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The Age of Revision

When the present government made a series of appointments to the Indian Council for Historical Research, a horde of people was up in arms, claiming that by these instruments the Bharatiya Janata Party was attempting to colour history to its own liking. Pro-government columnists responded to this accusation with devastatingly detailed accounts of misconduct by erstwhile functionaries of the ICHR, of political interference in deciding what shall be taught in history classrooms, and of plagiarised PhD's under the ICHR's auspices.

Particularly telling were Arun Shourie's lengthy accounts of the West Bengal government's editing efforts to put a happy face on Mughal rule and Stalinist horrors. It is no stretch to imagine that the historians who occupied the high offices of the ICHR under appointments made by previous governments have systematically erased the truth about Indian history, replacing facts with their vote-bank theories of Mughal munificence and Hindu perversion. We need shed no tears for the departure of such worthies, we might only lament its belated arrival.

Clearly, past chroniclers of our past have been so busy rewriting it to their liking that by now a little balance might well be needed! But, jokes apart, what about the other side? Having been taken over by pseudo-secular benchwarmers in the past, is the ICHR now about to get a fresh coat of saffron paint in the name of revealing the truth? For us bystanders and for students in our classrooms who are the true victims of these political games, the distortion of learning does not appear to be at an end. A lack of credibility appears to be the only thread that runs through all the groups.

More recently, the fiasco over Union Minister Murli Manohar Joshi's attempts to infuse Indian cultural awareness into the education system has been under heavy fire. Some labelled it saffronisation by stealth, mostly revealing their prejudiced premise that Hindu education must be wrong by definition. Consistent with the rubbish that has gone on before, no one wonders why religious education in minority-run schools is not equally undesirable -- indeed, it is subsidised by the very government that wants to run Hindu schools to its liking now. Mostly, as we all know, none of this has anything to do with education policy or personal integrity from any of the participants.

We live the age of revision, where each little group that is able to muster a little clout in some sphere of our lives paints history a different colour. Nor is fact the only matter under scrutiny, emotion is equally so. The most visible examples were the renaming of two of our most prominent cities -- Bombay and Madras -- to conform to more nativist feelings. Alongside these high-profile actions came countless little ones, where neighbourhoods, streets, cities, and pretty much everything else with a handle got a little tweak. Even proposed new states had names that constantly shifted under them. And so we await the creation of Uttaranchal and Vananchal, pre-natally edited from Uttarkhand and Jharkhand.

The inevitable conflicts abound. After all, the whole point of rewriting history is to label the good guys and bad wolves with identifiable tags. In many cases, this could be done without hostility; this is especially true when it comes to undoing British stains, for the bad guys are thousands of miles away and barely clinging on to the glory of their days of laying waste to faraway lands. There is nothing to be lost by tarnishing what we see, rightly for the most part, as undesirable remnants of colonialism.

When the Bangalore neighbourhoods of Thomas Town, Cooke Town, and many others with obvious English thrusts were renamed in Kannada, for example, the only real concern anyone had was that the new names were totally out of the blue, unpronounceable even to some sections of the local population, and would make the already miserable bus service even less understandable. But not many cared that the "English" tags were being erased. Standing up for the vestiges of colonialism is political suicide, and for the laity it is much easier to not care what the new names are and simply go on using the old ones.

Whitewashing colonial visages, even in heavily Anglicised Bangalore, is not all that difficult, for a more poignant reason than indifference. As India emerges from the shackles of the past, a sense of our place in the world is bound to sweep us along. Hastings Town is the memory of a defeated society, while Hastinapur is the sign of immeasurable resilience it mustered in winning its freedom back. Who can argue with that?

But there is no political mileage to be gained from browbeating the British, since every politician is equally keen to do it. Pretty soon, we had exhausted the Cochins and Ootacamunds and began looking for other targets. In doing so we meandered on to the more gainful games, at least in political terms. When Ahmedabad and Aurangabad lined up in our sights, the games got ugly; anyone halfway familiar with Ayodhya could have predicted that.

What does all this bode for the future? Can we expect Indraprastha again, yet another rewriting of Harappan civilisation, and sundry other machinations competing to control our minds? I'm afraid so. The politics of brainwashing is alarmingly more rewarding to its charioteers than sensible efforts at nation-building, mostly because political parties in India are organised around divisive efforts far more than around progressive ones. Perhaps if the voters in Andhra Pradesh show the inclination to applaud some of Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu's initiatives, others might take a cue from that and opt for achievement-based electoral campaigns.

In the meantime, the theatrics continue. While being disgruntled with it, though, we need not be alarmed, for if the evidence of history is any suggestion, the shams perpetuated through political control are usually themselves rewritten in a few decades; indeed, even the rewriting becomes recorded history! Revising the past to suit the conventional wisdom of the present is as much a part of history as anything else, it appears.

Every society would rather tell its own story, and not have others take on that role. But even the most basic portrayals require the authority through which they may be imbibed in the masses. And once vested with that authority, every group will recite history to a familiar tune. After all, how many societies have a history that says "we were conquering rapists, and demolishers of other cultures. We went out into the world and sought to butcher every single person of another colour or faith so that the might of our own nation might be resplendent in all the world"? Zero.

And yet it must clearly be true that some societies did have such a blemished past. After all, butchery, rape, plunder, all these things are not modern inventions, history is as replete with these crimes as modern-day newspapers are. The cycles of civilisation produce a magic that is comforting, even if only by erasing the memory of our own failings. With each draft, the line between the overcome and the conquerors is blurred, until we merely write things down as we might wish them to have been.

The ICHR appointments and Joshi's education initiatives, whether we loathe them or love them, clearly fit this understanding. We might see the current round of revision as a rewriting of past ignominies that Indian civilisation has suffered, or as a political move to brainwash the majority of us to toe a particular religious agenda in public lives.

In either case, devoid of the authority to restrict the revisionism, we might best comfort ourselves with the observation that in time, all history is rewritten by the losers. For a while, at least.

Ashwin Mahesh