History writing must be dispassionate

Raziuddin Aquil 

Given the kind of myth and beliefs regularly thrown up as history and historians' quick dismissal of them as uninformed irrationalities, it is important to seriously analyse the objectives and parameters of professional academic history-writing and its distinction from politically-motivated popular histories of the public domain, and also examine controversial historical questions in a dispassionate and non-partisan manner. It is the historians' task to analyse and interpret in what context some communities of people, political or otherwise, believe in what they believe in, rather than just dismissing them as unverifiable data of no historical importance.

When historians do intervene, they lack credibility because the level of research is low and they are also suspected as partisan. Is it impossible for historians to be un-biased in their approach to history-writing even when they are dealing with contested questions of communally sensitive nature, so that they are taken more seriously than has hitherto been the case?

Historians committed to the politics of secularism and working with the framework of what is referred to as scientific history have tended to ignore or condemn popular myth and superstition. This is a flawed approach as religious beliefs and practices are central to many societies across centuries and they are often deployed as serious issues in the politics of the popular domain. Secular historians' rejection of religious beliefs as unimportant or their complete neglect means an important set of issues are either not seriously thrashed or at times just mocked. In cases of utter neglect of myth and legend, as those relating to ancient and medieval India, the space vacated by professional historians is enthusiastically occupied by non-historians and other purveyors of popular beliefs as well as political propagandists. The resultant situation can be utterly ludicrous, as witnessed in recent times.

Some of the popular myths about Indian history, especially on questions of religion and identity, certainly require trashing, even as professional historians themselves need some self-reflexive soul searching. Despite 50-60 years of investment in history as a discipline, which certainly does not need anything outside of it to justify its existence, the general public remains almost largely uneducated. Discursively also, one may like to think what exactly historians are doing which is of international import in terms of knowledge production? Where does Indian history exist in relation to global standards of historical research?

The so-called medieval India experts certainly need to reflect on the state of their historiography even in relation to other fields within Indian history and in social sciences and humanities generally, what with peddling the same old stuff and blocking fresh thinking by younger scholars. Certainly, if 80-year-old retired professors set the agenda for research in a society and its academic institutions, then the fields concerned are, to use a cliché, as dead as the dodo. The result is: a civilised and rational discussion over radical new thinking becomes impossible. Much as the upsurge of right-wing fringe is justifiably lamented, silencing of that kind unfortunately happens even in liberal academia and sometimes as crudely as one can imagine in a barbarous society.

Dogmatism in academia notwithstanding, some fine works have been produced, in recent times, by a number of historians working on religious and historical traditions in medieval and early modern India: Chitralekha Zutshi on the continuation of Sanskrit historical tradition in Persian in Kashmir, Kumkum Chatterjee on the Persianization of itihas-tradition in Bengal, David Curley on Mangal-kavya as a source of the history of trade and commerce, Sumit Guha and Prachi Deshpande on the Maratha celebration of its assertive past in a genre, bakhar, which in turn was inspired by the Persian tarikh tradition, David Lorenzen on Kabir and Gorakhnath, and Aditya Behl and Shantanu Phukan on the Sufi poetry of love, premakhyan, to name just a few.

Much of the research of the kind mentioned above is happening in America and Europe, which is being resisted by the entrenched orthodoxy in Indian academic institutions.

And, these are not merely concerns for historians of precolonial India. Are scholars engaged in postcolonial literature, critique, theories, etc., linguistically equipped to actually demonstrate the transformations in the 19th century from the period immediately preceding it? Can the vast Indian literature, in many different languages and genre, be brought within the ambit of historical research?

Further, for those subscribing to some political position or the other, history is not so much about what can be objectively ascertained from extant sources than what is the requirement of the time; interpretations can be accordingly twisted. Is it too much to expect from the historians to provide some approximation of truth relating to the human past in all its dimensions, sources permitting, even if dominant politics of the time dictates otherwise?

(Previously published in the Sunday Guardian: http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/history-writing-must-be-dispassionate)