I recently read a newspaper interview of a senior historian
saying how Amit Shah’s insistence that history should be rewritten with a view
to glorifying ancient (read Hindu-) India is ‘old hat’, because this project
has been actually going on for over a century now; also, that people like Shah
have a very clearly ideological-cum-political agenda, which is anathema to
serious history writing, and also that many of the claims of such ideologues,
though laughable (such as that ancient Indians had aeroplanes and plastic
surgery and nuclear weapons), are full of mischievous potential, because
average Indians, including those who like to think of themselves as educated,
are only too eager to confuse mythology with history, especially when it serves
to aggrandize their self-image.
All this is true, but I think that both interviewer and
interviewee have missed the real point here. To my mind, the real point is,
Indians by and large are not interested in history – not just
because mythology is so much more entertaining and less demanding of the
intellect, but also because (and this is the supremely important thing) reading
history does not easily and quickly lead
to jobs, and any cerebral effort that does not do so is hated by Indians of
all classes and ages with a deep, fierce, collective and unalterable hatred. So
it is drilled into children from a very early age that history is boring,
useless, too hard to read because it taxes the memory with so many facts,
names, dates and so on. By the age of 16, they are – well, 99% of them are –
convinced beyond redemption. Notice that the same logic applies even to what is
called ‘interesting’ by the entire middle class when they are in their early
teens (hence biology and chemistry are far less commonly liked than math and
physics), and a little later, when they all make a beeline for that great
Indian ‘passion’, engineering, they all want to go into IT or some branch of
computer science, not civil, mechanical, electrical or chemical, which have
been the core branches for ages, not because they are in truth fascinated by
computers but because the entire adult world has convinced them that in all
other branches of engineering, jobs are too few and far between, so they must
all convince themselves that they are ‘passionate’ about IT/computers. No other
race can make a virtue out of necessity as well as we can. Here I agree
entirely with our prime minister about the deleterious effect of a thousand
years of ghulaami – servitude of the
mind. Remember how during British rule most middle class Indian parents (including
Subhas Bose’s father) were ‘passionate’ about their sons becoming judges or
magistrates under the sahibs? As I have been saying for decades, if the word
went around that these days there are no engineering jobs available while
historians are being hired in vast numbers and at eye-popping salaries, every
Indian parent would beat the idea into their wards that they must be ‘passionate’ about history, and
God help those who timidly express any interest in ‘useless’ subjects like
physics or chemistry! When the chips are down, Indians have no loyalty to anything
except their pockets. As Noam Chomsky the American philosopher observed, you
don’t know what materialist means until you have known Indians well…
I have been truly passionate about history since childhood. I have
found that I have learnt more history, and still have instant recall about more
historical facts, than most history scholars do (I have checked out with my own
daughter, who earned a gold medal in history when she left college). That has
not prevented me from learning economics very well up to the master’s level, or
being a successful teacher of English over a lifetime at all levels from middle
school to university. It’s a matter of being really interested in knowing,
rather than in examination scores, which is all that middle class mothers
(especially the Bengalis among them) care about. I have among my ex students –
though their number is sadly few – people who have doctoral and post doctoral
qualifications in science and mathematics, yet also pursue a strong and abiding
interest in history on their own. I also know that much of the deep-rooted
dislike of history that grows in school can be ascribed to the bad effects of
utterly bored, boring, ignorant and unintelligent teachers. Moreover, to say
history is boring is also to say that you are not interested in knowing about
your past – your ancestors, your legacy, your past follies and mistakes, your
long-term weaknesses – and only fools are like that, because it has been well
said that men who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. I have seen
that some of the most technologically advanced countries, far more really
‘advanced’ than India, are deeply interested in knowing and preserving their
history: an interest in science and technology does not in any way impede the pursuit of historical knowledge, only a
lack of interest in knowledge does.
To anybody who asks ‘What is the use of reading history?’,
my first retort is ‘What do you mean by use?’
If all you want out of an education is a middling sort of mindless job, like clerkship, coding, or selling soap, it is
certainly of no use. And it is true
that no country needs to produce college graduates in history by the hundred
thousand. But it has been well said, and will be valid when IT has long been
forgotten as a hot career, that ‘man shall not live by bread alone’. History is
entertaining in a civilized man’s sense. History warns you against common,
oft-repeated stupidities and disasters. History prepares you to face the future
better. History is needed to appreciate a great deal of art and literature and
music. You cannot master a lot of subjects if you do not know a great deal of
their history, be it law or medicine or aeronautics. You cannot make a lot of
good movies or write a lot of good books without expert historical knowledge. AND:
history misread and mis-told can misguide whole nations with disastrous
consequences, as witness what happened in Italy and Germany in the 1930s (to
know which, too, you have to read history!)
I believe that, despite our first prime minister having been
a profoundly history-literate man, the subject has not got a fair deal as an
academic pursuit. First of all, by and large only science failures have gone to
college to read it, as lately as my daughter’s batch: that is not how a country
produces first class historians. Secondly, they have followed a too-rigid
leftist bias for too long in the universities, and that has not served the
discipline well. Thirdly, reading history didn’t lead to good jobs, and that
confirmed people in their opinion that it is a ‘useless’ subject. Fourthly, too
few historians have written well for educated laymen: how many writers can you
cite after you have mentioned William Dalrymple? Fifthly, we have actually done
too little serious, original research – why is the Indus Valley script still
undeciphered a hundred years after it was discovered?
In my considered opinion, therefore, it would not be a bad
thing if the controversy being stirred by those who are in power right now in
their effort to give a sharp and sometimes silly rightward-orthodox twist to
the reading and writing of history brought about a churning, an intellectual
ferment among at least the educated sections, a shaking off of apathy, a
stirring of renewed interest, in what history is all about. It might, in the
end, do more good than harm. At least more books like Manu Pillai’s Rebel Sultans (which meticulously
records how, rather than there being clear cut Muslim periods and Hindu periods
in history, things have always been far more complex: for instance, Muslim has
often fought Muslim with the help of Hindu generals and counsellors, and it was
political power and economic benefits that were uppermost in their minds, not
the spread of religious bigotry) might get written and read, even by engineers!
What harm is there in being a little optimistic now and then?
