History and the ethics of writing it

This article is in response to Idea of India, before and beyond, by Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit (The Indian Express, May 24, 2022), the Vice Chancellor of JNU. The piece in question is an edited excerpt from a speech delivered by Pandit on May 20 at a seminar organised by Delhi University’s political science department on the theme “Revisiting the Ideas of India from ‘Swaraj’ to ‘New India’”. Pandit begins: “Reducing India to a civic nation bound only by the Constitution (italics mine) disregards its history, ancient heritage, culture and civilisation”. Any modern society is governed by a constitution. So, the message is loud and clear – in its republican journey, India has outgrown its current Constitution. Indeed, no human document is final. The solution is to amend the existing Constitution or to have altogether a new Constitution that gives due consideration to its history, ancient heritage, culture, and civilisation? The modalities are not spelt out.

While Pandit’s attempt at understanding India on its own terms and not through the lens of the West is laudable, her search for an unadulterated Indian culture and civilisation in the distant past can hardly be missed. Leaving aside the ideas of the thinkers she refers to, here I wish to engage with conversation around “civilisation-state”, the discourse of history, and the role of theorists of society and politics.

As we know, the late historian Ravinder Kumar was the first to use the term “civilisation-state” to contrast the case of India to a modern nation-state that emerged in Europe based on the principle of “one country, one culture, one people”; it referred to syncretism and compositeness of the culture that flourished on the subcontinent.

Pandit’s understanding of India is at variance with Ravinder Kumar’s idea of India. She makes no mention of ‘Hindustan’, a political and spatial entity for around a thousand years before the arrival of the British. This Hindustan was inhabited by peoples of different faiths and ways of living. In a path-breaking study, Manan Ahmed Asif has demonstrated that the erasure of the idea of ‘Hindustan’ and the construction of the idea of ‘India’ were simultaneous processes that were effected through colonial historiography (The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, 2020).

Historians generally agree that the framing of the subcontinent’s history in terms of 5,000 years of unchanging Hindu society and of the medieval Muslim invaders and despots is a product of colonialism. The birth of Hindustan did not necessarily occur in confrontation with Bharatvarsha, rather it was a result of the exchange of ideas and collaboration between the people of Bharatvarsha and the newcomers over a period of time; it represented a synthesis of the worldviews and lifestyles of peoples who lived on the subcontinent. There is a lively debate on the etymology of the term ‘Hindu’ and the construction of ‘Hinduism’. In this debate, neither Hindu nor Hinduism are traced to the ancient past that informs Pandit’s narrative of India as a civilisation-state.

The idea of India that emerged in the course of the national movement and that formed the basis for our Constitution had as its concern ‘belonging on the subcontinent’ and not ‘searching for the origins of Indian culture and civilisation’ in the antiquity of the past. Suhas Palshikar has pointed out the denial of these two resources, namely, the national movement and the Constitution, in the narrative of post-2014 ‘New India’; these two resources, Palshikar argues, form the basis for democratic politics in India. I wish to add that the narrative of New India disregards the legacies of Sufism and Bhakti traditions on the subcontinent. And there is an erasure of Persianate India in this narrative.

Pandit says: “There is a challenge of distorted history”. She quotes E H Carr and bemoans that Carr’s dictum has been overturned in independent India: “Interpretations are sacred, facts can vary.” Carr might have meant exactly the opposite of the sense in which the quote has been presented here. He argued that any account of the past is largely written to the agenda and social context of the one writing it and advised the reader to “study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” Carr said: “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”

Writing in 1978, more than a decade after Carr, Hayden White argued that historical narratives do not emerge organically but are imagined and constructed by historians. This seems to be very much in line with Carr’s thinking. Writing in a somewhat different context, our own Shelley Walia observes: “Thus, discourse in history is never innocent; it is always related to interest and power. To have control over the discourse is to control history” (Humanities at the Crossroads, 2020).

So, the ruling dispensation in any society would naturally try to control the discourse of history. What does a historian do then – deny facts? Or does his/her role end with collecting and presenting facts? A creative and imaginative historian tends to question the permanent and fixed meaning attached to the interpretation of the past.

This also brings us to the issue of the ethics of history writing. Not for a moment am I for denial, non-acknowledgment, or suppression of facts; that will surely backfire. In what follows, I will try to elaborate on the point I am trying to make here with a few examples.

Pandit rightly mentions that Lord Gautama, the Buddha, was the first dissenter. What the piece doesn’t mention is the banishment of Buddhism from the land of its birth. After all, it is a fact that after around a millennium of vibrant spread on the subcontinent and in the neighboring regions, Buddhism almost disappeared from the land of its birth. This could not have happened without violence. Extreme communal violence and the brutalities of Partition are facts that have haunted independent India. As Walter Benjamin famously wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

The facts of history are important for social scientists. What, however, is more important is to envision and construct a future sans injustices, discrimination, and violence that might have soiled the facts of the past. How do we address the human dilemmas of the times we live in with mere facts? This calls for a transition from ‘empirical’ to ‘normative’. Ethical theorising is what is expected of the theorists of our society and politics.

(The writer is Adjunct Faculty, Flame University, Pune)