Christophe Jaffrelot, Pradyumna Jairam: The BJP's ambitions of rewriting history
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past
George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty Four
Extreme positions are not replaced by moderate ones but rather by extreme ones, though of the opposite kind: Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Will to Power
At the same time, Batra, long-time general secretary of the sangh parivar’s Vidya Bharati, devoted most of his energy to combating perceived errors in history textbooks written by secular authors. In his 2001 book, The Enemies of Indianisation: The Children of Marx, Macaulay and Madrasa, he listed 41 major flaws that reflected the historic tropisms of the Hindu nationalists: First, the idea that the Aryans came from another part of the world in ancient times because the Hindus could only be sons of the soil; second, all the glories attributed to ancient India in its epic poems are an accurate reflection of historical reality; third, the Muslim invasions opened the darkest chapter in Indian history, starting with the destruction of Nalanda University in the 12th century up until the end of the Mughal empire; and fourth, the standard account of the freedom movement ascribes too much importance to Gandhi and Nehru to the detriment of Hindu nationalist heroes. These serious flaws have all been attributed to the secularist or Westernised nature of history textbook authors...
George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty Four
Extreme positions are not replaced by moderate ones but rather by extreme ones, though of the opposite kind: Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Will to Power
History, like truth,
becomes a person apart, a metaphysical subject, of which the real individuals
are merely the bearers. Karl Marx, The Holy Family. (I would add that the same could be said of the
sovereign nation-state, a metaphysical subject coursing through historical
dream-time; with all individuals mere particles of the Nation. DS)
The will cannot
will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the
stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and
he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he
wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it
was.’ “Verily, a great folly dwells in our will; and it has become a curse for
everything human that this folly has acquired spirit": Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra
NB: 'Rectification' of the past (distant or recent) is a job invariably undertaken by ideological politics, of left or right. This always involves distortion, fabrication and 'political correctness'. Historiography is not exactly the special skill of bureaucrats and politicians, but this is an inevitable aspect of life in an ideological age. The hegemony of Bolshevism over the left-wing imagination also led, crucially, to the distorted presentation of Russian and communist history; and similar things happened in China.
These matters are too complex to deal with in this post, but we should remember that such efforts at interpreting human experience in terms of political requirements (of any variety) are bound to fail, as long as the human mind retains its independence. The Nazi regime could not subdue the minds of Karl Jaspers and Victor Klemperer, Stalinism failed to crush Akhmatova, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Maoism failed to overcome Ao Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, just as it could never digest Lu Xun.
That the Sangh Parivar is now doing its best to impose its view of the past upon India's youth, is a sure sign of its totalitarian character. For any political group to aim at seting up an ideocracy (the rule of a ideology) is a sign of weakness, not strength. Truth cannot be nationalised. Let us see how this scheme works out. DS
Union Home Minister
Amit Shah, while speaking at a recent seminar in Banaras Hindu University on
the 5th century emperor, Skandagupta, declared: “Putting together our history,
embellishing it and rewriting it is the responsibility of the country, its
people and historians”, suggesting that there are different ways to write the
history of India and that professional historians had not done their job
properly so far. One of the government
spheres in which the sangh parivar has always shown interest is the teaching of
history, not only because it contributes to defining the national identity, but
also because the parivar believes the version of the past portrayed by
secularists does not reflect reality.
Shortly after Narendra Modi’s rise
to power, in August 2014, the RSS formed a committee, the Bharatiya Shiksha
Niti Aayog, to “Indianise” the education system. It was headed by Dinanath
Batra, who had specialised in rewriting Indian history according to the canons
of Hindu nationalism. In 2010, he had filed a civil suit to ban Wendy Doniger’s
The Hindus, which he felt gave Hinduism a bad image. Batra also pressured the
University of Delhi to remove from its syllabus an essay by A K Ramanujan - Three Hundred Ramayanas - that contradicted the Hindu nationalist idea that
there was a single version of the epic.
At the same time, Batra, long-time general secretary of the sangh parivar’s Vidya Bharati, devoted most of his energy to combating perceived errors in history textbooks written by secular authors. In his 2001 book, The Enemies of Indianisation: The Children of Marx, Macaulay and Madrasa, he listed 41 major flaws that reflected the historic tropisms of the Hindu nationalists: First, the idea that the Aryans came from another part of the world in ancient times because the Hindus could only be sons of the soil; second, all the glories attributed to ancient India in its epic poems are an accurate reflection of historical reality; third, the Muslim invasions opened the darkest chapter in Indian history, starting with the destruction of Nalanda University in the 12th century up until the end of the Mughal empire; and fourth, the standard account of the freedom movement ascribes too much importance to Gandhi and Nehru to the detriment of Hindu nationalist heroes. These serious flaws have all been attributed to the secularist or Westernised nature of history textbook authors...
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