'Chhaava', illegal immigrants and bad histories

The recent landings in India of US military aircraft carrying ‘illegal immigrants’, and the theatrical release of Laxman Utekar’s Chhaava are two events which cannot be more different from each other.

Utekar’s film forcefully and selectively uncovers a fragment of history, with a view to giving a message that might find resonance with wide sections of present-day audiences. The messaging is clear — a clash of civilisations. On the flip side, the humiliating treatment meted out to Indian deportees, who were shackled and pushed out of the United States, like convicts, reminds us of the turbulent histories of European settler colonialism in the Americas, spanning over centuries. Embedded in these histories are experiences of intense and prolonged violence, forceful occupation of large swathes of land, destruction of communities and cultures, and systematic annihilation of Native American populations.

The two phenomenally different events under consideration, the release of a Bollywood film and brazen muscle-flexing by a superpower, are linked by an implicit connecting thread — the past’s often complex, yet unavoidable, relationship with the present.

Here are three critical pitfalls that are central to producing ‘bad histories’.

The first of these pitfalls is a reliance on myths as a window to the past — an assumption that they present a faithful picture of past realities. Indeed, myths can and do give us certain useful clues to understand the past societies and cultures where they were formulated and circulated. Additionally, they also provide insights into people’s beliefs, rituals, and practices in contemporary contexts, wherein they still hold sway and continue to remain important. But they, by no means, offer an accurate glimpse into life, as it was in the past.

The second pitfall deals with stereotypes and stereotypical representations of the past. History has no room for stereotypes and sweeping generalisations. The narratives it presents emerge out of a conversation with and between different sources — archaeological, archival, experiential, empirical, and more.

Any history which assumes that identities are fixed in perpetuity, and that people of an ethnical, religious, caste or other socio-cultural group carry certain designated traits that are organically transferred over centuries and generations is bad history. Attributing fixity to unstable and dynamic identities, and treating them as frozen or changeless, constitute major historical follies. Further, supposing or expecting a seamless continuity between the past and the present is also a mistake.

The third pitfall is that the past and the present have a vexed relationship. The two are intricately linked, with the latter emanating from the former. Yet their immediate contexts are widely different, as also the underpinning structures, frameworks and values that have sustained them. We cannot study the present in isolation from the past.

At the same time, we cannot judge the two by a single measure. This does not mean that we refrain from asking tough questions, or studying restive periods, tumultuous events, and despotic leaders/rulers. To turn away from or silence the histories of past conflicts, violence, and wars is wrong; but to foreground and deploy them selectively to corner, intimidate, and persecute others in the present can pose a far greater threat.

We cannot understand the current regimes, structures, and semantics of power, or the struggles and resistances against them without examining the past. India’s fraught modernity, Africa’s poverty, and the heavy militarisation of the US have to be understood, for instance, in relation to their respective colonial encounters, and the differing trajectories that these encounters followed in the three cases.

In a postcolonial context, we can justly use history to lay bare the destructive nature of colonialism and expose varying forms of colonial oppression, but to employ it to foment hatred and hostility against the former colonists in contemporary times would be unfair and uncalled for.

We cannot go around settling scores in the present for what was done in the past. We must be aware of our complex, multi-layered, and often extremely violent pasts to better understand current-day structures, systems, conditions, and identities.

Still, such awareness does not imply that we use these pasts, however disturbing they might be, to breed hate and violence today. Any history that gives us license to do so should be explicitly identified as bad history.

Finally, we need to ask when, why, and how are particular histories produced and disseminated? What are the implications of production and circulation of different kinds of historical knowledges for their immediate contexts? These are questions, deeply entwined in the exercise of power and who controls it at a given moment; for after all, historical narratives too are signifiers of the power that is wielded, that certain groups, identities, races, religions, cultures, and politico-ideological formations command over the others.

We need to remember that our goal, while producing and consuming history, should be to learn about varied pasts. It should not be to hold or win competitions, affirming the superiority and righteousness of some over the others.

Anshu Saluja is assistant professor of history, Azim Premji University, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. The views expressed are personal.

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