ICHR move fraught with danger

The Indian Council of Historical Research’s (ICHR) decision to document the history of villages, cities and towns on the basis of oral and material evidences to ‘join the missing links’ in India’s history from its ancient past, needs to be welcomed with some reservations. Though we make a claim that the modern Indian civilisation goes back to at least 5,000 years, there are few historical evidences or proofs to establish a credible, authentic narrative. Our recorded history, in bits and pieces, for about 2,000 years is available in various literary or historical works across the country or the travelogues written by explorers like Ibn Battuta, Francois Bernier, Vasco da Gama, Faxian and Hsuan Tsang.

While they give a fairly good account of the rule of some of the kings and their kingdoms and the advances made by society in general, the gaps are extremely wide and there is little information available on the lives and achievements of the common people. Research in areas like archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics is not only inadequate, but they do not throw enough light on inter-regional linkages of different eras.

The ICHR, through its ambitious project involving an army of researchers in universities, wants to fill the gap in history between the period of Harappan civilisation and the arrival of Brahmi script. As people in villages and towns have transmitted their unbroken collective memory down the generations, the ICHR wants to document the oral and folklore traditions that give a glimpse into the past. ICHR Chairman Y Sudershan Rao says a committee of experts will be constituted for the compilation of what is termed as ‘Historical Encyclopaedia of Villages and Towns in India.’

Laudable as the objective is, there are reasons to harbour misgivings because of the ruling BJP’s unabashed previous attempts at ‘saffronisation’ of India’s culture and education. In the last NDA government, then human resources development minister Murli Manohar Joshi came under a lot of flak for trying to give a saffron hue to the history books. The present government too has courted controversies by its interference in university campuses and packing organisations like the Film and Television Institute of India and the film certification board with its cronies of hardly any stature. Last, but not the least, is the present ICHR chairman, Sudershan Rao’s known RSS leanings and ‘unscholarly’ observations in the past. He had called for using Ramayana and Mahabharata as valid sources of historical research and strongly defended the ‘merits’ of the caste system.