I'm going to speak about history today and before I start moving into more intricate matters I want to make a few very elementary distinctions. The first, of course is that history is one of those words which is used to designate not simply what transpired in the past, or what happened in the past but the practice of writing and thinking about the past. So if one is engaged in history, needless to say one is engaged in the practice of writing and thinking about the past, about traditions of historical enquiry and so forth and the bulk of my comments today are going to be obviously about the practice of history, that is how do we think about history, what are its philosophical, epistemological suppositions and the reason why I've picked history or rather it was picked for me is I happen to teach in a history department I am notoriously probably the only person in the history department at my university or perhaps at any other university who has consistently made arguments against history that is, for anti-historicism. So in a way I'm speaking from within the profession and against the grain and consequently am engaging in a different kind of intellectual exercise.
Now the word history is a word that really acquires a particular resonance in the 18th century. But before we move to the 18th century, it's important to mention a rather brute fact that many educated elites in India find unpleasant which I think non the less ought to be registered as a fact which is that India is one civilization that never really bothered much with history. I'm sure you've heard different variations of this argument, that is that Indians didn't really have a historical sensitivity and frankly I quite agree with it but not for the reasons that this argument was first made in the early 19th century by British colonial writers such as James Mill who wrote a very large work called the History of British India. The argument that he advanced in that book was that Indians really lack the historical sensibility, now that's rather unfortunate so he states because he argues that the most eminent mark or sign of rationality of people is to have a historical sensibility. So if India lacks a historical sensibility then from his standpoint this suggests that India is in fact less evolved, they don't have rationality in that civilization, to lack rationality (if that ever is the case) is to be construed as childish etc.
I want to suggest to you that the argument that Indians lacked a historical sensibility or rather if I may put it in a more colloquial way that they didn't bother much with historical thinking, now this was in fact an attitude that was cultivated quite deliberately by Indians. Because clearly if your looking at whether Indians had analytical capacity, it seems to me that there's no question whatever, if you look at premodern India, ancient India you find a huge range of texts on mathematics, astronomy, literature, philosophy, theology and so on. All of which obviously require some degree of analytical thinking. So it seems to me that the argument that history has not been important to India is very important because it holds out the example for us of how we can disassociate ourselves from a dominant or what will subsequently become a dominant way of thinking for the entire world.
Which leads me to the second general proposition from which the rest of my talk will evolve, and that is that I think that at this particular juncture in time, I would say that history is now the dominant paradigm, that is to say that if you ask the question, is there a people that doesn't want to be without a history, I'm referring obliquely to a very famous book written by Eric Wolfe, "Europe and the people without history", my answer to that question would be no, there isn't a single people who wants to be without a sense of history. I mean, the most offensive thing that you can tell people who have not ordinarily been included within the orbit of history is to tell them that they don't in fact actually have a history. But keep in mind that there we are talking about the first sense of history that is something that obviously everybody has a past.
Now, among the Greeks, very early on, if you look at ancient Greece, if you go back to about the 8th century B.C., you have a major writer by the name of Herodotus, one of his works that has survived is a book called "the Histories", and if you go about three centuries after that you get to Thucydides who was writing at the time that Plato and Aristotle were also writing. And Thucydides's main argument is that the problem with Herodotus is that there is too much myth in his histories.
Now, note the argument because one of their distinctions that is really operative for all of us in the modern world is a distinction between history and myth. And what I am suggesting to you is that there was a point in time even in the west when in fact history and myth were not in fact actually divorced from each other and so there is a necessity that the west feels at this point already by the 5th century B.C., to disassociate, disaggregate history from myth. And then of course the question is what are the criteria by which you disaggregate history from myth, where the criteria are scientific or supposedly scientific such as, for example, the fact that Herodotus talks about dog headed men and Thucydides's rejoinder to that would be that there's no empirical evidence for that. So this is what I mean, that you could actually put up a whole set of criteria to distinguish history from myth.
Now this leaves unanswered the question as to why a certain people were comfortable with a discourse that did not have to disaggregate history and myth and whether in fact we could be comfortable at this juncture in time with having not to disaggregate the two in the way in which it seems to me we moderns want to do so now increasingly. What better way for historians to discredit something than to designate it as myth.
For all those of us who are from India or who follow matters in India you will know that there is a debate raging on at the present moment about history text books while in fact both the parties are actually in agreement with a great number of things. That's what is much more interesting than the supposed differences between the two parties. You'll find exactly the same thing incidentally in the debate that took place over the destruction of the Babri Masjid or rather in the period leading to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. What is striking is how far both the people who claim to be secularists and the people who were actually opposed to them, that is the Hindutvavadis in fact actually agreed that history would be the terrain on which this dispute would be resolved.
As an academic discipline history really only effectively gets established in
the late 18th century which is when in fact many of the academic disciplines
were about to come into shape in Europe and England. Geography, history, disciplines
like that are now beginning to acquire all the characteristics of a discipline
and some of those characteristics of a discipline obviously means having a professoriate,
having in fact a certain form of certification, having certain kinds of academic
journals which are in fact journals where one can proliferate certain ideas
about one's profession and so on, all the paraphernalia that goes into the making
of a modern discipline.
Now, in India in the early 19th century as I pointed out, James Mill already advanced an argument about the importance of historical thinking. It begins to have a profound impact on Indian nationalists. This is something that has been documented now by a whole range of Indian historians, some of the subaltern school, some outside the subaltern school. So for example if you look at Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a person who is most often talked about in this context, a novelist from Bengal who also wrote works of prose, some theological works as well, in the late 19th century in fact, he has this rather famous quotation where he says that if an Englishman is going out on a hunting party and during that party he happens to sneeze, he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, he blows his nose into it, he'll record this fact for posterity. Now we had great battles, we had great kings, we never even bothered to record their existence in posterity. So he's contrasting the minutiae of European history, how far even the minutest incidents get reported and the fact that we are in different to even the largest events that we can possibly think of. So he sets up this contrast and he makes the argument that in fact in order to be a proper nation-state, one has to have a historical sensibility. A proper nation-state I think is crucial to our enterprise here in every respect of the term because it seems to me that this is a part of the problem of the world that has been colonized namely that all of us in a sense are striving to be proper subjects of a proper nation-state. As we are going to find out, history of course is one demonstrable example of how in fact this actually come into operation. So one of the things that Bankim is going to ask for is in fact the creation of a certain kind of historical literature and Bankim himself actually contributed to that enterprise in numerous ways, one of them was to write what would really become a new genre in the Indian context, that is the historical novel. He wrote a whole series of historical novels which featured characters such as Aurangzeb and others.
Now this argument that if we don't have a historical sensibility, if we don't have a historical practice, we cannot be considered in fact a proper nation-state gets widely accepted within discourses of Indian nationalism. The only person I would argue who effectively signifies his dissent from that is Gandhi, effectively the only person who really dissents from this model. So Gandhi in fact is going to make a very strong argument for what you might call anti-historicism, but he also manifests a sheer indifference to what we might call the products of history, that is, the products of historical practice and the whole idea of historical practice. There is for example, just to give you one of many quotations, when he was once asked what he thought about the Mahabharat being a true historical record of what had transpired in India at a certain point in time, and he said that frankly he couldn't care less whether in fact the Mahabharat really actually features true historical events and so forth. What he was trying to suggest was that this is in fact people who are trying to demonstrate that the Mahabharat ought to be taken seriously as a historical narrative are in fact people who have been, colloquially speaking, colonized.
Now let me take a slightly different trajectory for the moment because we have to consider what has transpired in the last three decades in the discipline of history and this will touch upon a few of the remarks that were made here in very different contexts.
In the Euro-American world and the Anglo-American world, the most significant development within the discipline of history has been the accommodation that has been made to various kinds of ethnic and marginalized histories. I use the word 'accommodation' deliberately because that already suggests to us the severe limitations of that kind of approach. It's the kind of thing that Gustavo argued in his note (on Multiversity) that is, that there is a certain tolerance for diversity and minority histories this but this tolerance is always from a position of feeling elevated. It's not a hospitable way of thinking about the rest of the world. I want to suggest to you that this paradigm of ethnic studies and ethnic histories that has been set up in the United States and in Britain and to some degree in European countries as well in the last two or three decades reflects a rather impoverished conception of ecumenism and pluralism.
Now this accommodation takes shape in various ways. There are various kinds of theoretical movements, set of influences, post structuralism in some ways, post-colonial theory in other ways so to put it in a nutshell, what I am suggesting here is that there is an attempt to in a sense pluralize the dominant conception of history. And one of the problems with this is that if you think of, for example, a painting within a frame, what this argument suggests is that you may be able to rearrange what you put inside the frame, substitute one painting for another or take fragments of another painting, make a pastiche out of it but what ever you do you do not to do away with the frame. It still wants to operate within that particular framework that has already been set up. So in other words it seems to me that only so far will certain kinds of dissenting views pertaining to the practice of history be permitted within that dominant paradigm.
Now let me advert very briefly to two recent developments in history that are usually championed by people who see themselves as extremely progressive, extremely liberal. One is the development of world history and the other is inter-disciplinary history. I have critiqued both of these models. To critique world history in a way is to appear to be like the obdurate native who doesn't like development. One is seen as being churlish, being parochial and provincial. After all, instead of doing the history of Oklahoma or Nebraska only or Europe in the 18th century, we're doing world history, why should that be a problem for somebody coming from India like myself.
And I want to suggest to you that there are a number of severe problems with these recent advances in history. One of the problems is that world history seeks to increase commensurability between knowledges. And in fact I think one of the principle endeavours of Multiversity should be incommensurability. There are some kinds of conversations we don't want with some people. I think that that should also be part of the principle of Multiversity.
Now what world history really does is it sort of puts within its orbit those who have been formerly excluded. In a way it's a way of capturing their worlds and then we have to understand all the possible consequences and ramifications that emanate from that particular position. So what I am suggesting to you is that world history is a sort of well intentioned but in fact insidious way of colonialism, a way in which the practice of history now extends much further than what colonialism could do in real practice.
Interdisciplinarity also has certain kinds of problems. It is no accident that if you look at interdisciplinarity it is one of the few arenas where the extreme right and the extreme left in the American academe converge. Both agree on the need for interdisciplinarity, the extreme right does so because it argues that education should be holistic on the old model of the liberal arts education, we've got too much compartmentalization, we do not know enough about the rest of the world and so on. The extreme left does so precisely because identity politics has become so crucial to the American university. Not only the American university but in fact the Anglo American University and again to some degree in Europe as well. So it's a point of convergence, interdisciplinarity of course is also a way in which you can market the University better now than you could before.
In fact, one of the things one notices at all major research American Universities, the chancellors or presidents of these Universities shout themselves hoarse literally about the need for interdisciplinarity. The minute you do it of course, the gate keepers come crashing in, make sure you don't do it because then of course we'd have to look at what the practice of interdisciplinarity really includes. I have a definition that I sort of came up of interdisciplinarity, I call it, repeating the follies of more than one discipline in one's own work, you repeat the follies of all the disciplines that you work in when you start doing interdisciplinarity work because what in fact interdisciplinarity fails to do is to question the way in which all formal knowledge became segmented into certain disciplines and why is it that disciplines have these kinds of certain boundaries and so on. And I'm suggesting that these are things that we have to be extremely conscious about because we do have to bear in mind that if you look at India for example, it seems to me that the most successful group of Indian academics, particularly overseas, has been the subaltern group of Indian historians. I cannot think of a single group of Indian academics working in the humanities or the softer social sciences who have been more successful in that sense. And one of the reasons why the subaltern school has in fact gained a certain legitimacy in the west is precisely because they do not ultimately question what I would call the epistemological suppositions of history.
If you look at subaltern studies, what is very clear is that they basically work on the same model that the colonialists used to, you use a set of western theorists Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Levi-Strauss, all of these people but your raw material is still Indian, India is a factory that furnishes raw material. But they would never think of using for example, Gandhi's practice and theory of sexuality to interrogate Foucault's history of sexuality. They would never do that, they would use Foucault's history of sexuality to understand Gandhi's, they would never do the reverse. And it seems to me that that points to one of the kinds of limitations that I am suggesting you find incorporated within the present practice of history.
My last comment is that if you look at India at this present juncture in time, it is very clear that for the first time it seems to me the ascendancy of history is now widely accepted among a certain class, the middle class and educated elite, that is that history of all the disciplines have become ascendant in a certain way. This is a rather novel development in the case of India, a very striking development, particularly because until a hundred and fifty years ago you scarcely even had a work of history. The earliest work professional historians can come up with is the Rajatarangini which is a work from Kashmir already heavily influenced by the Sufi Islamic presence in Kashmir and then you have this big gulf in between again until you get to about the 18th to 19th centuries.
So, the ascendancy of history in India is rather new and I'm also trying to suggest to you that its extremely troublesome because if you look again at what happened in Ayodhya, it seems to me that the most interesting response we had was from Ramchandra Gandhi who is not a historian when he wrote his book "Sita's Kitchen", where in fact he has a very different reading of what the real problem is in Ayodhya. But if you look at what the historians had to say and you confine yourself to that, then one in fact ends up debating whose facts are really better. And I'm not for a moment suggesting that the Hindutva historian's argument was just as good. Within that paradigm it seems to me there's no question whatsoever that if you actually look at the kinds of texts that were used, the kinds of ways of interpretation that the people who were arguing against the theory that there was a temple there these secular historians in fact had much more solid argument than their antagonists within that paradigm. The question is, are they able to step outside that paradigm and what might be the limitations of that paradigm.
DISCUSSION:
NAGARAJAN: People all talk about unity in theory, historical unity. I have to reject it, from one sentence. All the consequences are contained in the definition that the product is related to the producer in a hostile inimical manner, the point is to change it, that is the whole thing of Marx. Any society can apply it. There is no such thing, so here the ancients were very much concerned about the problem of man. The problem is whether you have to reject the product or surrender to the product or conquer the product, once the whole problem is over, the problem is solved, there is no need for history at all.
So they were unconcerned about the history precisely because it was a social problem that they were concerned about. Here there are three positions, rejection (Shankara says reject the whole thing, you are free) Surrender (once you cling to something only then do you have freedom) Conquer (conquer it, then the whole problem is solved. This is the characteristic position of all our ancients.
So history is of no use to me. Gandhi was correct and the approaches, lack of understanding of history, lack of appreciation of history has nothing to do as you said, our people are not irrational they are highly rational, highly analytical. But as you suggested, we have to reject that historicism.
RAJIV: I think the question that our Puranas have been facing is that Neethi Ki sekdhi hogi, I can't translate Neethi in morality. That is a central question I think in all our Dharamshastra. Neethi ki sekdhi hogi. Not through itihaas, but through bhakti. And therefore, Mahabharat being a historical text and even Gandhiji accepted it as a history, its main ethos and purpose is to inspire Bhakti. And therefore it has been included in the Bhagvat Purana.
ASHIS: I think that the meaning of itihaas in pre-modern times was different. Now retrospectively, itihaas has come to mean history. In fact I want to come to that. I want to start with this question that in contemporary times the relevant question would be, is the historian moral because good history is by definition outside morality. History doesn't wait for anybody, neither the historian nor you nor me nor country or nation but a good historian can take a moral position. Before the emergence of history in this particular form you could still ask the question: is the history moral. I doubt whether that question can really be asked about history, whether the knowledge is moral. And that is because what we have not discussed which Vinay has hinted, that traditionally there were other modes of construing the past. It is not that people did not live with the past, but they constructed the past differently. And each of these modes, myths, legends, epics, Puranas, grandparents' stories, public memory, inherited rumours, each of these had a built-in component of morality. In fact it was sought to be made moral, by building in a principle of forgetting, which history cannot have by definition, no contemporary knowledge system can have. You can have a principle of remembrance and history, that's what oral history is all about. Of history you cannot ask what is the principle of forgetting, but you can only ask what is the principle of remembrance. But in alternative modes of constructing the past, you can always ask two questions, what is the principle of remembering and what is the principle of forgetting. What should be forgotten on grounds of morality.
CLAUDE: The discussions that take place in academic circles try to give people the impression that history is probably a slightly superior form of discourse and whatever work I had done in history, particularly in the history of science and technology was useful in that respect, that I was able to show that much of the history or what paraded as history was actually mythological, so I'm trying to attack the notion of history as myth itself. Myth, in the popular sense of the word. Because if we take the simple example of the histories of science and technology which are available, all of them, most of them are written by people from the west and you'll find very elaborate mythological descriptions of the stream of technology development in them.
I mean for example you get some very extra-ordinary histories of science and technology which do not mention very critical stages in the development of science and technology like for example the take over of the zero, the stirrup from china, gunpowder, many of these things they don't figure at all in these discussions. It's as though from the Greeks onward to present time, the west developed science and technology on its own without having to bother about anything because the germ of modern science was already there, concealed in the Greek seed and it somehow sort of unfolded and evolved itself. This is a very elaborate myth and it is why don't we apply to all as part of the Multiversity thing because we are also thinking in terms of doing europology and so on, this is a very interesting thing, to convert all western history into myth. And that gives us a very vast program because you not only have to look into this, you take a book about the history of ethics and you'll find that the book is only western discussions on ethics. It has nothing to do with what we consider to major ethical civilizations like China and India and all the ethical issues being raised in the Bhagvad Gita and so on. Nothing is there but they call it a history of ethics, which means that anybody who reads that book in any part of the world would think that here is all the ethics that you need to really discover and so on.
So how much of academic knowledge itself is myth, is something that Multiversity should seriously consider taking up because its available in printed form, nobody is concealing it anymore, you can go through it like a knife going through butter, you can at the same time use the exercise to disempower western knowledge, to bring it down a couple of pegs and ultimately sanctify myth in its own way. So I would like to think that we should do much of this reverse type of thing in the Multiversity.
RAJIV: One of the things that we try to do is to re-excavate their own historical memory. What is there which you must remember, which can probably enhance your self image? What is that which you should correct as an internal correction and in term of the corpus of knowledge of their surroundings, people must know their surroundings, their village, their community, their forefathers and so on. Because if you know then you will love. If you love, you will have some patriotism and in one place Gandhiji also says that history is necessary because it makes you patriotic.
So I'm not talking about nationalism, I'm talking about patriotism. But then there is no literature about Saurashtra. Some old history written by a part of some memoirs by some British historian a part of the larger Rajasthan history, etc. But nothing which was written by people of Saurashtra as what we today call history, but then. I know the Gujarati literature you know Jabis Chand Meghani this great poet and literary person of Saurashtra. He has written two sets of eight books, one set is called Saurashtrani Rasdhar, it is the stories of the valour and beauty of Saurashtra. He went from village to village and recorded all this oral history which has become the immortal literature of Saurashtra. Every child used to read, these days probably less but yes it was very popular.
The other set is Sorki Bhar Gutia. Bhar gutias are the outlaws who took arms against the oppressors, this that and the other. In the introduction he writes that I have collected these stories from our people because our young people think that all those great values, valour, bravery, sacrifice, all these belong only to the British people and we don't have anything because we have a very low idea of ourselves. Therefore I have collected all these stories of valour and sacrifice and bravery from amongst our people because only if our young people know this then maybe they will think that their motherland is worth respecting, patriotism. I would call this as some sort of important history, itihaas. Itihaas which teaches patriotism, itihaas which probably brings us out of the western hegemony of historical knowledge about our own land which has given us a low self image of a people.
MAKARAND: I was only going to say that both these interventions bring us to in a sense a question which was sort of lurking behind what Vinay was saying, and also what Ashis da, was saying which is, what are the uses and abuses of history, and obviously both these suggestions are therefore suggestions for counter histories because fundamentally you're putting history to a different use from the colonial or the western prospective.
But one of the questions that emerges is that if you look at, as you said, western histories when they say history of ethics, history of philosophy, history of science, they are all constructed very selectively, obviously. But it is precisely through such selectivity that the notion of the west as a continuous entity was constructed in the first place. So, how can we have it both ways? If we're really taking this enquiry seriously, what it really means is that there is no such thing, the west itself is a myth, then to be anti western would be to strengthen the myth of a west. That indeed we're in a Multiverse with different patterns of communication and exchange of ideas and cultural flows and what we therefore need is to show these patterns and thereby the notion of a continuous west which then exported itself, exploited others, I think, can be undermined. So, something like Janet Abullahgod's book about the thirteenth century world system and other such books which show that there was no such continuous entity, there were different kinds of flows. So that was one point. Rather than undoing something in such a manner that we're still doing it in a way, that was one point.
And the other point that you mentioned about myth and history is also to me very interesting because if western histories are myths, then are we also saying as an inversion that our myths are histories because the question then is that are we going to be content with just that, in other words, are we going to say as to take Vinay's point further, let's be anti-historical. So what do we do then, do we have myths and say lets re-mythologize ourselves. I don't think so.
So what I would simply say is that we need both. You need histories, we need the whole gamut of things. You can't just say they're doing this, let's turn it around, let's invert it. No, I think you need different sorts of histories. I mean, the historical imagination or the imaginary if you want to use that phrase, once its been incorporated, it can't just be banished and I think that what we need to really focus on are the uses of history, the abuses of history and the multiplicity of perspectives which include histories and myths and other ways of self definition, and ways of forgetting as ways of remembering.
CHIMNI: If you can expand on this understanding of anti historicism, and what kind of a resolution of a problem like Ayodhya could be offered because as an individual I am confronted with this problem that there are different ways of remembering the past and there are different ways of forgetting. How to you arbitrate between different ways of forgetting and different ways of remembering the past from an anti-historicist sort of model which you just expounded or which you suggested that Gandhi expounded.
VINAY: When you talk about resolution, needless to say I don't have a blue print. But the first thing is to think about the fact. So if you had to think about the historical fact that the Babri Masjid stood there for a very long period of time, so why is it that at this particular juncture in history, some group of people start finding a problem with this place and decide that they're going to characterise it in a certain way. Now this is where it seems to me that the argument about principal forgetfulness becomes important. I mean there are ways in which civilizations tacitly agree that there are some things that are not in a sense important enough to think about, or that it is better not to think about them.
SHILPA: I just want to add a comment regarding how Multiversity will approach history. Given all the conversations that I've just been listening to very carefully, I believe it should share a simple point: recognising and articulating that history, or the current project of history, is necessarily a kind of manipulation. This means looking at any project that tries to collect somebody's past, as a project of manipulation. I think this view gets you out of the 'good' manipulation or 'bad' manipulation argument. It's just a question of manipulation. Now, can we recognise the lenses by which we're manipulating? Whether the lenses are used to support a project of the nation-state or to support a feeling of patriotism? Really, that will involve children, youth and adults asking who is manipulating this time and why? At least, they should understand is that the starting point to any work on historical processes is manipulation. The lenses you are looking through are manipulated lenses.
VINAY: But I'm afraid that's not how people write. People don't make their assumptions clear at the outset, that's the whole enterprise of hermeneutics and interpretation, to figure out what the different ways of reading texts are. If assumptions were clear, there would be no task left for interpretation.
SHILPA: To say, "This is the assumption that we're working with," or "These are the assumptions we're working under," I think this is very much a part of any process of recalling anti-historicism. For example, if I'm going to collect stories, then I should say, "This is a collection of stories that I have chosen to suit my interests and beliefs. This is not the definitive works of all the people of, say Mewar, or Saurashtra." I think this approach would be very different to what's normally done in the name of history - which is to say, "This history is applicable for everyone." It is again tied to the project of building a nation-state, or building a market in some cases, or building a kind of cohesive group. But what the dominant form of history does in the process, of course, is to eliminate the other opportunities or spaces for recreating history, or contesting that version of history and viewing it from other angles.
So our approach in the Multiversity might be different. We might say that whoever is participating in any effort related to history will constantly engage with questioning others' existing assumptions, as well as putting their own assumptions out there for people. I think that is one way to make Multiversity work different from the project of history today, which tends to make us forget that what is in front of us is interpreted, biased, and manipulated.