There’s no single truth

Reassessing the leaders of the past and retelling history, as well as the ongoing debate on the revision of history text books for school students, have been in contentious and acrimonious public discourse in recent times. The babel of voices that follow reminds me that the collective noun for a group of historians is ‘argumentation’ and for good reason. At every pivotal point in historical inquiry, historians, or pretenders, have wrestled over the past, debunking each other, choosing different subjects for attention, and arguing about what actually transpired and how it is interpreted. Societies have always engaged in revisionist history—retelling sharply contrasting accounts of events, people, or ideas from what had been written about them before. The argument is that interpretive contests are inherent to historical understanding and that contrarian views about the reality, significance, and meaning of the past are part of a democratic society.

Fundamental to this process is the distinction between ‘the past’ and ‘history.’ The past is simply what happened at some point before now and can be reconstructed only by the evidence it leaves behind. The narratives and analyses that emerge are what we call history. Because each historian is an individual differentiated by gender, ethnicity, and community; nurture, education, and culture; and politics and ideology, they come to hold different views, have different purposes, and create different interpretations, often to serve their own ends. Second, as the world in which we live changes, historical narratives tend to align with the times to yield interpretations more compelling and relevant to those of the current generation. This reality provides the general context for revisionist history. Yet to fully understand revisionist history, we need to ask: How should we understand shifting interpretations of the past? It is important to distinguish historical inquiry from myth, eschewing the fables of the past, even if they are the great epics. The Ramayana and Mahabharata are literary masterpieces but not historical texts. This means that we must banish demi-gods as causal agents from human affairs. Revisionist history must be subjected to critical evaluation.

Doing so will doubtless create tension within historical studies between subject-limited revisionist history and the more universal breadth of history, but it will also serve as a bulwark against attempts at a historiographical shift—philosophic, religious, and cultural—that the ideologues of the rewriting of history seek. Though few changes in historical interpretations cause deep and enduring changes in understanding of the past, all new interpretations of historical facts must be critically examined for their impact on existing knowledge and convictions and what they do to social relations. Here, consideration of scale is essential. The reassessment of, say, whether Vedic math knew the Pythagorean principles before Pythagoras may not have a wide or deep impact. But reinterpretations of other subjects can carry much greater consequences because pseudo-history affects more significant issues and larger populations. For instance, the proposed across-the-board changes to history textbooks specifically address certain aspects of India’s past, causing a historiographic shift.

It does not require new evidence to shift historical understanding. The commonest source of revisionist thinking arises from shifts in perspective, and history can never be fire-walled from the present. Yet, many people do find it difficult to accept frequent changes to what they were taught to be true, whether it concerns our freedom struggle, the role our founding leaders played, or the legacy of a plural society ingrained in our psyche. It’s not surprising that they should ask: If the past cannot change, then how can the history about it change? They are not surprised to learn that at least some of what was taught as history is now taught in different ways. Many people dismiss such interpretations as nothing more than the result of ideology and politics.

To be sure, everyone agrees on historical facts, but what do they mean? They gain meaning from the interpretation that people give them, and not surprisingly, people disagree among themselves about their meaning, and disagreement over the past is inescapable because that is hard-wired into human nature. What about the argument that history can and should be objective in the sense of being an accurate and full account of what actually happened? It’s likely to surprise most people that, in today’s post-truth world, this perhaps cannot be. The reason, both existential and epistemological, arises from the impossibility of knowing all that happened in the past. Only some, never all, evidence of an event—reports of witnesses, physical remains, and films and sound recordings—remains behind, doesn’t deteriorate, isn’t purposely destroyed, or isn’t manipulated. What’s missing would tell us more, but it doesn’t exist to do so. We’re thus left to interpret what remains as best as we can by subjecting the evidence available to examination for authenticity, accuracy, and meaning.

Each new perspective on a subject will bring it closer, even if it can never reach a consensus, to what probably occurred and why. There is no single truth. The same event can be interpreted by multitudes in multiple ways. We should keep in mind that revisionist history is universal, and therefore, we must learn to live with disagreement and argumentation. A democratic culture must allow for different views and different truths to coexist and compete for the public mind. It ought, also, to be recognised as a contestation of ideas, some of them cast off in one political era yet always available for reuse in another. As the public, we must remember: In intellectual discourse, retelling history is a political enterprise. Hence, the interpretations that best meet political objectives are advanced, whether they are true or not. Notice how selective the political discourse is, with little or no discussion on matters that matter to the public. In the miasma of public discourse extant, we must remain aware of the risks of politics in intellectual pursuits if we are to preserve the integrity of knowledge. So, consider history being reinterpreted with circumspection. Our common history and cultural heritage cannot be changed.

(The writer is director, School of Social Sciences, MS Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences)