textbooks. Besides, these revisions leave absurd gaps. If Mughals did not exist as one infers from the NCERT textbooks, how will you explain to children as to who Maharana Pratap fought against with so much valour and courage. If you delete India’s first Education Minister Maulana Azad, how will you explain to the future generations of his powerful negation of the two-nation theory and what is at stake for Indian Muslims in the secular state.
The Historian’s Quest
For the historian, facts and evidence are necessary, not beliefs or empty rhetoric. To illustrate, there has been the legend of the port of Muzhiris in Kerala of having conducted trade with the Mediterranean and Europe between 300 BC to almost 1000 AD. Historians did not conclude this on the basis of rumours or centuries of oral say so. Historians wanted concrete proof. This, despite the writings of none other than Pliny the Elder (25-79 AD). It is only after the excavations at Pattanam, Kodungallur, that historians are cautiously veering round to the concept.
There are many who fail to realise that there is value in studying history and understanding it in its purest sense. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present”. If Nazi Germany studied its history right, it would not have attempted the disastrous invasion of Soviet Russia which resulted in losing every square inch of conquered eastern Europe and ultimately leading to its own destruction.
As the greatest modern historian Eric Hobsbawm in defence of history put it, “what historians investigate is real” and that there is a “distinction between establishable fact and fiction”. The sooner those behind the textbook revisions realise this, the better it is for India.
For a counterview, visit: Far from erasure, the truth about the Mughals must be told
Santosh Paul is Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India. He is the author of “Choosing Hammurabi: Debates on Judicial Appointments” (LexisNexis), “Appointing our Judges: Forging Independence and Accountability” (LexisNexis) and “The Maoist Movement in India: Perspectives and Counter Perspectives” (Routledge). Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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