03-07-2008, 03:54 AM
One more from Pioneer, 7 Mrach 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->My history vs your history
Ashok Malik
Every two years or so, India goes back to its tried and tested "history debate". The trigger is usually a new film or book. The clichés and the rhetoric are always the same - this is "not history"; this is "factually incorrect"; this is "insulting" to a particular group/identity.
The past month has been particularly rich in such controversies. State Governments have banned the screening of Jodhaa Akbar. The Supreme Court has allowed the circulation of American academic James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003) but recommended a few lines be excised. Activists of ABVP have responded violently to an essay by the late scholar-writer AK Ramanujan on folk and non-mainstream versions of the Ramayan that has been prescribed for second-year BA students at Delhi University. Finally, there have been prohibitions on the novel Rani - based on the life of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi.
The four phenomena are not linked, except by the loose idea that all of them deal with events that occurred, or narratives that were developed, in the past. Yet, they present us a field fertile with examples of how contemporary Indians view history, contest history and use it to fight very contemporary political battles. In essence, the four examples have roles for at least five schools of thought - or of villainy - in the great Indian war for history.
<b>First, the "history as orthodoxy" school of professional historians, those who guard the past jealously.</b> With Jodhaa Akbar - and more so, with Mangal Pandey/The Rising, the biopic made in 2005 - a familiar bunch of historians begins by pointing out errors in the script, nit-picking over details and technicalities, flogging and regurgitating 30-year-old doctoral theses, and essentially suggesting film-makers should stay away from history.
Admittedly, there are exceptions to the rule. <b>There are academics who don't see a problem in popular culture reinterpreting history, souping it up as it were - without entirely mangling it - to sell a book or pack a movie theatre</b>. Hollywood does it all the time. Mel Gibson's Braveheart suggested that Scottish rebel William Wallace slept with the Princess of Wales and illegitimately fathered England's King Edward III. It was nonsense but Oxford dons did not go apoplectic.
<b>Second, the "history as denial" school,</b> which, in the case of Jodhaa Akbar, is not so much concerned that the real life Jodhaa Bai was probably not Akbar's wife, but <b>that the film implies a system of political matrimony between certain Rajput families and the Mughals</b>. In today's political context, it is an inconvenient truth.
<b>The Marxists are adept at this culture of denial.</b> When the Mitrokhin Archive II was published a couple of years ago, it detailed how the KGB bribed Communist Party leaders and fellow travellers in India. It would have been appropriate to appoint a commission of inquiry to study the evidence in the book and in the larger, unpublished archive that Vasili Mitrokhin escaped with and which is now in the possession of the British Government. Instead, Left leaders stonewalled; one of them even said Parliament couldn't discuss the Mitrokhin book as it was "fiction" and a "novel".
<b>Third is the "history as popular sentiment" school, which insists that depictions of history must conform to "popular sentiment".</b> While seemingly persuasive, there are pitfalls to this logic. What happens when there is not one popular sentiment but multiple, contradictory popular sentiments?
Take a cinematic example. In 2002, Shah Rukh Khan starred in and as Asoka. In the film the Mauryan prince is depicted as a happy-go-lucky youth who is forced into conflict by the intrigues of the Patliputra court and by his wicked step-brothers. They hate him and murder his mother. When one of the evil brothers escapes to Kalinga, Ashoka attacks that kingdom. His is thus a just war.
As it happens, this moving script - reflecting popular sentiment about Ashoka in, at least, suburban Mumbai - runs counter to popular sentiment about Ashoka in Orissa (Kalinga). Oriya children grow up hearing of Chanda Ashoka, the terrible king whose unprovoked invasion led to unforgettable massacre. So should Shah Rukh Khan's film have been shown across India but banned in Orissa?
<b>Fourth is the "history as inoffensive" school. It contends that historians and those using history as a tool for creativity must not offend.</b> For instance, versions of the Ramayan that may depict Ram in poor light should not be part of public discourse.
<b>It is important not to lose context. Politicians who use fringe renditions of the Ramayan just to insult Hindu sentiment and score political points cannot be excused.</b> In 1993, in the charged aftermath of December 6, 1992, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh sponsored an exhibition that emphasised an obscure tradition that Ram and Sita were siblings. It was political, not scholarly, action, and deliberately provocative.
Similarly, ideologues may pack middle-school textbooks with prejudice against cherished heroes. <b>At the heart of the NCERT textbooks controversy in the NDA years was Satish Chandra's Medieval India. After the Second Battle of Tarain, it said, "Prithviraja (Chauhan) escaped, but was captured ... (and) was allowed to rule over Ajmer for some time ... Soon after, Prithviraja was executed on a charge of conspiracy." </b>Is this how a schoolchild is introduced to an iconic figure?
Yet, taken to an extreme, "inoffensive" history, one entirely subservient to "popular sentiment", can result in mob veto. A multifaceted, even contrarian or counter-factual narrative of history is surely permissible at a university; or among under-graduates who are supposed to be serious students of the discipline. That is why the ABVP's Ramanujan intervention has gone too far.
<b>Finally, fifth is the "liberal fundamentalism school", which sees every objection as conspiracy and censorship.</b> After the James Laine verdict, one commentator accused the apex court of "giving aid and succour to all those tendencies that are out to subvert liberal values in this country". How true is this? Shivaji's adherents have taken objection to a few lines in Laine's work, such as: "Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father." The aggrieved say this is character assassination.
True, the Sambhaji Brigade had no business vandalising a research library in Pune where Laine had worked. Yet, was it not justified in fighting a court battle? After all, can a serious historian get away with making a fairly incendiary allegation without referring to a single source or any oral or textual evidence whatsoever? <b>Popular sentiment cannot be an eraser, but neither can scholarship be licence. Alas, India has a history of both.</b>
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->My history vs your history
Ashok Malik
Every two years or so, India goes back to its tried and tested "history debate". The trigger is usually a new film or book. The clichés and the rhetoric are always the same - this is "not history"; this is "factually incorrect"; this is "insulting" to a particular group/identity.
The past month has been particularly rich in such controversies. State Governments have banned the screening of Jodhaa Akbar. The Supreme Court has allowed the circulation of American academic James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003) but recommended a few lines be excised. Activists of ABVP have responded violently to an essay by the late scholar-writer AK Ramanujan on folk and non-mainstream versions of the Ramayan that has been prescribed for second-year BA students at Delhi University. Finally, there have been prohibitions on the novel Rani - based on the life of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi.
The four phenomena are not linked, except by the loose idea that all of them deal with events that occurred, or narratives that were developed, in the past. Yet, they present us a field fertile with examples of how contemporary Indians view history, contest history and use it to fight very contemporary political battles. In essence, the four examples have roles for at least five schools of thought - or of villainy - in the great Indian war for history.
<b>First, the "history as orthodoxy" school of professional historians, those who guard the past jealously.</b> With Jodhaa Akbar - and more so, with Mangal Pandey/The Rising, the biopic made in 2005 - a familiar bunch of historians begins by pointing out errors in the script, nit-picking over details and technicalities, flogging and regurgitating 30-year-old doctoral theses, and essentially suggesting film-makers should stay away from history.
Admittedly, there are exceptions to the rule. <b>There are academics who don't see a problem in popular culture reinterpreting history, souping it up as it were - without entirely mangling it - to sell a book or pack a movie theatre</b>. Hollywood does it all the time. Mel Gibson's Braveheart suggested that Scottish rebel William Wallace slept with the Princess of Wales and illegitimately fathered England's King Edward III. It was nonsense but Oxford dons did not go apoplectic.
<b>Second, the "history as denial" school,</b> which, in the case of Jodhaa Akbar, is not so much concerned that the real life Jodhaa Bai was probably not Akbar's wife, but <b>that the film implies a system of political matrimony between certain Rajput families and the Mughals</b>. In today's political context, it is an inconvenient truth.
<b>The Marxists are adept at this culture of denial.</b> When the Mitrokhin Archive II was published a couple of years ago, it detailed how the KGB bribed Communist Party leaders and fellow travellers in India. It would have been appropriate to appoint a commission of inquiry to study the evidence in the book and in the larger, unpublished archive that Vasili Mitrokhin escaped with and which is now in the possession of the British Government. Instead, Left leaders stonewalled; one of them even said Parliament couldn't discuss the Mitrokhin book as it was "fiction" and a "novel".
<b>Third is the "history as popular sentiment" school, which insists that depictions of history must conform to "popular sentiment".</b> While seemingly persuasive, there are pitfalls to this logic. What happens when there is not one popular sentiment but multiple, contradictory popular sentiments?
Take a cinematic example. In 2002, Shah Rukh Khan starred in and as Asoka. In the film the Mauryan prince is depicted as a happy-go-lucky youth who is forced into conflict by the intrigues of the Patliputra court and by his wicked step-brothers. They hate him and murder his mother. When one of the evil brothers escapes to Kalinga, Ashoka attacks that kingdom. His is thus a just war.
As it happens, this moving script - reflecting popular sentiment about Ashoka in, at least, suburban Mumbai - runs counter to popular sentiment about Ashoka in Orissa (Kalinga). Oriya children grow up hearing of Chanda Ashoka, the terrible king whose unprovoked invasion led to unforgettable massacre. So should Shah Rukh Khan's film have been shown across India but banned in Orissa?
<b>Fourth is the "history as inoffensive" school. It contends that historians and those using history as a tool for creativity must not offend.</b> For instance, versions of the Ramayan that may depict Ram in poor light should not be part of public discourse.
<b>It is important not to lose context. Politicians who use fringe renditions of the Ramayan just to insult Hindu sentiment and score political points cannot be excused.</b> In 1993, in the charged aftermath of December 6, 1992, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh sponsored an exhibition that emphasised an obscure tradition that Ram and Sita were siblings. It was political, not scholarly, action, and deliberately provocative.
Similarly, ideologues may pack middle-school textbooks with prejudice against cherished heroes. <b>At the heart of the NCERT textbooks controversy in the NDA years was Satish Chandra's Medieval India. After the Second Battle of Tarain, it said, "Prithviraja (Chauhan) escaped, but was captured ... (and) was allowed to rule over Ajmer for some time ... Soon after, Prithviraja was executed on a charge of conspiracy." </b>Is this how a schoolchild is introduced to an iconic figure?
Yet, taken to an extreme, "inoffensive" history, one entirely subservient to "popular sentiment", can result in mob veto. A multifaceted, even contrarian or counter-factual narrative of history is surely permissible at a university; or among under-graduates who are supposed to be serious students of the discipline. That is why the ABVP's Ramanujan intervention has gone too far.
<b>Finally, fifth is the "liberal fundamentalism school", which sees every objection as conspiracy and censorship.</b> After the James Laine verdict, one commentator accused the apex court of "giving aid and succour to all those tendencies that are out to subvert liberal values in this country". How true is this? Shivaji's adherents have taken objection to a few lines in Laine's work, such as: "Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father." The aggrieved say this is character assassination.
True, the Sambhaji Brigade had no business vandalising a research library in Pune where Laine had worked. Yet, was it not justified in fighting a court battle? After all, can a serious historian get away with making a fairly incendiary allegation without referring to a single source or any oral or textual evidence whatsoever? <b>Popular sentiment cannot be an eraser, but neither can scholarship be licence. Alas, India has a history of both.</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->