Narayani Gupta: The problem with cherry-picking facts from history
NB: A timely reminder of the vulnerability of historiography to ideology. There are some among us who wish to 'rectify' history; whose resentment at the past can never be satiated, neither by revising textbooks nor by bulldozing the homes of the poor. Their emotional affliction is best described by Friedrich Nietzsche:
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: Thus Spake Zarathustra. Thanks are due to Professor Narayani Gupta for this article. DS
In my younger days, if we wanted to comment on any article in a newspaper, we rattled off a short letter to the editor on our typewriter. Now there are journalists whose comments are in the form of an article as long as the one under discussion. Many of them can only be described as clones of Humpty Dumpty, confident that “When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, no more, no less”.
A recent example is
that of an article by S Y Quraishi (‘Calling
out hate’, April 15) and the comment that followed. Noting the
alarming reports of hate speeches in the social media, Quraishi wrote, “It is
at the root of many forms of violence that are being perpetrated and has become
one of the biggest challenges to the rule of law and to our democratic
conscience.” He lists those who can act firmly and swiftly - during elections
it is the Election Commission that must act, and in the “non-election” months
the state has the power to act by using provisions of the Indian Penal Code,
and the Representation of the People Act. The sense of urgency in his article
was palpable.
There was a rejoinder
to Quraishi in The Indian Express (‘Ignorance
isn’t bliss’, April 21). Balbir Punj, the writer, says in the
second paragraph that Quraishi’s “arguments are drearily familiar, facts dodgy,
and conclusions delusional”. Punj adds: “Quraishi’s article has little to do
with the anatomy of hate or its ongoing malignancy”. Quraishi was not
dissecting the emotion of hate, he was criticising the inaction of the Election
Commission and the courts, in the context of hate-speeches made by individuals
over the last year.
Punj begins his piece
on a breathless note: “Hate and bigotry feed on each other. They germinate and
flourish on a toxic diet of divisive and schismatic ideologies and polarising
creeds that discriminate against human beings on the basis of colour, region,
gender, faith - and divide them between believers and non-believers - ranging
the chosen ones against the idolatrous”. The strapline was “Understanding trail
of hate in India requires honest examination of its origins”. Eleven of the 15
paragraphs in the essay deal with this trail.
History as a
discipline is about time, place and people. Teachers of history
compartmentalise themselves into sections of time and of place/region. Not so
the non-historian. Punj writes, “For aeons, India has had syncretic traditions,
inspired by the Vedic aphorism “ekam sad [sic] vipra bahudha vadanti” (there is
only one truth and learned persons call it by many names). In September 2020, a
16-member committee was set up by the Ministry of Culture to study the origin
and evolution of Indian culture, “dating back to around 12,000 years ago”. It
held two meetings and vanished from the scene. That’s a cautionary tale.
Bhakti and Sufi cults have been for long described as “syncretic”. Punj does not associate Sindh with its great Sufi tradition, but with bin Qasim’s conquest in 712 CE and the coming of Islam — “as Chach Nama, a contemporary Arab chronicle states, [he] introduced the practice of treating local Hindus as zimmis, forcing them to pay jizya… ‘Hate’ and ‘bigotry’ thus made their debut in India, which was hitherto free from this virus”. It is worth locating and browsing through translations of the Chach Nama, for its accounts of the attitude of the Arab rulers of Sindh towards the Hindu population and their places of worship. A natural outcome of this beginning was the enduring presence of Sufi orders in Sindh.
The simplest — but not
wholly ethical — way to substantiate an argument is by cherry-picking. From
8th-century Sindh the author moves to 11th-century north India. He writes of
Mahmud of Ghazni who “took a vow to wage jihad every year against Indian
idolators”. (I tried to locate a source for this, and came up only with one —
an earlier article by Punj, on July 12, 2019). Ghaznavi’s exact contemporary,
Rajendra Chola, was in the same period raiding Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. In
Indian school textbooks Ghaznavi has always been an “invader”, the Cholas were
“conquerors”.
The next eight centuries are omitted, and the trail moves down to Malabar (the Moplah Rebellion of 1921), then north and east India (the Partition tragedies of 1946-8), the “decimation” of Hindus in neighbouring countries (no dates) and people in Spain and Sweden. He proceeds to ask a rhetorical question “Can laws or police fight hate?” And this article was published a day after the BJP-run civic body let the bulldozers raze homes in Jahangirpuri “in the face of the Supreme Court order” as the Indian Express headline stated on the same day as Punj’s article!
Punj’s narrative could
be described in his own words - “charged reactions, punctuated with
half-truths, deliberate omissions and tailored narratives, offer no real
solution” [to what?]. This is followed by a line which I find extremely
difficult to decipher - “pusillanimity to face facts will only exacerbate the
situation and give egregious results.”
Partha
Chatterjee: No one, not even Indians, can claim to be part of an ancient nation
Communalism in Modern India: A Theoretical Examination (1986)
Allah Baksh's death anniversary: May 14; 2021. By Anil Nauriya
Sumit Guha
lectures on Asia, Europe and America in the Making of 'Caste'
Sumit Guha -
Glimpsed in the Archive and Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale
Book review: Sumit Guha's new book on the history of
caste
Oxford
University's Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme comments on Venkat
Dhulipala
Democracy and workers' movements - stories from
Jamshedpur
Manimugdha S Sharma - Subhas Chandra Bose wanted
ruthless dictatorship in India for 20 years
Jawaharlal Nehru's 57th death anniversary /
‘हिंद के जवाहर’ का जाना…
Anil Nauriya: July 1, 2021 is the Centenary
of the Dharwar Firing
Apoorvanand -
Bhagat Singh was not the ultimate militant nationalist he's made out to be
One hundredth anniversary of the all India hartal
against the Rowlatt Act
