Whenever questions are asked about what we can learn from history, it invariably leads to philosopher George Santayana’s oft-quoted aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Studying history enables us to develop better understanding of the world in which we live. Building knowledge and understanding of historical events and trends, especially over the past century, enables us to develop a much greater appreciation for current events today. And if we heed Santayana’s warning, then remembering history – and learning important lessons from it – should help us to avoid previous mistakes and prevent previous misdeeds from happening again.’
The liberals in India are moaning
the rise of Modi-Shah- Yogi in India. However as some of the modern historians
have started to study and write on the phenomena of rise of Modi, one does realize
that Modi was not made in a day. It took more than a century of ideological battle
that Sangh parivar fought to reach there. One of the most important reason for
the rise of Hindutva regime is the way India wrote its history since the advent
of Congress- especially its precolonial history.
The Anti Colonial nationalism
pioneered by in opposition to the British had applied a romantic gloss on pre
colonial India. It was an Eden vandalized by Satanic Europeans But had the British
really ruptured Indian historic Continuity? Or was it India’s decline, precipitated
by centuries of conquest, that enable Britain to so quickly to overpower the subcontinent?
The “Pre- Congress” history taught in India goes something like
this
- · India was a prosperous country before British Arrived to India.
- · Mughals were these great rulers who were “Secular” and they contributed to the great civilization that India was and it was “Melting Pot of Cultures”
- · Ganga-Jamni Tehzeeb prevailed in India where Hindus and Muslims of the country lived happily and harmoniously and it was only when the British who employed their wicked Divide and Rule theory and caused problems which ultimately led to the partition of India
- · A fully developed national consciousness existed in the subcontinent before the arrival of the British. They smashed it and divided the natives.
Singling the
British out as uniquely disruptive villains proved a convenient way for republican
India’s secular intellectuals to bypass awkward questions that ought, in the
long term interest of the country, to have been confronted head on. The
airbrushing of the pre-colonial past was intended to deny ammunition to all
those who cited the creation of Pakistan or a “Hindu Rashtra”. Historiographers
tasked by the secular Congress establishment to clarify India’s past, motivated
by their desire to do good, caused immeasurable harm by blurring it. The nation
that emerged out of it is now without a rudimental apprehension of their
difficult past. Medieval India, despite all the evidence of its methodical
disfigurement was depicted in Schoolbooks as idyll where Hindus and Muslims coexisted
in harmony and forged an inclusive idea of India which the British came and
shattered. This fable has been so deeply internalized that in 1998, India’s
then President KR Narayanan was able to tell an audience in Turkey that before
the intrusion of the evil Europeans the interaction between the old civilization
of India – the Hindu Civilization and the Islamic civilization was a Friendly
experience.
Unfortunately
for them and the national project – grand mosques of Northern India are still
decorated with stone tablets in which you can still see traces of the preexisting
liturgical monuments that were razed to furnish the building material for them.
The chronicles of the subcontinent’s medieval rulers are full of pornographic
descriptions of the horror with which the place was teemed.
All imperialism
is vicious, but that is not the standard adopted by India’s secular historians.
They tell us, Portuguese “were intolerant of the existing religions in India
and did not hesitate to force people to become Christians”. Indeed they did all
they could to make more converts. However on the other hand Islamic invaders “did
not produce any fundamental change in the Indian society but they did help to
enrich the Indian culture”. Truth is far from this. If one reads the campaigns of
Babur, the founder of Mogul empire, the Portuguese pacification looked like a
picnic. Imperialism in other words was destructive only when the Europeans did
it. When the Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme.
Such well intentioned
sanitization of the past was never in the long run going to be able to
withstand the awakening of the people to their history. The “secular”
establishment squandered a rare opening in the early decades of the republic to
heal the wound by supplying Indians a forthright accounting of the history. Had
India be honest about its past- about the atrocities that were perpetrated and the
heritage that was ravaged- it might have desicaated the appeal of the Hindutva supremacism.
It might have reconciled Indians of their harrowing past, provoked a mature
detachment from it and denied the present dispensation the opportunity to weaponize
history. To come to terms with the past, to move on from it, we must first
acknowledge and accept it. No Indian individual or community bears any
responsibility for what happened in the precolonial era. By downplaying and
denying what happened, secularists unwittingly implied otherwise.
