Supposedly irrefutable evidence of division is said to lie in the Muslims over the last 1,000 years having victimised the Hindus, treating them as enslaved. Romila Thapar explains why historians question this theory
The following is the text of the C.D. Deshmukh Lecture delivered by Romila Thapar on January 14, 2023, at the India International Centre in New Delhi.
The highly respected historian of modern Europe, Eric Hobsbawm, commenting on the relationship of history to nationalism, given that histories become prolific when a society nurtures nationalism, writes that history is to nationalism what a poppy is to a heroin addict. I would add that the dependence has to be recognised and analysed. Origins generally rise in status when placed in the ancient past. They then have to be legitimised by assessing evidence and accuracy. What comes from the poppy and enters the mind of the heroin addict, conjures up fantasies about a magnificent past – or otherwise – and about which fantasy sustains the present. Those of you who are familiar with the counter-currents of actual history as opposed to imagined history, in the India of today, or indeed have smoked pot, might appreciate the parallel.
I shall speak this evening initially on the link between history and nationalism, and subsequently about why history has become entangled with legitimising a kind of nationalist history that is questioned by many historians.
Even long-lasting cultures like ours, have been punctuated by points of immense historical change. The punctuations have transformed our societies. These changes are not arbitrary. Nationalism itself is one of these seminal points of change. By definition, nationalism should carry the entire population of citizens in a nationalist movement that makes for a new society, together with its multiple requirements. Nationalism is a concept which, when it comes to be adopted, terminates the old social system and brings in an alternate society with values and structures that virtually revolutionise the existing society. Nationalist principles do not have roots in the ancient past, because the new society they give rise to, is a response to current requirements, and not to those that have long since passed away.
Nationalism assumes that it brings about the uniting of communities on a substantial scale and for the first time. Their loyalty is to a new structure, namely, the nation-state. The single unitary purpose is the construction of the nation, that is of citizens forging a single national identity, as for instance when the Indian national movement struggled to establish a state consisting of free citizens liberated from colonial control.
But nationalism can have variant forms, from a single unitary identity to divergent identities. In India, the divergence was of two new nationalisms identified by religion, the Muslim and the Hindu, growing out of the colonial construction of India. These distinctly different nationalisms have diverse intentions. The unitary drew in all the citizens and was anti-colonial whereas the multiform segregates specific identities, differentiating them from the other that is singular. Their agendas differed and were tied to creating two fresh nation-states.
What then was the kind of society that unitary nationalism was intending to build? At Independence, when the polity mutated from kingdoms and the colony of earlier time, into an independent nation-state, unitary nationalism was characterised by the necessary presence of democracy and secularism. Every person was to have equal status and equal rights as a citizen of the nation-state. Inevitably democracy and secularism become essential to the rights of the citizen. These rights had never existed before. Societies of the past rarely gave every person the right to being equal or having a free status. The caste rules of the Dharmashastras, for instance, underlined inequality and the absence of such freedom.
Where a nation-state comes into existence, the people cease to be subjects of a ruler or a kingdom, and become citizens of the state. Democracy is adopted as the model polity. This implies that governing the state is dependent on the wishes of the people who are represented in various state bodies. Power lies not with those that govern but with the agencies that represent the citizens – the judiciary, the legislature the executive. The rules of government are not the arbitrary wishes of the ruler but the actions based on constitutional authority. The rules and intentions of the functioning of the state are recorded in the constitution.
Nationalism when it is singular should unite the people, a unitary nationalism as with the anti-colonial Indian nationalism. Other categories of specific and segregated nationalisms are not intended to unify citizens but to segregate them according to identity. Segregation means that primary status is given to the group that counts as the majority. The agendas of these two are distinct and need to be understood. This is the point at which there is a turn to history. The legitimacy of identities and their history is claimed to date back to ancient times, and the older it is, the greater status it is supposed to have.
It is therefore with the emergence of segregated, diverse nationalisms that there develops a difference, or even in some cases a confrontation between the professional historians basing themselves on methodological correctness in researching history, and those who are not trained historians yet purvey a non-researched history. The intentions differ. The multiform group is more dependent on public support and reformulates history to uphold the requirements of the majority among the citizens. The others, not of that identity may have lesser rights as citizens. History becomes crucial to justify the primacy of the current majority and the form of nationalism.
In previous times the study and writing of history in various forms was left to scholars from whose midst came the professional historians. Slowly there was a shift in history towards the social sciences which demanded a training in reading sources, and in learning systems of analysis and methodology. History is now a specialised discipline in which the proven reliability of evidence is crucial. There is no catechism in historical study. So now there is the history written by the trained professional historian and other views of the past projected by the nationalism of the many segregated groups each vying for the primacy of its particular identity. The latter are questioned or rejected by the professional historians and are in turn said to be incorrect in what they present. Many who make pronouncements on history lack training but who nevertheless pronounce upon the past with full confidence, basing themselves either on hearsay or their own imagination.
History for them is just a story, a story that I narrate, or you narrate, or anybody else for that matter. Making up stories is great fun and very entertaining as we all know from having told bedtime stories to children. But when these stories are claimed as factual then they have to be proved. They cannot be part of entertainment – especially when they become central to the most influential of current storytellers: namely, the media of every kind.
Democracy, which is politically crucial and a significant aspect of nationalism is often used by non-historians as a slogan. But democracy is a recognised concept of modern times as is secularism and both are tied to the nation-state. The historical change brought by nationalism is legitimised by insisting on its components having an ancestry in antiquity.
Let me suggest a couple of examples. The 18th-century French revolution claimed some links to Greek democracy so as to legitimise the change from monarchy to the nation-state. Yet there was an absence in Athens of the concepts that moved the French. The free citizens constituted a bare fraction of that of the population of Athens. The overwhelming majority were slaves and aliens who had no representation in, or rights to, governance. Imbuing governance with an ideal of democracy was an imaginative way of using the remote past to claim legitimacy for a revolutionary change in 18th-century France. The revolution was seeking legitimacy for its call to ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, by maintaining that they had existed in ancient times. This is a familiar formulation in our times.
Indian sources mention the centrality of the gana-sanghas and gana-rajyas, especially with reference to oligarchies and chiefships around the time of the Buddha. Free citizens find little mention nor instituted methods of representation. The heads of Kshatriya families more frequently sat in the assemblies. The Shudras and the dasas despite being the majority, were excluded. The panchayats of medieval times, and the village assemblies such as that of Uttaramerur, had select membership. Caste society based on varna as described in the Dharmashastras was a contradiction of democracy. The concept of the gana-sangha seems more prominent in Buddhist texts than the Brahmanical.
Democracy, necessary to a nation-state, came to India later in modern times together with nationalism and secularism. The ideals of the French Revolution were beginning to be debated by a wider audience. They were picked up in America and tied into American political thought. As every historian knows democracy and representation were discussed with the coming of the nation-state, associated with the emergence of the middle class, with the new technologies and functions of industrialisation and the changes being introduced by capitalism. It entered colonial thinking when these ideas began to be debated in the colonies.
European social theories of the 19th century bestowed an inferior status on the colonised. The theory of race became prominent in part to justify the control of the European over many non-European populations. To legitimise this particular type of control, the argument of successful conquest was insufficient. The innate inferiority of the dark-skinned colonised people had to be firmly established. Hence the importance of what was called ‘race science’.
Any culture that defined its people as fairer skinned than the other was taken as superior. Thus, the Aryan speakers referring to the dasas as dark was read as skin colour and therefore racial inferiority. The application of race to caste classification further clinched the segregation of the lower castes and the Adivasis.
The controversy over the origins of Aryan speakers is both a serious controversy among scholars but also has a component of contestation between most professional historians and those with pretensions to appropriate knowledge. The former locate the Aryan speakers as migrating from Central Asia in slow stages, whereas the Hindutva theory insists on their homeland being within the boundaries of India. Hindutva holds that both the Hindu and Hinduism originated in India, so they have no choice but to argue for indigenous origins. But defining the boundaries of India as with land-marked boundaries anywhere, has to contend with the fact of boundaries changing every century.
The study of the Aryans associated with Vedic texts is a fascinating historical example of the diverse sources and disciplines now required for investigating such topics. In the 19th century knowing Vedic Sanskrit was sufficient. Slowly the additional disciplines came. Archaeology in the 20th century brought fresh questions on the interface of two diverse cultures – the Harappan and the Vedic. That there were interactions was proved through the new discipline of linguistics pointing to possible Dravidian language elements being present in the earliest Indo-Aryan. The nature of this interaction requires further analysis to clarify aspects of cultural history.
In recent years Aryanism has again become a contention between professional historians and others, but the latter with a few exceptions. That the Aryan speakers were indigenous to India has been questioned this time by geneticists whose DNA analyses of post-Harappan samples of the second millennium BC shows strains from Central Asian populations. Historians working on the Vedic period have now to be proficient in handling genetic data as well, whereas the non-historians writing on the topic can let their fantasies run….
https://thewire.in/history/what-history-really-tells-us-about-hindu-muslim-relations
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‘Baba’ – A Personal Tribute to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, by A. L. Basham
Kautilya’s observations on the causes of discontent in a polity
Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi’ – Gujarati translation launched in Ahmedabad
After the truth-shower 