Table Of ContentEMINENT HISTORIANS
Their technology, their line, their fraud
ARUN SHOURIE
HarperCollins Publishers India
For
Anita
Everything
Contents
Introduction
The Historians
1. A characteristic concoction
2. Eminent entrepreneurs!
3. How to do it!
4. A fitting tribute
5. When cornered, cry ‘Petty’,
‘Personal’, ‘Uncivilized’
6. ‘…after selling himself in the flesh market’
Their Line
7. A circular
8. Devices to further the circular
9. ‘Let us look forward to the positive aspects’
10. Insinuate falsehood, explain away the truth
11. Were all these authors also communalists?
12. The policy of ‘broad toleration’!
13. The litmus test
14. Erasure to parity to absolution
15. ‘Maybe perhaps, probably mostly… Therefore’
16. Gavah chust, muddayi sust!
Context and Consequences
17. The tug of intellectual fashions
18. The appeal of ‘The Theory’, and
the antidote to it
19. Programmed to self-destruct
20. The pattern of consequences
21. The changing balance
22. The insidious, the false
23. A few reasons, a few lessons
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Arun Shourie with HarperCollins India
Copyright
Introduction
In June–July 1998, progressives kicked up quite a racket. The government
has packed the Indian Council of Historical Research with pro–Ram Mandir
historians, they shouted. It has surreptitiously altered the aims and
objectives of the Council, they shouted.
As is their wont, they had sparked the commotion by giving wind to a
concoction.
As is their wont too, they were charging others with planning to do in
some undefined future what they had themselves been actually doing for
decades – that is, write history to a purpose.
The commotion led me to look into their record – to look at what they
had made of an institution like the Indian Council of Historical Research,
and to read the textbooks they had authored.
Small scandals turned up too. So accustomed have we become to crores
being raked off that the amounts mentioned in this narrative will seem less
than the pilfering of pickpockets. That is so in part because our standards
have become so lax. And in part because the real crime of these eminences
does not lie in the loss they have inflicted in terms of money. It lies in the
condition to which they have reduced institutions. It lies in their dereliction
– because of which projects that were important for our country have
languished. It lies even more in the use to which they have put those
institutions.
They have used them to have a comfortable time, of course. They have
used them to puff up each other’s reputations, of course. But the worst of it
is that they have used their control of these institutions to pervert public
discourse, and thereby derail public policy.
They have made India out to have been an empty land, filled by
successive invaders. They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even
more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate
specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a
construct of the British; no such than as Hinduism, just a word used by
Arabs to describe the assortment they encountered, just an invention of the
communalists to impose a uniformity – that has been their stance. For this
they have blackened the Hindu period of our history, and, as we shall see,
strained to whitewash the Islamic period. They have denounced ancient
India’s social system as the epitomy of oppression, and made totalitarian
ideologies out to be egalitarian and just.
They have belittled our ancient culture and exaggerated syncretistic
elements which survived and made them out to have been an entire
‘culture’, the ‘composite culture’ as they call it. Which culture isn’t? And
all the while they have taken care to hide the central facts about these
common elements in the life of our people: that they had survived in spite
of the most strenuous efforts spread over a thousand years of Islamic rulers
and the ulema to erase them, that they had survived in spite of the sustained
efforts during the last one hundred and fifty years of the missionaries and
British rulers to make us forget and shed these elements, that the elements
had survived their efforts to instead inflame each section to see its ‘identity’
and essence in factors which, if internalized, would set it apart. Most of all,
these intellectuals and the like have completely diverted public view from
the activities in our own day of organizations like the Tabhligi jamaat and
the Church which are exerting every nerve, and deploying uncounted
resources to get their adherents to discard every practice and belief which
they share with their Hindu neighbours.
These intellectuals and their patrons have worked a diabolic inversion:
the inclusive religion, the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land,
they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the
exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies – Islam,
Christianity, Marxism-Leninism – they have made out to be the epitomes of
tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!
This has been their real crime. It has also been a bit of a feat. For they
have been just a few: during the Ayodhya controversy, for instance, every
other week a press statement would appear in favour of the stand of the
Babri Masjid Action Committee – one week over the names of ‘eminent
historians’, the next over the signatures of ‘distinguished social scientists’,
and the week after that in the name of ‘leading intellectuals’! But they
would always be the same lot. Always the same small lot: six in one
statement, eight in the next; their high was forty-two once. But what
commotion they have been able to create, and what mischief.
They have been able to do so because of what they were advancing – for
instance, the Marxist ‘thesis’ they were parroting in their textbooks – was in
accord with the temper of the times. Because their kinds were in critical
positions in professions like journalism and universities. And because the
rulers reckoned that to garner votes it would be politic to dress up in
progressive plumes; patronizing persons who had taken out a copyright, so
to say, on the progressive hue was accordingly useful.
Most of all, they were able to work their mischief because of the control
they came to acquire over institutions.
Times have changed: the committed progressive of yesterday is the
unthinking conservative today.
The needs of the rulers have changed: who can fool the masses today by
nationalizing banks and parading certificates from progressives?
The theory in which progressives preened about had been shown
decades ago to be without basis. At that time no one listened. But today no
one invokes it! For it has floundered on the one test the progressives had
said alone mattered: the test of practice. Whatever the theoretical
imperfections, whatever the empirical evidence, the one thing that counts is
that it has worked in practice – in the Soviet Union, in eastern Europe, in
China: that was their argument. And as only those facts about these
countries were facts which they certified, the argument could scarcely be
countered. Today that very argument works to the opposite effect: whatever
the logical coherence you claim for it, whatever scraps of empirical
evidence you adduce in its favour, the one thing that counts is that it has
failed in practice!
So, the fashions are changing, the patronage of rulers is evaporating,
their holy books have been repudiated in their Meccas.
All that remains is their hold over governmental institutions. The
remedy is twofold. First, enable a multitude of other institutions to come up:
for this, a few changes in laws, some marginal incentives for setting up and
running foundations, and faith in others – that persons outside the state also
are eager to do good by the country – are all we need. Second, loosen the
hold over existing institutions of eminences of the kind surveyed here: for
this all that is needed is to document what they have made of these
institutions.
The Historians
1
A characteristic concoction
‘Rational vs National,’ screamed the headline of the new pall-bearer of
secularism, the magazine Outlook. ‘Fresh evidence available with Outlook
reveals that not only has the ICHR [the Indian Council of Historical
Research] been packed with “sympathizers,”’ the story announced, ‘but a
new statement of objectives or resolution [sic] has been added, changing
certain key words from the original Memorandum of Association of 1972,
legitimized by an Act of Parliament. While the original Memorandum of
Association states that ICHR’s aims would be to give “rational” direction to
historical research and foster “an objective and scientific writing of history,”
the new resolution, which will be included in the Gazette of India, states that
ICHR now seeks to give a “national” direction to an “objective and national
presentation of history.” So, “rational” has been changed to “national”, and
“scientific” too has been changed to “national” …’
‘Tampering with history,’ proclaimed the old pall-bearer, The Hindu.
‘Apprehensions of this kind [that the fabled “Sangh parivar” is out to rewrite
history] have been substantiated by a related decision. The resolution by the
Ministry of Human Resources Development – nodal Ministry under which
the ICHR comes – that details the new nominations carries with it an
amendment to the Memorandum of Association by which the ICHR was set
up; while the institution was set up “to foster objective and scientific writing
of history such as will inculcate an informed appreciation of the country’s
national and cultural heritage,” the new government’s mandate is that the
ICHR will give a “national direction” to an “objective and national
presentation and interpretation of history.” This amendment is certainly not
just a matter of semantics. Instead, one can clearly see in this an intention on
the part of the BJP-led government to rewrite history….’
The next issue of the CPI(M) mouthpiece, Peoples Democracy,
reproduced this editorial! And carried with it an article by one of the
ringleaders, K.N. Panikkar. ‘Saffronisation of historical research,’ proclaimed
