Why is Sangh Parivar engaged in rewriting history?

BJP supporters might have a point in questioning the validity of erstwhile mainstream historical narrative but are firing their bullets at the wrong target

If one watches India's prime-time debates on the television channels or the internet, or even if one only reads news articles posted online and elsewhere, one is quite frequently confronted with the word 'narrative'.

Those who oppose the incumbent powers firmly believe they are indulging in a massive rewriting of history, obscuring facts not palatable to them and highlighting figures and events conducive to their agenda.

On the contrary, those in support of the ruling dispensation claim that their emphasis is only on "correcting" historical wrongs, which involves highlighting facts hitherto un-published, and demeaning facts which they see as instances of "historical injustice".

To an objective observer, the best route to understand who is in the more rationally or perhaps ethically justified position is to understand how history is written.

Ideally, history is written by academicians and scholars, who go through a rigorous process of peer review of their theories and accounts before they get published. How clean and transparent this review process is determining how factual any historical narrative is. In other words, the scientific method of observation, experiment and cataloguing is what dictates the global narratives of history. This hasn't been the case throughout most of history. Before the scientific revolution, history was taught more through anecdotes, i.e. personal reflection on the part of the individual scholar, and stories, i.e. fictionalised accounts of historical memories and narratives, were the order of the day when it came to the accounts of history. That is precisely the reason why the Mahabharata has references to events and entities that are considered 'impossible' by today's scientific standards. In other words, the distinction between story and history is not as old as a naïve observer may assume.

Returning to the present, the attempt to revise history must be seen in the light of how the scientific method of chronological record-making proceeds. For this, a brief exposition of the scientific method itself is necessary.

The scientific method, developed not by scientists so much as by philosophers like Karl Popper, Quine, etc., is based on experimental observation and validation. In other words, what cannot be validated through observation is not considered science. Measurement or observation is key to the process here. That which cannot be substantiated through references, citations, and archaeological proofs is not considered history today.

The historical accounts of figures like Lord Ram, Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Arjun, Bhim or other characters in some of the great Indian epics have not been conceived on these lines. Why is this so? Did the historians of yesteryears have some insight into observation and measurement that today's 'scientific-minded' historians lack? Or was society intellectually very backward in that era - even during the days of Nalanda and Taxila, that they couldn't distinguish between fact and fiction?

A key to solving this mystery is in understanding the word measurement - a euphemism for observation in textbooks of modern science, especially those of theoretical physics pertaining to the quantum or sub-atomic realm of matter. In modern science, according to the most popular and accepted Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, introduced to the world by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, pioneers of quantum physics, measurement is not an act separate from the one who is observing. In other words, although not many people seem to be aware of this, an act of observation is dependent on the person observing. There are no facts independent of the person checking them, just as there is no person independent of the environment he is surrounded with.

This does not mean that we can alter things by looking at them. It means that any scientific knowledge or any perception for that matter shows us not what things are but only shows us how we see things. In simpler words, any theory or piece of knowledge we acquire tells us more about ourselves and our own manners of perception rather than the thing perceived by us. In most crude language, anything we see, hear, taste, smell, feel, touch, or perceive in any possible manner, does not show us reality, but rather it shows us our brains perceiving reality.

Bringing us back to History and the battle of narratives being fought out on our television sets, computer screens and smartphones, what is the measurement or observation of a historical fact? Are the individual historians observing or researching a fact and modifying it while checking it? Are the institutions of historical scholarship and academia co-creating facts when they peer-review each other's research and publish only what is personally acceptable to their club, so to speak?

It could indeed be that historians are subconsciously or perhaps consciously changing history while observing it and that the 'clubs' of academic scholarship are being run by those who wish to dictate historical narratives based on their own self-defined notions of academic superiority and scholarship, which would even dictate what counts as 'proof'.

BJP loyalists, pejoratively called 'Bhakts' and 'Andh-Bhakts' by their opponents, might actually have a point when they question the validity of the erstwhile mainstream historical narrative or account. It is just that they're firing their bullets at the wrong target. Instead of focusing on "rewriting" while peddling it as "rediscovering" history, it would be more suitable for them to question the validity of historical narratives as being objective per se, with an as unbiased and non-political approach as possible.

In other words, we are indeed living in a 'post-truth' world, as those who keep shouting the words 'false narrative' to counter another person's point of view might have realised. But the point of realising that truth or at least knowledge is subjective is not to challenge the other person's subjectivity with one's own subjectivity, whether one supports the left, right or centre. It is to realise that we all live in our own subjective perceptual fields, which should ideally make us respect our opponent's point of view more and try to listen and learn from it. The truth will only emerge from a discussion between those who oppose and respect each other. It will not emerge from realising on the one hand that knowledge is relative and subjective and then immediately imposing this subjectivity upon another who we also acknowledge as being equally subjective.

Democracy is based on disagreement and reconciliation, not in self-imposed intellectual contradiction and forced imposition of this ailment upon others. If that were so, then we would all be mentally ill, and the whole world would be a 19th-century lunatic asylum, with no one fully communicating with anyone else, except that, in this case, even the healers and nurses would be patients with us, which is not a fantasy many of us would like to indulge in.

(The author is a research scholar)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.