The Great Indian Political Debate - 2

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Hindu Right’s Attempt to Appropriate History

Subhoranjan Dasgupta



I. Introduction

I am aware of the provocative emphasis implicit in the title “Hindu Right’s Attempt to Appropriate History”. This title might prompt a few or many to think that only the Hindu Right, none else, has attempted the wrongful appropriation of history till date. Obviously, that is not the case. The truth of the matter is essentially simple: all political forces ranging from the secular-democratic to the state-rooted socialist— there are so many shades in between—wielding hegemonic power have tried to disseminate their particular versions and interpretations of history. We might choose to describe these attempts as acts of influence or appropriation, which in specific contexts could turn out to be downright false, dangerously divisive and, therefore, socially pernicious. In fact, when these three elements combine, the very act of appropriation imbibes a fascistic trait. But before associating the Hindu Right with this act of calculated appropriation, let me provide four specific examples of other manipulations, two from our subcontinent and two from beyond. These instances will not only substantiate Irfan Habib’s candid observation, “Well, history by being history, based on analysis and evaluation, has to be influenced by some sort of an ideological bias. Always there has been, there is, and there will be mainstream history, Rightwing history, Leftwing history etc.”1 but would also compare well with the programmatic praxis of the Sangh Parivar’s ahistorical historiography.
I offer first, two examples from the subcontinent. Those who have read Yvette Claire Rosser’s two monographs—“Islamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks”2 and “Indoctrinating Minds—A Case Study of Bangladesh”3—will instantly recall that these two instances of appropriation are offered by Pakistan and Bangladesh. Whereas, in Pakistan, since its birth, military as well as civilian governments have wrongly used history to sustain the basic project of Islamic nation-building; in Bangladesh, ironically, political forces opposed to the secular principle of the liberation war have deftly used the collective loss of memory of the new generation to promote the same spirit of majoritarian communalism, which often borders on blatant fundamentalism. In point of fact, this influence has accelerated at present with the Jamat-i-Islami sharing power with Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Needless to add, there are striking similarities between the ways and methods adopted by the radical Islamists on our west and east and those adopted by our very own Hindu Right. This similarity, binary in character, is pithily summed up in the following phrase of Yvette Claire Rosser, “Hegemonic Hindustan: Pakistan’s Significant Other”.3 Not surprisingly, both these ‘hegemonic Hindustan and Pakistan’ are in one single voice quite dismissive of Akbar. Almost echoing Vinayak Damodor Savarkar’s vilificatory assessment of Akbar in Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History,4 Pakistan’s statist historians inspired by I.H. Quereshi5 dismiss Akbar as dubiously Islamic and, accordingly, dangerous. To cut it short, histories such as these are based and thrive on plain distortion of facts leading to maliciously distorted analysis and interpretation.
I offer now, two examples from the Western world, highlighted not by historians but by two creative personalities, Heiner Mueller and Guenter Grass. The most important and controversial dramatist and theatre director of Germany, after Bertolt Brecht, and an avant garde Leftist, Heiner Mueller, in an interview given in September 1992, titled Auschwitz Kein Ende / Auschwitz No End,6 said:
There are infallible documents in Washington which prove that the USA knew of the existence of concentration camps long before the Russians liberated Auschwitz. Churchill knew since 1941. Even more explosive is the fact that German producers of the killer-gas, I G Farben, conducted their experiments in close cooperation with American concerns.7
Without exonerating the Nazi criminals in any way, one still feels like asking a crucial question: did the textbooks in Germany, USA, England record this information, this fore-knowledge? I put this question to academics who are busy recording the re-writing of history in Europe since the fall of state socialism. Their answer was: ‘Not as yet.’ This is an instance of appropriation by erasure.
This example of not fabrication, but duplicitous silence, is no monopoly of the West. Germany’s most well-known living novelist, Guenter Grass, whose opposition to Nazism and Neo-Nazism needs no repetition, in his latest documentary novel Crabwalk,8

tragedy of the war years, the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945 in the Baltic Sea. Struck by Soviet torpedoes, the ship went down with 9000 people, mostly women and children—German refugees—trying to escape towards Germany. Without going into the problem of ethics related to this disaster, without trying to judge, the question that is now being asked is elementary: why did Soviet and East German textbooks of the former GDR treat this incident as taboo? Why this deafening silence? Of course Grass was asked: “Don’t you think that this novel will add to the arsenal of the Neo-Nazis?” His answer was quite categorical:
This question is both mischievous and stupid. Should one present the dark spots to the Neo-Nazis on a platter so that they may exploit these to the hilt and claim that Wilhelm Gustloff is the only truth and Auschwitz is a lie? Is our ideology so weak and fragile? We shall face the past full and square and then condemn Fascism for what it is.9

II. Hindu Right’s Appropriation

The Hindu Right, since the days of Acharya Ramdev, author of the fanciful Bharatvarsh ka Itihas (1910-1914 in two volumes),10 implemented the following measures to appropriate history wrongfully. But this entire enterprise was given a new, frightening dimension since the wresting of political power by the BJP. The limited ahistoric progamme of the past then turned into a fullscale national venture.

Measure 1: Imposition of Silence
Those events and processes that have occurred in the past, which question and oppose the ideology and worldview of Hindutva as well as expose the condemnable acts of the votaries of Hindutva or their icons, will be suppressed. This is the measure of imposing silence, and, as we know, it could prove to be quite fruitful. Why? Because if you succeed in imposing this silence over and over again for a sufficient stretch of time, you manage to produce a tabula rasa where the unpleasant truth fails to appear. The most flagrant example of this kind of suppression occurred when Murli Manohar Joshi was the Minister of HRD. He saw to it that the relevant volume of the series ‘Towards Freedom’ (1946) edited by Sumit Sarkar did not see the light of the day because he feared that this too would expose the loyalist and servile character of the Hindu Right in the 1940s with documentary evidence, as the preceding volume edited by Parthsarathy Gupta had done. When I interviewed Professsor Amartya Sen on the follies and fallacies of the Hindutva-inspired history, he gave another less flagrant but revealing example of this well-directed silence. He said:
The introduction of European scholars to Hindu scriptures, in particular the Upanishads, was to a great extent based on the Persian translation of the Upanishads done by Dara Shikoh, the first-born son of Shah Jahan . Dara Shikoh was not a great Sanskrit scholar but he did work hard with the help of Hindu Pandits to learn Sanskrit and he translated parts of Upanishads into Persian. But I have not seen any mention in the Hindutva literature of the contribution of this Mughal prince to the spread of understanding of Hinduism at home and abroad.11
Even the ghastly murder of Dara at the direct command of Hindutva’s bete noire Aurangzeb did not result in any recognition of his role.

Measure 2: Choice of Half-truths
Instead of placing the entire Gestalt of Truth with its several layers and currents that could be wellnigh anomalous, the Radical Hindu Right’s history-writing has indulged in arbitrary and deceitful ‘pick and choose’ in order to focus on what they would like to and to eliminate what they consider unpleasant. Compared to total silence and suppression, which has been labelled Measure 1, this second method promotes a selective manipulation of facts as well as a selective silence. The result is a proliferation of half- truths which are, at times, even more dangerous than unadulterated lies. The most blatant example of this meticulously planned ‘scissored’ history where one part of the page remains and the other part is rejected is the current deification of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar by the Sangh Parivar. Any comprehensive and reliable assessment of Savarkar will have to take into account his early phase as a freedom-fighter and his authoring The First Indian War of Independence (1857) as well as his later and decisive phase of politics steadfastly affixed to Hindutva, based on religious antagonism, peppered with repeated declarations of loyalty to the British Raj and his undisputed role in encouraging the assassination of Gandhi. All the present-day acolytes of Savarkar do not mention this second phase at all. They harp ceaselessly on his ‘brave exploits’ as a selfless freedom-fighter, uncompromising patriot etc etc. Even archival evidence pointing directly to the contrary (available in the National Archives) and the impartial assessments of A. G. Noorani and Ranjan Gupta in their respective books Savarkar and Hindutva12 and Beer Savarkar, Itihaser Aloi13 have failed to move the appropriators. Precisely because they refuse to see. For, if they dare open their eyes, the entire edifice that they have built around this man will crumble. After all, the Sangh Parivar cannot boast of many Savarkars who at one point of time did something laudatory. As a result, we are given a truncated version which attempts to invest ‘loyalist Hindutva’ with the deceptive glow of anti-colonial resistance. Wherein lies the limitless danger of such misappropriation? The answer to this question becomes clear when you recall what the poet-statesman of Hindutva, our former Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had to say on his hero. He, without blinking his eyes this time, said: “Savarkar, like Bhagat Singh, will be forever revered as an uncompromising fighter.” To students of history, who are well aware of the lives of these two figures, I need not outline the unbridgeable difference between the two. When, however, one tries to erase this difference, backed as that one is by the formidable power of the state, history is taken for a shameless ride.

Measure 3: Frenzy of Fantasy
By comparison, this is much simpler. It indulges in ceaseless production of plain lies which are presented as truths of the aggrieved heart and emotional verities. Once this Pandora’s Box is opened myths, fairy tales, suitable fragments of epics, fancies, dreams, nightmares—all rush into the terrain of history to convert it into an ever-expanding forcefield of fantasy where appropriation is fomented by sheer, unbridled imagination. A pathetic sense of glorificatory wish-fulfilment, communitarian to the core, accompanies this flourish of history gone awry. It began with pioneers like Ramdev who tried to sell the idea that the North Indian Aryas had their resplendent Aryan Air Force. Harald Fischer Tine’s expose of Ramdev’s fantasy is suitably titled ‘Inventing a National Past’.14 This tradition has continued—when not in power, surely and steadily—and when in power with sound and fury. As a result, we have to challenge today the following myths or heart’s desires parading as history:
1) There, in that particular place, Ma Sita cooked. Hence, we have Sita ki Rasoi, which has to be purified and recovered.
2) Lord Krishna himself prohibited the killing of cows in Brindaban.
3) Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey under the direct influence of Indian epics.
4) The Vedas declared that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its own axis
Such examples can be piled up. In fact, the state-directed propagation of this accumulated garbage almost threatened the very progress of genuine historiography. For the first time, we crossed the Rubicon to confront another enterprise which was simply another discipline or lack of it, call it creative extravaganza if you choose, but not history.
Now that the process of appropriation has been described, let me underline the essence of this appropriation and its radical difference from the essence of history. The essence of this appropriation rejects history—to use the use the words of Amartya Sen—as ‘capacious heterodoxy’. When asked to explain what he meant by ‘capacious heterodoxy’, he said:
In order to study history, we have to have a sense of space-that there could be different ways of looking at past events, and in case there are differences, we should be able to argue it out. Heterodoxy is important because understanding history requires different approaches. Furthermore, heterodoxy is itself sometimes among the most interesting things to study in the history of a civilisation or a culture.15
In place of this enquiring and invigorating heterodoxy, the axis of Hindutva’s history revolves around the narrow and confined antagonism between the Hindu and its ‘Other’, specifically Muslim and Christian. Sumit Sarkar condemns this self-devouring myopia because it bolts the door on the flowering of ‘many histories’ revolving around so many other axes—like gender, class, social movement, environ-ment, creative texts etc etc.16
We now phrase the final question: what constitutes the fundamental difference between a wrongful appropriation and an acceptable text which does incorporate a specific point of view, or even an ideological stress? Explaining the difference Irfan Habib argued:
You, as a historian, no matter what point of view you hold, have to deal with facts, and not fiction. As to how you arrange, select, place, that is your concern, but you cannot brandish fiction and fantasy as history. Nor can you select in a manner that impairs the multiple sides of an event or a figure. As opposed to this, what we confront today is the propagation of lies, half truths or fiction garbed as history. Secular politics and honest historians are opposed to this motivated, unprofessional propagation.17

III. Romila Thapar on Somanatha

In conclusion, I would like to evaluate a recent example of remarkable resistance to this kind of propagation. This short evaluation, of Romila Thapar’s book Somanatha—The Many Voices of a History18 honours an abiding example of that historiography, which is opposed in every possible way to Hindutva’s attempted appropriation of history.
A vicious slander campaign was launched by the hardcore Hindu Right against Romila Thapar when she was offered the prestigious ‘Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South’ at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. last year. Supporters



Tell this commie, anti-Hindu woman to get lost because she dares to question the fact that Mahmud of Ghazni plundered and destroyed the Somnath temple.
But Romila Thapar, who describes herself as a ‘good liberal historian’, has never challenged facts, no matter how unpalatable they are. Her book Somanatha—The Many Voices of a History—a remarkable example of assiduous and open-ended historiography—begins with the sentence:
In 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni raided the temple of Somanatha, plundered its wealth and broke the idol.
From the very second sentence, however, this eminent historian questions the Saffron interpretation of the event, which has been carefully constructed to serve the sectarian agenda of Savarkar-Hedgewar-Golwalkar and the rest. The basis of this RSS version was provided by colonial historiography framed by the British who depended solely on Turko-Persian chronicles. Indeed, the latter acquired a hegemonic status and the British imperialists utilised this source to “underline the theory of a permanent confrontation between Hindu and Muslim…since the raid could neither be forgiven nor forgotten.” (pages 12-13) It is not at all surprising that those who swear full-throated by nationalism and their foreign masters stuck to the same thesis. For, while the British fanned the Hindu-Muslim hostility to strengthen their rule, the votaries of Hindutva inflamed it further after 1947 to sustain their march towards a Hindu Rashtra.
Romila Thapar has not ignored chronicler-historians like Ferishta whose ‘Turko-Persian’ reading of the event had its own political agenda to fulfil. In one solid chapter running to 40 pages, she has dissected this one-sided, simplistic version penned by fawning court-poets who eulogised Mahmud as the torchbearer of Islam inflicting severe humiliation on infidels and their idols. In order to drive their point home, they repeated the ravage over and over again. But this repetition simply did not occur. Exposing the element of fiction ingrained in this cyclic exaggeration, the author says:
…after the first raid, the claim ceases to be history and becomes rhetoric.
What is really baffling is that the Hindu-nationalist historians like K.M. Munshi (he took the lead in rebuilding the temple after 1947, much to the annoyance of Nehru) did not bother to examine the ‘other’ crucial sources. These are Sanskrit inscriptions claiming that the ‘desecrated but not destroyed’ temple revived as a place of pilgrimage soon after the raid; biographies and chronicles of Jaina scholars which indicate that the raid of Mahmud did not disturb Chalukya power; biographies by Rajput poets which do not reduce the Turk-Rajput hostility to the single cause of a vertical religious divide; and, above all, stories and legends inspired by popular imagination attesting to a vibrant syncretic attachment to religion even after Mahmud’s depredation.
All these other sources were excluded or consigned to amnesia so that the dangerously selective ‘memory of trauma and devastation’ could be nurtured for centuries. This module of trauma had no place for the spirit of amity that bound Arab traders and people of Gujarat in the eleventh century together, no mention of the mosque which was allowed to be built near Somnath and no reference to Mahmud’s nephew Gazi Miyan who
was disillusioned by his uncle’s plunder and decided to spend his life in the service of humanity. (page 55)
By juxtaposing all these varied sources for the first time, which question the one-dimensional Turko-Persian narrative by cross-evaluating one with the other, by being inclusive in the proper sense of the term, Romila Thapar has underlined the difference between enlightened historiography and dubious memory parading as history. No wonder, her opponents fumed:
It’s a shame to the US and the Indian Government that a Communist like Romila Thapar is having a free run.
Describing Romila Thapar as a Communist is a wrongful appropriation of identity, and identity is an intrinsic part of history. Her book sets the records straight. It recovers the past in the way genuine historiography should. n

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Interview with Irfan Habib, by the author. ‘For Truth’s Sake’, The Statesman, January 19, 2004.
2. Islamisation of Pakistan—Social Studies Textbooks by Yvette Claire Rosser, Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2003, in association with Observer Research Foundation.
3. Indoctrinating Minds—A Case Study of Bangladesh by Yvette Claire Rosser, Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2004, in association with Observer Research Foundation.
4. Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History by V D Savarkar, Rajdhani Granthagar, New Delhi, 1970. Savarkar’s assessment of Akbar is in the fifth section of the book.
5. Islamisation of Pakistan, page 42.
6. Drucksache 16, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, pages 603-614.
7. Ibid., page 607.
8. Crabwalk by Guenter Grass, Faber and Faber, London, 2002.
9. Guenter Grass in conversation with journalists, 2002. From Radio Broadcast, Deutsche Welle.
10. Bharatvarsh ka Itihas (in two volumes) by Acharya Ramdev, Swami Sraddhanand Anusandhan Prakash Kendra, Hardwar, 1910-1914. Harald Fischer Tine’s excellent article on Ramdev’s history ‘Inventing a National Past’ is included in Hinduism in Public and Private edited by Anton Copley (OUP, 2003).
11. Interview with Amartya Sen by the author, ‘Hindutva and History’, Outlook, January 21, 2002.
12. Savarkar and Hindutva by A. G. Noorani, Left Word, New Delhi, 2002.
13. Beer Savarkar, Itihaser Aloy/Veer Savarkar, In the Light of History, Dey’s Publishing, Kolkata, 2004.
14. See 10.
15. See 11.
16. Interview with Sumit Sarkar by the author, Ananda Bazar Patrika, June 6, 2004.
17. See 1.
18. Somanatha—The Many Voices of a History by Romila Thapar, Viking, New