Clio stirring

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?